llewelly

I tried to write an introduction and it was so empty it collapsed inward on itself

pronouns: he/him
note: I boost many political posts
note: I boost many insect photos
favorite mineral: Luddite

Public Key

npub1np0nrz20fgjre42ll0ndu7k09lkl65ewdukfw30je4l6wmz80stse05h00

NIP-05 Address

llewelly_at_sauropods.win@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsfshe339855fpu640lhek70t8jlm0a2vhx7tyhghev6la8d3rhc9cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds4pnzhl

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1np0nrz20fgjre42ll0ndu7k09lkl65ewdukfw30je4l6wmz80stse05h00

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Last Notes

2026-04-07 23:24:17 UTC

"For me, the most ironic token
of that moment in history [the
first human moon landing] is the
plaque signed by President
Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11
took to the moon. It reads, "We
came in peace for all Mankind."
As the United States was
dropping seven and a half
megatons of conventional
explosives on small nations in
Southeast Asia, we congratulated
ourselves on our humanity. We
would harm no one on a lifeless
rock."
-- Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot, pg 169

2026-03-11 18:36:30 UTC

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oh, I had forgotten it was used that way in Brave New World, thank you for the reminder - I think.

2026-03-11 18:27:38 UTC

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I seem to recall about 3/4 of the offenders were men SFF authors based in the USA. But my SFF reading fell off a cliff when I entered college and never came back, and now that era seems a long time ago.

2026-03-11 18:08:37 UTC

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overall I like the word, but by the time I was about 25 I was heartily sick of certain writers constantly using it to describe femme bodies.

2026-03-06 06:40:50 UTC

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so-called "AI" companies: "Our product could destroy civilization!!"
investors: "Here's billions and billions of $$$$!!!"
high energy physics: "actually our experiments aren't as dangerous as you've been led to believe"
investors: "we've got to convince governments to stop wasting money on it, then."

2026-03-04 10:02:04 UTC

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when I was a kid arms smugglers like Ollie North bought weapons from Iran and sold them to the Contras.

2026-02-11 16:16:13 UTC

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next time my head explodes I'm gonna tell everyone it's ok, all that mess is just literary figures, splattered all over everywhere.

2026-02-11 10:24:51 UTC

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is mathematics a natural science?

2026-01-23 11:47:15 UTC

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how does cat crime keep you up?

2026-01-03 16:02:14 UTC

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a piece of wood, basking on a sunny rock. Geese swim nearby.
There, now I've fixed the framing for you.

2025-12-29 14:16:00 UTC

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I'm trying to think of a five-eyed animal, and the only thing I can come up with is Opabinia, the weird Cambrian (stem-)arthropod. Unfortunately, Opabinia didn't look much like Myaku Myaku; Opabinia's eyes were on stalks, it had a long, flattened body, and strange clawed proboscis in front.

2025-12-23 23:12:39 UTC

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I think this has been much researched, though proper experiment design and how it affects interpretation of results is still very much a live issue, in part because animal behavior scientists rarely get the funding they need, and must compromise experiment design with limited resources. But cats play close attention to the ear positions of other mammals. However, those positions have much more to do with emotional state than with direction of sounds being listened to.

2025-12-13 21:42:32 UTC

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an ecosystem meant to filled with giant fog-adapted trees, obviously.

2025-12-12 22:59:59 UTC

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what I hear, via wikipedia:
"Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages."
versus:
"They have no call or cry or any voice."
one of the above you can hear, the other you cannot.

2025-12-09 15:17:27 UTC

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hm. Pelophylax nigromaculatus is native to Eurasia, so I guess this is great news for Europe, but since it's not native to North America, I don't think it makes much difference to the separate invasive hornet issues in North America.

2025-12-03 20:41:11 UTC

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I thought the whole point of IoT was to turn every home appliance into a toilet with a camera and a subscription fee?

2025-12-03 15:24:09 UTC

remember, every ecosystem contains millions of parasitoid wasps. Whenver a computer company advertises their "ecosystem", ask yourself who is the parasitoid wasp and who is the caterpillar.
#ecosystem

2025-11-08 22:07:50 UTC

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is it like that Stephen King novel about the nurse who was also a superfan?

