@catselbow@fosstodon.org cover

catselbow

@catselbow@fosstodon.org

I'm the IT manager for the UVa Physics Department. I have a PhD in physics, and used to do research in nuclear physics. I teach introductory programming to undergrads. Also, flies are underrated.

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jencmars , to random
@jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

Magicicada

catselbow ,

@jencmars @alexhaist

Unrequited cicada love.

jencmars , to random
@jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

Did you know there's an octopus called the Wunderpus?

catselbow ,

@jencmars
Look!
Down in the sea!
It's a crab!
It's an eel!
It's WONDERPUS!!!

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Why is worm music kind of one-note?

They are strictly D composers.

catselbow ,

@futurebird

I dig worm music.

catselbow ,

@futurebird
Just being humus.

catselbow ,

@futurebird
It's loamy at the top.

jencmars , to random
@jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

Small, round, and flappy.

catselbow ,

@jencmars
Awwwwwwww! Can I pat the little head?

catselbow , to random

A handsome broad-snouted weevil.

A roughly fig-shaped gray weevil stands on a bright green new leaf. The weevil's snout is short and blunt. It's flanked by two round jet-black eyes. From the snout's tip, long, segmented antennae diverge to either side. These are clearly inspired by 1950s sci-fi movies: a long straight club-shaped segment emerges from the snout, and then elbows into a line of bell-shaped segments terminating in a large, gold, egg-shaped knob. The whole thing is clearly designed to shoot heat rays or receive telepathic communications. The weevil's head is sunken into the shoulders of its thorax, as though it's wearing a snood. The elytra of its abdomen are decorated with rows of dimples and streaks of black like the texture of marble. Then there are the toes. The lovely toes. Each foot is constructed from a stack of three heart-shapes, the biggest near the tip, and from this distal heart sprout two delicate rabbit-ear shaped fingers.
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    • + sohkamyung
    bookgaga , (edited ) to poetry group
    @bookgaga@mastodon.social avatar

    "Next morning I'll confess I overmarmaladed
    the toast on purpose, trying to make up
    for the chromatic deficiency, for orangelessness,
    though the sky begins to show at times
    we can observe, now, look -"

    @poetry
    Aperture by Dawn Macdonald from Northerny (2024 University of Alberta Press) https://tinyurl.com/2vnr7s47

    catselbow ,

    @handmade_ghost @bookgaga
    My wife plays an online word game called Wordiply that challenges players to find long words containing particular strings of letters. I've suggested that she look for an opportunity to use "overmarmalading".

    catselbow ,

    @bookgaga @handmade_ghost
    We're suffering from an overmarmalady.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Exciting ant queen collecting trip in AZ. Why does it feel like all the coolest ants are in the South and South West. It's not fair.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV1CkkkKbOM

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird @errg @kechpaja

    Campaign slogan if ever I heard one.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird @aronow @errg @kechpaja

    Is she still selling those autographed bibles? I've learned so much from the one I bought, like for example how it's totally OK to covet your neighbor's mozzarella sticks.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    The time genie will bring back one (1) extinct animal from any time in all of earth's history. The animal will be integrated into an ecosystem seamlessly with no major negative consequences. You get to pick the creature.

    Do you feel obligated to pick something like a sauropod just so people can experience the awe?

    Do you bring back something more recent to correct the crimes of mankind?

    Or are you selfish and you ask for hell ants so you can finally see how their mandibles work?

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Moas.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    The special words for forms of lichen are almost as good as the special words for the textures of ants.

    The Foliose, The Crustose and The fruticose.

    Areolate, Filamentous, Placodioid, Byssoid and Calicioid

    Who can forget Cladoniform and the Squamulose!

    And must we mention the Gelatinous and Leprose?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen_growth_forms

    catselbow ,

    @apophis @futurebird

    Lichen texture + johnson solid = Shakespearean insult:

    "Thou squamulose metabiaugmented hexagonal prism!"

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    There is a spider who lives on the bookshelf by the Camponotus discolor ants. It floors me how quickly this ant who tried to escape got into trouble. (if I see them soon enough I rescue them — so she was lucky— but her other escaped sisters probably not so much)

    I love house spiders so I’m deeply torn about this.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Sit them down and have "the talk" with them.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Taught my CS how to program a mandelbrot set generator from scratch today.

    Still don't have the colors doing exactly the right thing. This is in python, but we'll sort it out in the next class.

