alexwild

alexwild, 9 months ago to Florida

It was never about free speech.

#NewCollege #Censorship #Florida

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2023/08/22/new-college-of-florida-tells-student-workers-to-remove-pride-blm-pins/70649925007/

alexwild, 3 months ago to random

As someone who lived with actual subsistance farmers for a couple years, I have to roll my eyes at survivalists and other farm romanticizers who blithely talk about "we'll grow our own food!" as if that were the easier option than keeping our society's ship afloat.

Farming to feed yourself is hard. Really hard. Y'all have no idea.

alexwild, 4 months ago to twitter

Twitter/X suspended numerous journalists overnight, with no reason given.

#Twitter

alexwild, 10 months ago to random

If you're new to Mastodon, know that you don't get your tusks until one of the longtime natives scolds you for not putting your stuff behind a content warning, and your response sets off an old-school flame war that defederates at least three instances.

alexwild, 2 months ago to random

We have lots of great reasons to change from fossil fuels to renewables, but one underappreciated one is that oil money funds a disproportionately large portion of the resurgence of white supremacy.

alexwild, 9 months ago to random

It's not that Americans themselves are getting more fascist, more hateful. If anything, Americans are becoming more tolerant.

It's that a small set of extremely rich people is getting bolder about funding extremism, bolder about supporting coups, bolder about buying courts.

alexwild, 9 months ago to Texas

A Texas jury has found that feeding the homeless is not a crime.

#Texas #txlege

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/food-not-bombs-tickets-citations-trial-not-guilty-18267217.php

alexwild, 1 year ago to space

I personally don't find this acceptable.

#SpaceX #Biodiversity

https://futurism.com/wildlife-starship-explosion

alexwild, 1 year ago to random

There were two domestic, right-wing terrorist attacks in Texas this weekend, and we are not talking enough about how the Republican Party has intentionally seeded this bloodshed.

#Texas #Fascism

alexwild, 11 months ago to random

Since there is a lot of confusion about bees, and the saving thereof, a thread:

1. Honey Bees are a Eurasian/African species not native to the Americas but used here for agriculture. Their well-being is no more a conservation concern in the Americas than that of house cats or chickens.

2. Honey bees are having some problems, though, especially with high winter colony losses. Commercial beekeepers are slower to build colony numbers in the spring, which raises early-spring hive rental prices...

alexwild, 8 months ago to random

If you listen closely to the Starlink satellites as they go overhead, you can hear them cry out “nationalize meeeeeeeeeee”

alexwild, 9 months ago to random

“What is the function of Species X?” Is a question I hear often from non-biologists.

But it’s hard to answer. Species don’t exist to serve a function. They exist because they can. Everything is just trying to find a way to be.

alexwild, 11 months ago to random

Tired of the trope that all Australian animals are deadly and dangerous. Just because a few common species are aggressive and can kill you in minutes doesn't mean all of them do th

alexwild, 10 months ago to random

I'm hear to tell you that honey bees are not native to North America, they are not important to our local ecology, they are not beneficial to our natural environment, they are actually pretty mean and prone to stinging, and they don't need to be protected or saved.

alexwild, 2 months ago to SciComm

Several of us overly online biologists spent years quietly doing an experiment on Twitter, trying to find out if tweeting about new studies from a set of mid-range journals caused an increase in later citations, compared to set of untweeted control articles.

Turns out we had no noticeable effect; the tweeted papers were cited at the same rate as the control set.

Our paper, headed by Trevor Branch, was published today in PLOS One:

#SciComm #Twitter #X #Science

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0292201

alexwild, 7 months ago to random

Anyway. Who’s a reliable source of news here from Gaza/Israel?

alexwild, 6 months ago to Palestine

For those of you not on the other platforms where scientists hang out, biologist Michael Eisen was just removed from the chief editor position of the prestigious journal @eLife, allegedly for retweeting an Onion piece sympathetic to Palestinians.

#eLife #Palestine #Censorship

alexwild, 9 months ago to Ukraine

Hi. If you see "Biden only gave {tiny amount} to help {issue X} while spending millions on Ukraine" in any of your social media, that is propaganda. It's from Putin's disinfo shops aimed at convincing the west to stop supporting Ukrainian defenses against the Russian invasion.

You can and should report and block those accounts.

#Ukraine #Disinformation

alexwild, 22 days ago to random

Biology faculty at UT are meeting today to talk about a hiring plan. I really don't envy their job of trying to make a department located in Texas attractive.

We're in the middle of an ongoing purge of black staff, the adminstration just called in the state police to beat and jail students, and no one in their right mind would want to risk pregnancy to have a family here. It's bleak.

alexwild, 10 months ago to Texas

It’s happened. Our department has lost a young faculty member to a better offer in a safer state.

Texas’s extremist government will end up wrecking the universities here. Given a choice, people don’t want to subject themselves to fascism.

#Texas #GOPextremism #UTAustin

alexwild, 8 months ago to bluesky

For those of you who have tried #BlueSky, what do you think of it? What do you like, or dislike?

(I’ve been on it for a few weeks and have some thoughts, but I’ll share those later)

alexwild, 4 months ago to random

I have seen two news stories in the past 6 months about Jackson, Mississippi.

1. The white state government is removing the locally-elected judiciary of the majority black city and replacing it with unelected, white-appointed courts.

2. Hundreds of bodies have been found buried behind the jail, many of people never charged with a crime who were reported by families as “missing”.

These are fundamentally the same story.

#WhiteSupremacy #Mississippi #Jackson

alexwild, 11 months ago to random

Clarence Thomas should have to drink the water.

alexwild, 11 months ago to random

"We" aren't failing at controlling climate change. That's because "we"- the actual people- have little power to make the decisions necessary to fix things.

Instead, this is being done to us.

The small group of sociopathic billionaires driving the destruction would like nothing more than for us to blame ourselves for what they are actively doing to us, absolving them of blame.

So stop saying "we" are failing. We're not. We're fine.

alexwild, 1 month ago to australia

A gallery of Australian ants, the animals that pretty much run the entire continent.

#Ants #Insects #australianwildlife #australia

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Regional-Ant-Faunas/Australian-Ants