tepat-side

When you're making the biology from the ground up with perfect knowledge of the clades, it's natural for you to just make clade names that are descriptive and perfectly align with the organisms under them.

But that's not how it works in the real world. In the real world we have:

Relics of outdated frameworks: The whole kingdom, phylum, order, class... setup is still kind of present even though we know Linnaeus was wrong about it being neat categories.

Relics of older ideology: Humans in the clade primates (related to prime, primary) because we put ourselves at the top of a hierarchy. We no longer think that's valid, but the name persists, as are the names that define lower clades of primates by proximity to humanity (Hominin, Hominid, Hominoid), and our self-assigned binomial name Homo sapiens "wise man".

Just plain errors: Like Crocodilia being in a clade called Pseudosuchia ("false Sobek") because originally we thought of those as crocodilian-like, but didn't realize crocodilians were actually part of the clade.

Of course, a spec-bio project is already a massive undertaking (one I probably won't be doing any time soon), and this extra layer would be a lot of extra work. You'd have to develop all your creatures with placeholder labels and then go back and figure out the history of biology and paleontology. Maybe you could do the biology work and hand off the naming to another person.

I also understand it could be confusing to the audience, especially if you have some historical errors thrown in.

Public PSA: Royal Commission

The royal commission into antisemitism is closing submissions on MAY 31st. Please ensure you submit.

You can talk about your experiences if you are Jewish or not

Please do your bit. Tell everyone about what you see and experience.

There are free resources to help you draft your submission or if you get called up for a public hearing:

1. AUJS - for Australian Jewish Students contact [email protected]

2. National Legal Aid - [email protected]

The birdandmoon image “Animals With Misleading Names” says that the mountain goat is not a goat.

Now, unless this has changed recently, both of those animals are caprines.

Both of those statements can be correct, but only one at a time.

If you consider all caprines to be goats, then yes the muskox is a goat. And so is the mountain goat, the sheep, and so on.

If you consider only members of genus Capra to be goats, then no, mountain goats are not goats. And neither are muskoxen, sheep, and so on.

Regular person: No, whales are mammals.

Do you have an opinion on this type of concern, or is your campaign for password managers more focused at people who don't manage their passwords at all (and so e.g. risk using the same password for multiple sites, etc.)?

I do still recommend a password manager for you! Here are the advantages that come with a password manager even if you're already storing passwords in a relatively secure way:

Password Manager autofill is a safety feature - it prevents you from entering credentials in a phishing site; you set the passwords to only autofill at the correct domain so when you're directed to an incorrect domain they won't populate when you click the button, which is a warning that you're on the wrong website.

You should be creating unique answers to security questions (they are often revealed in breaches, and people use the same answers across accounts, which is basically the same as sharing passwords across accounts) which even people who are creating good passwords are likely not doing because writing them down or remembering them is arduous; this is much easier in a password manager with a notes section

You should be saving account recovery codes for your accounts, password managers are a good place to do this (in the notes section) and if you copy/paste them in the PWM notes there's no chance of a transposition error

You may need to use your passwords when you are not at your desk someday; a good password manager (Bitwarden my beloved) will allow you to install a browser extension and use an app on as many devices as you want and additionally has an website where you can securely access your passwords online if you don't have a device with the app or extension installed (the "what if my laptop and cellphone fell into the ocean while I'm traveling" scenario - you need to get into your email to get your boarding pass!)

Passwords that are easy to type are easy to crack; password managers generate and enter high-entropy, secure passwords effortlessly.

Security-wise, password managers are a single point of failure only if:

Someone gains access to your password for your password manager - if someone gets the encrypted data from your vault in a breach they still need to crack each password. You can prevent this by creating a single very secure, very easy to memorize password and protecting THAT rather than having to protect many passwords.

