If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Back in 2018, around the time I emailed my immigration lawyer about applying for US citizenship, I started work on a short story called “Radicalized,” which eventually became the title story of a collection that came out in 2019:
“Radicalized” is a story about America, and about guns, and about health care, and about violence. I live in Burbank, which is ranks second in gun-stores-per-capita in the USA, a dubious honor that represents a kind of regulatory arbitrage with our neighboring goliath, the City of Los Angeles, where gun store licensing is extremely tight. If you’re an Angeleno in search of a firearm, you’re almost certainly coming to Burbank to buy it.
Walking, cycling and driving past more gun stores than I’d ever seen in my Canadian life got me thinking about Americans and guns, a subject that many Canadians have passed comment upon. Americans kill each other, and especially themselves, at rates that baffle everyone else in the world, and they do it with guns. When we moved here, my UK born-and-raised daughter came home from her first elementary school lockdown drill perplexed and worried. Knowing what I did about US gun violence, I understood that while school shootings and other spree killings happened with dismal and terrifying regularity, they only accounted for a small percentage of the gun deaths here. If you die with a bullet in you, the changes are that the finger on the trigger was your own. The next most likely suspect is someone you know. After that, a cop. Getting shot by a stranger out of uniform is something of a rarity here – albeit a spectacular one that captures our imaginations in ways that deliberate or accidental self-slayings and related-party shootings do not.
So I told her, “Look, you can basically ignore everything they tell you during those lockdown drills, because they almost certainly have nothing to do with your future. But if a friend
ever says to you, ‘Hey, wanna see my dad’s gun?’ I want you to turn around and leave and get in touch with me
right away,
that instant.”
Guns turn the murderous impulse – which, let’s be honest, we’ve all felt at some time or another – into a murderous act. Same goes for suicide, which explains the high levels of non-accidental self-shootings in the USA: when you’ve got a gun, the distance between suicidal ideation and your death is the ten feet from the sofa to the gun in the closet.
Americans get angry at people and then, if they have a gun to hand, sometimes they shoot them. In a thread /r/Burbank about how people at our local cinemas are rude and use their phones in which someone posted, “Well, you should just ask them to stop.” The reply: “That’s a great way to get shot.” No one chimed in to say, “Don’t be ridiculous, no one would shoot you for asking them to put away their phone during a movie.” Same goes for “road rage.”
And while Americans shoot people they’ve only
just gotten angry at, they also sometimes plan shooting sprees and kill a bunch of people because they’re just generically angry. Being angry about the state of the world is a completely relatable emotion, of course, but the targets of these shootings are arbitrary. Sure sometimes these killings are have clear, bigoted targets – mass shootings at Black supermarkets or mosques or synagogues or gay bars – more often the people who get sprayed with bullets (at country and western concerts or elementary schools or movie theaters) are almost certainly not the people the gunman (almost always a man) is angry at.
This line of thought kept surfacing as I went through the immigration process, but not just when I was dealing with immigration paperwork. I was also spending an
incredible amount of time dealing with our health insurer, Cigna, who kept refusing treatments my pain doctor – one of the most-cited pain researchers in the country – thought I would benefit from. I’ve had chronic pain since I was a teenager, and it’s only ever gotten worse. I’ve had decades of pain care in Canada and the UK, and while the treatments never worked for very long, it was never compounded by the kinds of bureaucratic stuff I went through with my US insurer.
The multi-hour phone calls with Cigna that went nowhere would often have me seeing red – literally, a red tinge closing in around my vision – and usually my hands would be shaking by the time I got off the call.
And I had it easy! I wasn’t terminally ill, and I certainly wasn’t calling in on behalf of a child or a spouse or parent who was seriously ill or dying, whose care was being denied by their insurer. Bernie’s 2016 Medicare For All campaign promise had filled the air with statistics (Americans pay more for care and get worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world), and stories. So many stories – stories that just tore your hear out, about parents who literally had to watch their children die because the insurance
they paid for refused to treat their kids. As a dad, I
literally couldn’t imagine how I’d cope in that situation. Just thinking about it filled me with rage.
