#colourfromtheheart

[canisalbus]

if you're having trouble with crochet patterns in words, especially not in your native language, you may have better luck with crochet pattern charts! it's the same information as a written pattern, but drawn out! they pretty much all use the same symbols, too, so you don't need to worry about learning a bunch of symbol systems

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[p1tstop]

my mum one time commented that she liked the color of the minivan she was looking at (that she didn't want but needed bc kids) and the sales guy really condescendingly said "oh, honey. You don't buy a care because of the color" she goes "not from you, i don't" and hauled the whole family out of the dealership 😂

your mom said

and i admire that !!

[mngwa]

Hi i hate mosquitos and get bit by every one within 20 miles of me, but i know they have their place, even if i don't know much about what that place is so: this is me asking about your mosquito rant

SAME! I am apparently Delicious and literally act as a mosquito trap to anyone else in range. It's likely how I got West Nile, tbh. However, I will now argue for mosquitoes' right to exist.

Mosquitoes, depending on species, have 2 purposes that we care about: pollination and being something for everything else to eat. Males of many species are actually pollinators - only the females go for blood, and usually only when they're about to lay a clutch of eggs. As such, they're a native pollinator species! You've likely seen how important native pollinators can be through save the bees campaigns, but of course plants have evolved alongside many different pollinators - including things like mosquitoes. Secondly, they make up a big part of the biomass of a lot of areas! Even though they're individually pretty small (unless you live in Alaska, where they can be huge), they collectively, just by mass, make up a lot of what's local to the area. As such, they're a big prey pool for your local critters - other insects, arachnids, and insectivores of every stripe. Bats in particular eat a lot of them, but basically anything that will eat bugs likes a good mosquito now and then - including their larvae, which are often a staple for the nymphs of any local dragonfly species you have.

As such, any project to eliminate them would be attacking two big connections on the local ecological web simultaneously. Even if the mosquitoes aren't a food or pollination staple to any species in the local environment, it would still be a huge loss.

(This rant began as railing against the various projects to eliminate mosquitoes, so now I'm going to talk about that for a moment.)

So on the fun and science-fiction-y side (though still a Bad Idea) is the anti-mosquito laser. Which is exactly what it sounds like, honestly. Still under development, has been for over a decade now. Basically it scans the area around it, identifies mosquitoes based on their wing beats, and zaps them dead. It's not as extensive as the other projects are, and it isn't up and going right now - whereas the others are. So, while it's a fun diversion, I'm moving on.

The big problem, to my mind, is the genetically modified sterile male mosquitoes, which are beginning to be released into the wild to control mosquito populations. (Before anyone starts: I don't have an issue with the idea of genetic modification, or genetically modified food itself, etc. I have problems with Monsanto, and with this specific usage. Both ideas can exist.) The problem here is that these sterile males aren't where that ends. And honestly, sterile is a misnomer for them - they are, in fact fertile; but they have a dominant gene that will kill any offspring they produce. As such, if enough of these are released, a local extinction could occur - running into the problems outlined above. Eventually, this could become a species-wide extinction - but that would be an eventuality.

The primary reason that we want to eliminate mosquitoes is the diseases they carry and pass on. Dengue fever, yellow fever, zika virus, etc. Malaria, the worst of the bunch, is horrifyingly deadly, and I have no problems making diseases (in this case a plasmodium, a single-celled parasite) extinct. This is all to say, the eradication of the diseases they carry is a worthy goal - but killing off entire insect species or genera is not the way to achieve it, and will just bite us in the ass. Thus I introduce: Project Needlenose, a genetic modification project to make mosquitoes immune to malaria.

Mosquitoes derive no benefit from being infected with the plasmodium and acting as its vehicle to other hosts - so vaccinating the mosquitoes against it wouldn't hurt the local ecosystem, while still achieving the end goal of decreasing the spread of malaria.