2025-11-07 16:54:17 UTC

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an ostrich has two toes on each foot, with the smaller of the two on the outside of the foot. The ostrich at the link has three toes on its left foot, and its right foot has a small toe on the inner side. The smoothness of the feathers is also unrealistic. I feat the image was generated by automated plagiarism machines.

2025-11-04 21:19:07 UTC

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what kind of mats? Door mats?

2025-10-30 07:13:41 UTC

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he was afraid to call it "the counterclockwise island" because he couldn't remember how the Coriolis effect worked.

2025-10-29 10:48:14 UTC

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in the 16th century, swords were on their way out. They would become unfashionable only 400 years later.

2025-10-28 19:01:21 UTC

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I'm old enough to remember when it was unusual for fantasy to portray dragons as "domesticated".

2025-10-28 15:55:07 UTC

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having seen a deer¹ steal a leg of lamb from a barbecue, I would not have expected sheep tallow to be a deterrent.
¹a mule deer, which don't live in Europe. Even so ...

2025-10-18 12:50:04 UTC

The Helpless Perplexity of Volition would have been a great band name.

2025-10-12 14:26:49 UTC

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everyone's still mad at you all for saying "actually the Vikings didn't put horns on their helmets"

2025-09-24 15:25:44 UTC

what if the rapture happened 66 million years ago and everything alive today is descended from the left behind?

2025-09-17 14:28:33 UTC

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oh, sorry, I got the meaning of your question upside down.

2025-09-17 14:04:14 UTC

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https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs
There have been a number of attempts to re-write the core of emacs in other languages, but with a translator to support emacs lisp code.
here's a recent update from one of those attempts, led by [@ramin_hal9001](https://fe.disroot.org/users/ramin_hal9001 ) :
https://fe.disroot.org/objects/e64fa19b-e049-449e-9fef-b68b2b8a133a
There have been others, but sadly I've forgotten them.

2025-09-16 10:52:42 UTC

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I am reminded of a scene in a Frank Baum novel in which a princess who owns a closet full of heads she can magically swap for her own, dithers over whether or not to wear the beautiful black-haired head with the fiery temper.

2025-09-16 09:34:59 UTC

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Thank you. Based on the following picture, I had assumed the sign itself was historical, even if the frame was reconstructed, but now I think it isn't.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CheckpointCharlieSign1981.jpg
(edit: looking at other pictures, I think the above picture is looking away from all the fortifications you mentioned.)

2025-09-16 09:04:07 UTC

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wonder who is responsible for keeping that historical sign in good condition. Interesting the german text appears to lack the clauses about weapons and traffic. I suppose it was fair to assume if you read german you didn't need those reminders.

2025-09-13 09:12:39 UTC

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a while ago, I read _The Age of Wood_ , by Roland Ennos, and it had a vague paragraph along the lines of "there were many different types of stone axes, but the most common were actually splitting mauls, meant to split wood along the grain …" followed by text on how having efficient tools for splitting wood along the grain, but no efficient tools for cutting across the grain affected the uses of wood, and, frustratingly, never explained the "many different types of stone axes".

2025-09-11 19:50:50 UTC

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the real question is, how long do we have before the GOP makes the rabies vaccine illegal?

2025-09-08 11:16:37 UTC

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it seems the direction the camera pointed in is offset by about 30 degrees from the line that passes naturally through the low points of each step?
(There some unavoidable ambiguity here because perspective is a lossy transformation)

2025-09-01 11:04:29 UTC

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footnote: All of us were young back then, but some had vision problems. The guy who accidently used a d12 for d20 for most, maybe all, of a session did not have any known vision problems, and was an experienced player. (Plenty of newbies mix up d12 and d20; it was surprising because he'd been playing for over 5 years. As had everyone else present!)

2025-09-01 11:00:55 UTC

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when I was young, there were 2 of us in the group who preferred varicolored dice. The rest prefered same color sets, but only one player was argumentative about it.
one evening, the argumentative advocate of same color sets was having a long series of low d20s rolls. Hadn't rolled above 12 for the whole session. Near the end, he finally realized he'd used a d12 for an uknown number of d20 rolls. Maybe the whole night! And he was mad nobody had noticed.