One day, as I was swimming in the community pool across the street – a critical part of my pain management strategy – I was struck with a thought: “Why don’t these people murder health insurance executives?” Not that I
wanted them to. I don’t want
anyone to kill
anyone. But why do American men who murder their wives and the people who cut them off in traffic and random classrooms full of children leave the health insurance industry alone? This is an industry that is practically
designed to fill the people who interact with it with uncontrollable rage. I mean, if you’re watching your wife or your kid die before your eyes because some millionaire CEO decided to aim for a $10 billion stock buyback this year instead of his customary $9 billion target, wouldn’t you feel that kind of murderous rage?
Around this time, my parents came out for a visit from Canada. It was a great trip, until one night, my mom woke me up after midnight: “We have to take your father to the ER. He’s
really sick.” He was: shaking, nauseated, feverish. We raced down the street to the local hospital, part of a gigantic chain that has swallowed nearly all the doctors’ practices, labs and hospitals within an hour’s drive of here.
Dad had kidney stones, and they’d gone septic. When the ER docs removed the stones, all the septic gunk in his kidneys was flushed into his bloodstream, and he crashed. If he hadn’t been in an ER recovery room at the time, he would have died. As it was, he was in a coma for three days and it was touch and go. My brother flew down from Toronto, not sure if this was his last chance to see our dad alive. The nurses and doctors took great care of my dad, though, and three days later, he emerged from his coma, and today, he’s better than ever.
But on day two, when we thought he was probably at the end of his life, as my mother sat at his side, holding the hand of her husband of fifty years, someone from the hospital billing department came to her side and said, “Mrs Doctorow, I know this is a difficult time, but I’d like to discuss the matter of your husband’s bill with you.”
The bill was $176,000. Thankfully, the travel medical insurance plan offered by the Ontario Teachers’ Union pension covered it all (I don’t suppose anyone gets very angry with them).
How do people tolerate this? Again, not in the sense of “people should commit violent acts in the face of these provocations,” but rather, “How is it that in a country filled with both assault rifles and unimaginable acts of murderous cruelty committed by fantastically wealthy corporations, people don’t leap from their murderous impulses to their murderous weapons to commit murderous acts?
For me, writing fiction is an accretive process. I can tell that a story is brewing when thoughts start rattling around in my mind, resurfacing at odd times. I think of them as stray atoms, seeking molecules with available docking sites to glom onto. I process all my emotions – but especially my negative ones – through this process, by writing stories and novels. I could tell that something was cooking, but it was missing an ingredient.
Then I found it: an interview with the woman who coined the term "incel.” It was on the Reply All podcast, and Alana, a queer Canadian woman explained that she had struggled all her life to find romantic and sexual partnership, and jokingly started referring to herself as “involuntarily celibate,” and then, as an “incel”:
Alana started a message board where other “incels” could offer each other support, and it was remarkably successful. The incels on Alana’s message board helped each other work through the problems that stood between them and love, and when they did, they drifted away from the board to pursue a happier life.
That was the problem, Alana explained. If you’re in a support group for people with a drinking problem, the group elders, the ones who’ve been around forever, are the people who’ve figured it out and gotten sober. When life seems impossible, those elders step in to tell you,
I know it’s terrible right now, but it’ll get better. I was where you are and I got through it. You will, too. I’m here for you. We all are.
But on Alana’s incel board, the old timers were the people who
couldn’t figure it out. They were the ones for whom mutual support and advice didn’t help them figure out what they needed to do in order to find the love they sought. The longer the message board ran, the more it became dominated by people who were convinced that it was
hopeless, that love was impossible for the likes of them. When newbies posted in rage and despair, these Great Old Ones were there to
feed it:
You’re right. It will never get better. It only gets worse. There is no hope.
That was the missing piece. My short story
Radicalized was born. It’s a story about men on a message board called Fuck Cancer Right In the Fucking Face (FCKRFF, or “Fuckriff”), who are watching the people they love the most in the world be murdered by their insurance companies, who egg each other on to spectacular acts of mass violence against health insurance company employees, hospital billing offices, and other targets of their rage. As of today, anyone can read this story for free, courtesy of my publishers at Macmillan, who gave permission for the good folks at
The American Prospect to post it:
I often hear from people about this story, even before an unknown (at the time of writing) man assassinated Brian Thompson, CEO of Unitedhealthcare, the murderous health insurance monopoly that is the largest medical insurer in the USA. Since then, hundreds of people have gotten in touch with me to ask me how I feel about this turn of events, how it feels to have “predicted” this.
