What is the best explanation you’ve heard for 1 not being a prime number? For me it’s “because it breaks everything in my programs since the loops won’t terminate” but that’s obtuse. “Because the God of math decrees it so!” is compelling, but shallow.
“it can only be divided by 1 distinct number” is contrived.
1 “feels” prime— it has the fewest factors. (Primeness being about NOT having factors) ruling it out for having too few? eh.
“it’s the zero of multiplication” is better… thoughts?
@futurebird@weaselx86 this is how a lot of math terms are. The set theory definitions of integer addition and subtraction, which form the basis of arithmetic and higher math weren't formally defined until the 1920s, but the concepts of addition and subtraction were widely used and agreed on for thousands of years before that. The definition that gets formalized is the one that's the most useful in the most situations.
@winter@glitzersachen@futurebird Yeah, the definition of "only divisible by 1 and itself" is only valid for natural numbers, but gets weird in larger sets. E.g. if you include negative numbers, 2 is still a prime, but it is divisible by 2, -2, 1 and -1.
(and, weirdly, 2 is not a prime in gaussian integers, since it is (1+i)*(1-i))
When colonies are small they are nervous. Here is the young queen and her 23 daughters are gathered close to her frozen in fear as I feed them and collect the little trash pile they made. When their numbers pass some tipping point they will stop cowering like this and grow bold. I wonder how each ant decides if she should be brave or hide? how do they know the size of their colony?
@futurebird I want to understand what I am seeing. So, you have made a new nest or enclosure and they are repopulating it. Because it's an enclosure you need to move refuse out and food in. During that process, all the ants gather around the queen to protect her or are they seeking her out for instruction/orders?
When they cower, in my mind it visualizes more human or canine, with them lowered their heads and looking away from you. That doesn't sound... right?
Such neat mannerisms. I'm curious if it's ubiquitous among ant kind? Perhaps certain groups have a higher/lower tolerance to what equated to "large enough"?
Level of some "Here I am, all is well" pheromone? I'd guess (only guess), ants just produce a pheromone that indicates presence having the same function as the incessant acoustic signal from geese and sheep.
Sam Alito is so much worse than I ever suspected. Watching him speak, reading his writing you encounter a man who clearly thinks he's smarter than everyone.
For various reasons, we do not often encounter smug academically styled conservatives. But, he's the genuine article. He sincerely believes himself a brave iconoclast who will be seen as a hero someday.
His self-flattery could be a weakness. He is very wrong about how history will remember him.
@chemoelectric@futurebird
It was long ago, but I think I borrowed both of those Mortimer Adler books from a friend, but about a week later she had to move away, and she wanted them back before moving away, and I was about 2/3 done with the first and had barely started the 2nd. But on the other hand, if I don't finish a book in less than a week, that's usually a sign I'm not going to finish it ever, unless it's as technical as a university text book.
In olden times, when people kept commonplace books, it was usual not to read books cover to cover. They might copy some of what they HAD read into their commonplace.
The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of "woke" things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.
Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.
The ozone could have a huge hole.
We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.
@futurebird The endangered species act was passed 92-0 in the senate, 390-12 in the house and signed by Nixon. The ban of DDT was by the EPA under Nixon and EPA administrator Ruckelshaus, a Republican. The Montreal Protocol banned CFCs in 1989. It was widely supported as it has been ratified by every country in the UN.
It is inspiring to see that people do come together when motivated.
Do you like parasites? Or dislike them but can't stop learning about them? The worst ones are in the sea. Makes all of the parasitoid wasp stuff seem tame! There are worse fates than being paralyzed and fed to a hungry larvae who eats your organs selectively so you live longer.
Here is a great video. It is very gross. But it's cool.
> And we went out and found dozens of different animals from reptiles to birds to fish to all sorts of mammals of every size and went look! My hands! I can pat you! Wanna be friends?
@Willow_Crow@futurebird >40 and I engaged with it IRL before it was Internet phenomenon, spending a lot of time in abandoned buildings either used as squats or for raves (or both) and spent a lot of time wandering through such spaces especially in the afternoons after the party was finished and there were few people around (although the squatters were sometimes followed around by an entire gang of local cats, a mix of pets and strays (one tomcat was later rehomed by a fish supplier))
Research means formulating a question. Sketching the kind of evidence you think would provide answers to the question and then dispassionately looking for that evidence and either answering the question or determining it can't yet be answered.
Falling into an internet rabbit hole and stimulating your sense of fear or wonder reading the strangest things you can find that creep you out isn't research. It's fun maybe, but it's not research.
Yes both involve searching and reading but ... come on.
There are a lot of people online who will say they have been doing "research" and it's true they have read, and watched many things. But they have no questions, no, threshold for answering those questions. It's just "spooky browsing"
And I like getting creeped out too as much as anyone. But that's just not research.
Part of conspiracy culture seems to be creating this pile of unsettling half-understood things. Ominous images. Creepy theories... but never asking any particular question or looking for an answer (or even looking to see if it could have an answer)
It's like when I read a bunch of SCP files and ghost stores and then I can't sleep because the shadow men will eat me.
Only this isn't a cheap thrill ... it destroys families. And yet they keep saying how much "research" they do!
Every day is Leg Day with Dirhinus! This is a parasitoid wasp. They lay their eggs in the pupae of flies, often flies that are found on corpses (including human corpses, making them forensically significant.)
Wasps are distant cousins of ants, and you can see something of the ant her... and something of the alien. Why is her head like that?
Her big back legs have a retractable tarsus so they can be used as prongs when injecting an egg into a fly pupae.
This is the kind of thing I always imagined a husband would get when grocery shopping before I had one and, lo, it’s the sort of thing they really do come home with.
@futurebird@promovicz So I only looked at mastodon.social's local timeline, (see the Methodology section for an explanation), so that's kind of accounted for.
I bought some pink sand for my ants but it’s strangely hydrophobic? It is very fine sand and it will become saturated if stirred vigorously - but why does it trap air like this? isn’t this odd?
@futurebird I've seen this effect even with sand from natural places (not to mention occasionally dry potting soil, rice, etc). My uneducated guess is it happens when there is some very fine dust mixed with the sand, it keeps the water from wetting the sand grains.
I was wondering why hand stencils are so common in early human cave art... then I read one of the comments on the video about the art "This is so cool I'm going to do it in my son's room."
@futurebird yeah, they are easy, and they are fun. But even more: The shape of the human hand clearly shows it's made by humans. Lots of other "easy and fun" stencils would, after 10,000 years, would leave plenty of doubt as to whether they were human made, or wouldn't make good newspaper photos.