I am a christian milennial who works in commercial greenhouses. If you have questions about plants or commercial horticulture, please ask them! Always excited about plants, mushrooms, and sci fi. My icon was one of my foster kittens. Background photo is Lake Erie.
Due to popular request, I am providing the spreadsheet calculators for Star Trek age comparisons and for calculating the orbital period of planets in the Star Trek universe.
You will need to copy/download the calculators in order to use them.
Link to age comparison calculator
Link to orbital period calculator
Questions?
Please reblog the post and ask!
I am willing to add more aliens to the age comparison calculator if you have age comparison data (e.g. stuff from Memory Alpha or Memory Beta, stated vs apparent age, etc.).
Technical Notes are below the cut:
Age Comparison Calculator
I had originally done this solely by ratios, but a request for Klingon ages made me realize the limitation of that. Subsequently, I reworked it to rely on regressions.
Currently the comparisons between current human vs Federation human, Vulcan/Romulan, and Klingon lifespans are modeled using a power regression. The comparisons between current human vs Cardassian and Bajoran ages are modeled using linear regressions.
In order to make these regressions I used reference ages as follows:
Federation human: equivalent to human ages between 0-20yr, max age: 120 vs 150 (upper bound from Memory Alpha)
Bajoran: equivalent at age 8, current human age 18 equivalent to age 27 (see Cardassian regression - similarity based on biological compatibility re: Ziyal), age 70 equivalent to age 100 (from DS9 ‘Dax’), max age: 120 vs 180 (personal headcanon)
Cardassian: equivalent at age 8 (based on Rugal’s appearance in DS9 ‘Cardassians’), current human age 18 equivalent to age 27 (personal headcanon), age 50 equivalent to age 70 (apparent vs deduced age of Dukat), max age: 120 vs 170 (personal headcanon)
Vulcan/Romulan: equivalent between ages 0-20 yr (appearance of Spock vs Michael), max age: 120 vs 270 (from Memory Beta)
Klingon: age 8 equivalent to age 1, 16 vs 8 (both from Memory Alpha), 20 vs 10 (made the math work out fine), max age: 120 vs 150 (Memory Alpha).
If anyone has more accurate values/estimates I can put those into the regressions to improve them.
Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.
The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--
If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.
Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?
We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.
I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.
Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.
if there are people who care, it's never a lost cause. at one point, kākāpō, a nocturnal flightless parrot species from aotearoa, were thought to be entirely extinct for decades. until 1977, where booming calls from males were heard on the small island of whenua hou. now, thanks to people who care so much they dedicated their lives to caring, kākāpō numbers are close to 300. despite the setbacks. despite the small gene pool causing infertility and health problems. people cared so fucking much that they survived. this is one of COUNTLESS, countless similar stories. I'm studying ecology so that I can go into conservation and all around me, every day, I see people who care enough to put years of their lives into learning about and solving environmental problems. I don't know man. hope isn't just some nebulous thing. it's tangible if you do something with it.
Tim Wong saw the decline of the pipeline swallowtail butterfly, and dedicated himself to providing habitat and raising babies, and it worked.
Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.
And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.
It is!! It always is!!
There will be good things and if you cannot find them, make them! The time will pass anyway, you can choose what to do with it, and so many, many people are choosing to try to help.
The Lord Howe Island rodent eradication project never fails to make me cry, it’s so beautiful.
The population of an entire island working together to eradicate every last rat and mouse to save the native bird populations. They had to trap a bunch of the birds and keep them in captivity so they wouldn’t be hurt by the rodenticides, and released them after the rodents were gone. Normal residents helped by phoning in tips whenever they saw rodents. And they did it. Lord Howe Island, last I read, remains rodent free, and the native bird populations are rebounding!
Acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, both of which were terrifying specters of my childhood, have been largely dealt with. Ecosystems devastated by acid rain are also recovering.
In 1979, an audacious, expensive conservation project was begun to try and breed california condors in captivity toward being released into the wild again. This was considered useless and hopeless by many people, but many more people said we had to at least TRY.
In 1991, the first captive-raised condors were re-introduced to Big Sur, Pinnacles, and Bitter Creek.
In 2006, three months before I turned eighteen, the first wild pair of condors was seen nesting in Big Sur in over a hundred years. A hundred years.
We did that. We fixed it.
How about another example.
When my mom was small, in the 1960s, there were many, many days of the year she was not allowed outside. Days and days they had recess indoors, because the air was so poisonous to breathe. Here's an article about it, with some good pictures.