I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now, and I gotta tell you, I have complicated feelings.
“One medical doctor, whose identity the Daily Beast confirmed, commented with sympathy for Thompson’s family and said the killer should be charged with murder, but then wondered about the damage the CEO had done. “I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials,” they wrote. “It has to be on the order of millions. His death won’t make that better, but it’s hard for me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company.” “What has bothered me the most is people that put «fiduciary responsibility» (eg profits) above human lives, none more so than this company as run by him,“ wrote another medical doctor, who also spoke to the Daily Beast to confirm their identity. “When other’s human lives are deemed worthless, it is not surprising to have others view your life of no value as well.””
If f is the homomorphism that sends elements of Z_12 into products of powers of roots of unity, there are 12 different possible selections for what f(1) equals. f(1) = e^(pii/6) may be the most obvious. since 1 generates Z_12 f(1) is all you need to define to define f, but when the group is not cyclic you need to use a more general method to find the homomorphism.
first you would have to find the basis of the group by representing it as products of groups of prime power order, in this case represent Z_12 as the direct sum of Z_3 and Z_4.
then you know that Z_12 as ordered pairs of elements Z_3 and Z_4 can be generated as linear combinations of (1, 0) and (0, 1).
So in order to define a function f that sends elements of Z_12 into products of roots of unity, you only need to define f((1, 0)) to be ANY 3rd root of unity and f((0, 1)) to be ANY fourth root of unity.
In my case I arbitrarily defined f((1,0)) = e^(2ipi/3) and f((0, 1)) = e^(2ipi/4), which gives f((1, 1)) (the generator of the cyclic group) to be f((1, 0)) * f((0, 1)) = e^(7ipi/6)
Since there are 3 third roots of unity and 4 fourth roots of unity, there are 3*4 = 12 possible different functions and hence twelve different representations of Z_12 using the exponential function (when the group is not cyclic, the homomorphisms will not be isomorphisms).
“Typhoid & swans - it all comes from the same place.”
Blue lasers, lasers that emit a light beam with a wavelength between 400 nm and 500 nm, are key components of various technologies, ranging from high-resolution displays to printers, medical imaging tools and data storage solutions. A key advantage of these lasers is that they generate coherent and intense light beams that can be leveraged to develop highly advanced optical technologies.
One approach to developing blue lasers entails the use of colloidal quantum dots (CQDs). These are nanoscale semiconducting particles with unique optical properties associated with their size.
Lasers based on these nanoscale particles could have notable advantages, including enhanced power-efficiency and tunability. Most quantum dot-based lasers developed so far utilized cadmium (Cd) particles that emit red light, while efforts to introduce similar blue light-emitting lasers were sparser.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As I go into my fifth year of writing Pluralistic (!), I find myself increasingly reflecting on the unexpected pleasures of creating the collages that head each post. I am by no means a visual artist – my drawing skills are sub-stick-figure, and my spatial sense overall is remarkable terrible. I can’t solve jigsaws, I get lost in hotel corridors, and I can’t find things that are
right under my nose.
But addressing the challenge of illustrating
extremely abstract ideas related to tech policy, corruption, monopoly and other hard-to-visualize ideas has awakened some kind of latent, heretofore unsuspected interest in visual communications in me. Relying exclusively on Creative Commons, public domain, and extremely solid fair use claims in selecting my source materials adds a spicy challenge that makes the whole thing even more engrossing.
