Saw the queen this morning when feeding the colony and she looks great! She’s almost five years old which is impressive for a little bug. She’s almost five was busy laying eggs as ever. Such a handsome ant. 🐜

Elbow at the Roadrunner, Boston, last night

Lol okay bro burns-notice.ghost.io/we-do-not-ha...

Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie. First, there's this fine set of four photos of the same grey heron, by Zongora: From a distance, you might assume that the long-necked bird shown in the top two pictures is a different […]

R U Up Yet #cats #catsofmastodon #torties

I missed this story a week ago: a judge undid the halt to the Block Island wind farm. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/22/trump-cannot-block-rhode-island-offshore-wind/86299506007/

Can bivalves be domesticated? It turns out that yes, farmed oysters have systematic differences in their genomes compared to their wild counterparts! Farmed oyster larvae have been found to be less hardy in the face of starvation (we've selected for rapid growth instead of flexibility in their […]

Charlie Kirk's killer? Terminally online and gun culture. The far right Evergreen shooter? Terminally online and gun culture. The Annunciation killer? Terminally online and gun culture. Yesterday's killers? Online and gun culture. The always forgotten CDC killer? Online and gun culture.

Right wing villainization of the left in wake of Charlie Kirk's killing needs a response, as do innumerate claims that left wingers are biggest terrorist threat. But falling into a "Both Sides Mass Killers" game w/right wingers lets them avoid the guns and malaise problem common to most killings.

@ai6yr My uncle was arrested at gunpoint by US troops with fixed bayonets after spending the whole day as a first responder diving into the burning waters of Pearl Harbor to rescue and recover US sailors and marines on Dec 7, 1941, as a soldier of the Hawai'ian Territorial Guard -- he was […]

UK's Labour Party abandoned transgender people. The gambit to pursue rightwing voters by abandoning a targeted minority failed, and now they're facing the prospect of a historic loss. US Dems could learn a lot from their failure. Great piece from S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism.

With great effort, Matt Parker demonstrates the counterexample to a longstanding conjecture in knot theory, that unknotting number is additive under connected sum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7f-nGohVc

An ORIGINAL Pascaline for sale- doesn’t even say how much for the shipping smh press.christies.com/la-pascaline...

I got a mention in @tomscott.com Tom Scott's weekly newsletter- thanks to my new best bud!

So far there have been zero trans women reported as having visited epsteins pedo island. But lots of people who want you to think trans women are threats to children seemed to have gone there at some point. Curious...

I was refreshing myself on partials when “the only known portrait of Adrien-Marie Legendre” caused a record-scratch in my mind. What The Heck Is This? I really thought I knew what this cat looked like— a round and forgettable-looking frenchmen like many […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

The Rapture? Oh, it is as it was predicted when I was but a young man. The man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars and now he only eats guitars

@mattmcirvin But also I didn't really expect them to come back without any impact? Remote learning was a compromise. I hope we never have to do that again!

@mattmcirvin I do think there is a little something about lockdown. Students in middle school during those years seem most impacted. They are just a bit behind on some math skills and for the years right after I had to break some of horrendous cheating habits. That is passing through. But […]

[Autism Teacher Observations] I've been teaching for a long time and I'm pretty good at it, not to brag or anything. Over my career I have watched autism and learning disabilities (which aren't the same thing) become more discussed, in some cases better addressed and in other cases become more […]

When you’re the daughter of a baron and born into unimaginable wealth and luxury but tsarist russia makes you go :yikes:

#tilingtuesday again, huh?

After a chaotic series of meetings, the CDC's vaccine policy group seems to be making smaller changes to recommendations than were previously reported as probable: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccine-changes-what-it Among other things, they're not dis-recommending […]

If you're even just a little into ants you've heard of Gigantiops destructor. These beautiful big-eye'd ants live in humid forests in South America. They live in smaller colonies and hunt by sight. They are excellent jumpers with long slender legs that allow them to navigate leaf litter and […]

For on the other side of the Atlantic ocean there is another ant. She also has huge eyes. But, her legs and antennae are shorter and more stout. She isn't closely related to Gigantiops, but really we know very little about this ant. There are no photos of […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

Gov. Healey releases Massachusetts state recommendations for COVID vaccination for basically everybody: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/healey-administration-issues-new-evidence-based-covid-19-vaccine-guidance-for-mass/3810571/ We're going to need a lot more of this--it sounds like the […]