    The most annoying thing is making the magnitudes of the terms in the series into a number between 0 and 256 without knowing exactly how big they will get.

    I need to find my old James Gleick book.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    I have my students do it like this:
    Start at some point, c, in the complex plane. Start generating terms of the series z_{i+1} = (z_i)^2 + c. Keep doing this until |z| gets greater than 2, or the number of terms, n, gets greater than some cutoff (say 100). Then graph Re(c) versus Im(c) and colorize based on n, which we know will never be more than 100 (or whatever we pick as our limit). Stable points have high n, unstable have low.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    It makes pretty pictures. I'm just in it for the pretty pictures.

    futurebird , (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    An overactive imagination is seen as a good thing, a fun thing but it can be a little annoying and overwhelming to have a breathless 5 year old telling a wild story about everything in your mind who never stops. Everything is like six other things— and part of a story that never slows down or stops. I have to spend a lot of energy thinking about what’s normal enough to talk about. Increasingly? I’ve just been giving up. Let the chips fall where they may. LMAO

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    I think the world would be a much better place if we could all feel free to talk (politely and considerately!) about whatever we're interested in, without worrying that we're being boring or annoying, or that we'll be considered foolish. As it is, we're taught that squashing our wide-ranging interests is necessary, so we can become a focused, serious adult, unsullied by frivolity.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Why is it that the worst tasks: the ones I want to do the least are things that take like 17min tops to complete— but I think about how I haven’t done them — oh no no just can’t bear to do them for 30min a day for two weeks?

    For me, at least, a task is odious if it may cause me to find out bad news that produces more tasks, if it involves forms, if it involves talking to people on the phone, especially someone I don’t know (what if they are mean to me? 😫)

    It’s not THAT bad. Is it?

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    And then you have to do an online "form training" course that has 2 hours of unskippable videos with a comprehension quiz every 5 minutes.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    I've been at an institution of higher learning for 40 years. I have seen it all.

    catselbow , to random

    A very handsome beetle (Hippopsis lemniscata) with long, Long, LONG antennae, on a wild onion.

    #beetles #coleoptera #insects #arthropods #photography

    The same beetle, but now we're looking down on his back, giving us a better view of his lovely stripes, which run from tail to head and are continued by the two long antennae.
    Now we zoom out, so we can see the beetle's antennae in all their long, long glory. They trail down below the insect's body, and are at least four times the body's length! They are spread in a narrow V, and barely turn up at the end.

    A long, thin beetle dressed in conservative stripes of chocolate and sable stands head-down on the on the white, bulbous head and green stem of a wild onion. The beetle's body is covered with soft peach-fuzz fur. Its raspberry eye gleams like polished garnet. A long, segmented antenna emerges from the eye and trails down, down past the bottom of the image. The antenna is brown and ridged, like a twig, and thicker than the beetle's legs.
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    catselbow OP ,

    @jencmars
    Weeks, even.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Is there a good resource or book for learning about some of the details of how webservers work?

    For example if I want an IP address on a intranet to be a webpage that people on that intranet can go to... how would I set that up from scratch. Let's say I have a machine with a static IP on the local net... (but what I really also need to understand is how a static IP is established locally, a DNS?)

    Maybe the dream book or resource doesn't exist. But I ask anyway.

    (it's macs if that matters)

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    You asked for a book, but I'm going to stretch that a little and offer some lecture notes from a short course I gave years ago. This is a lecture on how web servers work. Maybe there's still some useful information? (Apologies in advance for the terrible presentation.)

    https://discovery.phys.virginia.edu/compfac/courses/sysadmin1/12-web/presentation-notes.pdf

    jencmars , to random
    @jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

    The sound of my new printer's paper feed squealing as it tries and fails to grab onto my paper is going to haunt my dreams...

    catselbow ,

    @jencmars
    All printers are inhabited by demons barely held captive by the printer's fragile plastic and metal frame. They delight in taunting us and inciting us to blasphemy: "Paper jam. Open right door. Open bottom door. Remove paper tray. Paper jam. Open right door..." Only by driving us to smash their prisons can they be released from their bondage.

    jencmars , to random
    @jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

    It's Caturday, here's a cat!

