Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird
1/2
wow what an interesting thought. I have no idea. I guess wings would be a problem for the stereotypical ant nest of tunnels, but of course not all ants live in tunnels. Army ants don't, although they did ancestrally. And bees manage it somehow.

hooray! ants part 2 is out!
https://www.palaeocast.com/ants/

how ants evolved from wasps

new 113 million year old ant from the Crato Formatio of Brazil!
@futurebird

#ants
#fossils
#insects
#paleobiology

@futurebird @mattmcirvin
on level, it's hilarious, but's also tragic. Unfortunately, male-on-male violence over perceived failure to comply with gender norms is not rare. (Having suffered a lot of it in the 1980s, I spent the 1990s and early 2000s thinking it had become rare. But I no longer think it did.) Nor is it rare for people say "well, I can understand why because you used to look a girl when you were younger".

@ubi @futurebird

great idea for a spec evo universe, but I have found snails living in small streams that were otherwise surrounded by desert, and I don't think that's terribly unusual. Velvet worms, on the other hand, I've never seen outside of pictures, but from what little I know , they don't seem to be able to spread like snails do. But, without arthropods, maybe they would have evolved the ability. (And maybe they evolved it in the past, but we just don't know due to poor preservation)

@futurebird @noondlyt @weirdestate
abusive relationship detector going from 6 to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.

@joelvanderwerf @futurebird

I find it puzzling there are no land-dwelling cephalopods. Several species of octopus make occasional late night trips onto land. And terrestrial gastropods (snails and slugs) have evolved many times independently. It didn't just happen once. (I don't know if any of the terrestrial slugs were shell-less when they evolved terrestrial habits. As far as I know, a lineage of gastropods can evolve a shell or evolve it away relatively easily.)

@futurebird there are plenty of vertebrates that eat snails. And most fossil lungfish have the teeth for eating some kind of hard-shelled muck-dwelling prey. South American lungfish eat snails, among many other things. Maybe some of the others do as well, I don't know. Lungfish are the nearest living relatives to land vertebrates that aren't ancestrally land living. So in the absence of arthropods, snails could have been a food that provided an advantage to early tetrapods that came onto land.

@futurebird you're having quite the antventure

@futurebird @shafik

the thing is that I don't believe this story. It's too neat. It's too pat. Somebody knew Vonnegut and Heller knew each other, and made the rest up. Conveniently, it didn't appear until after they were both dead and could no longer object.

@futurebird
what stands out to me is that the news industry keeps trying their damndest to turn the public eye to something else, anything else. They are very obviously every bit as terrified of the epstein thing as trump is. Maybe even more terrified.

@futurebird financially, I can't afford $15. Mentally, I can't afford to look at aliexpress.

@futurebird to be honest I wish I could afford these and a pair of rainbow socks.

@futurebird
yep. Never leave an antlion alone wiith your ants. Even if they truly believe in "sustainable harvesting", they aren't willing to reckon with their desire to overharvest and always end up telling themselves "well a little overharvesting is ok".

@futurebird come on, antlions don't just eat ants. Technically, an antlion will eat anything that slides down into its pit. Throw them the occasional jedi and a few rebel scum and they'll eat those too.

@futurebird isn't there a staten island fairy in collusion with the salem witches?

@futurebird @josh0 @dalias @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots

@josh0 @futurebird @dalias @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots

"build a party line" fun electronics project becomes "give kid in next room 9V DC shock by turning crank on phone" ... : )

@futurebird

_Live, Under a Rock_ is a bootleg album of an indie band recorded at a small club in one of those half-abandoned towns in the Nevada desert.

@futurebird

when will the boas
come home to boahstowne?

it's not a home they've known
since way back in the Eocene
when the climate was
mean and green

@riley @futurebird

everybody knows
about Napier's bones
you could multiply
and you could divide
you could even extract
the square root
such sweet sweet necromancy

but nobody knows about
Genaille–Lucas rulers
with which you could save
a little addition on the way
at the price of a
much more complicated name
and no allusion
to death
and what the dead might say

#poetry
#math