creatures

is a fun (still WIP) website for biology/phylogenetics nerds. The stated purpose is to showcase lots and lots of examples of convergent evolution, but most of these I didn't know even one example of, and concepts are covered in good detail beyond the convergence part.

The pages that don't exist yet are neat jumping-off points for looking up stuff elsewhere, like:

"Tool use in elephants ...
Elephants are well known for their accuracy in throwing objects, and in addition use sticks for a number of purposes. Also of considerable interest is their use of fly-whisks to keep blood-sucking flies at bay."

I didn't know that...

A few fun pages:

https://mapoflife.org/topics/topic_591_snail-eating-an-asymmetric-diet/
https://mapoflife.org/topics/topic_592_bioluminescence/
https://mapoflife.org/topics/topic_471_agriculture-in-dugongs/
https://mapoflife.org/topics/topic_518_carnivorous-plants/

this post was written by my friend nanodrive 🙂 (you can find her on "youtube")

daily knowledge: in late 1998, bungie released myth II. however, it shipped with a game breaking bug, where if you installed the game to anywhere on your hard drive except the default directory, it would uninstall everything recursively on your boot drive since the uninstaller for the original game was hardcoded to only uninstall from the data directory, while the sequel's uninstaller was modified to uninstall from the applications folder as well, hence the reason for the bug. in order to counter this bungie ordered a recall on all the CDs for the game, and as a result they eliminated most of the profits they made from the game.

WOW. went and read more about this on Wikipedia and found this quote

The team essentially had two choices. On the one hand, they could say nothing, and quietly fix the bug in a patch that would be immediately made available for download on their website. In favor of this course of action, it was argued that installing a game to the root directory of a hard drive was an unusual thing to do, something there was little chance of anyone repeating, and so it was unlikely anyone would ever encounter the bug. The other option was to publicly announce the problem and recall the game. This is what they did. According to Jones:

"The thing that made the decision easy was that if we were to ship the game anyway and try to fix the problem later, some people were gonna get screwed. And that was wrong. It might not have been very many people - maybe one or two. But it would have bothered us the rest of our lives. Maybe not - maybe just two years. We'd be sitting around today: "Damn, wonder when the next person's gonna call?" It was so clear that there was one decision that led down the road of eternal damnation. The other was to spend a lot of money and do the right thing - and never make the same mistake again."

imagine any big software/game company acting with this kind of conscience now!! here in the Fuck You Age, microsoft or whoever will just force a shutdown/update on you and if you lose anything important or your device doesn't work afterward they're just like "oops. well, sucks to be you"

imagine "some people are gonna get screwed" being enough to sway a decision like this. damn. wow

encountered both these quotes this week, both referencing climate change, and it’s making me feel a way

meant to link the full essay on the right: https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/its-time-to-build-resilient-communities

i mean at this point i’m not surprised i never learned this bit of what’s otherwise a very famous part of history but i am always mad about it