hrrnngg my blog

Tony Benn's speech in the house of commons in 1998.

It’s me, the bisexual momma, again with a different post since I can’t edit my last post anymore, so I have to make another one. Still same situation, living in section 8 housing with two kiddos. I’ve been job searching for nearly a month now and still haven’t had any luck. I’ve officially lost count from how many jobs I’ve applied for that needed people immediately but still haven’t replied to this day. So in other words, I still need help with groceries, bills and gas. Please help anyway you can by donating or boosting this post! I am severely in debt to all you kind souls who’ve helped me through my struggling. I can’t thank you enough!! ❤️❤️🙏🏻

Venmo: malloreys

Cashapp: $MalloreyTaylor

Paypal:

That caterpillars and other larvae can’t lay eggs or make babies

That termites are not related to ants

That not all wasps sting

That insects even have distinct sexes and need to mate

That ticks and fleas are different things

That crustaceans count (as arthropods) just as much as insects or arachnids do and are not in fact “their own thing”

That scorpions are arachnids

That there are arachnids other than spiders

That “venomous” isn’t synonymous with “dangerous”

That bed bugs are a specific kind of insect (some people assume the old rhyme is broadly referring to biting pests in general)

That not every introduced species is necessarily invasive and needs to be killed on sight

That not everything in your house is a pest

That winged ants exist

That winged ants aren’t a species, but a special caste of a typical ant colony

That fleas, lice and ticks are all totally wingless

That there are no winged arachnids

That there are virtually no insects that live in the ocean

That mosquitoes breed in water

That spiders do not lay their eggs in or on other living things

That “bugs” have brains

That they have any organs at all and are not just walking shells “full of juice”

That they breathe oxygen like we do

That they have muscle tissues

That “bugs” have brains

That they have any organs at all and are not just walking shells “full of juice”

That they have muscle tissues

also

That not every introduced species is necessarily invasive and needs to be killed on sight

That there are virtually no insects that live in the ocean

But the only winged invertebrates are insects, and anatomically, their wings are modified from external GILLS that only arose in a lineage of early aquatic insecta.

Arachnids branched off from other arthropods before insects ever existed, and never had anatomy to develop into those gill structures. Insect wings are like a one in a trillion evolutionary outcome that will likely never happen again, so specific that even if our universe is terming with life I wouldnt be surprised if nothing else anywhere has anything like them!

Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”

(Photo cred: Assafn, Wikipedia)

These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.

Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.

So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.

Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsis plants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis, screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.

What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!

Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.

(Photo cred: Gianoli figure)

Wont be able to cover it until taxes hit and my bank will charge an overdraft fee of 30$ if i cant replace it today if anyone could possibly help me cover it would really be helping us out its been really hard to get by so far this year .-. Boosts appreciated

Eiffel 65 - My Console

We’re gonna play the game the playstation all day,

“the chinese government vanishes you for saying the wrong thing!” the chinese government does indeed do things in a v extreme way, but even in america, there are lots of things you can say that will get you put on a list, that will get you investigated, visited by the secret service, maybe even arrested, etc. etc.

“chinese internet users are rabid and will harass anyone who speaks out against their country” that literally applies to americans too

“how can chinese people let themselves suffer horrible working conditions for so little pay?” that can be asked of americans too, and the answer comes down to: because the government doesn’t want to increase wages and shit

“how are chinese people content to live under such a regime?” the same could be asked of americans, but we all know the answer to that, cause here in america, protests get violently suppressed and activists get assassinated

You Wouldn’t Download an E-Scooter

Many cities have banned e-scooter short-hire vehicles and are impounding them, and in other cities, repo men have been busily seizing scooters left on private property, and the e-scooter companies, who already lose money on every scooter (they’re making it up in volume!) just abandon their scooters to rust away in impound lots and turn into e-waste.

Which means that you can pick up scooters for pocket-change in municipal auctions! There’s only one problem: the control units of these scooters only take orders from companies like Bird and Lime, so even after you own one of these things, you can’t ride it without paying an overcapitalized bezzle for the privilege.

That is…not unless you swap out the control unit! For $30 or less, you can get a conversion kit that swaps in with just a few screws’ worth of fiddling. Once you do that, that city impound scooter becomes your scooter, at a price so cheap you can buy two!

This strategy is totally legal, and totally toxic to Bird and Lime’s business model, and boy do they know it: last year, Bird threatened to sue me for writing about this in a bid to keep the news from spreading. Luckily, we recognized the hollowness of their threat and, with help from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we were able to force them to back down and issue an apology (albeit not a very good one).

Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103) 

The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts: 

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)