Survivng the American Nightmare

Venus Flytrap Knowledge Nuggets

Nugget 1: These carnivorous wonders are not only cool, but rare too. Flytraps have been introduced to other areas outside their original habitat, but their natural range is North Carolina and a small section of South Carolina. Nugget 2: They get most of their energy through photosynthesis, but they also famously get some of their nutrients from digesting insects too. An insect will crawl across the leaves, brushing against tiny hairs that trigger a response for the leaves to snap shut. Boom! Lunch is served. Nugget 3: Venus flytraps do have some threats, the biggest of which is habitat loss and poaching. You can help keep these insect munching friends safe. 

Check out our tips on how to spot a poached flytrap:  http://ow.ly/E0Uf50HzrXL Photo: Venus flytraps by Jennifer Koches/USFWS

a sweet bison i drew for my sister hehehe

Then you should support the decolonization of Hawai'i and give it back to the indigenous peoples there because they are why it's so beautiful and the waters are perfectly clear.

And while we're at it support #Land Back because if we give authority to care for the indigenous people here on the main land, we can probably have a place that's that beautiful as well (assuming it's not too far gone yet).

hypothetically speaking, if we could produce nuclear fusion on a commercial scale it would provide us with totally clean and practically unlimited energy. no radiation, no pollution, just energy. fusion is actually the process that powers the sun itself, so scientists have been attempting to recreate fusion for decades because it's essentially the 'holy grail' of clean energy sources.

up until now, while we've technically been able to recreate fusion, it has always taken more energy to actually make fusion occur compared to the energy the reaction puts out. but now we've finally had a reaction happen where it produced more energy than it cost. meaning that nuclear fusion is going to be seen as a fully viable and possible energy resource, so more funding will be put into it to try and improve the process. we're still decades away from potentially using it as an energy source, but this is a HUGE step towards unlimited energy with no environmental repercussions

here's an article on it!

Thank you for sharing this! This is another one of those situations where we are just now seeing the noticeable, dramatic payoff of years and years of quiet, unnoticed environmental work.

“Experts say years of conservation efforts have resulted in some of the healthiest waters in generations, with booming fish populations, clearer ocean waves and more chances to interact with our urban aquarium.”

This quote also really got me:

I will never forget how excited they got when they identified the small (1-2ft) sturgeon. We nad no clue what the big deal was with a big (to us) greyish fish.

It was the first time they had seen a sturgeon that far down the Hudson.

That was nearly 30 years ago.

About 15 years ago, a friend who lived near the Hudson told me they they didn’t see a point in trying to ‘save the world’ because everything was screwed already and it was only a matter of how long until the end.

Which is to say that the Hudson and nearby ocean have been healing a bit at a time for decades and often the healing is invisible to everyone but the experts.

That working to fix things matters, even when you can’t see the progress.

That this absolutely amazing milestone is the result of thousands, perhaps millions, of people working in science, in industry, in education, in civil engineering, to make hundreds or thousands of seemingly ‘little’ changes.

remember that there are people still fighting against pipelines poisoning indigenous land and water. do NOT forget about us in the midst of all this.

qadashdinesh, zisan! chin'an shida!

This is like 20 thousand years ago! And the joy and happiness of going to water made this child playfully skip along! It’s universal! Dancing their way back to their family!

In a language we will never hear, a culture we’ll never know, with thoughts and ideas we can only imagine! There are millennia of untold moments of happiness, of human connection and warmth that are gone forever. But they still happened! Did that family even notice the tracks they left? How could they have known that that one day their impossibly distant descendants would be able to see the imprints they made?

Another set of tracks in the same area shows three men hunting a giant kangaroo, running at incredible speeds, but one of them had only one foot! They jumped along on one foot, every so often an imprint from a stick appearing. How did they lose their limb? An accident? A fight? A predator? Was it completely gone or maimed? Was it from birth? Either way this person was cared for by their family and was able to heal and participate fully in life! They most likely felt grief when their family member lost the use of their limb! Who cared for them? Who gave them the stick to help them walk? What kind of joy did their family feel when they made a recovery? Did someone shape and carve the stick? They certainly worked all of their other wooden tools, something as essential that would have been too.

This was during the ice age when Australia became a brutally cold, dry desert. Their entire food system had to change. By all indications it should have been a stark and difficult life of little resources. But no! They worked together! They looked after their wounded and sick! The speed that these hunters were running at was incredible and means they were well fed and healthy! A millennia of helping one another and caring for one another and all we can get are tiny glimpses of these moments did they catch the kangaroo did they laugh and congratulate each other when they did how happy were they to bring it back to their families I just

It is true that exercise can have mental health benefits. To just name a few, it can increase your energy level, reduce skeletal muscle tension, be a healthy outlet for anger and improve sleep quality.

... and some of you are probably reading this with an exhausted sigh, thinking "That's great and all but I am already depressed. My current level of energy, tension, and sleep quality doesn't allow me to go to the gym."

And you know what? You are right. This piece of advice sucks! I know that because I have been on the receiving end of it so often during the years I struggled with depression. When you can barely get out of bed, when even everyday tasks like showering or eating or finally throwing away the moldy bread on your counter are so frigging exhausting that you have to postpone them - then yeah, you literally can't go to the gym. It's not a lack of willpower, it's not laziness, you physically can't do it.

It's important to acknowledge this when we talk about the mental health benefits of exercise. Otherwise, this piece of advice is not only useless, it's also outright disrespectful towards the very people it's meant to help.

So, how can you reap the benefits of exercise when you are already struggling with depression?

First of all: Recovery from any kind of illness takes time and patience, and depression is a real illness! Exercise can be a great addition to therapy, medication and other recovery efforts but it isn't a magic cure. You will not immediately feel better. Throwing away your pills to replace them with a yoga mat would be a horrible idea. Flip off Ignore aunt Karen when she tries to tell you otherwise.

Start small and slow. Ridiculously small if necessary! It's okay to forget about the gym and any kind of structured exercise for now. Just move your body for tiny, manageable amounts of time. It's okay to make it as easy as possible: take a walk without leaving the apartment (and yes, a one-minute walk to the counter to throw away that moldy bread absolutely counts!), stretch without leaving the bed. You are just easing back into it, be gentle with yourself.

"Pick something that looks fun" can be great advice for people who are getting into exercise after a period of inactivity - but if the inactivity is caused by depression, chances are that nothing sounds fun and enjoyable to you right now. You can ask yourself if there is any kind of physical activity you used to enjoy or used to want to try (even if it doesn't sound fun now, you may find that you still like it). Or you can just decide to treat exercise as a chore. It's okay not to have fun. You don't actually need to enjoy exercising to get the benefits!

Stay away from fitness influencers from now. Stay away from any content that tries to shame or guilt people into exercising. Stay away from anything with a body-negative approach to exercise. You are already feeling low, you don't need that crap.

If you struggle with eating enough and regularly, if you are currently underweight or if you have a history of using exercise as a form of self-harm, please talk to your doctor or therapist before you start exercising to make sure it's safe for you to do so.

With all my love,

Anything is better than nothing. Literally just standing outside in the yard for 5 minutes and looking around and then heading back inside for a week is better than nothing. It helps! It actually really helps, you can feel it helping a little.

Even just opening the window and standing near it while you're on your phone and breathing in the fresh air and hearing outside noises can be really helpful.

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.