Catoblepas

It was a more innocent time. I was introduced to cupholder.exe from my mom, who got it from a coworker’s chain email, as all things spread in those days. I think it might have specifically been called a coke can holder in the email because we were in the south, lol.

I was weird beforehand! Now excuse me while I let my cat lick my armpit, she gets very upset if she’s not allowed to.

I saw a neat video recently from one of those rewilding organizations about how they’re doing basically the same thing to expand native forests at a rate faster than it would regenerate on its own. Apparently the nursery grown saplings tend to drop dead when someone stops caring for them, but saplings transplanted from a few hundred meters away were already taking care of themselves and are more likely to survive.

Anyone who understands batteries want to tell me if this will eventually explode or something?

Base 10 means when you count it goes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Base 4 means when you count it goes: 1 2 3 10. 10 would still be equivalent to 4, 11 would be 5, 12 would be 6, and 20 would be 8.

To an alien that counted in base 4, base 4 would be base 10, because 4 is where they start adding 0s to numbers and they don’t have a concept of what 4 is. Probably not really if they were a mathematician alien, but it made me laugh.

It would be miserable to bike with kids where you are right now because of who your local government decided public space belongs to and how they should get to use it (ie, people in cars and they should use it by driving around). It doesn’t have to be that way and it’s absolutely possible to live perfectly happily without a car when communities choose to prioritize public space being for things other than cars.

A cargo bike would probably be better for you, then, or just a cargo attachment to a bike. E-bikes are strong enough for hauling and getting around that I see a parent and 1-2 kids being hauled around by them all the time, and I doubt your groceries outweigh that.

If you haul furniture for work or are constantly doing free deliveries for friends or something then yeah, you’re going to need transport that accommodates that. But that’s an edge case and doesn’t really negate the societal need for communities to be built around human beings and not cars. If you lived where I do you would be eligible for door to door service from the disabled transit to take you to and from the grocery store. There’s not a reason for you or anyone else to need to spend (tens of) thousands of dollars on a car, insurance, gas, and maintenance to access food or your job when we could just be doing mass transit and improving pedestrian/cyclist access.

But what was really interesting, and took me much longer to figure out, was that the hawk always attacked when the car queue was long enough to provide cover all the way to the small tree, and that only happened after someone had pressed the pedestrian crossing button. As soon as the sound signal was activated, the raptor would fly from somewhere into the small tree, wait for the cars to line up, and then strike.

That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length. The bird also had to have a good mental map of the place, because when the car queue reached its tree, the raptor could no longer see the place where its prey was and had to get there by memory.

It was an immature bird. Cooper’s hawks rarely nest in cities in our area but are common winter visitors. So the bird I was watching was almost certainly a migrant, having moved to the city just a few weeks earlier. And it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns. To me it seemed very impressive.

Emphasis mine. That’s wild!

I feel so much more normal for just saying hello to my shower spider now.

Putting the ‘strange’ in ‘getting some strange.’

I do groceries for 2 people once a week with a bus and my legs. With an e-bike and a cargo trailer it would be trivial.

Don’t forget it’s never too late to start masking.