You don't have 2FA/MFA set up - you should have at least email MFA set up for your important accounts (with MFA recovery information in your PWM) as a security measure regardless (but you do really, really need to make sure that you've got recovery methods established for every account that you've got MFA set up on; MFA is important but is much scarier to me personally because that can genuinely really seriously lock you out of accounts, whereas if you lose access to your password manager you can still reset your passwords if you maintain access to your email)

(you can also export your vault into a csv and store that in an encrypted folder on your desktop, or print it out and put it in your underwear drawer if you're really worried)

This is a misunderstanding of where the risk is.

Here's the important thing that everyone should know about encryption and password managers: company that makes your password manager does not have the password to your password manager.

In any moderately reasonable password manager, the company does not store your password, they store a *hash* of your password.

Think of your login password as an egg, and encryption algorithm as a recipe for cake. When you create your password, you are cracking an egg into a bowl; the password manager company doesn't look at the egg, it takes the egg and adds sugar and flour and butter and vanilla extract and puts it in a pan and puts the pan in the oven and then sticks that cake in the freezer. When you log in in the future (cracking another egg) the company follows the recipe again and compares what comes out of the oven to the cake they have on record from when you created your account.

If the data gets stolen from your password manager, it can only be decrypted by your egg. The password manager company doesn't have your egg, it has a cake, and nobody can reconstitute the egg from the cake. It is impossible, and lots of very smart people have done lots of very complicated math to demonstrate this.

This is something called Zero Knowledge Storage (or zero knowledge architecture/encryption). It's called that because the provider has zero knowledge of what they are handling; they do not have access to your information, they are simply holding the container that holds your information and making sure the proper cake is produced before they open the container. Nobody else's egg will make the correct cake, and again, nobody can get your egg out of the cake they have on record.

There are some password managers that are not very good at all and do not use this storage model; that's part of why I use and recommend Bitwarden - I know Bitwarden uses this storage model because Bitwarden is an open source product, which means that I can download and examine the source code on my own if I want to check (and if I don't want to check on my own, I can see what people in the Bitwarden forums are saying about it and those are the kinds of wonderful maniacs who DO go check on their own and will yell very loudly if they find a problem. I do not trust the security practices of tech companies, I do trust the security practices of open source security advocates).

With this storage model, the only way someone can get the password to your password manager is from you. If someone steals all of the data that Bitwarden has, they have not stolen a key to your bank vault and access to all of your secrets, they have stolen a bank vault full of other bank vaults.

So you are at no more risk of having your passwords stolen from a (good) password manager than you are at risk of having your passwords stolen from a notebook in your desk, and are in fact much safer (because of all the things mentioned in the first post).

Once people know this, they usually become concerned that they can't trust their password manager (after all some password managers have been breached and lost data and even stored passwords in plaintext before), and that is why I recommend bitwarden (or another password manager that security nerds have torture tested; PrivacyGuides.Org - a consumer privacy advocacy group - recommends Bitwarden as a private, secure password manager and notes that Bitwarden has a high bar for default security but also allows you to make it even MORE secure during setup)

With a good password manager, YOU are the single point of failure when it comes to accessing all of your passwords, not the password manager.

The point that I was making about needing to crack encryption is that the unencrypted data won't make it out of a good password manager (because they don't store unencrypted data) and this level of encryption is functionally impossible to crack. That's why the big risk isn't your password getting leaked, it's you getting phished (which autofill protects against!) or you forgetting your password (and losing access to your password manager, because they can't reset your password because they literally don't have access to decrypt your account - they warn you about this during setup).

This IS a concern for people who are in abusive living situations or who might have a really ridiculous amount of money that they talk about online; if your abusive parent or partner might find where you keep the password to your password manager, they can access all of your accounts. If a kidnapper can scare you into giving up the password to your password manager and that's where you keep the access for your crypto wallet, they will have access to your crypto (I'm assuming none of us have crypto here but "kidnapping and torturing people for their crypto passwords" has become an unpleasantly common news story). If you are in either of those situations I recommend A) don't write down the password to your password manager, just make it something you are sure you won't forget but someone else is unlikely to guess or B) don't fuck around with cryptocurrency.

