jna_sh

For an animal to evolve to fill this niche, the niche would have to convey some advantage that favours their survival and reproduction (i.e. natural selection). Aside from the fact that this isn’t actually a terribly efficient process and is subject to lots of random effects, the niche in its current form as influenced by human activity is clearly not conveying a survival benefit, or the vultures wouldn’t have declined. A member of another bird species deciding to take to scavenging trash heaps whilst happening to have a mutation that protects it from diclofenac (which is toxic to lesser degrees in other non-vulture birds) is not impossible, but unlikely, and could very well be a process that occurs at a timescale that is incompatible with the rate of continued change by humans.

You’re reading a summary of a working paper published in a mainstream news outlet. The submitted article links through to the full 95 page paper that has the methodology https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Soc...

If any readers want to explore this topic more, a useful term is “ecosystem services”, which captures the various ways that healthy ecosystems support human health.

The US doesn’t do differential equations in high-school? Huh, TIL

This was really lovely to say, thank you!

There is no explanation to why, it’s all cultural and historical. There’s no distinction in conventional taxonomy

The game doesn’t track score, to the extent that frog and toad are not even separate buttons

Sure, but if someone told me they were getting up for a walk on a flight because they didn’t want to get DVT, I wouldn’t go on a tirade about how their life was ruled by fear. That’s what my original comment was intending to address.

One of the things the game is trying to communicate is that this isn’t possible :)

There's an explanation at the end of the game!

The tree toad gets everyone

I don't believe I mocked anyone, maybe I mocked the idea that anyone who wears a seatbelt on a flight is gripped by fear. I apologise to the concept.

Oh and regarding the score: I chose not to track or display a score because it didn't feel in the spirit of the game, and besides that, there's no fair way to score it. It can't be based on their common name, as shown in the game itself, for example. You could argue that the only way to win is to always press frog, since all toads are frogs by scientific taxonomy, but I don't want to say folk taxonomy is invalid. But really, I don't think the score matters to the learning objective.

Which is why the game doesn't track it, there is in fact not even two buttons.

I've got terrible news for you: inspect the source in browser.

Thanks so much for the kind words and thoughtful comment.

Regarding the objective, it's targeting the most common understanding of "frog" and "toad", which for most people will be folk taxonomy, and they probably aren't aware that there's not a scientific taxonomic distinction. So from your list, I think most people will approach it as option "a". However you might be happy to know that when selecting species, there's a couple that are in there because they belong to taxa that contain both "frogs" and "toads", so "b" would be quite difficult!

In that it goes for "a", it's really intended to show that folk taxonomy, like most ways people categorise things, works until it doesn't. Really important to me to note that it's not trying to favour "scientific" taxonomy over folk, though. There's evidence that practicing folk taxonomy, by observing and categorising what you see in nature around you, helps build connectedness with nature, which has a lot of benefits, and making people aware of folk taxonomy as a thing that they contribute to is the ultimate objective.

That is very much the intent of the game! Frog vs toad is what's known as "folk taxonomy", taxonomy based on people's informal observations and characterisations, and not on the principles of scientific taxonomy. There's a lot of common everyday examples of folk taxonomy that people don't realise aren't "scientific", and are very confident about, and the progression of species in this game was intended to really poke at what people know makes a frog and a toad.

Hi there! I'm the creator of this game, happy to answer any questions people might have. This is a total surprise, thanks so much for playing!

Why do you perceive wearing a seatbelt on a flight and minimising time out of a seat as such a high cost/inconvenience? I hear this line of thought a lot, particularly nowadays around masking to avoid COVID, and I’m always intrigued by this idea that avoiding this tiny act that barely impacts you is somehow sticking a big middle finger up to fear

It was a marked queen in a small hive, this happened at a (shared, membership based) bee park where the keeper keeps hives for breeding, not production. There’s some longer backstory to why the queen was targeted that I probably shouldn’t post, but otherwise that’s what I was told. I’m not a beekeeper, just someone who signs up to help with too many things, so your barometer will be a lot more accurate than mine!

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Funny, I went out on hive maintenance round with a local beekeeper here in the Netherlands, and he was telling me about bee thefts. Not even whole hives, he’s had other beekeepers go in and steal just the queens, effectively killing the hive in the process.

The creators recently announced that they’ve gotten funding to do a 2.0! https://chaos.social/@blinry/111011979500389143

Also, it’s made in Godot, and whilst an older versiob of the engine, I’ve found it a valuable codebase for a couple of things. I particularly like how they deal with level creation, their file format for custom levels is very KISS.

I was really hoping this would be the Ohio cryptic lineage, which was being tracked by the same team https://x.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444603829407746?s=20

“Modern” is an extremely funny delineation given the small temporal window of this whole thing

I don’t think any part of my comment implied this was happening naturally, but just to clarify: it is a cycle very much driven by human activity. My intent in explaining the cycle wasn’t to say “this is happening anyway without humans starting fires” but to say “not only do fires started burn down trees today but they also make future fires worse”.

Which is why I say it’s a key contributor to the increase in fires, and disagree with it just being a long term consequence, as you say. Because of this cycle, there will be incidences of slash and burn land management that progress to major forest fire that would not have done previously.

This article doesn’t cover one of the key contributing factors to this which is the cyclical nature of drought resilience and deforestation. As rainforest is lost, precipitation decreases due to a decrease in tree perspiration, reducing humidity and the amount of water available to the trees, making them more susceptible to fires.

When you then combine that with longer dry seasons, higher max temperatures, and slash and burn land management practices, the rainforest is in for a bad time.

Genuine question, why are you posting this?

I don’t think there is (or needs to be) much more to it than Garry’s personal history and success with Source

Doesn’t the post link to an article that suggests reverse osmosis membranes may be responsible for some of these nanoplastics? Am I misreading this?

Different brew methods extract differing amounts from the coffee, so the amount of water is indeed consequential. Same grams of coffee in to a pour-over vs espresso would result in different amounts of extracted coffee material consumed.