TFC's Community of the ScienceWorld

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Safety
Enshittification
Wildlife
Fossils
Birdfeeding
Audio
Economics
Birdfeeding
Philosophical Questions: Morals
Trees
Writing About Fireworks
Birdfeeding
Early Humans
Today's Adventures
Agriculture
Gaming
Birdfeeding
Follow Friday 7-3-26: Nature
Conservation
Birdfeeding
Community Thursdays
Today's Adventures
Science
Winterfest in July Bingo Card 7-1-26
Space Exploration
Birdfeeding
Clean Beaches Week
Affordable Housing
Cuddle Party

LiveJournal has 37 comments. Poem: "Walnut Park" has 46 comments. Early Humans has 22 comments.


There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, July 7 with a theme of "Don't add to the casualty list in an emergency."


"Save All the Pieces" belongs to The Big One and needs $99 to be complete. Stylet has misplaced a giant ground sloth.


The weather has been sweltering this past week. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, two starlings, a mourning dove, a male cardinal, a robin, a male indigo bunting, and a fox squirrel. I've seen several bats flying around. Bobwhite quail are calling. Fireflies are swarming. Cicadas are singing. Currently blooming: pansies, violas, sweet alyssum, marigolds, honeysuckle, snapdragons, lantana, million bells, blue lobelia, petunias, portulaca, nemesia, fan flowers, firecracker plant, pineapple sage, yucca, Asiatic lilies, snowball viburnum, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, spiderwort, narrow-leaved mountain mint, elderberries, golden rain tree, garlic chives, blackberry lily, Queen Anne's lace, purple echinacea, yellow coneflower, frost aster, cosmos. Green fruit: tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers. Ripe fruit: mulberries.

The Mechanisms Of Enshittification
How the things you buy get worse, who profits from it, and how to tell before you pay.

Find out who owns the brand now, and whether the founder is still there and still in control, because that one fact predicts more than any review. Check whether the company went through bankruptcy in the last decade, and who bought the name out of it. If the brand is public, check what share of its revenue goes to marketing. Notice when the same brand turns up at a flagship store and at Costco and at TJ Maxx all at once, a sign the name has been split across tiers and licensees. Ask how the person selling to you gets paid, because commission turns every recommendation into a sale. And run the math that marketing is built to keep you from running: divide the price by the years the thing will genuinely last, and compare across fifteen years instead of one weekend, because the cheap option you replace twice over is usually the expensive one. If you cannot find out who actually makes a product, that is your answer.


As much as possible, buy things direct from the creator or at least from a company still run by its founder(s).

There are a few other options. Goods sold in Amish territory tend to be rock-solid because those folks are very frugal, make a lot of their own stuff, and have zero patience with planned obsolescence.

Also, be prepared to quit purchasing a category of product that has become useless. If it's not going to do the damn job anyway, you might as well keep your money in your pocket.

Ancient bees turned tooth sockets into tiny nurseries 20,000 years ago

A stunning fossil discovery shows that ancient bees used the empty tooth sockets of mammal bones as tiny nests after owls scattered the bones across a cave floor 20,000 years ago. It's the first known evidence of bees nesting inside animal bones, revealing an astonishingly creative survival strategy.


Fascinating. It seems to be a unique but likely extinct species of bee which nested in bones, but without any actual bee remains, this cannot be proven.

They're from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, though so feel free to toss them into Peculiar Obligations as a prompt.

Podfic Feedback Toolbox: 5 ways to give great podfic feedback

In podfic meta discussions, it periodically comes up that some people want to leave feedback on podfic but just aren't sure what to say. This post is an attempt to give some new ideas to anyone who would like to expand their repertoire for expressing their thoughts about podfic. It is not meant to pressure listeners to leave feedback if they don't feel comfortable with that. Hopefully it will work more like a toolbox, providing tools that people can use to help them accomplish their pre-existing goals more easily and successfully.

Today is cloudy, muggy, and hot.  Yesterday's rain never arrived, but there's more chance today too.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.  Honeybees are busy carrying water to the hive.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen two starlings, a mourning dove, and a male cardinal in the forest garden.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I watered tree seedlings in the savanna.

Queen Anne's lace and frost asters are blooming in the savanna and prairie garden.  Purple echinacea and yellow coneflower are blooming in the wildflower garden.  Wild bergamot is blooming in several places in the prairie garden.  The first few cosmos are blooming in the north notch of the prairie garden.  :D  

I hear thunder to the south, I can see rain to the northwest, and we're starting to get a downdraft.  I don't know if the promised rain will actually arrive, though.  I hope so.  We need it because the ground is drying out from the heat, even as humid as it's been.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

It drizzled earlier, just enough to wet the leaves and make small puddles in the road.

EDIT 7/4/26 -- I went outside to watch distant fireworks for a while.  There were well over a dozen shows in view.  :D  The storm didn't bring much water but did drop the temperature to near-comfortable level.

I am done for the night.

Cities can't afford to keep treating trees like decoration

Stand under a big old tree on a sweltering afternoon and you’ll understand something city planners are only now starting to take seriously: that shade isn’t decoration. It’s doing a job.

Trees are cooling the block, catching stormwater before it floods the street, and scrubbing pollution out of the air a person’s actually breathing.


Actually it's doing about 22 jobs.

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Common birds are secretly pollinating Britain's flowers

The fieldwork was conducted at Wicken Fen, a National Trust nature reserve in Cambridgeshire. The reserve is an 800-hectare (about 1,980-acre) patch of old fenland, thick with birds and flowering shrubs.

Local bird ringers caught birds in fine mist-nets across several spring and summer seasons. Right after each capture, the team swabbed the bird’s beak, head, and chin for pollen. The overall tally was striking. Of the birds sampled in one full season, 89% carried pollen of one kind or another. That covered at least one individual from each of 29 species. Pollen, it turned out, was almost everywhere across the bird community.


Pay attention to the habitat: it was wild, on the wet side, and brushy. Many small songbirds love this kind of habitat. In a small yard, you can create a rain garden or wildlife pond that includes spring-flowering bushes. They offer not only early food but also great cover and nesting space. Include a patch of soft mud, as many birds use that to build their nests.

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Today we went up to Champaign-Urbana.

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Indie charity bundle for Accessibility in Tabletop Roleplaying Games (Pay What You Want)

This is a pay what you want bundle, where any proceeds go to the charity DOTS RPG Project, which is dedicated to making rpgs more accessible for everyone!

We have mini RPG's of 24 words and full systems over 200 pages! Games that add an element of skill or dexterity to dice rolling, and ones that forego rolling and focus on irl actions taken in day-to-day life! Solo games journaling or otherwise, for gm lead groups, and one where a full party of players controls a single character!

Projects to support full campaigns or for one or two sessions of adventure! A toolkit for accessibility in fate, and ones focused on something expansive as a sprawling skyborne realm, or as small as a way to generate roads on the fly for chase or driving sequences! Dice and tarot cards and trading cards! Sci-fi and fantasy and historical fiction! Whatever you look for in an rpg you can probably find some of it here!


Are you sick of assholes making the world less accessible? Poke a bigot in the eye with this game bundle!

Today's theme is Nature.

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