Then they came for the horror

Then they came for heavy metal

For example, these four are all the same, with only slight variation in #1:

(I actually have duplicates from some of the "self-identified" anons above.)

But these two anons share the same new stock phrases:

"days are heavy" / "days that feel impossibly heavy."

Not to put too fine a tin foil hat on it, but:

That is the kind of threat someone involved in these kinds of financial scams and the social engineering behind them *would* make! It's a threatening statement to the existence of my blog which usually means heightened fear/anxiety of the target, which makes people more likely to fall for a financial scam. Social shame and embarrassment are also heightened emotions! Bullying works! This would make an excellent social engineering counterpoint (if tugging on heartstrings doesn't work!) and might even be effective on many people!

Sure, you can search the supposed connected usernames those anons claimed and find out specifics that way — but not a single one of those screenshots I showed specifies what they're referring to! The IDENTICAL messages from four "different people" never actually mention what their "family's struggle" even is! There's zero fucking context in the space of those messages. They're all IDENTICAL. I literally cannot be committing denialism about anything specific because those asks don't actually say anything I could be denying. How does this person know that these anons aren't a recently impoverished Nigerian prince?

So now you're asking why don't I just click on the usernames and find out more details? Simple. Because they're fucking fraudsters who sent me the same message like, six times with 4 different usernames attached AS ANONS. Why as anons if they have their own blogs and could send the messages that way? SIMPLE AGAIN: because if they're not logged into the blog accounts, you could have whole teams of people copying and pasting these anon asks to various Tumblr users constantly, and you can probably just bypass the ask limits by changing VPNs or going incognito or something. This is a DEDICATED scam. Is it a bot? MAYBE! But that also would explain some of why it doesn't work *while logged in* to the blog accounts — because being anon probably makes it easier to focus on volume.

Falling for these isn't just an 'oopsy doopsy, you're out some money' sort of a thing. If you send money to obvious scammers and if you platform obvious scammers, you are very likely directly financially supporting modern day slavery. That's not an exaggeration, and I'm not being alarmist. Please read any of these articles on the subject if you don't believe me:

It is a mountain of social constructs and cultural adaptations heaped upon a single kernel of hard biological truth, which is 'human babies need human milk (or a nutritionally complete synthetic replacement)'.

1- Human infants are very needy among mammals, have a very long altricial period, and have big developing brains that need a lot of food to support. This requires near constant proximity with caretakers, and for most of human history, specifically caretakers who are lactating. We did not have the tools necessary to bring children past infancy without lactating (and thus recently pregnant) people having to devote a lot of their time to early child care. A baby does not survive without human milk, and nutritionally complete baby formula is a very recent invention. Prior to that point in history, any human being Can perform most of an infant's care, but only people who can lactate can keep them alive until they can be weaned (and Generally speaking, breastfeeding lasts longer when possible for practical reasons).

2- humans love sorting things into categories and recognizing patterns, this is an evolutionary trait that helps us survive the world as cultural animals, and it produces cultural constructs. Sex/gender/sexgender is one of them. Reproductive ability (and traits usually associated with it) is always taken into account because it's a big fucking deal when you're living at subsistence levels, it's how your kinship group and society Survives. You've got people who have ability to get pregnant via intercourse, and people who have the ability to induce pregnancy via intercourse. We get the root idea of 'man' and 'woman' based on these, and what primary and secondary sex characteristics are most commonly associated with these abilities (and what labor roles are associated with each reproductive role within a given system). The notions of 'man' and 'woman' are not always constructed in the same ways and their cultural definitions will always extend beyond reproductive functions and collections of sex characteristics (whether this is readily admitted or not), but reproductive functions are never wholly immaterial to sexgender construction.

