Dandelions Deserve More Respect Than They Get

Janelle Monae at Met Gala 2025, in custom Thom Browne

Janelle Monae at the Afterparty

AVOID BOA CONSTRICTOR . COM/JEREMY STONE REPTILES

Normally I don't post things like this but I cannot stand by and not say my piece on this. The ball python hobby has been going down the shitter for a long, long time. Not the keeping part of it, no, the big minimalist breeders who see these living, breathing creatures as nothing more than a dollar sign in a plastic tote, are absolutely ruining the hobby for us. Jeremy Stone, owner and runner of boaconstrictor(DOT)com, was throwing ball pythons high up into the air, 'juggling' them, to show potential customers how 'docile' they are. Absolutely no respect to the animals, and with how much he dropped them I would be surprised if one or two of them didn't have a broken rib. If you want to watch the video, a screen grab was taken before he dirty deleted it. It's here. (Sorry its on facebook, I havent seen it on any other platform yet) Not only is he risking these animals being majorly injured, he is showing just how little most big ball python breeders actually care about their animals. Because this is how other big box breeders are reacting:

(Screenshots are not mine, but are shared with permission) NONE OF THEM SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT I am appalled and disgusted. I look at my babies, at Leliana most of all, and I could never imagine treating any of them with even the slightest bit of disrespect. These animals are so sweet, and so curious, and so special. And they're being treated like garbage. Adding on to that, now PETA and other places that exploit pet ownership for money will take this video and try to use it to end the reptile keeping hobby. Because they see this and can share it, and can make it seem like us small hobbyists, that actually love and care for our animals, are treating them like that. He is making us all look terrible. Needless to say, I am not breeding ball pythons anymore. I can't stand the thought of any of my babies going to someone like that. As much as I vet through people before they buy, I can't stop them from rehoming, and there is always a possibility that they'll end up in the hands of someone who only see them as a dollar sign. I'm not 'getting out of the hobby' as it were, they are my babies and they are here to stay. I just won't be breeding them anymore. I may breed other species in the future, but I can't stand the way the ball python hobby has turned out.

I’m entering my Vetinari era. Going to start saying shit like “Capital!” and “Do not let me detain you.” and “A great rolling sea of evil. Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end.” Gonna start juggling knives.

We are losing nearly ten percent of the planet’s insect population every decade due to human influence. If you have taken even an entry level biology course you understand how terrifying that figure is for not just humans but all life on Earth. As EO Wilson put it,

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos”

Even despite the urgency of this issue, there are few conservation initiatives focused solely on preserving invertebrates. The Xerces Society is one such organization! If you share my concern about insect population decline (and you are able to do so), please consider donating to their current fundraiser to help protect our most vulnerable neighbors. They are still short of their fundraising goal!

My fundraiser for Xerces

My fundraiser for Xerces

The Xerces Society is a science-based conservation organization that promotes pollinator health, endangered species conservation, and pestic

she always called me a princess, but i became a queen.

STORM // ORORO MUNROE

source → storm (2024) #5, written by murewa ayodele and drawn by lucas werneck.

The post on that reading comprehension study is good (and reminded me of some of my complaints about GPT a couple years ago, although the LLMs have gotten much better since then).

But the thing that really stood out to me is that I feel much this same way about math instruction:

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

One of the big problems I have primarily in Calculus 1 (which is the lowest-level course I've taught) is that students just don't expect math to make sense. There's a bunch of rules to follow, which you have to memorize, and then you look at an expression and use some rule that seems like you could use it.

But that's not how competent mathematicians (and I use that word in the broadest possible sense) interact with mathematics. Mathematical formulas mean things. They have syntax, and semantics, and you can break apart a computation and talk about what individual terms mean and are doing, and what manipulation you're doing and what that corresponds to.

(Sometimes, of course, that's easier than others. Calc 2, in particular, involves a lot of "tricks" where it's hard to explain the logic in the middle of using them. But that's why I'm focusing on Calc 1 here, which is mostly not like that but does have a lot of application-y problems where this semantic understanding is important.)

But if you've never worked through a math problem and felt like everything was meaningful, you don't expect meaning in what you're doing, and you don't expect your own work to make sense. And then, well, it won't, and you'll struggle and get lost in the middle of every problem.

was talking to my mom about how white people ignore the contributions of poc to academia and I found myself saying the words "I bet those idiots think Louis Pasteur was the first to discover germ theory"

which admittedly sounded pretentious as fuck but I'm just so angry that so few people know about the academic advancements during the golden age of Islam.

Islamic doctors were washing their hands and equipment when Europeans were still shoving dirty ass hands into bullet wounds. ancient Indians were describing tiny organisms worsening illness that could travel from person to person before Greece and Rome even started theorizing that some illnesses could be transmitted

also, not related to germ theory, but during the golden age of Islam, they developed an early version of surgery on the cornea. as in the fucking eye. and they were successful

and what have white people contributed exactly?

please go research the golden age of Islamic academia. so many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for their discoveries

people ask sometimes how I can be proud to be Muslim. this is just one of many reasons

some sources to get you started:

PubMed Central (PMC)

Arabic Medicine in Literature

Google Books

A History of Medicine: Byzantine and Islamic medicine

but keep in mind, it wasn't just science and medicine! we contributed to literature and philosophy and mathematics and political theory and more!

maybe show us some damn respect

IT IS [WEELVIL] WEDNESDAY MY DUDES

Do you have a care guide, feeding guide, or just more info about Japanese rat snakes? Is the blue a morph or them where they’re young? They’re soooo pretty

That was the standard morph! They're actually duller when young, and blue out more as they get older.

They're not common in captivity, so I can't point you towards in-depth care guides, but they're pretty dang easy as long as you give them lots of space and things to climb.

You'll want a hotspot set to 85 and an ambient temperature in the low-mid 70s. A heat mat is a great heating choice for them to maintain those lower temperatures. 50% humidity works well - make sure they always have water and a humidity hide, which they'll use from time to time.

They do great with the standard all-rodent diet. The biggest note there is that they're really great and enthusiastic eaters, so you have to be careful not to overfeed! They'd probably eat every other day if you let them. Don't let the begging for food get to you.