Pretty exhausted today, so some things I might leave till tomorrow, we'll see. In the meantime, some of my old photos. Theme is butterflies and moths. This is a glasswing, Greta oto,
This is an Atlas moth, fresh out of its cocoon, drying out its wings, gathering its strength to live its new life as a moth, after the life of being a caterpillar. My old photo
Another photo of mine of that Atlas moth, resting on its old cocoon
and my photo of the Atlas moth's antennae
another glasswing butterfly I photographed
I took this photo of a butterfly on Udzungwa mountain, Tanzania
Another old photo of mine
A husk of a chrysalis, a shell of a cocoon, left behind by the butterfly not so long before, my photo
Butterfly on a banana tree flower, my old photo
I get along fine with all wild creatures, my photo
That's probably enough photos for today, the rest can wait for other days. Some of you may, Heavens forfend, be tired of butterflies and moths, so I'll end this thread with my old photo of an orchid:
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This is a bizarre & wholly wrong condemnation of the young #KeiraBell, who was badly advised, allowed to go through unnecessary surgery & medical treatment, & who now points out how badly advised she was.
Yes, #KeiraBell *dared* to go to court to protest malpractice and bad advice. Too bad if you don't like that, the UK still manages to be somewhere where a person can go to court to redress wrongs. Suck it up, get over it.
I still can't get over the other tweeter who wanted Biden to go in and muscle the UK into ignoring its own High Court judgment. I mean, seriously, what planet are people living on?
1/n I was asked my thoughts on the video below (sound on! Watch in full), not sure why. But here are some of my thoughts, in a thread. It's about Los Angeles, where Eric Garcetti is mayor, in CA, where Gavin Newsom (D) is governor.
cc.@CathyYoung63
2/n This is not a simple matter, & I will be very rude to anyone trying to be simplistic about it all. My very first reaction is, of course she's right to protest. I myself would under those circumstances. Confronted with both loss of livelihood AND with gross inconsistency.
3/n The abhorrent way the USA as a whole (many US states in particular) simply left a great deal of its own citizens in the lurch, that's well-known. As too that this will mean a further widening of the abyss between the well-off & the poor, cue @Chris_arnade. But that's not all.
1/n A thread for those who don't know me well yet. When I cover science, medicine or COVID_19, I don't do feel-good stuff, and *especially* I don't do "Hide or obscure inconvenient stuff for the good of the proles". I do facts instead. Here follow a few examples.
2/ A long while back, I did a thread on breastfeeding, a very important topic in Africa, because of marketing campaigns for baby-formula, + that many women there see baby-formula as a status symbol, breast-feeding being only for the poor.
3/ I was astonished to get flamed by a tweep. The tweep kept going on about "my body, my choice". That's not my problem, that's your own choice, but it was *irrelevant* to that *usually* breast-feeding is >much< better for the infant than baby-formula.
1/n On a very different level, for those suffering at the moment, I offer the example of Port Hedland, West Australia. The entire town was a *rusty red* in colour, and it's one of the more depressing ones I've ever been in.
cc.@ChrisSidwells, @jdpoc:
2/n The entire region back then of the huge Pilbarra had a *total* of 22,000 people living throughout it, plus another 22,000 in its one town, Port Hedland. Which was very *red*.
3/n Most buildings in Port Hedland were built of depressing cinder block (because of the occasional tropical cyclone), and the light grey had all turned red because of iron-ore dust. Port Hedland exists largely just only to transfer iron-ore (plus other ores and salt) to ships.
1/n Kim Stanley Robinson is a very interesting science-fiction writer. He's also only all too obviously caught in a rut, and shows the weaknesses in his thinking in a stereotyped way.
He's definitely 'political', but in that weird way the US 'left' are.
2/n For example, Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) centered one story (in his Three Californias Trilogy, 1984~1990) around the "5%'ers", *a decade* before everyone there started nattering about the 1%.
3/n Another of KSR's stories in the Three Californias trilogy was, to me, a bizarrely exaggerated guilt, "blame America" theme, where some unknown foe has nuclear-bombed the USA into pre-1850 tech, and the USA ... just accepts that??!