One of the few advantages of having really grey hair is that it takes colour pretty easily. @steggy (whose handiwork this is) called it a modern mullet: business in the front, party in the back. #hair #hairdye

What do you call the day after everyone at last notices that someone is terrible? The Platnermath ha ha ha hm. ug.

every morning I ignore the daily writing prompt and then wait for the writing late #Poetry

I missed reading Starlink's latest conjunction report when it came out a bit over a month ago. I just skimmed through it and I think I need to go lay down for a while. It's terrifying how close we are to major collisions in orbit all the time... (I especially love the note about how […]

They also list 4 "disposal failures" which are satellites that died before SpaceX purposefully chucked them into the atmosphere. This includes Starlink 34343 which either exploded or got hit by debris a couple months ago. https://keeptrack.space/deep-dive/starlink-34343 4 out of thousands of […]

Kjell keeps finding sherds of Early Black Ware, the artless homemade pottery produced without the benefit of a wheel in villages around Lake Mälaren from c. 540 to 1200. It's ugly but it helps motivate us: this site starts at least 900 years ago. In graves we often find complete Early Black […]

Something from 2025 on Trump and the manipulation/misuse of the past. https://progressive.org/latest/the-danger-of-maga-history-karn-20250130/

Messaging lesson here: DO say - "yet again, MAGA wants to keep people from voting to control our elections to seize power" DON'T say - "see!!! they're the ones doing voter fraud!" Bringing up "fraud" merely feeds desire for anti-voter laws. newrepublic.com/post/206857/...

If you open a clothing store in an airport you must call it Airplane Mode you cowards

critics of LLM-generated code: "But if all the code is LLM-generated, nobody will know where all the bodies are buried!" advocates of LLM-generated code: "Precisely!" the un-askedd question: "wait, why are there bodies buried in the code?" #programming

They have found a Lasius emarginatus x platythorax hybrid. Just kill me now.

out of context podcast quote: "... the bird extremists who say oh, triceratops is a bird ... "

RE: https://mastodon.social/@badastro/116873969015823115 today the Sun celebrates because aphelion is when the apes are furthest from the Sun.

"I've been robbed." "That's horrible!" "They stole our training data. 😢" "Where did you get the training data?" "😡"

Good Afternoon Leiden, the academic’s quiet paradise #netherlands #leiden

Oddity #MushroomMonday #mushtodon #mushroom

Giving the gears #monochromemonday #photography

It has been zero days since I had to verify the output of a large language model and it was wrong.

My day today was more amphibious than terrestrial. 😀 #BikeTooter #nz #rain

For some reason they are very cute wasps. Just totally innocent looking. But I'm not fooled. That's a paralyzed ant queen under her! And she dragging her by her antennae! Darwin was right. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/301924276

It is raining in NYC today and if it's sunny tomorrow it will be a good day to look for queen ants! Pack few test tubes like this one in your purse just in case! (If you don't have any test tubes you can wash out an old pill bottle, punch a large hole in the […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

RE: https://flipping.rocks/@frankashwood/116872117692845716 This fact directly goes into the story I'm writing! 😎 #amwriting #stwormfighter

"Ringbum Millipede Muncher" is my new go to insult.

What we leave behind #archaeology

Camponotus punctulatus is a carpenter ant from Argentina. They make massive mounds in open pastures. This might sound very pedestrian and boring but it's very odd that a carpenter ant is building mound. Solonopsis (fire ants) make small mounds and are a real […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

Imagine if someone was brushing your hair but they stopped before it was brushed enough. Imagine if you protected your home from dangerous pigeons that could be up to *anything* but the people you protected didn't recognize how much you suffered to keep them safe! Imagine if you wanted to […]

Potatoes. PO - TAY - TOES. Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew. (I will sleep well tonight! And dream of potatoes. Or a potato-hilling machine.)

