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.
A benefit of giving my Camponotus nicobarensis colony a room with dirt to play in has been finding out that they will quickly bury large food items. I gave them a huge dubia this morning... which normally would keep them busy for about two days, in an hour it disappeared it into the ground.
I'm glad I can feed them in a space with a hard surface too... since if they bury food it will be hard to know when they have eaten it all. (which can make the tank too dirty)
They dug a pit under it, then it sunk down... then they tugged it off into a side tunnel.
I want my funeral to work like that. It was awesome.
In a few days I'll try to get a time-lapse of them doing this... if I can just keep them from sticking dirt on the the front glass... this is why I didn't want to give them dirt. They are very creative and have made all sorts of abstract mud sculptures and curvilinear forms tufted with moss. Who knows what lurks in the ant mind!
I just got my fixie out of the shop and was able to ride it again. I forgot how much I loved this bike. When I went to pick it up the bike shop guy was like "um did you know one of your tires is off of a wheel chair?"
... I did not... but I guess it was strange that it was gray. I used to get my bike fixed by a guy in the park who worked out of his van BEST prices in the city. ... but yeah, IDK where he got his parts... LMAO
I almost wish I could be a messenger again. It was a life.
I rode my fixie on RAGBRAI (it still has the sticker) and all though grad school so I could have takeout to eat while studying.
I've been off it for years, but it all came back. I do ride much more slowly now. But that's for the best for me, and all of NYC if we are being honest.
Pica: Can I licky every bacon and poach egg?
Me: No, that would ruin the human breakfast, but you may have a little crumb of bacon and little crumb of egg.
Pica: donot want
Me: Then go away.
Pica: Can I PLEASE licky every bacon and poach egg? PLEAS
Nothing makes a meal feel fancy like quite like featherlight flatwear. I want forks optimized for spaceflight. Titanium butterknife! The new definition of luxury!
@futurebird
I just want a spoon that won't bend when I use it on the ice cream I just dredged up from the bottom of the chest freezer.
(I mean, I have that, but it looks very old, and of course it's very thick. But I love it.)
in other news, the bowl I'm eating out of has titanium in the glaze. But not for lightness; it's super heavy. Titanium dioxide (rutile, usually) is a common high fire glaze ingredient. Although maybe not for mass-produced stuff.
@futurebird I have bought and been gifted vinyl records, usually artists I want to give money to - I don't actually have a record player yet, but I'm (slowly, idly...) looking for one!
I have just accepted that I like to look at the art and have them. I don't have space for a player and I don't want to not have the six records I've found.
One is music based on the sounds that ants make!
I hope every day to be asked to a record playing party where everyone brings their records from home and you listen to them.
We learned this the hard way: if you don't have anything tied to not getting vaccinated enough people will opt out out of vague notions about medical distrust, or just the inconvenience of getting it done, that you will have outbreaks.
Nearly all schools from Harvard to little community colleges simply won't let you teach or attend if you don't have the shots. It works.
When you have private schools without these rules ... that's where we've seen outbreaks. This is so simple. Come on.
Is there a place in the oral arguments or in the missives from the Supreme Court where the more reasonable justices can raise and call attention to the outrageous actions, conflicts of interests of their peers?
Shouldn't having a symbol, in support of an attempt to steal an election at one of their homes make it in to the record?
Could they be more aggressive in this way? If not why not?
They all pretend to be so impartial and its dishonest. It's ugly.
@futurebird we’d all be better off of they were sent to individual rooms to write their answers. But it’s really just pageantry for future “internet owns”. So that’s what we’re getting.