Hilding Neilson just gave a mind-blowing talk on "Indigenizing the Drake Equation". I will spend a lot of time thinking about this, he made a lot of incredibly good points about how incredibly biased our thinking about searching for aliens is.

Main point: we're not looking for "civilizations", we're looking for breaks from Nature. We can only detect "civilizations" that are like us: doing terrible damage to their environments.

#IAUS399

New horrors. The Biodiversity Heritage Library needs help. The Smithsonian Institution will end its support as of 1 Jan 2026.

This is the world's largest open-source archive for biodiversity literature and archives -- the place where you can find all the old, but still very useful, botanical literature, among other things.

Please share widely with your networks. #biodiversity #Archives #defendresearch #botany

https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/call-for-support/

I was asking my roommate how her day was and she said she had been looking at purple urchin sperm in petri dishes.

So.. good?

For the love of science, why do so many people use AI-generated slop images for their blog posts and in their presentation.

It literally never looks good, doesn't add anything and makes you look like someone who love shitty images.

Stop.

Migrating back here from my previous, now-defunct, account @nix. if you know me please boost so I can reconnect with followers.

This is a good time for an #introduction I suppose.

I'm an #educator from #stl that firmly believes in decentralized self organization, such as #anarchism, #socialecology, #solarpunk, or #librarysocialism.

Also I'm a big #urbanism and #foss nerd and #ebike commuter. I'm very involved in the local #freestore and trying to help organize larger #postcapitalist ventures.