Sooo are centipedes like fruit flies and not engage in any real form of sexual selection, or is the female going around judging the fuck out of every jizz pile she encounters?
"Mmm-mm, look at that poor viscosity, obviously from a low-quality male. This one on the other hand: deep color, firm texture, nice and sticky... clearly produced by a male with the superior genes I want to pass along to my offspring."
Second panel of the original comic (posted here) amended to track better in 2024 based on the first panel's dialogue
The episode predicted the situation down to her needing to pull the country out of the mess left by former President Trump
There was a conversation about lupine seed collection in the comment section of a post a little while back, and now that my lupine is going to seed I thought I'd follow up on what that looks like.
From left to right, we have immature seed pods (still green, still developing), maturing seed pods (brown, with black seeds inside), pods just about to pop (you can see them starting to split open with the round black seeds poking through), old pods most of which have popped open and dispelled their seeds, and finally a branch with all four stages present (generally seed pods develop from the bottom up, however this can be affected by variables like sun exposure).
The seed pods are apparently heat-activated; we've been getting a major heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest and the pods have been exploding open like crazy during midday when the sun hits them and the ambient temperature is at its peak. The seeds are propelled out when the pods burst open, and I've witnessed them fly well over ten feet.
If you want to harvest lupine seeds, the key is to grab them when they're mature but not yet expelled; you can do this by harvesting the pods by hand as they mature, but usually I prune the branches off the lupine once the pods on the branch start opening and put the entire branch in a bucket to break open at their leisure. While this pruning is generally unnecessary if you're not interested in seed saving, it does prevent thousands of volunteer lupine from popping up all over the garden (it's nearly impossible to keep all the seeds from spreading so I usually get a few dozen every fall and spring, but it's super easy to remove any that aren't wanted). One year I pruned the spent flowers before seeds could develop, and while that did produce a small second round of blooming I think it overly stressed the plant. Many lupine species are fairly short-lived perennials (with a few annuals sprinkled in), so it may be worth stressing them for more blooms if it's likely to die soon after anyway.
Some general disclaimers about lupine: due to their prolific seed generation and speedy life cycles, lupine are highly invasive outside their native range. There are also many species of lupine out there, so before planting make sure to source species from your area! There are some more "domesticated" ornamental species out there, but I'd really recommend sourcing a native variety if you can. They are really wonderful plants that require little care once established, have unique and showy foliage, and native bumblebees absolutely adore their gorgeous flowers.
I hope this was informative!
Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.
For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they're just in a more advanced state of "finding out."]
In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.
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Inspired by a comment reply I made in another thread, I thought it would be fun to share what plants native to your region you've had easy success with growing from seed, either in pots or direct-sowing. Please mention your country/region when commenting!
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican seen as a potential running mate for Donald Trump, tells a story in her new book about shooting and killing her young dog and a goat
Noem, who became governor in 2019, likened murdering her canine to having the ability and willingness in politics to do anything “difficult, messy, and ugly.”
I remember when presidential candidate Mitt Romney sunk his political career by telling what he thought was a humorous tale of creative problem solving that involved strapping the family dog to the roof of an overloaded car. This is like that, but horrifyingly worse.
As any farmer or gardener will tell you, nitrogen is critical for plant growth, and for most plants it's obtained via the soil. Soil nitrogen can be depleted if not replenished (in an agricultural context, by compost or fertilizer), but there's plentiful nitrogen in the atmosphere (which is mostly nitrogen, actually) so any plant that has nitrogen fixing abilities has constant access to this critical nutrient. There currently exist nitrogen-fixing plants (peas and clover for example), but they don't actually do it on their own, they rely on a symbiotic relationship with bacteria.
I'd be furious too, having such incompetent, out-of-touch advisors. This article alludes to it but others have gone more in-depth: Biden's advisors keep telling him the economy is great, the problem is messaging: the American people just haven't heard how great it is. Telling people struggling to pay their bills every month that they're better off than they were four years ago isn't messaging, it's gaslighting. His advisors should be telling him the truth, that the economy is only good on paper, that while the "haves" are living large the "have nots" are not only struggling, their ranks are quickly growing. Don't get me wrong, anyone who votes for Trump because they think he'll do better at economic issues is a moron, but history shows that a lot of people are going to go this route come November at the current pace of things. And Biden's advisors are just as moronic if they don't understand this.
The article: "a bunch of us are worried about the potential rise of fascism in the United States, so we're moving to Italy"
Tell me that you are oblivious to international politics without literally telling me that you are oblivious to international politics.
More to the point, if Americans were the type to "flee in droves," left-wingers would have left states like Texas and Florida en-masse for bluer pastures. Moving within the United States is a million times easier than moving overseas, and if they're not doing the former in the face of fascism/degradation of human rights in red states, why on earth would they engage in the much more difficult latter? Definitely sounds like a case of taking anecdote and non-committal musings online too seriously.
This is in Missouri, for anyone wondering.
Millennials grew up in the 90s, possibly one of the "best" decades in modern history: good economy, closest we've gotten to "world peace," comparative political stability and "quiet" (the biggest scandal in US politics was Monica Lewinsky), and problems existed but generally seemed to be getting better with time not worse. The 90s were an optimistic time, especially considering the snowballing disaster of a 21st century that followed.
Edit: also advancements in science and technology were bright and exciting, without the constant existential dread of "what calamity have we unleashed this time?" The biggest tech/science-advancement ethical debate I remember was about cloning people, which is a genuine sci-fi-esque moral quandary but ended up being generally moot in reality.
In a statement, the consul general of Israel to the southeast US, Anata Sultan-Dadon, said that the diplomatic mission is "saddened to learn of the self-immolation at the entrance to the office building". "It is tragic to see the hate and incitement toward Israel expressed in such a horrific way"
Anyone else caught off guard by this utterly tone deaf statement?
Then the years go on, the kid becomes an adult and begins cooking for themselves. The first meal they make for someone else they realize (1) how difficult it is to estimate when a meal will be done (2) how much work goes into cooking, especially for a whole family and (3) how hurtful and disruptive it is when the person you're cooking for decides they'd rather eat your food when it's cold and gross and everyone else has already finished eating and are trying to clean up. And that's not even incorporating the social elements of family dinner time the kid is eschewing. I didn't understand as a kid why my parents were so adamant about family dinner, but as an adult it's something I'm really glad they enforced.
Hard disagree. I am not a linguist, but did study language acquisition a bit in the context of childhood development and unless the science on the topic has changed dramatically in the last decade, it seems pretty clear that there are physiological differences between child and adult brains that dramatically impacts language learning.
For example, there is a critical age period for being able to distinguish different sounds, something that if not learned during this period may be impossible to ever pick up. This age period is shockingly young; I don't remember exactly but iirc it's less than one year old.
The most well-known example is that in Japanese, R and L are the same letter (their R/L letter sounds like a cross between the two, with a bit of D thrown in). Thus Japanese people have difficulty distinguishing between R and L in English; I personally verified this with a bunch of my Japanese friends (including a number who spoke English very well) and they could not distinguish between "election" and "erection," no matter how clearly I enunciated. However this is far from the only example out there; native English speakers similarly struggle differentiating various sounds in languages from countries like India and China that are clear as day to those speakers. This is not a matter of will or attention or even practice, it's a brain issue.
Given this, I find it highly unlikely that there aren't other elements of language learning that are harder (or even impossible) to properly learn outside the critical window.