I’ve written about my process in finding and preparing these sources before. Here’s 2023’s notes and highlights:
This year saw some new, exciting discovering and challenges. First and foremost is my switch to kagi.com as my preferred search-engine, which is like having access to a time machine that’s connected to pre-enshittificated Google:
Kagi’s image search is
amazing, far better than Google’s, and it has great copyright-based filters. When combined with tineye.com (for finding high-rez versions of images that might not be correctly tagged for rights status), it’s even better. Even so, often Kagi will surface thumbnails of images Tineye can only find as high-rez on proprietary stock art sites like Alamy, covered in gross watermarks. These images are still in the public domain, watermarks or no, but erasing the watermarks is a
lot of work. However, Alamy is a pretty good source of bibliographic information about the original sources of these images, for example, which issue of a 19th century boxing magazine they came out of, and then Kagi can find me high-rez scans of these sources, at the Internet Archive and/or the Library of Congress. I snag those PDFs and import them into the GIMP (which I use for editing) and pull, clean and crop a new high-rez version of those images for my own use. This year, I got much better at saving and organizing all that work on my laptop, but next year I’m hoping to get into a rhythm of uploading my high-rezzes to Wikimedia Commons so everyone can use ‘em.
Getting better at collaging isn’t merely getting better at using search tools, of course. Knowing
what to search for is even more important, especially given the constraints of only using public domain/CC sources. The Library of Congress is a wellspring of visual material, but its own search tool is sadly lacking; however, Kagi’s image search comes to the rescue again, thanks to the “site:loc.gov” flag, which restricts results to the LoC.
It was through these searches that I realized how many of the source images I was pulling down were the work of Joseph Keller (1872-1956), an American political cartoonist who worked extensively for
Punch:
Keppler was called upon to illustrate many, many political issues that have parallels with the modern competition, corruption and geopolitical stories. A scant few of these remain in the periphery of the public’s imagination today, most notably “The Bosses of the Senate,” quite possibly the most significant antitrust cartoon of all time:
But Keppler is a
wellspring of great public domain images, and I’ve been drawing on them heavily. It gives me great pleasure to do so, not just because they’re so well-suited to the stories I write, but also because his posterity deserves it. He should be in the American illustrator pantheon alongside the likes of Norman Rockwell!
Besides my search engine and my sources, 2024 saw one other
gigantic change in my collage-making: I had cataracts removed from both my eyes in September, and my ophthalmologist implanted lenses that corrected my severe astigmatism and permanently focused one of my eyes at 23" and the other at 25’ (this is called monovision). My new eyeballs are still bedding in, and there are days when my vision is severely subpar, but I’m experiencing continuous improvement, and I think this will be a game-changer for 2025.
2025 will also see the long-awaited Version 3.0 release of The GIMP, the free/open image editor I exclusively use. GIMP (Generic Image Manipulation Program) was first released a quarter-century ago, and it’s been in version 2.x for
twenty years, so this is a big milestone. I can’t wait!
Well, enough forematter. Let’s get into this year’s best illustrations. If you want high-rezzes of these (or any of my other collages), you can get them at full rez from my Flickr gallery of Pluralistic collages:
Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners”
This one combines three sources: a public domain image of the Las Vegas sign, a CC 0 image of a western ghost-town, and a fair use gank of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatar. I spent a lot of time hand-cropping the blades of grass around the sign’s footing to create the illusion that it was planted in the ground. I’m also pretty happy with the dirt effect I managed on the sign.
The demand for electronics has led to a significant increase in e-waste. In 2022, approximately 62 million tons of e-waste were generated, marking an 82% increase from 2010. Projections indicate that this figure could rise to 82 million tons by 2030.
E-waste contains valuable materials such as metals, semiconductors, and rare elements that can be reused. However, in 2022, only 22.3% of e-waste was properly collected and recycled, while the remaining materials, estimated to be worth almost $62 billion, were discarded in landfills.
Although efforts to improve e-waste recycling continue, the process remains labor-intensive, and a significant portion of e-waste is exported to developing countries, where cheap labor supports informal recycling practices involving hazardous chemicals.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to impose martial law collapsed after 190 Members of Parliament barricaded themselves into the National Assembly chamber and voted to end martial law while the military tried to break in to stop them before they could vote. Many members had to climb a fence at the back of the building to break in to get a majority of the 300 member body in the room to vote.
There’s no sugarcoating it: The 2024 election was terrible news for science, the environment, and the role of expertise and evidence in public policymaking. A lot of important things we care about and have worked hard to create and protect are going to be broken, some beyond repair. Destructive things we worked hard to prevent are going to happen — including some that we won’t be able to undo.