My mom was 13 in the picture on the left. She was 50 in the picture on the right.
In 1987, there were 27 California Condors in the world, all captive.
In 2024, there were 566.
369 of them fly free.
That happened within my lifetime, and I'm not even 40 yet.
When you lose hope, think of our stories we're telling you. Recount them to yourself like a prayer. That's what I do.
There are 369 California Condors flying free in the sky right now.
Black footed ferrets were considered completely extinct in 1979. Then we found a single den in Wyoming in 1981. In 1996 it was classified as extinct in the wild.
By 2013, there were approximately 1,200 living wild, across 18 dens. Their numbers increase regularly, and while the face challenges due to habitat loss, climate change, and their limited genetic diversity, they're in a much better place than they were.
Because people cared, and they worked, and they fought to make things better.
academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches
you give animals an extra set of dna and they crumble into a little cartoon pile of ash. you give plants an extra set of dna and they say ahh finally an extra set of dna to do activities with
Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.
You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.
Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.
And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.
A lot of union folk very literally fought and died for the workers’ rights we have today. Like no joke, bosses would hire goons to straight-up murder unionizing and striking workers.
All the most basic workers’ rights we have today were all paid for in blood. And conservatives have never stopped trying to take them all away again.
NEVER FORGET THAT LABOR DAY IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. I know people who legitimately think it’s like a secondary mothers day - you know, for going into labor.
But it’s about workers rights and the people who campaigned for it to be a holiday knew this fucking day would come.
If you are in the US and about to celebrate a 3-day weekend, thank a goddamn union worker.
The fact that agricultural workers in the US still (yes still) do not have protection against retaliation from unionizing, and that the few unions in agriculture do not have much power, is imo one of the reasons why working in ag is pretty brutal.
You know what ag doesn't have? A five day forty hour work week. Or overtime pay. Or strong workplace safety enforcement.
A lot of why workers in the US have some protections is also due to federal regulations - lobbied for by unions and by workers themselves.
And the reason why those protections and, in many cases, unions, don't exist in agriculture is past (and current) racism.
Be grateful for what unions have done, be grateful for what the New Deal did in the 1930s for Americans, and what the Progressive movement did in the early 1900s.
And if you have a moment, remember that agricultural workers don't benefit from any of that.
just learned americans have different standard paper sizes than everyone else. what do you MEAN you don’t have A4 as the standard. what do you mean your standard paper size isn’t even the same size as an A4. apparently it’s like. ’letter’ and ’legal’ and whatever else. help!!!
wow my local oak trees are really having a mast year. I can hardly take a step without crushing a dozen acorns underfoot -> I should get back into foraging and learn to process these … groceries are getting hella expensive anyway -> huh, gathering acorns is really fun -> I need to make a squirrelsona
My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.
What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.
Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.
But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?
People kept trying to do this to my petcare business. “Let us build you a website! Let us buy you some ads! Let us print you flyers and cards!” I have exactly as much business as I can handle, and I’m happy with that. “But if you expand you could hire other people to do the work and pay them less, and raise your prices and eventually you can work from home!! Let us help you!” I’m doing this because I like playing fetch for a living, I like being outside moving around all day every day, I like spending time with each animal separately, I like being trusted by my clients with the keys and codes of their homes, it makes me feel proud. None of what you’re offering me is what I want. I don’t want a dozen miserable contractors who I pay 40% of each visit, I don’t want to try and wrangle and hire and vet people to do the part of my job that I like for me. That sounds bad. That’s a bad idea. And they looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. “But… website!! SEO! Ad buys! Targeted coverage! Constant growth!!” I don’t want any of that in my life it sounds fucking awful
One of the cruelties of capitalism is that if you want to do work you’re good at and love, a lot of the time your only option is to enter into some kind of business, and as soon as you do that, all the structural incentives of the system start trying to pull you away from the parts that you’re there for (i.e. the things that make life worth living) and towards various kinds of exploitation. Anyway, this also applies to writing and selling novels.
I agree with OP down to my bonessss. The best things are done with pasison by artisans, who deseve to be compensated respectfully, but aren't into their work from a place of greed or whatever misguided capitalist-brained bros think 'efficiency' is.
I'm plenty efficient, at getting things done the way i intend to.
i described to my econ-brain-rotten brother how i run my tattooing business and got the same responses as above.
