L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

"Say you're in a couple and you get in an argument. Go for a silent walk together." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/magazine/how-to-get-in-sync-with-someone.html

"When violence *is* the law, and not the effect of its enforcement, it presents the rules of narrative with a crisis; because what we have is a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that narrative's causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call causal logic (or 'because principle') of the story, is missing." Frank B. Wilderson III

The mass extinction at the turn from the Permian to Triassic geological eras was fueled by enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses, released when volcanic activity burned through coal and oil deposits in prehistoric Siberia. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/science/extinction-global-warming.html

New approach is writing a reactive piece, as I normally would with a blog post, then going back and editing out whatever thing I was reacting to so the piece is more meditative. Voila! An essay.

Platypuses glow greenish-blue under blacklight. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/science/platypus-glow-ultraviolet.html

This article points to the ambivalences and nuances of South Korea's cart-driving door-to-door yogurt saleswomen, yakult ajummas— mostly middle-aged, often mothers. On the one hand, it's a commercial enterprise, shaped by the profit motive. On the other, their routes foster important communal ties. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/asia/south-korea-yogurt-yakult-ajumma.html

"The sauropods weren't competing for the same plants, but dividing the resources among themselves. The scientific term for this is niche partitioning—when coexisting species avoid competing with each other by behaving or feeding in slightly different ways. The Morrison world was highly partitioned, which is a sign of how successful these dinosaurs were. They were carving up almost every square inch of the ecosystem, a dizzying array of species flourishing alongside each other…"

One thing this book does well is provide a logic for the diversity of sauropods— Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, etc— a branch of dinosaur evolution that often gets boiled down into a slurry of long necks and flat teeth. The notion is that different species of sauropod are specially adapted to eat certain types of plants, and the traits that differentiate them are, to a large degree, bound to their differences in diet.

Some of these sauropods are clearly just giant legsnakes.

I wonder why bipedalism never really took off among modern carnivorous mammals. It seems like it was a pretty successful adaptation during the Jurassic, but I can't think of any mammalian carnivores that sport that body alignment as an adaptation.

The section on the adaptations that allowed sauropods to reach the upper limits of body mass is pretty fascinating.

It sorta stands to reason that dinosaurs' ascendancy has something to do with their adaptability in response to the Tr-J extinction event. But what, exactly? Did the changes to the climate suit their physiology better? Did the mass deaths of other species simply open niches that dinosaurs were then free to fill? There's a lot of room for speculation, but little definitive evidence on which to eliminate competing theories, AFAIK.

Reading this. As I understand it, dinosaurs were small beer during the Triassic, outclassed by bigger, more dominant competitors, like pseudosuchians and amphibians. Then Pangea split about 201 million years ago, venting vast amounts of magma and noxious gas, initiating catastrophic climate change and triggering the Tr-J extinction event. Dinosaurs fared better than other families, becoming dominant in the Jurassic. There's no consensus as to why.

To be clear: I don't MIND anyone here talking about their politics or ideologies. Hell, that's 90% of how I spend my leisure time, such as it is. It's just not what I keep coming back for.

I think the principle thing I like about Merveilles as a community is its practicality. Most of what goes on here is oriented toward doing.

Twitter, by comparison, is very discursive— so much of it is focused on the production of an ideological matrix.

Much of the Fediverse is also structured around generating ideological matrices, but I've mostly filtered that down into the minority of what crosses my timeline.