quod absurdem est

“As a biologist, I have been asked by many, many people; “why do we need mosquitos?” and “Why can’t we just kill all the ticks?”. People may argue that they serve no purpose in the ecosystem, and nothing would really be affected if we got rid of them. After all, these animals are just nuisances, right? Everything would be better off if there were no parasites to bother them.

This is, of course, an untrue claim. Parasites play many roles in the ecosystem and their presence is absolutely necessary. For instance, let’s look at mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are remarkable animals. There are many thousands of species, and only a few drink blood. Mosquitoes of all species subsist primarily on nectar, just like bees. This makes them critical pollinators. Of the few species that drink blood, only the females are interested in doing so, and they only do so to secure vital proteins for incubating their eggs. The males will continue to only feed on nectar for their whole lives.

But, besides being pollinators, what makes mosquitoes really incredible is their larvae. These larvae are aquatic and capable of surviving in extremely hostile conditions and in very small volumes of water. A mosquito will happily lay her eggs in an otherwise barren muddy puddle, and thousands of babies will thrive there, filter-feeding on microscopic organisms. This, in turn, provides food for other animals. Other aquatic insects as well as larval amphibians subsist largely on mosquitoes. Some insects will seek to lay their eggs in areas that mosquito eggs or larvae already exist, because it is a guaranteed food source.

This sudden abundance of life will attract predators of those animals, and so on and so forth. Suddenly, an entire thriving ecosystem has sprung up around this muddy puddle that otherwise would have supported little to no life, all thanks to these hardy larvae. In this way, mosquitoes are the foundation of many food-webs and allow life to colonize new, formerly inhospitable places.

However, defending the ecological importance of any animal is ultimately an exhausting task for biologists. The idea that animals must serve a purpose, must benefit humans in some way, is a fundamentally flawed way to view the natural world.

Every living organism that exists is a result of billions of years of evolution, all interwoven in a delicate balance with each other. If any of these pieces are removed, things will begin to collapse around it. We cannot sort animals into the categories of “useful” or “not useful”, because animals do not exist to be useful to us. They all have a place in the world, and we don’t get to pick and choose which species deserve to live without sending catastrophic ripple effects throughout the surrounding web of the ecosystem.

Whether we like it or not, parasites are part of the world and we have to coexist with them. Our focus should be on prevention of diseases associated with these parasites, by deterring them from biting, vaccinations against the bacteria they may carry, and affordable treatment if infections do occur, rather than figuring out a way to remove them from the planet entirely. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Everything is deeply interwoven, and every species is necessary. The moment we allow ourselves to debate which species could be driven to extinction without consequence is the moment we will begin unravel the world around us, and, ultimately, humans will feel those ripples too.”

Which means my grandfather's father was a sharecropper, which is within my family's oral history for why the [surname] family property and farm is the way it is and has been in the family for so long.

My grandfather died at 96 years old at the turn of the century.

Sharecropping as we know it today ended sometime in the 1930s-1950s depending on the state. Not only was my grandfather a sharecropper's son- my grandfather was a sharecropper himself during his early adulthood before he left home to join the military and later became a preacher.

My grandfather marched with Martin Luther Kin Jr and educated my father on black politics and activism. My father just turned 71, the same age as Ruby Bridges, the little girl who sparked the mass desegregation of education. She was born in 1954. There exists a photo somewhere of a little boy on a man's shoulders in the crowd at one of MLK's public events. That's my dad.

That's how close this is to the current era.

I said that once as a teenager on a forum. I was mocked and told that I am either way older than I claimed to be or that I am way off in my estimations because slavery was long ago. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Civil Rights movement itself, that is in recent enough memory to be evident in the lives of those who are alive today. My grandfather's grandfather- I'm just 5 generations removed from slavery.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Progress.

"The people of Faithfall are mighty, proud and loyal, to the very end. Their love of community and goddess bind them together in times of danger and uncertainty. And their leaders will sacrifice all that they possess to ensure the safety of Faithfall and her people."

"The people of Faithfall are mighty, proud and loyal, to the very end. Their love of community and goddess bind them together in times of danger and uncertainty. And their leaders will sacrifice all that they possess to ensure the safety of Faithfall and her people."

Poor thing, she's dying from cringe 😔

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

ur so right i didnt realized the compression would make it go to shit

Smaugust day 5 - "Small."

Very, very small.