mrrao

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

Me? I had some really spectacular bruises and a lil friction burn on my nose from where Mr. Airbag and Ms. Glasses had a disagreement. That's it. That's it.

I was driving a little tiny coupe and went more or less head-on with a pickup truck. The entire engine and hood of my car was twisted rubble that was not connected to the rest of the car afterward. I sat down on the verge, about twenty or thirty feet from the accident, while I waited for the cops and EMTs to work their way through the traffic backup to get to us, and found that I was sitting beside one of the headlights of my car. The whole entire headlight, bulb and reflector and cover and frame and all.

All I had were bruises and that little friction burn. That's it.

Crumple zones save lives. So do seatbelts and airbags; half the bruising was the exact shape of my seatbelt in livid crimson and black on my torso. It was and remains the most insanely intense bruising I have ever experienced in my life. BUT IT WAS JUST BRUISING!! Unpleasant, sure, but eminently survivable and didn't even require much treatment beyond not wearing a bra for a few days. But all the force that created that spectacular bruising was force that wasn't flinging me through the windshield or impaling me on the steering column. My car crumpled and crushed and dissolved but it held me safe and secure and protected.

No actually. Combat rated vehicles have standards for crash and shock absorbtion. Obviously you dont have airbags and crumple zones on an armored vehicle, but you do have multi-point harnesses, rollover protection, fire suppression systems, internal padding, seats designed to absorb sudden impacts and protect the users... AND THEY STILL HAVE TO ASS CERTAIN ROAD SAFETY LAWS TO BE ALLOWED ON THE ROADS

It is also less repairable than a military vehicle. Military vehicles are often fixable with basic tools and skills. You can wrench, bolt, hammer, and weld on those things.

The cybertruck however. Needs special advanced glue and a depot level repair facility. For basic shit.

Awful vehicle.

that being said. can we not erase the fact the entire conversation began with disabled people talking about being medically abused pretty please. & also, iirc the post that first really blew up about "mean girl nurses" never said "ALL nurses are evil bitches who hate everyone and they deserve to be mistreated" it was saying "women who sought power over other people in high school go into careers where they can wield power over other people, same as men, and there are women who go into nursing and present themselves as kind and caring and maternal, who are motivated by a desire to have unquestioned authority over other people's bodies to make themselves feel powerful, again, same as men who do the same things in masculinized careers." & i just find it "interesting" how all that has been reduced down to "all nurses are mean girls")

i think nuance is always important & doctors and nurses do need better treatment and society frequently praises them while also supporting their abuse. and yet they are also universally recognized as vital important members of society & empowered to have immense control over the lives of people who are systemically vulnerable and seen as leeches who add nothing to society. and yet who has to deal with the impacts of their stress and their trauma and their anger and their burnout? the disabled people under their care.

again. Nuance! but i just cannot help but Side Eye In Cripple some things people say on this topic. it can both be true that nurses (& doctors) experience horrible working conditions and that, in my opinion, that any conversation about burnout and abuse of medical professionals needs to also criticize the authoritarianism of the medical field and how widespread medical neglect and abuse is, lest we simply fall back into "the poor beleagured doctor who is Jesus Christ On The Cross Himself, all-wise and all-knowing and forced to tolerate all these entitled know-it-all ungrateful patients!" which changes nothing for anyone.

like. look at this article. the actual context for the "mean girl to nurse pipeline" (that some women seek out power over people to control them and make themselves feel bigger, and women are likely to do this through caretaking in the role of nurse, teacher, mother, etc.) is not brought up at all. the fixation is entirely on "its mean to call nurses mean girls! they experience a lot of bullying! you don't REALLY know any mean nurses, just poor tired bullied ones!"

First, the phrase itself is unfair to women. Although nursing is a female-dominated field, this phrase focuses on women as being the “mean” ones to worry about.

like. do youuuu fucking see the erasure of medical abuse. the actual bullshit nurses do to real living human beings, which goes massively under-reported. & not just disabled people but people of color as well. god fucking forbid medical professionals are treated as anything but literal saints descended from heaven. god forbid white cisgender women are recognized to have the ability to be cruel and power-hungry and to hurt other people through traditionally feminine roles based on caretaking. like I genuinely do understand that nurses are subject to immense stress, bullying, and violence, and that providing better working conditions for nurses is vital to improving medical treatment for all patients.

but when the actual neglect and abuse nurses can do to their patients is ignored and drops out of the conversation entirely, in the name of complaining about nurses being called "mean"? sorry but it pisses me the fuck off.

