TheVat

Denver Zoo Conservation AllianceLucy the African Pygmy Goose - Denver Zoo Conservation Al...Where They Hang Out At the zoo: in Bird World In the wild: swamps, marshes, shallow lakes, slow moving rivers and other bodies of water in Africa Favorite Foods At the zoo: greens, specially formulat Apparently a species of Least Concern with the IUCN. Quack!

Yes, that's the principal conclusion of all the research. Ducks are totally f-ed. NAAM, the National Association for the Advancement of Mallards, was the primary funding source. 🙃

(gift link) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/08/el-nino-effects/688429/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYhe5nEFgk7C87XxiXaHSqXw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share This El Niño Will Be Unlike Any in the Past Eight DecadesDie-offs and floods have started already, a prelude to supercharged storms and droughts. By Joshua Partlow In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, along the equator, scientists have drawn a box. It’s a big box, two-thirds the size of China, yet hardly anyone lives inside it. This rectangular swath of open ocean is monitored by satellites and a network of moored buoys that measure minute changes in the temperature of the water, with an eye toward anomalies. Every few years or so, driven by changing winds and currents, the water temperature in this part of the ocean starts to rise; even a half degree Celsius above normal over months warrants a designation that an El Niño phase has begun. That’s enough warming to unleash floods and fires, drought and famine, around the world. The box is called Niño 3.4. Right now, it’s hot in the box.(...) ...Most of the world experiences El Niño’s ripple effects as the heat building up in the equatorial Pacific radiates into the atmosphere and around the globe. This means great gouts of rain in supercharged storms in some places; in other areas, crop-killing dry spells that can extend for months. Along the Pacific Coast of South America, torrential rains and landslides have forced the temporary closure of a main route to Machu Picchu, in Peru; deadly floods have swept through arid regions of northern Chile. Countries such as India and Ethiopia are enduring some of their driest summers on record. El Niños tend to mean more rainfall across the southern United States and drier stretches across a band in the North. Strong El Niños can mean record-breaking heat, and this one is shaping up to be unlike any catalogued in the past eight decades. A 2-degree-Celsius increase in the Niño 3.4 box typically earns the title of “Super El Niño”; we’re already past that threshold, and experts project that the warming could peak at roughly twice as high.

Interesting stuff, with quite a complex snarl of possible causal chains between orbital eccentricities, axial tilt, and climatic effects. What I've gathered about Milankovich is that the main effect is on the magnitude of seasonal temp changes - IIRC, he focuses mainly on large landmasses in the N hemisphere where the swings are more pronounced than in the oceans. It will be interesting if they can really connect all those dots, between orbital and obliquity forcings and things like Fe deposition in marine sediments. I might have switched from bio to geo in college, if calzones had been involved.

And get their health information from quacks?

Yep. I recall when Portland was in the RW crosshairs as Shithole of the Month. Anyone who has actually been to Portland had a good laugh - has to be one of the prettiest and most livable large cities in the nation.

The supervolcano under Yellowstone we live 360-400 miles east of (prevailing westerlies would bring us ejecta) reportedly still has the capacity for super-eruptions. Ashfall fossil beds are found at our present distance or greater, produced by ultraplinian events from Yellowstone. In NE Nebraska, 400 miles farther east, ashfall was a foot deep on average but more concentrated in depressions, up to ten feet. As we are closer, and between a couple of ridges in a scoop-like neighborhood, I would see us as lucky if our chimney opening (about 26 feet above grade) remained above the ashfall and allowed us some air exchange. I suspect ash would undermine the power grid quickly, so if eruption seemed imminent I'd want to keep battery powered sabre saws charged, in case we needed to cut our way out of the attic to leave, and help neighbors also escape. N95 masks, snowshoes, and emergency backpacks fully stocked. Or the house collapses and we join a future fossil-rich tephra layer with anomalous inclusions of aluminum and lithium. 🌋 Not for another million years, I hope.

Go Daniel Dennett! Alf did flatten Ned Lein, a dog.

Haha. Do you think the aliens would take both of them off-planet in an exchange? That would really clear a lot of tedious crap from American newsfeeds.

Heavens! A curated assemblage of pertinent facts! I admit I didn't know much about the UK system until I saw Dirty Pretty Things a few years ago. Which, though not a curated assemblage of facts, did make me aware of the no-work requirement for asylum seekers. It did leave me curious about the work ban. If the asylum seekers are only getting a pittance from the government, wouldn't it give them a bit of dignity (and possibly help with joining UK life, if they end up staying) to at least work part-time in areas where labour is short supply? (Or will they all end up preyed upon by kidney black marketeers, as in DPT?)

Sounds like one of those words that means whatever people want it to mean when they're trying to form a sense of personal identity combined with a sense of belonging. A lot of people just check the trad boxes, nationality and religion. That doesn't work for me too well, since I'm a blend of ancestral nationalities and religious sects, plus several who more or less rejected parts of those. One even burned down a forest belonging to a king, to protest excesses of the monarchy. They didn't talk about him much on that side of the family. No wonder he's disgruntled. It probably made him start to hate English cooking.

"We will trade Taylor Swift for safe, commercially scalable fusion." Classic, I remember it. Shows how one can deceive employing literal truth.

Who is keeping you from your heritage? What fanatical beliefs have been imposed on you? Were you forced to attend a mosque? Marry a 13 year old? Sacrifice a goat during Eid Al-Adha? Join a jihad? You keep making the claim you have personal experience of cultural imposition - what are examples?