Good news about vaccination on the West Coast: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/09/17/west-coast-states-recommend-covid-vaccine-amid-cdc-turmoil/

Equality Caucus Rep. Mark Takano calls on Speaker Johnson and GOP House leadership to reign in their party's extreme rhetoric in trans people per this statement that just hit my inbox:

@llewelly @colinpurrington @rspfau @nev I have often wished I could find a curator of mites to help me understand the mites I find with ants sometimes. Identifying mites is very esoteric and impresses me to no end.

added a cheat sheet to the official Git website https://git-scm.com/cheat-sheet

As a Minister I miss speak out. Advocating killing the homeless on national television is a much more serious offense than anything Matthew Dowd said. Every moral person across the political divide should be outraged […]

Genus of Love by Tom Tom Club is sampled everywhere. I love listening to music and finding it in new places. I just ran across it in Shoomp by De La Soul.

Nate Perry and Ragged Company, Haverhill River Ruckus

What term to use when talking about one of my cats with my other cat? Brother? Nah, they're not from the same parents and NO, my cats are not my kids. My kids are my kids. My cats are grown up creature sharing my home. Housemates? Friend? No, they're not friends. They avoid each other most of […]

Clam gardens have been used by Pacific Northwest native tribes for thousands of years. They build rock walls to trap sediment, at the right height to be immersed at high tide but also exposed for harvest at low tide. This encourages burrowing clams to settle in […] [Original post on scicomm.xyz]

Rogatons Rediffusions - 30/10/2023 - "Corrompu" Source: https://www.bouletcorp.com/rogatons/2023/10/30 LES ALBUMS ! Tome 1: https://www.exemplaire-editions.fr/exemplaire/libraire/boutique/livre/rogatons Tome 2: https://www.exemplaire-editions.fr/exemplaire/libraire/boutique/livre/rogatons-tome-deux

New sign on the office wall. Don’t make me point at it!

Unenforced type checking and significant whitespace

The point of sale system at this Qdoba has a lag BEFORE it reads your card, during which it displays "Please remove card", and doing so will cancel the transaction. This has bitten me at least twice and I think I've seen the same problem elsewhere.

“Unlike a typical mesh, which stores per-vertex 3D positions, a mescher stores per-vertex 2D screen-space positions and a per-edge depth difference. Whereas differences in depth across edges must sum up to zero as we travel around a standard mesh, this is not […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Clams of course produce poop from digested material, but they also produce pseudofeces from all the stuff picked up by their gills that they don't eat. The pseudofeces is packaged up in mucus. Both the poop and not-poop are shot out the siphon when the clam claps […] [Original post on scicomm.xyz]

#SciArtSeptember day 1 fluid. This is an old one from 2020 "Wild Atlantic Wave" - I need to do more of these! @fibrearts @textilearts @embroidery #wildatlanticway #wildatlanticwaves #art #fineartinstitch #textileart #embroidery #fineart #contemporaryart #MastoArt #artistsonmastodon #fediart #artist

NOW: Judge Breyer finds President Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act with deployment in LA. Enjoins further use: Ruling: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

shhhh! My husband is developing an obsession with cicadas. He's always liked insects, but never really found "his bugs" but I think the mysterious goggle eye'd cicadas may have his heart. I'm obtaining and leaving field guides in strategic locations about the apartment. wish me luck! (and if […]

If you've been watching "Peacemaker" you know why the comments on this four-year-old absolute banger by Norwegian rocker Ida Maria are now full of references to birds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSWwuEdlhZQ

I still remember the first time I checked code into a repo for a large application with many others working on it simultaneously thinking “How can this possibly work? Any line of code I wrote could interfere with anyone else’s and the only tool I have is some crude thing based on diff?” It […]

My wife loves escape-room-type puzzles and as a present I gave her a gift certificate to Level99, a similar but not identical sort of place in Natick, MA. It was fun though not perfect. Level99 is actually more similar to Boda Borg, a Swedish import with a location in Malden where we've gone […]

In the US, police can collect "evidence" in the course of investigating crimes. In a way a heap of cash could be evidence of a crime. However they simply get to keep this cash (it goes to the police station that takes it and perhaps some disappears along the way some of the time) this creates a […]

Last weekend we had a fun time at Seabreeze, a small amusement park on Lake Ontario just outside of Rochester. The highlights for me included one of the oldest operating roller coasters in the world; a quirky log flume with an unusually scary drop; and an absolutely unique little coaster with a […]

Paul Blartleby, Mall Scrivener