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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2023

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  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzHonestly wtf?
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    4 days ago

    I live in the middle of nowhere in Eastern North America. Saw some growing all by itself in the middle of the lane. It never came back in that spot and I’ve never seen any other plants. The seed pods are really spiky and light, they must hitch a ride on stuff.

    I decided not to try it after reading a few “trip reports”.


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzInsulin
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    8 days ago

    Something I’ve noticed is when untraveled people in the USA try to contextualize themselves with other countries they pick the worst examples they can think of. Favelas in Brazil or slums in South Africa for example. We do this to the point where our entire conception of countries (or in the case of Africa, continents) is the worst imagery we can think of. I think they genuinely don’t believe that, for all their troubles India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, etc also have smartphones and big buildings and libraries and universities and laboratories, and educated people living decent lives.

    They also can’t see how the overcrowded jails full of pretrial prisoners, the barefoot children carrying buckets for water in Appalachia, the rundown schools full of illiterate kids, the impunity of rich private interests, the corrupt sheriffs and judges, and on and on, puts us in the company of the “third world countries”. Yes we have nice places too, but SO DO THEY. A broken society in the 21st century isn’t people living in mud huts, it’s children shitting in the street next to a glass skyscraper with LEED Platinum certification.





  • Huh, found a source from 1683 where a guy named Edward Tyson presented his research on the worm to the Royal Society, and he called it the “joynted worm”. He also refers to it by its Latin name Lumbricus latus which AFAIK just means “flat worm”, and Lumbricus teres Intestinalis which I’m guessing means “round worm of the intestine”.

    This is actually a great paper because he’s arguing against spontaneous generation of insects from rotting meat by pointing out that these worms are only found within the bodies of living animals and therefore must be the product of these animals eating eggs or body segments of the worm.

    https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1683.0020

    OK, looks like at least as far back as this they were calling it “tape worm”. This just makes me wonder how old “tape” is:

    …And the first is, it’s being flat; hence call’d Lumbricus Latus… and by some in English, the Tape-worm. -page 115


  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlLiberals be like
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    2 months ago

    Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.

    This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.


  • Watching videos has been broken for a few weeks. On the 24th of Sep they mentioned that they’d identified a potential cause, but since then there haven’t been any updates. They typically aren’t super communicative and tend to lock down posts because of the huge surge of duplicate bug reports and unhelpful comments they get whenever this happens. So the silence is not that unusual, but it has been slightly longer than usual for an update.




  • Boss once had me fill a dumpster with old halogen flourescent bulbs. Probably 90% of them shattered in the process. Then it turns out that was the wrong dumpster so we had to shovel all the broken bits into another. Didn’t learn they had mercury in them for a decade. I was 15. So that’s cool, wonder what that did.