My t-shirt saying “I’m no fucking predator or paedophile” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

During the last wave in Colorado, prisoners were used as slave labour for this culling. The first case of human transmission was from one of them and they go back to overcrowded prisons full of immunocompromised people. If this cull doesn’t use them, at some point enough farms will be impacted at once to overwhelm private contractors.

Now sue the school out of existence.

Zoe Schlanger - The Light Eaters. Buy this yesterday. It’s so fucking good. All the current science on plant communication and neurology. The Factually podcast did a good interview with the author recently- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBToVPeuHX0

Michael Pollan - The Botany of Desire. Pollan is better known for his How to Change Your Mind book about psychedelics, but this a particularly good book on four materialist histories of plants.

Matt Candeias - In Defense of Plants. It’s kind of like a broader version of The Light Eaters with a focus on plant behaviour.

Richard Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist. This and Biology as Ideology did more for me as a scientific horticulturist than any particular book about plants. To understand a plant, you need to understand the dialectic of organism and environment because a plant is intrinsically tied to one setting it mediates its whole existence around. The biggest thing that will hinder you in plant science is the way it isolates the subject into an object of study, trying to remove as many of the variables as possible. But plants exist as a product of endless variables and The Light Eaters shows that we’ve barely scratched the surface of their world or how it works. The more nuance you can build into how you approach plants- the ecology, the chemistry, the soil-atmospheric interfaces, the ethnobotany and anthropology, the environmentalist theory- the better you’ll understand them. Botany on its own is pretty narrow.

I can only imagine how many useful genes that saves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They’re a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they’re congregating in the only reliable food source left. They’re a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.

I can’t imagine something braver than posting this photo. Thank you kind sir. You are truely a scholar and le gentleman.

https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/

I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.

England should be disqualified for filling every waterway with shit. It’s like a performance-enhancing drug if you only have to swim in a little bit of it.

They’re totally different scenarios but I couldn’t think of any other successful modern lunar landers which weren’t also Chinese. Mars is just the one other thing I know we’re flinging lil guys at.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxeejp0y2pjo

During the descent, an autonomous visual obstacle avoidance system was used to automatically detect obstacles, with a visible light camera selecting a comparatively safe landing area based on the brightness and darkness of the lunar surface, the CNSA was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.

The lander hovered about 100m (328ft) above the safe landing area, and used a laser 3D scanner before a slow vertical descent.

That’s super neat. When the floodlights came on I figured it was just doing it for the clarity of the footage before a preset landing sequence started. Have any of the Mars probes had such sophisticated real-time landing systems?

Genocide Joe 2024- “Bring the Boomerang Back”

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I like the Snowflake Method. You start with the core idea and branch out in a fractal-ish pattern to develop different elements and plot points. Mindmapping software helps keep it organised: https://xmind.app/

My magic rocks do something. Trust me. Crystals and turquoise are for rubes but this magic rock is named after a planetoid so it has special energy. Buy these very expensive magic rocks instead of the cheaper ones at the woo store.

The Magic School Bus was from a time before woke pollution. I fondly remember every episode ending with the class yelling at the Latino student.

Can’t do this anymore. Not since teaching became “woke”.

lol, lmao, and I cannot stress this enough- heehaw like a donkey.

Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.

Harvard’s grad students are with the UAW. The tension between faculty and admin boiling over could become a much bigger thing, with the UAW also organising grad students across the country. At least at my university the bulk of the courseload falls onto the grad students outside of lectures.

A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.