Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn't call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.
Animals cover astonishing distances when they are looking for food. While caribou, reindeer and wolves clock up impressive mileage on land, seabirds are unrivaled in their traveling distances. Arctic terns travel from the Arctic to Antarctica and back as part of their annual migration. Wandering alb...
There has been a lot of research into how seabirds choose their flight paths and find food. They seem to use their sight or sense of smell to assess local conditions.
Wandering albatrosses can travel more than 10,000km in a single foraging trip, though, and we don't know much about how these birds use mid- and long-range cues from their environment to decide where to go.
For the first time, however, my team's recent study gives an insight into how birds such as wandering albatrosses may use sound to determine what conditions are like further away.
Canadian scientists say evidence from cave art all over the world shows digits may have been ritually removed to appease deities or aid social cohesion
Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art.
In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone.
In the past, this absence of digits was attributed to artistic licence by the cave-painting creators or to ancient people’s real-life medical problems, including frostbite.
But scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be far more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” said Collard.
Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!
I'll be keeping my eyes open for further news.
Climate action in New Orleans has found support from faith leaders working across historic divides
It has been another catastrophic climate year: record-breaking wildfires across Canada scorched an area the size North Dakota, unprecedented rainfall in Libya left thousands dead and displaced, while heat deaths surged in Arizona and severe drought in the Amazon is threatening Indigenous communities and ecosystems.
The science is clear: we must phase out fossil fuels – fast. But time is running out, and as the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation worsen, there is mounting recognition that our political and industry leaders are failing us.
If the science isn’t enough, what role could – or should – faith leaders play in tackling the climate crisis? After all, it is also a spiritual and moral crisis that threatens God’s creation, according to many religious teachings.
Globally, 6 billion people – about 80% of the world’s population – identify with a faith or religion, while half of all schools and 40% of health facilities in some countries are owned or operated by faith groups. In addition, faith-related institutions own almost 8% of the total habitable land surface – and constitute the world’s third largest group of financial investors.
Scientists have been vollying the question back and forth for more than a century.
Neanderthals, which disappeared from the archaeological record roughly 40,000 years ago, have long been considered our closest evolutionary relatives. But almost since the first discovery of Neanderthal remains in the 1800s, scientists have been arguing over whether Neanderthals constitute their own species or if they're simply a subset of our own species, Homo sapiens, that has since gone extinct.
So what does the science say? In particular, what does the genetic evidence, which didn't exist back when many early hominins were first discovered, show?
Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.
That good eh?
Hopefully the weekend will improve things.
Friday: Friendly? Freatening? Freaky? How's it going?
I went out for a curry with some friends last night, have a fairly straightforward day at work today then a pizza this evening and have a day booked off on Monday: I have some DIY lined up over the weekend.
Should be a good showing of the Perseid meteor shower this weekend too. It peaks tomorrow, but it looks like it'll be cloudy. I might spend a bit of time in the garden this evening though, since it is supposed to be clear, and see if I can spot any.
With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.
Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.
I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.
I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren't much of a problem. One frequently nudges people's elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.
I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.
I'm going through Robert Brightwell's Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier's Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist's uncle.
They are very well researched (as were GMF's) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison's War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman's Waterloo, which shouldn't have that problem.
I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy's-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.
Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.
Lesser Burdock (Arctium minus), UK
With, I think, a male red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) doing bumblebee stuff.
Working from home today - or supposed to be. I finished a couple of Big Things at the end of last week and am really struggling to get stuck into any one of the dozen other things that are on my list now.
I've deleted a lot of photos and sorted the recycling though. I'll be sharpening pencils soon...
Common Field-speedwell (Veronica persica), UK
Another naturalised introduction, this one from Eurasia, first recorded in the UK in the C19th.
I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton's which is what this particular survey is looking for.
Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be 'Exit pursued by a very damp bear.' I expect.
Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.
A lot of the practical stuff would be covered by The SAS Survival handbook, by Wiseman, which is the only one of that kind of book that I have actually used things from and have returned to from time to time. It is sitting on the shelf in front of me, in fact, just above a couple of Simon Schamas and next to The Encyclopedia of Comic Characters (I haven't organised anything since moving house).
The Lord of the Rings would be my next. One of the tiny number of books that I have re-read multiple times, and would happily do so again. It is the only book that has left me feeling able to smell the air of its world.
The third is more difficult to choose, but I'll say The Complete Works of Jane Austen - because I have never read any of them, but am certain that I will enjoy them and she is, of course, another British author - given that this is British Books.
If 'complete works' are considered a cheat, then maybe Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, which I have read a loooong time ago, but know that I get far, far more from now.
They always say that you should stack up everything that you think you'll need and then put half of it back in the wardrobe. The problem is working out which half, of course.
Hope it all goes well anyway and that you have a good time.
Friday fread
Kickin' in the front seat or sittin' in the back seat: which is it today folks?
Workwise, it should be ok today, then - rain permitting - I have a bat monitoring session this evening. That might be pushed to next weekend though (I'd get to watch the Perseids at the same time, if it was, by the look of it).
And then out to an open air production of A Winter's Tale tomorrow night - also rain permitting and the forecast is currently saying it won't.
What have you got lined up?
you also haven’t addressed my reasons for doubt.
A) When did you ask me to?
B) By pointing out the cost/benefit to both sides, I would have said that I did anyway.
However, if you would like me to go into more detail: this is a property that was not occupied by the PM or his family - Greenpeace have stated that they were aware of this. The 'high security' was evidently provided by the police - who would also have been aware of this. Even at the best of times, given a little advance planning, avoiding a routine police cordon - routine being the key word - is not exactly difficult.
I struggle to see why Greenpeace would take the route that you are suggesting (a literal conspiracy theory) and decide to take the risk of losing credibility instead of doing as they have frequently, attestably, through court records, done and evade the existing security.
Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.
You haven't addressed the critical point:
What would be the consequences for both when the co-ordination was leaked/revealed?
Both would stand to lose vastly more in credibility than ever they might gain.
Whilst that might not matter to Sunak - a lost cause politically anyway, and clearly someone who values money highly - Greenpeace thrives on commitment to the cause.
It certainly seems to me a highly implausible scenario.
So, you're suggesting that this was co-ordinated by Greenpeace and ...the Prime Minister? To keep up whose appearances exactly?
What would both parties stand to gain from this?
What would be the consequences for both when the co-ordination was leaked/revealed?
You say that you found out that lemmy.world had disabled downvotes. Where did you you find that out? I'd certainly seen nothing myself here - I know that some instances have - and can certainly see and use the downvote arrows.
Lively Lughnasadh folks!
Blood on the corn, harvest in the horn, may you never hunger, may you never thirst!
Lively Lughnasadh folks!
Blood on the corn, harvest in the horn, may you never hunger, may you never thirst!
Lively Lughnasadh folks!
Blood on the corn, harvest in the horn, may you never hunger, may you never thirst!