Mastodawn

New on Entomology Today: An electric eel donated to a natural history museum in 1873 had two ticks embedded in its skin, making it the first known instance of ticks parasitizing a fish. But it was never documented until now, more than 150 years later, when a curator and tick specialist chanced upon the specimen, identified the ticks, and reported the case in the Journal of Medical Entomology. https://entomologytoday.org/2025/12/03/ticks-eel-museum-collection-specimen-first/

Ticks on an Eel: Museum Specimen is a First of its Kind

Two ticks found on an 1873 electric eel specimen mark the first recorded case of ticks parasitizing a fish—but only documented just this year.

Entomology Today

Bill Caputo 4d ago

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Greg Lloyd 4d ago

@dysfun 🧵#Dijkstra #quote

So great — thank you! I had to dig up the source:

Dijkstra, E.W. “Introducing a Course on Calculi.” EWD1213, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, 30 Aug 1995.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1213.html

Bill Caputo 4d ago

gaytabase 5d ago

I was looking up dijkstra quotes and i found a good one i don't remember seeing before:

My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

Bill Caputo 4d ago

Andy P 4d ago

Inside you are two naturalists

Bill Caputo 4d ago

Pierce Darragh 4d ago

is there a tool for annotating webpages or snippets of webpages?

say I'm reading a blog post. I want to:

catalog the whole post, maybe archive the version I saw in some (perhaps simplified) form
highlight snippets
add comments (either to snippets or the whole post)
maybe tag the post and/or snippets for search

Bill Caputo 5d ago

Henry Fisher 5d ago

What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?

Bill Caputo 5d ago

Brian Marick 5d ago

Why am I spending such a large chunk of my remaining months struggling to create a series of blog posts dissecting critical rationalism/Popper/Lakatos/“the scientific method”/etc? https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/05/02/waterfall-science-views-of-mount.html

Answer: because I always get annoyed when people advocate rules that they themselves don’t follow. And I dislike moralists who pretend they’re motivated by pure rationality. And I dislike theorists who legislate at those actually doing the work. And and and. (1/3)

Waterfall science (36 Views of Mount CritRat)

Methodologies tell people how to do things: they describe steps in a process. A useful rule of thumb is that gotchas for a methodology cluster around the steps the methodologists aren’t interested in. The critical rationalists aren’t interested in experiments. They are Big Design Up Front, Command and Control people, and their methodology suffers because of it. ⊕ About this series

Bill Caputo 5d ago

Baa 🐑6d ago

In order to prevent AI scraping we're switching the ActivityPub format to XML which has no known methods of parsing reliably.

Hacker News 100 May 9

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-lightning-the-answer-keeps-getting-more-interesting-20260506/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037517

What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. | Quanta Magazine

Armed with a slew of new instruments, physicists are closing in on one of nature’s oldest mysteries — and finding that storm clouds are seething with violent and unexpected phenomena.

Quanta Magazine