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"wow ur so good at math" ah ha but you see. you dont ever get good at math. you stay bad, but now youre bad at harder math

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I can't find the original post, but one of the Humans Are Space Orcs posts was about how maybe it would be absolutely unhinged that the average human can just approximately judge mass and velocity and distance with eyes and muscles, and throw objects with moderate to high accuracy. Like, no planning, binocular vision only, no triangulation, just toss stuff. They go apeshit over human sports, because that's like if a worm wrote a novel or something, practically a bloodsport.

On the flip side, the fact that most humans can't in any way explain explain mathematically what's happening in a game of catch is infuriating. "What do you mean you just kinda figure it? But it's not a guess?"

The practical result is that it turns out that humans can do the same thing with interstellar travel and skip a starship across the universe without any math, although you want to make sure you don't build anything to close to the approximate landing site.

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In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the long study of a butterfly once thought extinct has led to a chain reaction of conservation in a long-cultivated region.

The conservation work, along with helping other species, has been so successful that the Fender’s blue butterfly is slated to be downlisted from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species List—only the second time an insect has made such a recovery.

[Note: "the second time" is as of the article publication in November 2022.]

To live out its nectar-drinking existence in the upland prairie ecosystem in northwest Oregon, Fender’s blue relies on the help of other species, including humans, but also ants, and a particular species of lupine.

After Fender’s blue was rediscovered in the 1980s, 50 years after being declared extinct, scientists realized that the net had to be cast wide to ensure its continued survival; work which is now restoring these upland ecosystems to their pre-colonial state, welcoming indigenous knowledge back onto the land, and spreading the Kincaid lupine around the Willamette Valley.

First collected in 1929 [more like "first formally documented by Western scientists"], Fender’s blue disappeared for decades. By the time it was rediscovered only 3,400 or so were estimated to exist, while much of the Willamette Valley that was its home had been turned over to farming on the lowland prairie, and grazing on the slopes and buttes.

Pictured: Female and male Fender’s blue butterflies.

Now its numbers have quadrupled, largely due to a recovery plan enacted by the Fish and Wildlife Service that targeted the revival at scale of Kincaid’s lupine, a perennial flower of equal rarity. Grown en-masse by inmates of correctional facility programs that teach green-thumb skills for when they rejoin society, these finicky flowers have also exploded in numbers.

[Note: Okay, I looked it up, and this is NOT a new kind of shitty greenwashing prison labor. This is in partnership with the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which honestly sounds like pretty good/genuine organization/program to me. These programs specifically offer incarcerated people college credits and professional training/certifications, and many of the courses are written and/or taught by incarcerated individuals, in addition to the substantial mental health benefits (see x, x, x) associated with contact with nature.]

The lupines needed the kind of upland prairie that’s now hard to find in the valley where they once flourished because of the native Kalapuya people’s regular cultural burning of the meadows.

While it sounds counterintuitive to burn a meadow to increase numbers of flowers and butterflies, grasses and forbs [a.k.a. herbs] become too dense in the absence of such disturbances, while their fine soil building eventually creates ideal terrain for woody shrubs, trees, and thus the end of the grassland altogether.

Fender’s blue caterpillars produce a little bit of nectar, which nearby ants eat. This has led over evolutionary time to a co-dependent relationship, where the ants actively protect the caterpillars. High grasses and woody shrubs however prevent the ants from finding the caterpillars, who are then preyed on by other insects.

Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are being welcomed back onto these prairie landscapes to apply their [traditional burning practices], after the FWS discovered that actively managing the grasslands by removing invasive species and keeping the grass short allowed the lupines to flourish.

By restoring the lupines with sweat and fire, the butterflies have returned. There are now more than 10,000 found on the buttes of the Willamette Valley."

-via Good News Network, November 28, 2022

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having a nickel allergy is actually so insidious because what you MEAN I need to pay attention to the nickel content in my food. what do you MEAN that it doesn’t even present like typical food allergy symptoms (no tingly mouth, no throat closing, no stomach pain etc) and it took until my mid-late 20s to realize that dietary nickel is probably why I’d sometimes get hives randomly on my arms with no apparent cause and have also now deal with chronic eczema. what do you MEAN that all the foods that I eat specifically because they are high in nutritional value consistently also contain nickel.

Here I was thinking my nickel allergy was pretty mild!! so many mysteries in my life were all probably caused by nickel. It was always nickel.

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Belgians must be stopped

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This is it. The best WaT post

Only like 10% done with the fifth stormlight book after finally getting around to starting, but the prologue is so funny

gavilar trying sooo so hard to impress his stormdaddy and meanwhile stormfather is just like "hm. actually i think dalinar is lowkey kinda poggers."

and gavilar is like "no hes fucking not. also im shamelessly and flagrantly manipulating and encouraging his grief and alcoholism for my own gain. but that has nothing to do with why hes not."

and then gavilar fumbles so hard that stormfather is like "sorry but i think your entire bloodline is deeply cringe actually"

and then stormfather ends up partnered with dalinar anyway which just makes this all even more darkly hilarious

like i know why it happens like this from a literal textual standpoint. but I cannot help but feel like this sort of *comes off* as the stormfather having some kind of weird begrudging crush on dalinar and simply being unable to *resist* craaaawwling back to get himself a piece

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the fear I felt with the blurred pink mass in my inbox under the harried confession of mistakes

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5 year anniversary of the miette post \o/

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been doing a LOT of analog note-taking / journaling / planning lately (new years' resolution fulfilled! yes!), and I've slowly but surely started writing mostly in cursive again.

that said, I'm old (almost 35, ew) so I have questions.

if you want to RB this and put your age / locale / whatever else you think is relevant in the tags, that'd be very cool

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Bro write you're heart out

Youd have strength that I long for if you do

so heres the thing: i feel like writing a fanfic on kaladin and an imaginary character that i have cooked up in my brain, shes cool, carries a scythe as her chosen weapon, but the thing is i havent read mistborn so i might have incomplete cosmere knowledge. Also, never written a fanfic before. should i or should i not

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Dutch longsword fencer Tosca Beuming

Photographed by Martin Philippo and Andress Kools

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Oh lmao my stupid ass say the two carbons at the end and said ethyl completely forgot about the middle one

Yeah 1,3,5-tri-isopropyl-cyclohexane seems to be it

dog toys that make you stop dead in the middle of the store and figure out their IUPAC names

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1,3,5-ethyl-benzene?

dog toys that make you stop dead in the middle of the store and figure out their IUPAC names