While nothing exactly like the second Trump administration has happened before, some elements of what we’re likely to see mirror the era of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And several scientists affected by Harper’s repressive policies tell me that by working together and planning strategically, we
will be able to stop some of this.
During Harper’s time in office, from 2006-2015, Canadian government scientists were prevented from sharing their expertise in government policymaking. The government also banned them from speaking to journalists or the public, often referred to as “muzzling.” The Harper administration destroyed libraries and stopped some new hiring of experts in key areas.
The intent was simple: The administration had ideological policy goals, and they weren’t interested in letting facts, evidence or reality get in the way of achieving them.
The second Trump administration will almost certainly do this — and worse. They already took a stab at it the first time, when government experts who warned the public about harmful policy choices faced serious professional retaliation and taxpayer-funded sources of key information were suppressed, hidden, or even deleted.
What can we do about it?
I spoke with several colleagues who experienced working under the Harper administration, as well as several experts in the role of evidence-based public policymaking. They offered some clear advice.
Step One: They Can’t Delete What They Don’t Exclusively Control
For scientists working at government agencies, they suggest making copies of everything so it can be stored somewhere else — and to do that as soon as possible, certainly well before the next administration starts.
Step Two: Prepare to Speak Out (or Blow the Whistle)
Once the new administration takes place, one of the first things they’re likely to do will be to institute their own muzzling policy.
With this in mind, several colleagues pointed out the importance of getting information about what’s happening to the public. Investigative journalism sites like ProPublica are already actively seeking sources from government agency employees and have provided detailed information on how to safely and anonymously communicate with them. Research those options now, so you have the tools in your back pocket.
Step Three: Collaborate (Sometimes Quietly)
There’s another way to make sure important work still happens and gets communicated, several colleagues told me: Government scientists can work as part of teams that include external scientists. Working with collaborators on research projects means that even if you aren’t allowed to comment on a result or project, someone else can share it.
Step Four: Reveal How the Sauce Is Made
Several experts pointed out that agency-level regulatory decisions and reports, and changes to internal policies about how to communicate them with the public, rarely make headlines. This means that far too much of this will happen in the shadows. At the same time, we all have a duty to make sure that everyone knows that — despite some occasional bureaucratic annoyances — we are safer, healthier, and more prosperous when key decisions are made by people who know what they’re talking about evaluating the best available evidence, rather than by uninformed idealogues.
Step Five: Embrace Bureaucracy
And what if you see potential harm coming down the pike? Some experts advise using all the resources at your disposal to slow their implementation. Large bureaucracies like government agencies have their advantages in this regard.
Step Six: As Painful As This Is, We Can Get Through It
While the “muzzling” of scientific expertise under the Harper administration has effects that are still being felt a decade later, it did not and will not last forever. Neither will this.
so… if we arbitrarily assume on average an ant lives for a year for ease of calculation, and that the ant population has been on average the same for the last 60 million years (unlikely, but we could imagine this is the inflection point of a logistic curve), we could estimate the number of ants to have lived in that period as between 6E22 and 6E23.
the upper bound of that is actually pretty close to avogadro’s number! so we can say that
the number of ants to have ever lived is roughly
one mole
As part of the occult respiratory system of the earth, caves enjoy their own hermetic microclimates. And being so tenuously tuned to the world above, only the rarest squalls can disturb their meditations. In their coldest reaches ice may form and conform to strange configurations; a florescent hoar-frost that encrusts the rock with glistening needles. A field of glassy growths to bring a burst of constellations. Bubbles, captive in their upward glancing paths, withhold their precious cargoes. Folds of ice form perfect peristyles and colonnades. And all around the crystal clubs and branching trunks enclose a hyperborean fantasy: a verglas temple pegged with spikes of ice, and with waves of frost that never seem to break upon its hearth. Here, in this silent space, temperature replaces time as a useful referent of delineation.
Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary
The words ‘Deny’, ‘Defend’ and ‘Depose’ were discovered to have been etched onto the shell casings found where the CEO of United Healthcare was killed.
It’s been a real bad, uh, generation for the UK, huh?