    #insects #InsektenSamstag #insectsaturday #MacroPhotography

    catselbow ,

    @jencmars

    You'll have to wait until erpillar day to post the back end of it.

    jencmars , to random
    @jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

    How photographing jumping spiders is

    catselbow ,

    @jencmars

    Been there. Maybe carrying a decoy camera would help?

    futurebird , (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Is it "unjust" and "mean" to not let Pica lick (but not even eat) my mozzarella sicks?

    Facts:

    1. She has done this before
    2. She won't even eat them, just mouth them.
    3. She has a strong opinion about doing this.
    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    Please mention to pica that i voted, and that I'm waiting for my mozzarella stick.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    I demand a recount! Stop the (mozzarella stick) steal! PICA (Pamper Indolent Cats Again)!

    futurebird , (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Have you thought much about, or engaged with "liminal space" content in the past 10 years? (Through a reddit group, tumblr, compilation videos etc.)

    Regardless if you care about such content now, if you ever spent some time enjoying or being disquieted by such images and media... that's "engaging"

    If you don't know what this is about you have not. If you know what it's about but just never paid it any mind? Same.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    Most of the pictures of liminal spaces I've seen show building interiors, but highway medians are a kind of rural liminal space that's fascinated me my whole life. The long strips of median in the middle of the interstate are often linear forests, at least in our part of the world. What creatures live there? What would it be like to explore these spaces?

    catselbow , to random

    We look down on a sunny jumble of light purple flowers (phlox) in full bloom. Each flower is a tiny trumpet with a bell that flares out into a wide flat star made of five pear-shaped petals. The narrow opening of the trumpet is a dark five-pointed-star-shaped void in the center. The petals have a silky texture with delicate ripples and beautiful subtle gradations of color. Sunlight lies lightly on them. They are speckled with barely visible white dots of pollen.
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    • futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Every day is Leg Day with Dirhinus! This is a parasitoid wasp. They lay their eggs in the pupae of flies, often flies that are found on corpses (including human corpses, making them forensically significant.)

    Wasps are distant cousins of ants, and you can see something of the ant her... and something of the alien. Why is her head like that?

    Her big back legs have a retractable tarsus so they can be used as prongs when injecting an egg into a fly pupae.

    Showing how the tarus of the back leg can retract into the big shiny club like "thighs" This is a Dirhinus found in East Africa. They are found all over the world.
    Front view. A very alien face. Big bug eyes. chubby antennae. small dainty mandibles. The taco grove can also be seen from this angle.
    Thomas Shahan photo of the dorsal view. Showing the grove in the front of the head like a taco shell. The antenae can be tucked away into this grove.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Transformer wasp, with all the fold-away parts.

    friesen5000 , to random
    @friesen5000@mstdn.ca avatar

    Are insects animals?

    I've been asked this several times recently and as a biologist/ecologist I was taken aback.

    Is it a common view among non-biologists that insects are not animals? If not animals, what are they?

    Tagging some folks who may have encountered this: @alexwild @futurebird @nev @catselbow

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird @faassen @friesen5000 @alexwild @nev
    Cats are definitely beasts. King (or Queen) of.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird @TomasHelleberg @friesen5000 @alexwild @nev

    My cats bug me maximally, too.

    jencmars , to random
    @jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

    An illustration of rejected animal companions done for a free how-to-Beastmaster guide, The Buddy System.

    A few years old now, but I still like it. Done in Procreate.

    Which one would you bring as an adventuring companion?

    catselbow ,

    @jencmars
    I want to see them all go on an adventure together, like the Legion of Super-Pets.

    catselbow , to random

    Apologies for the poor pictures, but here's a little bee-mimicking robber fly, after and before catching a tiny bee for dinner. I followed this wily hunter around for quite a while, and he wasn't pleased with my interference so he didn't let me get very close.

    The same fly, before he caught his prey. His back is hunched, his legs are extended, and his wings have begun to spread. He stands up tall, watching for his victim.

    An oval green leaf is cantilevered into the image, held up by a thin stem that enters from the bottom left corner. A bee-like fly stands on this elevated platform. The fly has a shiny black body, but its back and face are covered by long shaggy yellow fuzz, some of which sticks far out in front, like a moustache. Impaled on the fly's spiky mouthparts is a small bee that it's just now caught. The fly's transparent brown wings are folded over each other and lying flat on its back. The hind legs are notable for their enormous Popeye-muscled femurs. Let's leave this little hunter to enjoy his hard-won meal.
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    • catselbow OP ,

    @jencmars
    Thanks!