Thank you, @Cap'n Refsmmat . And thanks for your helping us keep aligned to a "stable member matrix." Though clicking on the above yields Sorry! That page does not exist. Error code: 2S136/1Z

It certainly has been a misnomer here, as per my earlier allusion to indigenous tribes in the US. Where it was definitely about erasure. It's some better now, and the nearest high school to us now has Lakota (the language of the Sioux tribes around here) as an elective course. Agree with your comments about the fears of "replacement" or marginalizing as drivers of FR authoritarian subversion of democracy. Some of the manosphere loonies are especially worried about manly men disappearing as all are replaced by "soyboys." The mention of veganism reminded me of this and generally the way mythologies proliferate from some starting single kernel of anxiety.

To many Americans, accustomed to a highly heterogenous patchwork quilt of cultures, there's a tendency to find phrases like "______ integration" offensive. Integration is a word that somehow always conjures its opposite. Having lived next to an indigenous reservation, I know "assimilation" (with it's very dark history out here) also makes good people bristle. Such terms are a reminder of how often a core ideal of America has been tarnished by its own citizens. Groupthink, usually paranoia-driven, subverts all the fine talk enshrining individualism. I saw a similar thing spending a summer in France 50 years ago. People bashing Arab immigrants, others lamenting the buckling of France's ideals of personal freedom and cultural tolerance. La plus ça change, la plus c'est la même. Even some liberals here are apt to favor diversity so long as it doesn't come to their street. When it's close to home, they really want....total assimilation. Borg-like levels of it. Glad I'm not a social scientist. I think it would be incredibly difficult to plumb the depths of American hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance over what it means to protect the nation's core values.

Florida's swamps are besieged by these slippery devils, and people are looking for new ideas. An aquatic ecologist (quoted in second article below) is looking for a better eel trap. (Hovercraft optional.) https://www.fws.gov/media/ecological-risk-screening-summary-asian-swamp-eel-monopterus-albus-high-risk (...)There are negative impacts of introduced populations documented from peer-reviewed literature for this species, specifically in Florida where significant declines in the abundance of native fishes and decapods were found following the introduction of M. albus. M. albus is regulated in multiple U.S. States. M. albus has also been introduced beyond its native range in Asia and there have been reports of negative economic impacts due to burrowing behavior that has damaged rice fields in the Philippines and Japan. The History of Invasiveness for M. albus is classified as High due to the multiple established nonnative populations that have led to negative impacts. https://people.com/invasive-asian-swamp-eel-threatens-florida-wildlife-and-ecosystem-12066812 “We have no way to remove this animal from the wetlands,” Florida International University Associate Professor and aquatic ecologist Nathan Dorn said in a March presentation. “If someone wants to come up with a great trap, I’ll try it.” Dorn’s laboratory, which studies Everglades restoration and focuses on Asian swamp eels, confirmed their discovery at the Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in 2025, noting that the species might have reached the area the year before. The fish has since taken out a massive portion of the crawfish, frog and small fish populations that Florida’s heralded long-legged wading birds rely on.

News from Silicon Valley in Emily's feed: Per aide: Meta renegotiates a set AI to generate media rep.

My first stab at it was identity, x=x, but then I wondered if it was too much a tautology. An equation should "say something" if we're speaking in the domain of science. The simple ones do seem to be definitions. V=IR. The complexity comes when we unpack the deeper physical meaning of volt and amp and ohm as those exist in a circuit. (Or that volts are also joules per coulomb, or watts per amp, or electronvolts per elementary charge, etc.) Then we get into complex relationships that are teased out empirically and can't always be handily compared to water flow in some ideal Hagen–Poiseuille setup. For me, a really simple equation would say something that doesn't get you into all that unpacking. It's late here, so I'll have to think on that later. Wait, okay, I guess water flow in a pipe at its most basic might be one of the simplest, the rate is Q = A × V (Flow Rate equals Area times Velocity).

Dennis Dias has been reeling in quite a few years. I think I see what a grampus whole note (semibreve, as the Limey folk call it) is, something emitted by a cetacean that will not hold up well with excess reverb? And this acoustic accident somehow caused some distress in a Kentish town? Fascinating. Well, any band that composes the palindromic "Aja" is on Emily's playlist. As for hits like Hey, Nineteen, I may have to back, Jack, and play them again. On Emil bus, Dias, sitar rat, is said sublime, no?

Mahayaha Buddhists avoid the word worship in describing their veneration of the bodhisattvas, but it seems to me to have some elements of that. Guanyin, for example, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, is widely prayed to in East Asia for help and safety. Guanyin et al aren't seen as gods, nor as some ultimate spiritual refuge like a supreme being, but they strike me as sort of "god adjacent" in that they are prayed to and seen as guides towards nirvana (which they themselves have put off, so they can help mortal humans). Because of that, I find "atheist" carries maybe the wrong connotation for Buddhist practice when applied in the Western sense. Just saying, you have to be careful with your definition if you apply the term to a Buddhist.

Yes, the AI is confused if it thinks a site on a German host server could be "working in America" while kaput in Europe.

Emily took issue with some critcisms of her life by Emma of Normandie. I am mess, eh? Cudgel a leg, Duchess Emma I.

So this one went six days. Wonder if Pinball could get on now? I.e. was all this downtime for an upgrade or flushing out bots or something site improving? Hetzner gmbh, the host, refuses to tell you anything, I did learn that. Anyway, would be helpful to hear from @Cap'n Refsmmat or someone who knows what happened. Also, is there an email we could reach an admin or owner at, when site goes down? At present there's a catch-22 - you need the site up to reach anybody you could tell the site is down.