Doc Fancy

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”

High-speed rail! MRNA vaccines! New cancer treatments! Solar and wind energy collection! Better and longer-range EVs! That wood that's harder than steel! New apples! Fibermaxxing! Buldak Swicy ramen! Muppets! Muppets are too a technology, shut up!

Right?! Talk about a drive-by existential crisis 🙃

WELL THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING

see normally people UNDERestimate the taxonomic burden, but fortunately it is staggeringly unlikely that there could be 50,000 species of feather star 😅

Anyways the good news is that apparently this is par for the course…

(I’m psyched but also a bit alarmed because *reaching* this conclusion takes so much longer and there is a looming deadline.)

Five.

…goddamn.

But two decades on shallow water crinoids, and nada!

In 2022 we got a tiny number of deep water critters from the west coast — and one of the shallow species from there is new (it’s from an Asshole Genus which I know well and dread, haven’t had a chance to get moving on it yet).

This? FIVE.

3/

Because so far in the Coral Sea material, I am at *five* new species. Two of them are in the same genus!

(…the one I made that spreadsheet for last night.)

Feather stars aren’t the most diverse group, compared to starfish and brittle stars. Starfish? You expect HEAPS of new things.

2/

I made another spreadsheet for a tricky feather star genus last night. Today I tested it out.

Then I marched over to my Tim’s desk and said, “Okay, look, am I going insane? Is it NORMAL to keep finding new species? Am I missing something obvious?”

Tim: “No, that’s normal.”

Me: “Oh, good.”

1/

The ONLY WAY we get out of our current mess is by caring about everyone. Switching the targets of fascism doesn't end fascism. If both political parties embrace full throated fascism, we're not left with any electoral options, and a lot more regular people will embrace their own bigotry.

oh my god. You can’t make this shit up.

❤️🦖🧪🌏❤️

A thought that had genuinely never occurred to me

Part of trying to get on quietly and diplomatically in life and not clash with people is keeping up the pretence that fuckwits don’t walk among us in the world, but sometimes you just have to face up to the reality of the situation: Fuckwits do walk among us in the world, and they are not thin on the ground.

www.tom-cox.com/why-reading-...

Yeah, this is sadly truth. Doing the physiotherapy exercises every day is why I can *walk.*

You may laugh, but the Macbeths are a much better role model for a marriage than Romeo and Juliet. They discuss their problems (killing the king of Scotland), share their hobbies (killing the king of Scotland), and resolve their conflicts (by killing the king of Scotland).

Alleged someone allegedly burning a concentration camp in Kansas City.

Suburban wine moms will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a concentration camp" and then very effectively firebomb a concentration camp

Update: hours of spelunking Clark’s monograph, running Hartlaub’s commentary through google translate, and a giant spreadsheet of morphological characters later—

—pretty sure these are the same species, G. angusticalyx, whose defining feature is perhaps a tad more variable than the key implies 🙄

so wait you're telling me a moral panic around the internet is not based on any actual scientific data but just cynical governments looking to control access to speech

The fact that they're calling Wuthering Heights a love story is wild to me. That's like calling Every Breath You Take a ballad.

This pigeon ran me around for TWENTY MINUTES I'm so glad Maggie entered her gold leaf era to do it justice!!! 🪶

People should pay attention to this story. Trump actually tries his "you're fired" shtick, directly!! But it's mere words!! Because the guy has a (good) union (which is smartly making a symbol of this story)

Ford meanwhile suspended him immediately and surely would have fired absent union action

also the venn diagram of people mad they can't understand the lyrics and the people who think born in the usa is about how good america is is a circle

Anyways, I am glad to be working out again but now I have to pass out for a bit and I am kind of annoyed by that aspect of it.

I’ve done some story edits (about 25% of the way through edits on a short), I’ve done vocal exercises, I’ve done some recording (I need to rerecord the guitar scratch track for that song, it’s too fast), and I cannot actually do anything more because I went for a run.

Must sleep.

It’s *4pm.*

Back at gym after… a couple years… and slowly getting back into running…

I am on day *two*.

Things I had forgotten about the workout routine:

1. Relentless laundry

2. I have been for a run and now I must fall into a miniature coma for a bit

3. [book myotherapy appointment]

The longest volume of this monograph is over 800 quarto pages of small print and each volume is full of sentences like that. Just... sit with that.

If there's a taxonomist in your life, that you are close to, maybe give them a hug.

Anyways, I have done 4 out of 16 species...

Whew.

-Doc out 🔬

I'm now wondering if H.L. Clark actually did line drawings.

...never mind. If you read this rant, thank you, and I just want you to go back up and look at that sentence and marvel that it exists.

The technology of the camera lucida, though? It's basically a mirror on a stick, attached to a lense. There's your line drawing, Clark! You don't have to actually be good at it!

Hang on. Sorry. A.H. Clark. The other Clark - well A.M. Clark - could draw just fine.

Ultimately the photographic plates are the reason I bought a physical copy, because with all due respect to the Biodiversity Heritage Library - who do AMAZING and CRITICAL work - the scans of the photos are... bad.

Fortunately, A.M. mostly avoided the incomprehensible word salad of A.H. Sidebar: I also find H.L. to be very readable.

(...there are a lot of Clarks in echinoderm taxonomy. They are not related, as far as I know.)