It's like he absolutely didn't hear me when i explained the nuanced reasons i even started doing this work; I started tattooing because i was tired of the isolation of my (at that point) decade-long career in the animation industry. I was sick of my best work rotting on hard drives in shut down studios, of never getting to see anyone interacting with my art.
Moved to a big queer city, where my community got me started: queer tattooers patiently shared information and resources with me. early on, friends volunteered to let me experiment on their skin. Then they started offering to pay for materials, then more. Then they brought their friends to me...
I have a beautiful community of people who know me from the drag scene, from the poetry and writing scene, from the techno scene - and all these ppl come to me because they know me, met me, trust me, because they felt comfortable in my presence.
I only have like 1200 followers on my tattooing Instagram - which rly isn't a lot for a tattooer. But i stay busier than some ppl who have more followers - and im pretty sure that it's because 90% of the ppl following me have actually met me irl. I don't give out my info to just anyone. I have to have a nice interaction with them - and they with me - and i basically invite them to get to know my work, if i think they'd be interested, if they seemed excited about it.
I built my business out of love and care, and connection. I built it because i wanted more of these things in my life. I am making what i wanna see in the world.
Im deeply proud of what I've accomplished as a tattooer, exactly because i stuck to my own beliefs and built a business that is fully customized to me, what im excited about, my abiliy and disability levels, and my philosophical values. This part of my life is all mine, crafted and chiselled just how i want it.
I don't like getting up in the morning, so my sessions never start earlier than 1300. I have a hard time focusing alone + i wanna empower ppl who aren't artists to play with art + help ppl practice and engage their decision making and request making skills - so i design the tattoos with them sitting right next to me, being part of the art process. I don't like doing math and counting so i give my clients a sliding scale based on project complexity, and they get to choose how much they pay me. This also doubles as a way to give ppl more agency in the process of getting a tattoo. Etc etc it goes on and on - every aspect of the process is considered and phislophically and emotionally calibrated. I love what I've created and i love giving the gift of a well-crafted thing......
And after hearing me explain all that, my brother said my marketing wasn't efficient and my business isn't scalable...
I dunno, i think smtng abt capitalism legit gives ppl brain damage or smtng wtf
About the bakery - there's a bakery in my hometown that properly bakes their bread and their cakes. Where other bakeries get readily formed bread rolls delivered that just need baking (and afterwards look exactly like everyone else's bread rolls) they still do all the steps themselves. And people love it. There's another bakery in town as well, a local chain. And its produce is indistinguishable from nation-wide bakery chains (and their cake isn't even tasty, particularly compared to the real bakery).
The local chain started out as a single shop but now they're churning out mass produced baked goods. What's more, this local chain makes most of its money as s café because you can buy a slice of cake and a cup of coffee and then sit there for ages no questions asked. So it's chock-full of pensioners whiling away the day. Essentially it doesn't even function as a bakery.
In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"
We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines
We will be feeding our grandchildren strawberries and raspberries we grew in our gardens, dragging them along to the farmers' markets for tomatoes and eggs and goats milk and pickles and pecans and salsa and sunflower seed butter and jars of honey, as they complain and drag their feet because Gramma always stands around talking to people for like an HOUR
and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"
and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER
But they will go, because there might be baby goats.
Since I made this post, dozens and dozens of people have left tags telling me that it was the first thing today that made them want to continue living, that it was the first thing that made them consider that they might be okay years in the future, that they might grow old, that it was the first and only post of its kind they'd ever seen—the first post that boldly predicts a future where we make it.
And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?
Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?
the idea that there is hope for the future is the only way we have this kind of future.
there were kids who stayed inside because of the black plague and went on to help cure it.
there were women who sat at home and cleaned the house and dreamt up a world where they could vote and have jobs.
there were kids in the mines who thought up a life outside of it.
there were children who hid in annexes and wrote a diary where they prayed for a future without a terrible man in control
there were slaves who wanted freedom so badly and had hope that it would get better
there were gay people who hid in the corners of clubs and fought back for a future where they could walk down the street together
do you know what all of that has in common? they had hope that things would get better and they made that change. they looked at the world in its cruel ways and fought back.
so now, there are kids and teenagers and young adults and new adults who dream of a world so beautiful and the only amazon their grandchildren know is the rainforest
and it is in everything we do that we find this hope. wishing on dandelions, counting the stars, making our own clothes out of crochet or knit or sewing it, watching the sunset, going to the farmer’s market, feeding the birds, planting seeds.
step by step, we dream up, like our ancestors before us, a beautiful world