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    It could be worse... cicadas could be as loud as my cat and they could all sing a song of suffering and injustice all day long:
    "RAaaaAAHngh"
    "Mrawahnagh"
    "Angoororghragh"
    "NraaAahrahah"

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    "Scientists predict that the 17-year brood of periodical cats will emerge from laundry baskets this year and climb to sunny perches on windowsills, chair backs, and cat trees, where they will begin to sing their raucous mating song."

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Fact of the Day: A single mature Camponotus pennsylvanicus colony could have more individual members than there were early modern humans in Europe just before the last glacial maximum.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    Have I mentioned that every time you say "Camponotus" my mind starts singing

    Camponotus
    Five miles long
    Doo dah, doo dah

    and keeps singing it all the doo dah day?

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Picturing you riding a five-mile long ant like a sandworm.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Gonna get listed in the yellow pages as an "ant psychologist" ... I'll find out why your ants are too nervous... or aggressive... or depressed. Give me a call!

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    You're going to be doing a lot of group therapy. With LARGE groups.

    jencmars , (edited ) to random
    @jencmars@mastodon.art avatar

    Tending the flock.

    catselbow ,

    @jencmars
    I love this photo so much!

    futurebird , (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Tulip escaped again! She’s too smart! I caught her but she almost got taken by the house spider. She is home safe. I’m so glad she’s ok. This ant will be the death of me. Why do I have such bad sneaky little ants?? #namedAnts

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    As the Pink Panther said:

    Bad ant
    Bad ant
    Bad ant, bad ant, bad ant
    Bad ant, bad aaaaaaant

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    The disturbing thing about ant technology is it's all ants.

    The fridge? It's an ant.
    Your tank? It's an ant.
    Your boat? It's you, and other ants.
    Your house? The walls are ants.
    Your weed control for your garden? Tiny ants?
    Your glue gun? It's an ant (a baby ant!)

    So advanced high tech ants would have ant guns, and ant spaceships. Advanced ants would have ant computers for ants, made of ants. Advanced ants would have ants for storing data.

    And ant bombs.

    Wait! Those already exist!

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Ant railguns! A line of ants accelerate a single ant to an enormous speed and fire the ant at an enemy!

    dillyd , to random
    @dillyd@allies.social avatar

    Is it still seaside if it's on the sound? Or is it sound-side? Hmm. Here are some beach pictures.

    In the foreground, a large piece of driftwood covered in seawrack, green on the sides and Sandy white on top. In the mid ground, a beach with lots of large stones covered in seaweed. In the background, some trees and a white square building, and mostly blue skies with a few clouds
    Looking along a shoreline, with dark beach to the right and blue water curving to the left. In the distance we see a large ferry boat and some evergreen trees. The sky has a large blue section, with dark gray clouds on the horizon and white wispy clouds above.

    catselbow ,

    @dillyd @Elizafox
    If a river widens into a brackish inlet when it meets the sea, and no one's there to photograph it, does it make a sound?

    dillyd , to random
    @dillyd@allies.social avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    catselbow ,

    @dillyd
    Redbud flowers, young leaves, and young seed pods are edible. The flowers are sort of cabbagey. The young seed pods are like snow peas (they get leathery and inedible when they mature).

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Mike Johnson will make crime illegal. I don't know why they say it's a "do nothing" congress. That's a pretty big deal don't you think?

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird

    Won't that be bad for the economy? We shouldn't rush into a major change like this.

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    I haven't really kept up with DARPA. I remember they used to lurk around my college when I was in undergrad trying to get young CS/engineers. Everyone was sort of creeped out by them, "You're going to be making weapons of war, they are totally DOD funded. That's the dark side."

    They had gaming nights and stuff to try to convince us otherwise.

    But... have they made any truly heinous weapons yet? Or did they pull the best move ever and take all the DOD money and make cool if ominous robots?

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    Spent it all on pizza.

    dillyd , to random
    @dillyd@allies.social avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    catselbow ,

    @dillyd
    Beautiful! The red maples we have around here don't make large pompoms of flowers like that. They have small clusters of maybe a dozen flowers. Are yours Acer rubrum too?

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    52 percent of Americans don't believe that polls are accurate.

    This feels like the kind of fact that should just implode like a mini-blackhole.

    catselbow ,

    @futurebird
    I can't argue. It's just math.

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