2025-08-31 19:51:14 UTC

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some scammers believe a complete lack of underlying meaning provokes human recognition systems into rorsarching a special meaning that wasn't there, and that in turn helps the scammer sell the crap. I think the creator(s?) of the Voynich manuscript were probably of that sort.

2025-08-31 19:36:29 UTC

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I thought I saw an article about someone claiming to have "discovered new meaning" or some crap by using an LLM to "translate" the Voynich manuscript, back in 2022. Maybe @npub1ved…5w6p mentioned it, I'm not sure.

2025-08-31 13:10:10 UTC

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"We can only measure the differences in the squares of their masses!"
... that seems to imply no one has yet experimentally demonstrated that neutrinos don't have negative mass??

2025-08-27 19:27:34 UTC

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I'd think he was on his way to some thing.

2025-08-26 13:18:40 UTC

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congratulations!

2025-08-24 07:57:03 UTC

all my life the coal industry has been pumping out propaganda claiming south asia will buy billions and billions of tons of coal, and so about once a year every year since 2010, a bunch of reporters are astonished to find that actually solar is booming in south asia, whocouldaknowed they would go for sunlight so directly.
...
[pun intended]

2025-08-21 17:12:44 UTC

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corporate america spent 40 (or arguably even 50) years taking apart american manufacturing assembly lines, shipping the pieces to China with reassembly instructions. Now the news industry is finally waking up, acting like Rip Van Winkle, wondering how the heck China got so far ahead, and wondering if this means China will be the great power of the 21st century, a question which seems to have been answered at least 15 years ago.

2025-08-19 13:51:36 UTC

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oh. Thank you for explaining.

2025-08-19 13:48:50 UTC

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has it??
are you getting more money, or even any money at all for the translations you've been doing?

2025-08-18 09:34:02 UTC

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... this sounds horribly cruel ... like the 1980s.

2025-08-11 12:27:51 UTC

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had I not thought to check your edit I might never have known how dear those animals were ...

2025-08-10 20:47:37 UTC

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great work. Is the stiffness and cracking entirely due to the added sand and/or grog? (I forget exactly what was added to the clay)

2025-08-04 14:20:18 UTC

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ok, I admit, it's a regression

2025-08-04 14:16:46 UTC

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I blame mathematicians. Meaning would be easy if everyone could agree on which mean. But mathematicians invented dozens; arithmetic, geometric, harmonic, logarithmic, and numerous means named after mathematicians of various ethnicities. And there's generalized f-means, whose existence implies ineffable meanings, opening the door to literature and arts majors.

2025-08-04 13:59:09 UTC

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*sigh* everything involving choice is inimical to them. And they hate axioms generally.

2025-08-03 15:43:50 UTC

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if by "all of a sudden" you mean "back in the 1990s" , sure.

2025-08-03 15:12:26 UTC

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prior to about 2005, it was rare for an atlantic hurricane season to have more than 3-4 tropical storms (including hurricanes) prior to august. hyperactive atlantic hurricane seasons with less than 3 tropical storms prior to august include 2004, 1999, 1969, 1961, 1955, and 1950, and of course infamous hurricane andrew was the first hurricane of 1992, and it didn't get started until august 16.

2025-07-29 13:01:32 UTC

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as a small child I looked up to writers like Tolkien and Dickens and from them I learned how to spell words like "colour", "behaviour", "flavour", "harbour", etc, and being in the USA I was frequently dinged for these and numerous other spelling mistakes. : )
(I also looked up to Mark Twain, but that raises an entirely different set of issues.)

2025-07-24 20:58:31 UTC

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the best dictionaries are printed on:

2025-07-18 07:03:03 UTC

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the AD&D period is when I did by far the most playing of book-and-paper role playing games, and the most common rule set was something approximating AD&D. And I often ended a session thinking "well, one or both sides intended some kind of death to occur, but nobody intended what actually happened, so in some sense it *was* an accident ... "

2025-07-16 20:23:42 UTC

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I'm kind of sad you haven't gotten any replies (yet). I'd have thought the fediverse would contain enough old nerds of the wrong age to have played Call of Cthulhu, or been exposed to the fiction that inspired it. I guess maybe too few are willing to talk about it in times like these. : (

2025-07-12 15:20:54 UTC

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this is the hypothesis which sprouted from the magic beans jack stole

2025-06-23 09:55:45 UTC

now listening to @npub102y…v520 talk about a rediscovered ancient hominin, the "Dragon Man" skull
https://strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net/2025/06/23/episode-438-the-dragon-man/
#fossils
#humans
#denisovan

2025-06-22 10:13:06 UTC

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in practice it's a lot like paying to have your head cryogenically frozen after your death. In both cases, if your next-of-kin don't quit paying for the power bill out of apathy, they eventually figure out it was all a big scam and the scammers weren't keeping your head frozen anyway; it's thawed and been eaten by rats already. Similarly, the brain uploading company actually just sold all the data to criminal organizations and substituted in the cheapest chatbot they could find.