Honestly kind of fascinating how the doomer folk-wisdom about an economy that never recovered from 2008 and eternal stagnation that wonks are constantly screaming at people is entirely wrong in the American context just seems to be correct and cool-eyed analysis across the Atlantic.
Escalier au Musée Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) à Paris. Le Musée était à l'origine la demeure de Moreau transformée par sa décision de 1895 en atelier et musée de son œuvre. - source Aure Bonmatí Mondéjar.
Radioactive waste is often distinguished from hazardous waste due to the unique hazards radiation can pose - and proper transport, treatment, and disposal of radioactive waste can be just as crucial, if not more so. Many examples exist of improper disposal of radiation sources/radioactive waste, including at Lake Karachay, Mayapure, and Goiânia.
Lake Karachay, in the Ural mountains in Russia, is currently considered to be one of the most radioactive places on Earth. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union used it as a dumping ground for radioactive waste. In the 1960s, when a drought dried up portions of the lake, radioactive dust and dirt spread from the region. Eventually, concrete blocks were added to prevent sediment shifting and, in 2015, the lake was completely backfilled, turning the entire thing into a permanent (and dry) nuclear waste storage.
In 2010, in Mayapuri, Delhi, India, a research irradiator that had been unused for decades was sold at auction to a scrap dealer - without disclosing the hazards involved. The cobalt-60 source was broken into pieces, and eight people were ultimately hospitalized, with at least one known death.
Finally, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, unsecured radiotherapy equipment was stolen from an abandoned hospital in 1987. The equipment was dismantled and sold and, ultimately, four deaths resulted from the theft, on top of hundreds of people being exposed to the radiation.
Welcome to the project that drove me to the edge of my sanity.
The Big Eight was never meant to be an exhaustive list of all the cuisines of the country. It was a somewhat haphazard extension of the so-called “Big Four”
banquet traditions of imperial China: Cantonese (粤), Sichuan (川), Shandong (鲁), and Jiangsu (苏). The reason why The Big Eight contains Cantonese and not Yunnan isn’t because people in Yunnan don’t have a unique cuisine – it’s because Cantonese had an establish system of banquet presentation that was enjoyed by the merchants and the Mandarins of the Qing dynasty, and Yunnan didn’t.
[…]
Further, I also want to emphasize that we tried to come to this project from a position of humility. How to define the boundary of a ‘cuisine’ is not obvious. I went into (probably overly excruciating) detail about our methodology in the accompanying video, so I won’t re-hash too much of it here. Our rules of thumb were:
Passing The 50% Rule. If you’d estimate that more that 50% of the dishes are ‘unique’, and the dishes that remain often have different versions, it’s a separate cuisine.
Culinary Self-Determination. Do the people themselves (particularly the food world) make a distinction between cuisines? E.g. people in Louisiana are quick to make a distinction between Cajun food and Creole food, so to us this would be two distinct cuisines - even if the differences may not be overly obvious to an outsider.
Failing the ‘Mutual Intelligibility’ test. Imagine an old, talented home cook from one area. Would they be able to recreate a dish from another area solely from taste, without looking anything up?
‘Culinary Continuums’ must be broken somewhere.A little like dialect continuums in linguistics, there can often be small changes in food between neighboring towns and cities - that then morph into large differences if you zoom out and look at either end of the continuum. Boundaries will ultimately arbitrary.
There will likely be a lot of contention about some of these boundaries, and there’s
absolutely stuff that we missed. We’re also personally the most familiar with the South of China, so differing opinions and viewpoints are more than welcome.
There is no possible reality where this is in any way capable of being passed off as self-defense. It was never self-defense. It is, and always has been, a genocide.
Crying babies.
Crying babies.This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, meant to draw out and kill civilians while also making it far more difficult to locate and aid children who are trapped or alone.
good morning everyone remember that you cannot distinguish a reference frame of constant velocity outside the influence of gravity from a reference frame in free-fall, nor can you distinguish a reference frame experiencing constant acceleration in gravity-free space from a reference frame standing on the surface of a massive object!
Not only the skill at motion, but the comedy sensibility-when the suitcase starts *floating* uncontrollably instead of just being stuck-is fuckin’ great:)
Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.
