flora_explora @ flora_explora @beehaw.org

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627

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's OK not to know pi and it would also be OK not to get the joke :)

Reverse ADHD?

Haha cool blue, very nice!

All those masturbating flowers are weirder xD

Fascinating that the only aboveground part of the plant is its flower! Hard to imagine how it is parasitizing some vines underground and then all of a sudden produces this monster of a flower!

Although it is the largest flower, it isn't the largest inflorescence haha. But apparently both this plant and the one with the largest inflorescence (Amorphophallus titanum) both smell like something rotting and are so huge. I mean, shouldn't it be easier to attract flies?

If a crush of you is asking for nudes, maybe you should reconsider if the person is really that great. Asking for nudibranchs, on the other hand, would be an indicator of a much nicer person :)

Oh, I thought that it was qualitatively already a psychedelic sting. But yeah, quantity is key here xD

I don't get it. If the sting of U. pelulifera already contains bufotenin, what genetic change would be needed for a psychedelic sting? Wikipedia says bufotenin is a psychedelic substance and a DMT analog.

Fun fact: while searching for this, I've found that apparently some people seem to have elevated levels of bufotenin in their pee. Could be another source...

Hahaha lol, thanks for the laugh :)

OK, keep living in your fantasy...

If you actually wanted a phylogenetic tree to scale you would end up with a huuuge tree that has many more branches because it obviously is not as simple as depicted above. Take birds for example: There are all the dinosaurs in between that weren't birds but have their own branches. It has actually been a tough question where to draw the line between dinosaurs and birds (there is a whole article on wiki). And if you have any paraphyletic groups in your tree it gets even messier! If you are already displaying other groups at the subfamily level, you should then display all groups at this level.

All this is to say that the level of detail contained in a phylogenetic tree (or any graph for that matter) is highly dependent on the information you want to convey. Ideally you should draw it as detailed as necessary and as simplified as possible. In this case, we get all the information that is necessary but are not overwhelmed with facts that if you draw Squamata (lizards and snakes), you would also have to draw Rhynchocephalia (monotypic order) in.

Well, I actually completely agree with you and thought your initial comment to be quite interesting. I've never viewed this thought experiment as to be science vs religion.

My point in my previous comment was exactly that, all our lines and categories are arbitrary. They're really useful to us, but in the end still arbitrary. I enjoy categorizing stuff and so I like taxonomy a lot. But I always have to keep in mind that the categories I choose are ultimately human made and can never represent the full spectrum of nature.

Pantone 032 feels to aggressive to me, can I have another color? :P

We are so zoomed in evolution at this point that the arbitrary distinction between what is a chicken and what not doesn't make any sense anymore. Evolution does some jumps, but it is still hard to actually draw the line where a nearly-chicken has not been a chicken yet. Maybe someone could fill in my mental gap in here for me, but hasn't Richard Dawkins given the example of some animal (possibly a rabbit?) that is traced back in evolution and since you cannot draw the line when it hasn't been that animal it is rabbits all the way down?

Nope, seeing men as the default and considering everyone else as a secondary option is already a discrimination of the latter. I know that "alle Schüler" is referring to everyone in class, but it is not gender neutral. It assumes male students if not specified otherwise.

It seems like you don't acknowledge the existence of patriarchal violence or power. A discussion is probably futile in this case because our value systems are fundamentally different.

My intuitive explanation would be that all things have different states in which they can be: solid, fluid/liquid and gaseous. It just depends on how cold or hot it is what state the material is in. Even oxygen can be fluid at sufficiently low temperatures and metals gaseous at really high temperatures. (This varies with pressure, but maybe this gets too complicated.)

So when ice gets too warm (because it isn't in the freezer anymore for example), it changes its state to a liquid. You can imagine all molecules to be in various interactions with each other. When it is cold for them, they snuggle together and form a solid clump. When it gets warmer they begin to dance and not be as close anymore. They sway together and form a fluid. But when they are really hot they are even further away from each other so now they are pretty lose, forming a gas.

When water is in the form of ice it means that the water molecules are cold and snuggle together. As they get warmed by their environment they slowly begin to not be as close together anymore, so they slowly melt and form water.

This is especially true when you are talking with people in various languages and they all want you to know the common name of an organism.

More confusing is that I know some organisms only by their common name, some by both names and most only by scientific names.

iNaturalist gives always gives me the scientific names first but varies in common names between the different local variants. It is confusing if some are in English, others in German or Spanish etc.

If you zoom in, you can see that the "beak" is behind the leg in the foreground actually.

This got me interested and I looked up heteropteran mouthparts. The best description I could find was here. Apparently the segmented larger part of the beak here is the labium giving support to the stylus. The stylus is the blackish tube that runs from the head through the labium.

Useful comment!

The meme is the other way around though. The price tag in the meme is for researchers to pay so their article gets published in the journal. And it will be an open access article, so people who want to read it won't have to pay anything. What's so crazy about this is the huge prize tag for publishing your paper. It cannot be that costly to run an online journal.

What? How can this be true? "The generic masculine is gender-neutral"? You see where you made a mistake? German and most other languages revolve around a pretty strong gender hierarchy and patriarchy. So no, its default is definitely not gender neutral! I would be in favor of a true neutral. But we would have to come up with a new form.