RE: https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/116677899531441884

slowly, corporations are finding out some jobs can't be replaced by markov chains that talk like joseph Goebbels.

You'd think after a long weekend I might feel rested.

hello duck tape my old friend
I've come to sew with you again

#sewing
#idolatry

"For me, the most ironic token
of that moment in history [the
first human moon landing] is the
plaque signed by President
Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11
took to the moon. It reads, "We
came in peace for all Mankind."
As the United States was
dropping seven and a half
megatons of conventional
explosives on small nations in
Southeast Asia, we congratulated
ourselves on our humanity. We
would harm no one on a lifeless
rock."

-- Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot, pg 169

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116258677474446258

elon musk, he promised Mars,
but then washed out the very stars
with no stars in the sky to see,
who would care, who would believe?
who would dream of Mars,
beneath a sky without stars?

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116199504927810945

from one perspective, this is true, but from a different perspective, at the same time, calling "AI" skills "just documentation" is also a cruel and horrible insult to all good documentation and everyone who ever tried to write good docs ...

Anyone else noticed that the eyes of some gulls look like gemstones?
Just look at this beauty of a herring gull. Prettier than dalmatian!

for those of us who recollect the mercifully brief flirtations gnome, enlightenment, KDE, and BeOS each had with transparent backgrounds and transparent terminals, which looked so cool until they had to be used, the responses to apple's "liquid ass" user interface seem unsurprising.

remember, every ecosystem contains millions of parasitoid wasps. Whenver a computer company advertises their "ecosystem", ask yourself who is the parasitoid wasp and who is the caterpillar.

#ecosystem

it is often claimed that mammals cannot smell while underwater. This is not entirely true; shrews, moles, and otters have all been filmed exhaling small bubbles, and then re-inhaling the same small bubbles in order to smell things underwater. I don't know how widespread this behavior is.

#mammals
#smell

does a roman wheelbug have a cognomen?
#entomology

If your job is to build software and you decide that you’re not going to support “old devices “ then you need to understand that you’re making life more difficult for people who are already struggling with tech.
Elderly, people with disabilities, people who lack the means to buy the latest.

Lets rethink this.
Ok? Ok!

"While travelling to Paris he [Abel] published a paper revealing the double periodicity of elliptic functions, which Adrien-Marie Legendre later described to Augustin-Louis Cauchy as "a monument more lasting than bronze" (borrowing a famous sentence by the Roman poet Horatius). The paper was, however, misplaced by Cauchy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Henrik_Abel

#math
#history

what if the ghosts of carboniferous¹ swamps haunted the railways and factories that burned coal?

¹oh, yeah, and all the other coal swamps of other periods. Like, the paleogene coal swamps of Wyoming.

#fossils
#halloween

@futurebird @KateShaw
(Beebe seems not to have known that army ants normally carry their brood with them, and so the larvae didn't indicate they were searching for a nest. Historical issues aside, it's still neat. )

@futurebird
@KateShaw
look at this neat historical observation, from more than a century ago!

"... , including the larvae of the Painted Nest Wasplets. For an hour at noon during heavy rain, the column weakened and almost disappeared, but when the sun returned, the lines rejoined, and the revolution of the vicious circle continued ..."
-- William Beebe, _Edge of the Jungle_
https://archive.org/details/edgeofjungle00beeb/page/290/mode/2up

2/3
"— to the outhouse again, and on a large fallen log, a few feet beyond the spot where their nest had been, the ends of the circle actually came together! It was the most astonishing thing, and I had to Verify it again and again before I could believe the evidence of my eyes. It was a strong column, six lines wide in many places, and the ants fully believed that they were on their way to a new home, for most were carrying eggs or larvae, although many had food ..."

1/3
"At six o'clock the following morning I started out for a swim, when at the foot of the laboratory steps I saw a swiftly-moving, broad line of army ants on safari, passing through the compound to the beach. I traced them back under the servants' quarters, through two clumps of bamboos to the out -house. Later I followed along the column down to the river sand, through a dense mass of underbrush, through a hollow log, up the bank, back through light jungle —"
#ants
#Beebe

#antMill

context: I wanted to included this pic from an old spiderman comic, but sadly mastodon doesn't allow both an image and a poll in the same toot! How rude.

#pterosaurs
#dinosaurs
#FossilFriday