2025-06-21 21:59:29 UTC

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huh, I didn't know this. Is it a result of perihelion occuring during January, and the Earth moving relatively fast near perihelion?
Or is it something else?

2025-06-15 20:42:00 UTC

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if you look near the ends of the hoop you can see the corners peeling off. In other words, somebody made their own hilarious hoop add-on sticker, and stuck it on the sign. : )

2025-06-15 11:06:16 UTC

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I am especially surprised you saw a coyote up close while you had a dog with you, and especially an off-leash dog. There are coyotes in my neighborhood, but I have only seen them when there are no dogs about, that is, very early morning, well before the sun or the dog walkers rise.

2025-06-13 13:10:32 UTC

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what is the 2nd piece from the left, the long, smooth cylinder with tapered ends and 3 different "legs"? It seems to have a much smoother surface than the other pieces.

2025-06-01 02:20:58 UTC

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do armchairs dream of plush sheep?

2025-05-26 17:30:23 UTC

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either way, always seemed to me Miss Fortune would be better off far away from that creep.

2025-05-19 11:10:21 UTC

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hm, doi.org is giving me a DOI not found error for that doi.

2025-05-18 18:18:02 UTC

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congratulations!

2025-05-16 20:54:03 UTC

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I'm imagining it like this: "The development of sheet metal enabled metal to borrow more extensively from music genres that relied heavily on sheet music, such as hymns and classical."

2025-05-13 17:24:49 UTC

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reminds me of the 1988 Roger Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas novel _Flare_ , in which the Sun goes quiet for a few decades, and during the quiet, civilization comes to rely on a global network based primarily on bouncing signals off of ion trails in the upper atmosphere. Then, for the first time in decades, there's a big solar flare aimed at earth, and disasters ensue.

2025-05-12 10:59:10 UTC

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buses would solve all those problems far more effectively than waymo. The people who created waymo don't want to solve those problems. Waymo is about making things worse, not better.

2025-05-07 19:40:36 UTC

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see also: fingerprints and bitemarks. Also useless for crimesolving. But honestly, cops are fascists, and if they have a technique that works, they'll use it to imprison good people far more often than bad people. We're better off if their crap doesn't work. And in that light, modern DNA tech in the hands of a fascist government is terrifying.

2025-05-06 10:12:59 UTC

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I think in a few cases evolution in feral animals have been studied for insight into this: feral donkeys, horses, dogs, cattle, and maybe honey bees. Unfortunately I only recall reading that it had been studied, not the results.

2025-05-04 12:17:26 UTC

people talk about extroverts as if they were formerly troverts, but really, whatever the origins of the word, were extroverts ever really former troverts?

2025-05-03 09:07:15 UTC

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I'm just blown away by the heaviest april snow total being 3.48 times the 2nd heaviest ... wow.

2025-04-22 10:06:48 UTC

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what is a disorder in one environment can be a valuable adaptation in another environment.

2025-04-20 10:26:21 UTC

everyone criticizes Stegosaurus for having a brain the size of a carrot, but what if they hid their true intellect with steganography?
(ps: who hid eggnog in steganography??)
#dinosaurs
#fossils

2025-04-04 12:23:16 UTC

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when Bilbo and the dwarves hide in barrels and float down the river to escape from the elves of Mirkwood, doesn't that river pass through a tunnel at a point near the dungeons of the elves?

2025-03-30 12:12:48 UTC

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when Alan Kay described his dynabook idea in his 1972 PhD thesis, one of the proposed use cases was "a child sees an animal he doesn't recognize, and looks it up on the dynabook to find out what it is", which is not so different from the ant game, though it wasn't practical at the time. (Maybe the mid 1990s apple newton would have been successful if it had aimed that scenario, rather than trying to appeal to business droids and flopping spectacularly.)