There is one problem with Project Needlenose, which is why despite the fact that the GMO mosquitoes are ready to go, they have not been released yet. The issue is that we get one shot at fixing it in precisely this way. If the plasmodium evolves too fast, and becomes immune, we would have to start all over again - find a new way to modify the mosquitoes to attack the plasmodium, find a way to override the previous always-dominant gene, and work to rerelease the new mosquitoes into the affected areas. It could become a similar problem to the current antibiotic resistance issue. As such, it's been difficult to get clearance to try out this method, particularly as you would want to overwhelm local environments with the GMO mosquitoes to create herd immunity in the next generation of mosquitoes.

I would argue that this is our best shot at achieving the eradication of diseases like malaria while minimizing ecosystem disruption. EDIT: check your username tag on my blog, I found another post talking about similar things moments after posting this! It’s also in the mosquito tag on my blog.

[thebibliosphere]

I talked to the only geneticist near me who would test for EDS a while ago and he was rude and blew me off because my elbows don't hyper-extend, but I just got a new job, and my coworker's wife works at the same hospital, and apparently that dr, who my coworker also thinks is a jerk, no longer works there and there's going to be an EDS specialized clinic when this whole COVID-19 thing is over! My coworker already wants me to get actually tested lol

I’m sorry you had to deal with the dick doctor. My elbows don’t dramatically hyperextend either, but when you measure their extension (like the new criteria for diagnosis demands) they do flex beyond what they’re supposed to.

I am glad to hear your hospital will be getting an actual specialist though! That’s exciting!

[gallusrostromegalus]

my dad is a software engineer, my grandfather is an aeronautics engineer, my great uncle is a nuclear physicist/engineer, i'm an engineering minded artist, there's no way any house in our family ever had a chance, is there?

At this rate I’m amazed the building you’re currently living in is still legally classified as a house and not a superfund site.

[thebibliosphere]

the question is, HOW? how did he get you numb? bc i'm also immune and/or so-resistant-it-makes-drs-nervous to most anesthetics, and if i could know a thing that works?? that'd be baller. i have to have a second root canal done soon and i don't want to go through that without numbing again

I have a follow up soon, so I will ask him exactly what he did. I think mostly he’s just been learning how to work with my mouth, which sounds weird I know but I have nerves in weird places (some people are special and have an extra set of nerves, I have two extra sets of nerves AND a nerve cluster where it doesn’t belong. Fun!) so it’s like, knowing exactly where to inject and not missing. Also working like the fucking wind cause usually he only has a 20 minute window but it took 4 hours for this to wear off. So. Yea.

I will ask him for you <3

[thebibliosphere]

this may be a thing you've tried before, and i don't know how well your body could handle it, but in terms of pollen allergies have you ever tried honey? i move a lot, and used to always have really bad allergies, and i learned if you take a spoonful of local honey every day it gets your body used to the pollen in small amounts. it's not the fastest process, 2-4 months, but i've found it helps every time i move, even if i don't notice symptoms before.

Honey was one of the things I reacted to that made me aware I was having allergic reactions, sadly. I’ve been told to avoid it unless I am back in the UK where the pollen isn’t trying to murder me :(

[mngwa]

maybe a healed femur is not so much a sign of civilization as a sign of community? packs and herds are communities are they not?

Absolutely! But one frequent argument between anthropologists and biologists (and those of us caught betwixt) centers around this... pillar we tend to put humans and humanity on. Do, for example, baboon troops count as civilizations? How about orca pods? What counts as a language - and would whales (who do seem to have, well, dialects) count as having one?

In my personal view, it's not as black and white as it has previously been presented - i.e. humans didn't go from "wild animals who care not for one another" to "deeply interconnected civilizations" - but this is still an evolving field of thought in anthropology, and presentations of, for example, how elephants evidently mourn and remember their dead have been historically discounted. It's a difficult line to walk - we don't want to anthropomorphize animal behavior, because that leads to its own pitfalls, but we also need to take humanity down from the pedestal we've traditionally put ourselves on.

Essentially, that post just brings allllll of that arguing to mind for me, lol. I'm not meaning to say that being a pack animal is in any way a lesser thing, just that I would personally place the evolution of inter-individual, long-term care like that much, much further back than "the advent of civilization" (whatever we're defining that time, and civilization for that matter, as.)