(links to some sources on patient abuse under the cut since this is long enough as is)

#m.#reminds me of how the pitt has several scenes i remember being like.#whyyyy are we making so many jokes about drug addicts and mentally ill people and their distress guys 😀#like that one fucking scene of the one doctor berating a drug user for no goddamn reason but it portrays her as#righteous because He Lied For Drugs (literally no way for him to be honest with you)#lying to HIM about giving him a drug that CAN MAKE YOU GO INTO WITHDRAWAL IF YOU TAKE ANY OTHER OPIATES WITH IT (suboxone i think)#WITHOUT TELLING HIM!!!!!!!!!! MASSIVE massive violation of patient autonomy and SAFETY. since she LIED about what drug it was#and the man HIMSELF clearly wanted opiates so he wouldnt be in withdrawal for his daughters wedding#and then she. berates him? for not caring about his daughter???????#and no one seems to be annoyed at this scene but me a fucking pparently#because it was the sweet nice doctor and its her fucking character development to be cruel towards a drug user for doing literally nothing#except trying to seek the care he needed to live his life in the way he knew how#and ofc they presented it as ''well maybe when hes ready he'll get clean now that you were a jerk to him :)''#she shouldve been fucking berated for that. they shouldve had a whole scene telling her how big of a fuckup that was#but nooooo its her cute little character development moment#idc get that poor man some methadone and TELL HIM HOW IT WORKS

It is shocking how recent the idea that "people have the right to decide what medical care they do or don't want" is. The whole modern medical system in the US, for example, was built with the presupposition that doctors give instructions to nurses and patients, nurses follow those instructions and give instructions to patients, and patients do exactly what they're told and be thankful for it. Hell, the Tuskegee "Experiment" didn't officially end until 1972 and the ADA was only passed in 1990. The present day system is the culmination of literal centuries of medical abuse of vulnerable people, and the ways in which the system has improved has been through the ongoing struggles against it by those it abuses. And this is not unique to the US by any measure, just the one whose history I know best.

Lying to patients? It's for their own good.

Giving them a medication without telling them what it is? It's for their own good.

Having a patient imprisoned committed institutionalized against their will? It's for their own good.

Berating a fat patient for existing? Drug users for using drugs? Patients with disabilities needing (legally mandated) accommodations? It's for their own good.

We're only just now starting to grapple with the vast number of people who have been traumatized by the medical system. The last estimates I saw we're around 12% of patients exhibit symptoms consistent with PTSD related to experiences with the medical system, and that number rises sharply for patients of color (especially black patients), disabled and chronically ill patients, fat patients, LGBTQ+ patients, and basically any other marginalized group. Some doctors and nurses have worked intentionally to try to address and mitigate their biases, in many places the number of medical professionals who are themselves members of these groups has been increasing, but the vast majority just never even consider that they could be harming their patients. Like, for fucks sakes, it's 2026 and research is still finding that a substantial portion of graduating medical students still believe that black people have thicker skin and higher pain tolerance (or even can't experience pain at all!?!) and that women are more likely to exaggerate their pain and other symptoms.

can you imagine the process of getting your eyes diagnosed and setting up the equipment to properly grind and shape lenses

the Eridians ask if they can take the broken glasses, and the humans are thinking “oh they want an alien artifact that isn’t something essential to us, sure they can have it”

and then at the next meeting, the Eridians present that scientist with a pair of replacement glasses they fabricated with very nice Xenonite frames, complete with a perfectly-replicated-prescription for the lenses because they still have the tech they used for when Grace needed new glasses

even the most nothingburger uneducational math class will give some kind of real-world concrete example of a concept, even if only on the level of "Johnny has five apples. Sally takes away two. How many apples does Johnny have?" And will probably give a name for the general concept (subtraction). Imagine if anything we had done in middle school PE had been motivated to any degree. Like, "if you do a lot of this exercise it will be easier to lift boxes".

When Grace is still incredibly amnesiac and manages to remember what his apartment looks like, he remarks the lack of feminine touches in the decoration and casually wonders if this means he is single or maybe gay.

Upon learning of the astrophage problem, all the nations of the world get their shit together in record time and give Stratt basically unlimited power, authority and resources to do whatever is necessary to save Earth. This itself is a political choice. Pair it with the vastly different real world response world leaders have to climate change and it becomes a social commentary, sorry Andy but it really does.