2025-03-27 13:00:35 UTC

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one other thing: Wyoming is also overwhelmingly white.

2025-03-27 12:54:01 UTC

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Wyoming's major industries are mining and ranching. Wyoming has some of the largest coal deposits in the world, more cows than people, and more sheep than cows and people combined. In the usa, these are very conservative industires. It also has a culture steeped in guns and toxic masculinity.

2025-03-26 19:23:58 UTC

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I enjoyed it. Maybe I enjoy pointless stories. : )

2025-03-16 19:31:12 UTC

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the worst timeline

2025-03-14 20:44:39 UTC

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in the USA in the 1980s, most magazines had a few articles in each issue that would have "continued on page <whatever>" about halfway through the article.

2025-03-11 17:20:33 UTC

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it should be obvious from the raids on personal data that "DOGE" has been making that elon's new business will be wave after wave of cybercrime. Not only does he plan to steal from the USA government, he'll steal from anyone whose data was collected by the USA government. Why should he care whether or not anyone buys a cybertruck when he can just steal their money directly, without the hassle of them getting a truck for it?

2025-03-01 11:34:16 UTC

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honestly the gannet on the right looks like they're having serious second thoughts about the coldness of the water.

2025-02-26 16:28:12 UTC

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Pokémon's idea of evolution ought to have been called "metamorphosis" . It is similar to insect metamorphosis, although with "comic book" exagerations. Tangentially related: there is a neat podcast episode on how some entomologists were inspired to go into entomology by Pokémon:
https://arthro-pod.blogspot.com/2020/01/arthro-pod-ep-67-entomology-pokemon.html

2025-02-18 14:01:22 UTC

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thank you, that's interesting.

2025-02-18 13:55:15 UTC

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what kind of bird does it refer to?

2025-02-17 14:49:21 UTC

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you forgot a step.
you're supposed to brush a thick layer of oil onto the doorknob first!

2025-02-14 15:46:30 UTC

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html email is a huge security and privacy problem. Its widespread acceptance enabled widespread use of privacy-invading emails that track whether your computer fetched images or other remote things referred to in the html, as well as many other privacy invading techniques. It enabled the rise of the adtech industry, which is currently backing the nazi administration in the USA.

2025-02-12 11:31:08 UTC

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and after the Age of Brass came the Age of Fool's Gold, in which non-expert google queries inevitably brought forth mountains of lies from google's Lie Loving Machine (LLM).
finally, after the Age of Fool's Gold came the age of Pyrite disease, in which the lustre of the lies swiftly corroded, yet people lamented the loss of the lustre.

2025-02-04 10:19:25 UTC

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this reminds me that there are effectively two examples of herbivory among spiders (often thought to be "enirely obligate carnivores", but no). One is pollen; just about all spiders that build webs can digest pollen, and the other is spiders that live on ant-acacias; ant-acacias grow "treats" to attract ants that protect them from other herbivores. But along comes some canny spiders that have evolved to eat the treats grown for the ants.

2025-01-29 18:47:10 UTC

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oops, too late, I already looked at the alt text, but there was only one I didn't know.

2025-01-27 19:14:57 UTC

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is it about a chicken? If not I feel gulled.

2025-01-27 09:38:07 UTC

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at first glance I thought it was a pipe fish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipefish#/media/File:Some_derived_traits_in_pipefishes_and_their_relatives.webp

2025-01-25 15:33:00 UTC

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the hashtags #cats , #language , #starTrek , and #gardening seem active and appropriate. #renaissance is probably appropriate as well, but not very active.

2025-01-25 10:17:31 UTC

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maybe lure them to antarctica to investigate a paranormal phenomenon that is actually just the southern lights. : )

2025-01-19 22:03:39 UTC

although I love it, I often forget to post about episodes of the Common Descent podcast. Here's the newest episode on Chimeras, those strange, strange cartilaginous fish, related to sharks and rays, but outside of Elasmobranchii .
https://commondescentpodcast.com/2025/01/18/episode-209-chimaeras/
#fossils
#fish
#chimera
#deepSea
#ratFish
#ghostFish
#spookFish