more people have been to russia than i have

Incredible ask, thank you.

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Which shape is bouba and which is kiki? A Lingthusiasm zine

Here are two shapes. If you had to assign the name "bouba" to one of them and "kiki" to the other, which name would you give to which? If you think about it, you probably have a guess… In this Lingthusiasm zine, Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about these two linguistically famous shapes.

Print and fold your own copies for free! 

8½ x 11 paper: colour, b&w 

A4 paper: colour, b&w 

Learn more about bouba and kiki! 

What words sound spiky across languages? (Lingthusiasm podcast)

Which is "bouba" and which is "kiki"? (Tom Scott Language Files video)

Bouba/Kiki Effect (Wikipedia)

Research cited

Cwiek et al 2021, Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures

Loconsole et al 2026, Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

Öztürk et al 2012, Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds

Styles and Gawne 2017, When does maluma/takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter

More from Lingthusiasm

More zines that are enthusiastic about linguistics!

We also make a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

To Light, Crime was the source of society's "Rot." And his philosophy on what constituted "crime" was basically about normal-ass people who were willing to break the law. you know, the laws Cops enforce.

It also explains why he's indiscriminate rather than surgical. Because of his own biases, he never stops to consider the flaws in the methods of who gets arrested, or how that never actually seems to have an impact on Crime Rates tm. Cops (like Light) simply see this as evidence that they're not arresting enough people! That they're not going far enough! And these are the values our protagonist was raised with. A surgical strike would let Real Criminals off the hook, while targeting people who, yes, may be more evil by orders of magnitude, but they do it in a LEGAL way!

However, aside from those exceptions, since the early 20th century, the scientific community has adopted a strict rule of retaining names (and the principle had been advocated since the late 19th - name changes that were early enough were grandfathered in to avoid the chaos of restoring numerous names that had been out of use for decades, but since then it's been a solid rule). Once something's named, that name is permanent, even if it's later discovered to be inaccurate. So, for example, an early species of whale is called Basilosaurus, the -saurus being because it was initially thought to be a marine reptile. Although it was later discovered to be a whale ancestor, the name remains unchanged. So by establishing a rule allowing certain names to be changed, you open up the floodgates to other names being changed, including for political reasons. For example, a while ago Turkey tried to push for names referencing Armenia or Kurds to be renamed, which was rejected by the international community