The Ethiopian wolf
(Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.
Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker
(Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.
The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.
“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.
The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”
Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.
“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”
Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”
This is the autism website. Now, as an extension of the power of love and friendship, there are few things more useful than Knowing A Guy. Knowing A Guy means you have a support network. Knowing a plumber, or a tax accountant, or just that one dude that’s really fucking good at finding the information you need when you’re really overwhelmed, can be the difference between being able to pay rent and having a fun party with friends to fix your shit.
How does one end up Knowing A Guy? It’s a skill you can develop called Networking and it is one of the foundations of society. Unfortunately making those connections with people is fucking hard and nobody makes a tutorial for it. So, here you go:
The golden rule is
you scratch my back and I scratch yours
It is necessary for survival to seek out useful people
Great news! Everyone is useful in some form or fashion - including you! When given the opportunity to learn about someone, do it! Extroversion does not come naturally to some people and that’s okay. Just take whatever falls in your lap.
Types of usefulness: trade skills, connections of their own,
personality you jive with, pleasant to talk to, niche interest in shared hobby, security - the list is pretty much endless. I know a guy that lives in the metro area - no job, no major hobbies, inoffensively annoying to me personally, kinda ignorant, not attractive to me, but you know what? He knows how the fuck to get around the city by foot. My rural-raised ass APPRECIATES the guide.
Remember important information: general personality, background, skillset, likes and dislikes. You can find this information by making smalltalk about their life.
There is no such thing as pointless conversation.(Yes, even the annoying smalltalk)
The more people you know, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be useful in a given situation -
or will know someone who is.
It is overwhelming. In a given clique/community/workspace/whatever, there is A Guy Who Knows The Other Guys. This Guy is a shortcut. Find them. They’re often elderly, extroverted, a little bit annoying, a secretary or in some otherwise forward-facing position. Look for people that are gossipy/talk about other people a lot but not in negative ways. If they constantly talk shit, they’ll talk shit about you too. They’re still useful but be careful with the information you share
You do not have to like someone for them to be useful.
You do not have to like someone for them to be useful.*
If you have low self esteem, you’re going to feel like you’re using people. You’re not. That’s the devil talking.
People like feeling valuedand the connections you are making are the threads holding community together. Recognize people for their talents. It’s only a problem when you’re taking advantage of people
So: don’t feel scummy about it. You’re an animal. You have to claw out your right to survive and people will respect you more for it.
Luckily mutualism is the name of the game in the animal kingdom.
Offer something back. The foundation of a Know A Guy relationship is Mutual Benefit
Sometimes that Mutual Benefit is just spreading news of the The Guy far and wide. My plumber friend is my actual
friend and I love her to death, but I’m maintaining our backscratch relationship by pimping out her plumbing business to anyone that’ll listen
Food is a good Mutual Benefit. People across cultures for all of human history have bonded over food. I have good success asking people for a favor and then offering to buy them lunch in return **
General compensation is also good. Offer a service in return and always do your best to offer financial compensation as appropriate. Having your plumber friend take a look at your drain: doable with a case of beer. Having your plumber friend redo the pipes in your entire house? You need to pay for that.
Being transactional is not necessarily a bad thing. I would advise against keeping an itemized list of things owed, but fish don’t seek out cleaner shrimp just because they enjoy their company. Everyone gets something
Unfortunately being extroverted and generally personable is a huge benefit here, but that’s the value of the Guy That Knows A Guy. There’s someone out there that has consolidated All The Guys so you don’t have to be the local expert. Always remember nobody can do everything and you don’t need to master every skill
* This is the foundation of a functioning community. I have
many acquaintances that I find incredibly annoying. They include doctors, welders, artists, social workers, lawyers, construction crew and random fuckers at the grocery store. I do not hang out with them. I do not have to in order to maintain a civil Know A Guy relationship. I can drop them useful tidbits and fuck right off so I don’t have to spend any more time than necessary with them
** People may assume romantic intent. Be prepared for that. I generally denote that it’s a friendly/work lunch by calling them bro at some point if they’re my age. Otherwise my general demeanor is sufficient to show that I do this with everyone
Source: personal experience, mother’s teachings of crime, booth vending and poverty
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