Peepo wants to avoid getting sprinkled while curious about what's going on. #catsofmastodon #caterday

Subgenus Dendrolasius ants are NOT Lasius ants IMO because "Lasius" means "fuzzy" and none of them are fuzzy at all. They are the "shiny fuzzy ants"... this includes Lasius fuliginosus and sister species. However a phylogeny that excluded these ants would also […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

So which VPN are we switching to? mullvad: fash ExpressVPN/surfshark/PIA/NordVPN: isaeli njalla: only one connection / no selection of exits / seems like a vps basically? Windscribe: openly transphobic on Twitter (someone here linked it) ivpn: someone here had a problem with them too but I […]

One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past. "but nowadays people just..." and they describe something poor and broke people do today. We don't have as much documentation of how poor people lived in […]

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@spiegelmama/116853575950614007 The fedi is the funniest place on the internet and only six dozen people know this.

For decades, Mat wasn’t paid for his work. Enslavers rented him out for $100 a year to a man who wanted to turn the site into a tourist attraction – what would later become Mammoth Cave national park. In the mid-19th century, Mat was one of several enslaved guides who became an expert in the […]

First ever dinosaur fossil discovered on Antarctica identified as a titanosaur https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2026/june/first-ever-dinosaur-fossil-discovered-on-antarctica-a-titanosaur.html 🦕 #fossilfriday #dinosaur #prehistoric

Some people are STILL getting over it.... but I meant in a more normal way... sort of.

I was watching a video by Caitlin Doughty about John Wilkes Booth and some of the conspiracy theories about his body and death. And the Nonsense went on right into 1903 a date that caught my eye since it was when my grandmother was born. And this made me think about how much can change in a […]

"You cannot easily measure the resentment. Or the rage clicks when they smash a button to dismiss another “did you know” pop-up. You cannot easily chart the moment a user thinks, “I used to like this product, and now it feels needy.” You cannot easily quantify the slow erosion of trust." […]

There are 204 workers visible in the "small log" where the queen likes to stay. I cannot count the workers in the connecting tunnels. They have three logs like this one, and then there are the ants in the outworld hiding in the logs and rocks there. The queen […] [Original post on sauropods.win]

If you run a peertube instance, you should have gotten an alert to update. Either way, it's time to update - there's a security fix out for a high severity vulnerability. Some operators got hit last time this happened. Don't let that happen to you. Patch your OS while you're at it. And drink […]

Lasius fuliginosus are diabolical little ants and they live with ya'll over there in Europe. 1. Hyper Social Parasites (Obligate queen killers and brood robbers who target OTHER queenkillers) 2. Shiny and black and constantly busy. 3. They make "carton" (like the paper that wasps) and fill […]

@llewelly This is an obvious choice for "State Ant" https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Camponotus_novaeboracensis Literally the New York Carpenter Ant... and it's a very regal wonderful ant that is almost never a 'pest' -- I'm a bit more partial to Trachymyrmex septentrionalis because like the […]

The “New Yorker” cover features the joy of summer bugs… but not a single ant. This always happens. The ant is always forgotten 🐜😔 even though they are like half of all of the insects at this scale. I will write a letter.

when will Spiders Georg get a spider named after him? #spiders

🇨🇦🦀 CANADA DAY CRAB THREAD 🦀🇨🇦 Canada encompasses 3 of the world's oceans, so let's meet crabs from each one. In the Arctic, the spiky king crab friend Neolithodes grimaldii is found offshore (300-5000m depth). Same genus, different species, as the famous baby 1/7 🦑🧪

I've written a computer program. And I wasn't going to say anything but it seems it's a very powerful computer program and I'm worried it might be... dangerous. I've put it on a thumb drive and locked it in a safe, but maybe someone should come and carefully check it out in the air-gap room […]

"50 percent of New Yorkers are on Medicaid, 20 percent are on food stamps and 70 percent are non-white" -Fox News Host Jesse Watters I'm not on Medicaid or food stamps, but I'm still on the list of things this guy thinks are wrong with this city apparently. Medicaid is used by ... old people […]

Here is my new carpenter ant queen. Her colony has 11 workers and I’ve been sharing their progress since the day I found her. Her gaster is filled with nectar that her daughters have collected. They are using her like a water tank. #antqueen #camponotus

“we little ants are starving… it very sad please feed us more bugs” (You can see the queen on the right in this photo. She has never had a distended gaster in all the five years that I’ve known her. She nonetheless lays a lot of eggs) #camponotus #camponotuspennsylvanicus #antkeeping #ants

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/116838612044666548 I have wondered increasingly often whether "flee to create a new Internet" might be the extreme-but-necessary right answer.