The reason Grace decides to join the Hail Mary project is because of his students. He's in the middle of a class when he realizes the incredibly hard and bleak future that awaits his students due to the cooling Sun, and tells Stratt he wants to keep helping.

Shortly after figuring out how astrophage reproduce on his own, Grace is taken to the aircraft carrier, where he meets for the first time the other scientists involved in the project. After explaining his findings, a Chinese scientist announces their team has been able to reproduce Grace's findings, the implied reason being they had somehow spied on them.

During one of his first conversations with Rocky, Grace remarks on an unexpected hurdle of meeting aliens: pronouns. His conclusion is to just shrug and slap he/him pronouns on Rocky. There are no further conversations about this topic, not even when both of them are able to communicate fluently. Grace doesn't re-examinate his pronoun choice any further, nor, despite having a PhD in molecular biology and being curious about things like how Eridians eat, ask about Eridians' concepts of sex and gender.

Following that previous point, when Rocky mentions having a mate back home, Grace chooses for said mate the name Adrian. This is yet another reference to the Rocky movies, albeit a more obscure one, and a lot of the people that didn't realize this simply read both Rocky and Adrian as male and therefore gay.

One last bit re gender and sexuality is the fact that at no point during the book does Ryland Grace, a single man of unspecified sexuality, lament being single or express any sexual desires, which is why many people read him as being on the asexual spectrum.

The movie had to gloss over many things and completely skip over others, some of these later things were the incredible sacrifices and hardships Earth had to go through to survive until hopefully Project Hail Mary managed to find a solution to the astrophage problem. First off, in order to produce the astrophage fuel for the ship they paved a huge chunk of the Sahara desert, which had devastating ecological and climate consequences, altered or destroyed the homes and livelihoods of millions of people and created tons of refugees. Also, in order to win time and counter the effects of the cooling Sun, they start to nuke chunks of fucking Antarctica, because making climate change worse will make Earth hotter and therefore buy them time. The first time the scientist (a self-declared hippie ecologist) in charge of this orders the release of the bombs, he understandably breaks down and starts to cry. Needless to say, nuking the fucking Antarctica raises sea levels and also has horrendous ecological and climatic consequences and once again would in fact create millions of refugees. The fact that the book doesn't dwell on the consequences of any of these two actions doesn't change the fact that we as readers are supposed to extrapolate and put two plus two together whether Andy intended to or not. Expecting otherwise is frankly insulting.

At one point Stratt tells Grace what will happen to Earth while they await for the solution to the astrophage problem. She talks about the famines and how many people will die, but that's just the people that will starve to death. Millions more will die in the wars that will break out all over the planet because there is no way the richer and more powerful nations will be willing to share resources equally with the rest.

Grace gifts Rocky, a member of an alien species, a laptop that contains the sum of all human knowledge, history and media. He knows Rocky, but has never met other Eridians, and despite this he chooses to give it to them.

The fucking foundational plot of the book is interspecies collaboration, trust, and friendship. Choosing to meet and befriend an alien despite all the possible risks and dangers is just as political of a choice as choosing to kill an alien would be.

Rocky thinks this is stupid stupid stupid -- what if a scientist who's in the control group would have been the key to keeping Grace alive, question?! However, Grace insists that at least some attempt be made to let the Eridian scientific method operate unaffected by human influence first. Rocky badgers a concession out of Grace in turn that if Grace's health looks to be in extremely serious danger, Erid can abandon this "control group" nonsense and bring all claws on deck to preserve Grace's life.

---

Later, when Rocky and Grace are tossing around some ideas for places on Erid that Grace would like to visit in person if at all possible, Grace brings up Eridian zoos. His Eridian care team are just a little concerned that Grace might see the zoos, draw the parallels himself, and get offended -- instead, Grace goes back to his biodome all fired up with ideas to make his Eridian home more accessible and educational for his Eridian visitors.

---

There are bad apples in every bunch; despite very strict requirements and interview processes to determine which Eridian scientists get to join Grace's care team, there are one or two who make it onto the team who actually do view Grace more like a rare animal specimen than as a fellow scientist. This accidentally leads to the discovery of an extremely popular form of human enrichment: Trolling. Specifically, spite-motivated trolling.

is STILL creating wolf art TO THIS DAY. TEN YEARS LATER. proof that the world is beautiful. her username is wolfroad! you can find her art right here, and here are a few of her more recent pieces that I absolutely adore:

I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.

@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.

Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches

And THEN.

I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.

HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.

I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."

Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.

I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.

It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research

There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA

Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."

The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.

It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.

I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.

Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.

The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.

@motherfucking-dragons

it's called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.

in general i'm feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!

I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.

The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.

Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.

The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.

Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:

River cane has a really full, bushy, leafy look that makes it really hard to recognize as bamboo from a distance, because the stems are harder to see. The shape of the individual cane with its branches and leaves is narrow, because the branches spread out very little, but the foliage is DENSE. It's like a plume.

River cane is stronger, denser and heavier than invasive bamboos I've seen.

River cane stems are always green all the way around, no yellow (unless the plant's been dead for a good long time)

River cane stems feel smooth like plastic to the touch. The common invasive bamboo I've seen here, when you run your hand upwards along it, the stem feels awful like sandpaper.

The biggest way to distinguish them: River cane grows 6-4 feet tall when it's in little patches, and up to 10-12 feet when it's in a large size patch (like, the size of a backyard) It is known to reach up to 15 feet tall nowadays and historical records claim heights of 30 feet or more in fertile river valleys. I really want to stress that it's RARE for it to get big. A canebrake will almost always be many times wider than it is tall (sometimes they grow in very long strips along fence rows)

The best time to look for it is in winter before things leaf out, because it's evergreen and grows in dense masses, making it easy to spot.

Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.

European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?

In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.

Books that talk about Rivercane:

Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry by Sarah H. Hill talks about rivercane a LOT and gives tons of details of its uses and history.

Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter about Rivercane.

Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass is a book about Kentucky, but it talks about rivercane's importance including its relationship with bison. It's only a couple pages out of the whole book but it's still great information.

By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.

On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.

i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.

Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman

She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.

I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!

Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.

Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!

Roger Cain of Keetoowah/Western Band Cherokee shows and talks about Rivercane. This video has a BIG canebrake, the mature canes look as if they could be 15ft tall, but he says it's only a fragment of what they used to be!

Stan the River Man visits a Canebrake in Northern Kentucky. This channel only has 22 subscribers, I feel like I've discovered a rare and priceless treasure

River Cane Renaissance, Episode 1. This guy has devoted a large part of his life to studying Rivercane and now works with the eastern band Cherokee to try and bring it back.

Chattooga river conservancy video on Rivercane, haven't watched the whole thing myself but it looks really good and detailed

This is exactly what you think it is.

For privacy reasons, I share details online of my real world activities only reluctantly, and not very often. But don't be bamboozled into thinking I have forgotten the Canebrakes. It's exactly the opposite.

I have done a lot of networking and made a lot of contacts. I am not alone. There are other people with a story exactly like mine: first, they heard an offhanded mention of forests of American bamboo, which shattered everything they thought they knew about their environment. Next, they became crazed with fascination, searching for knowledge with insane ferocity. Then, they realized that river cane is not only a plant, it is a keystone species symbiotic with indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and it was almost destroyed due to the subjugation of its habitat and the genocide of its caretakers.

The canebrakes' devotees have been working tirelessly to compile every single scrap of information on canebrakes that exists in writing. Every record, every primary source, every historical mention, every comment and conjecture. I have been given access to some of this priceless treasure trove. The wealth of information is amazing, but even more amazing is how much is still unknown.

The history, properties, and ecological importance of the canebrakes is so much more than I imagined.

For example, the massive amounts of seeds produced by huge canebrakes in flowering events fed the passenger pigeon flocks. Likewise the Carolina parakeet was also dependent on canebrakes, and the extinct Bachman's warbler was a canebrake specialist. The destruction of canebrakes could be responsible for why these birds went extinct.

Canebrakes were absolutely fundamental to the indigenous peoples of the Southeast, providing for their every need. Food, shelter, containers, tools, music and art. The settlers foolishly thought the indigenous peoples were not "advanced" enough for metal tools, but in truth, they already had a material superior to metal. River cane by weight is stronger than steel. You can make knives and blades out of it.

I am excited for the future. It seems like momentum is building to save the river cane and bring back the canebrakes, and I am hoping to join together with all the other like-minded people to accomplish this task.

Holy shit okay i looked it up and HOLY SHIT. Published 2 months ago.

1700 years old.

And it says A. appalachiana, (the Appalachian species of native rivercane), has actually NEVER been observed to flower, which means ???? i dont even know what the fuck that means.

THIRTY hectares. THIRTY. That's HUGE.

Does this mean that???? Most canebrakes are so small now because they're babies????