carefully collected trinkets

For comparison, there are only 8.3 billion (8,300,000,000) humans alive right now. If 2.5% of that population was lost, we would lose 207.5 million (207,500,000). Which is still a lot, but only about one billionth of the loss we are seeing currently in bug populations.

June 21, 2026 - Hundreds of protesters broke through fences and stormed Kakomë beach, in the south of Albania, protesting against the privatisation of public coastal areas and a controversial luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner and the Trump family.

According to Albanian media reports, hundreds of residents from Nivice, Shen Vasil and other nearby settlements protested today on Kakome beach and dismantled parts of fences, guard huts and barbed wire, and entering the restricted coastal area, expressing public opposition to plans that involve closing off part of the protected coastline for a private tourist complex.

The protesters said that beaches belong to the people, not oligarchs, chanting slogans such as “Albania is not for sale” and “Flamingo Revolution”.

This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

social ergonomics should mean looking at social structures and analyzing the outcomes they have re: human welfare, and then taking that information back to the design board and redesigning things to hurt people less.

i will be real with you, I frequently just make people up in my head. I'll come up with a time and place that there was a hypothetical community of homo sapiens, and I will imagine how someone whose mind and way of experiencing the world works very similarly to my own, and I will imagine what their role in their community might have looked like, or how their experiences as a person might have been shaped, what kind of relationship they might have to their society, etc

this has a knock on benefit of making me think a whole lot about the different ways humans have organized ourselves over time and space, which I think is very useful to think and learn about when imagining alternative models to any current systems which are harmful

the one I personally come back to the most is "in small early homo sapiens groups, a person whose mind worked like mine would probably be a valuable member of the group in terms of double checking information and planning, and providing alternative observations and perspectives which could be used to enrich communal understandings of reality," because that's something that's quite important to human beings navigating group survival in whatever conditions we happen to be in. when undervalued, this trait looks like being pointlessly oppositional or going against social expectations at all turns for reasons that do not make sense to most people. when valued, as a part of a wide array of Ways People Work, it could be extremely beneficial to a group.

social ergonomics should mean looking at social structures and analyzing the outcomes they have re: human welfare, and then taking that information back to the design board and redesigning things to hurt people less.

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.