3- humans have very high rates of infant mortality without modern medical care (about 50%), and we spent the vast majority of our history living under very acute subsistence pressures and creating cultural adaptations to meet them. This means that most adults in a given society Have to reproduce Multiple times to bring enough infants to adulthood for the sake of population replacement and a kinship group's subsistence needs, and this means most people who can get pregnant will spend much of their adult life pregnant or nursing (and thus tied to infant care). Gendered labor divisions are based around both a society's unique subsistence needs and moreso around immaterial ideas about gender, and are not all the same, but there Are broad commonalities to how we responded to the problems of 'half of our adults have to spend a huge chunk of their adult life pregnant or nursing and closely tied to infants', particularly the most obvious extension of 'women do most childcare in general'. Another common characteristic is that labor activities that are more flexible and can be more easily performed with a baby on or near one's person are more often going to become feminine labor (though this can mean a lot of things, women have been doing backbreaking agricultural labor and hauling water with babies on their backs since forever). Gendered division of labor in at least SOME form is ubiquitous (though may be much more flexible in some societies than others), and at its very basic roots is a culturally adaptive response to subsistence pressures.

4- patriarchal hegemony is a characteristic of settled agrarian societies, while foraging societies (a very large and diverse category) are the only ones in which gender egalitarianism and a lack of social stratification as a whole are a common (though not ubiquitous) feature. This is where it gets a little hazier and I've seen differing arguments as to why patriarchy basically always accompanies broader social stratification (and why matriarchal hegemonies are basically absent, with the few possible examples being Extremely debatable), but it Is a mechanism of a gender class developing and its labor being exploited in the same way that lower social classes develop and have their labor exploited. 'Does most domestic work/childcare' is the most universal trait of feminine labor division (and demands on women in settled agrarian societies are high and also have commonalities across unrelated societies, you almost always see textile production or an equivalent being women's work), this is perhaps the form of labor that is more exploitable due to reduction of a person's mobility and having one hard biological factor (nursing) tied into it. Food production in settled agrarian states is something that MUST be done, lower classes develop around people being tied to that labor and exploited for it. Feeding babies with milk (and most capable adults spending a lot of their adult life pregnant/nursing) is something that MUST be done, the people tied to that labor (and associated subsistence labor activities that have been attached to this one) are exploited for it. Arguably, true matriarchies are absent (or are exceptionally rare) because the ONLY biologically innate aspect underlying gendered labor is "baby need milk", there is no such exploitable necessity tied into the 'man' gender role.

It's obviously a lot more complex in practice because you simply Cannot extricate the hard subsistence needs from the subjective cultural features, none of these things developed in the sort of simple linear fashion outlined here, ideas of "womanhood" and "manhood" are always interactive with reproductive traits but have neverrrrr actually just been about whether you are physiologically capable of bearing a child or not. Manhood and womanhood are constructs that occur in non-patriarchal societies, but when analyzing patriarchy this evolutionary angle is not very valuable, it's necessary to engage "man" and "woman" as classes, and to recognize the social constructs of "sex", "male and female", "man and woman" as being built around maintenance of patriarchal hegemony. Being a member of a feminized class under patriarchy has very, very little to do with the distant subsistence-oriented roots of gendered labor division.

But this provides us a very solid model for why gendered labor divisions are ubiquitous to begin with and why patriarchy is the gendered hegemony that emerges from them, one which does not require inaccurate bioessentialist assessments of sexgender being Real, women being 'made for' domestic labor, misogyny being an innate behavioral drive of """males""", etc. Gendered labor divisions are, at their VERY roots, pragmatic cultural adaptation to subsistence pressures that were common to all of humanity before having ways to feed infants besides human milk, with a million other cultural constructs on top of that; patriarchy first emerges as exploitation of this labor divide.

This animal is almost seven years old. When she was barely one she fell from a tree and hurt her backside near her tail. She had been lost for a whole day a few years ago, but today…this was all surpassed. As usual on Sunday mornings, I went to the kitchen to make breakfast. This tradition has been going on for nearly twenty years, only changed for holidays, vacations, and the occasional work…