That was the one that made me realize I’d outgrown the series. Dunno if old RL was really phoning that one in or what, but one of his chapter cliffhangers ended with “and the dragonfly bit me in half!” Then the next chapter started with “But it was just my imagination.”

If the female wasp crawls into the caprifig, she can successfully lay her eggs and die. The males hatch first, mate with the females, dig tunnels out of the caprifig, and die. The females, now covered in fig pollen from the caprifig, fly out to begin the cycle again. If the female wasp crawls into a female fig, she will not be able to successfully lay her eggs despite pollinating the fig with pollen from the caprifig she hatched in. The fig will absorb her body and her eggs as the fruit develops.

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

Keep in mind that poisonous and venomous are only different in a scientific context. In regular conversation people use them to mean the same thing (or at least they use poisonous to mean both-- venomous is less used in casual contexts)

Ugh, Elon continues to have the absolute most inane sense of humor on the planet. I’m not sure if it’s him or Zuck who are more clearly aliens wearing human skin

Added some of the other labels you were missing

The fence is off and the night is dark,
Thunder Lizard’s free in Jussaric Park.
The humans are quiet, though not asleep–
They’re sitting motionless in the jeep.
Facts nervously whispered as water ripples:
“You know dinosaurs have no nipples.”

Important data in a certain context,
Yet sadly useless when talking T Rex.
If only they’d studied a little bit more
The physiology of tyrannosaur,
They’d have the knowledge to get away
And maybe avoid becoming prey.

Yet moving (or not) won’t help to stop it;
His vision is accurately stereoscopic.

In one sense, native speakers literally can’t make mistakes (unless they’re drunk/tired or stumble over a word or something like that). For example, misconjugation is not a mistake-- it could just mean that the word wasn’t popular enough in their dialect to have a rigid conjugation, so usually this means that an irregular verb is falling out of use. A verb like abide is uncommon enough that its past participle form abidden has fallen out of use, and the simple past abode also has the acceptable abided, mostly because not enough people use it to maintain the same conjugations. So in a certain group of people with the same dialect, using abode is actually less effective at communicating than abided (I had to look up the conjugation for this, as I’d never heard abode outside the noun meaning home).

As for the direct and indirect pronouns (I assume you mean subject vs object pronouns), natives often use different pronouns in coordination (using an “and” to join two pronouns) than they would alone. It’s very common to hear “jim and me went to the store” whereas only a tiny fraction of those speakers would say “me went to the store”. Although no one would misunderstand (like they might with the verb conjugation above) a “jim and me” vs “jim and I”, people can hear the difference in register, and in certain situations a less formal register is more appropriate than informal. This doesn’t make those speakers wrong, and I don’t think it even changes the communicated meaning, as you said with “what I understand is not what you mean.”

Because no one has ownership of what’s absolutely correct, a lot of this stuff falls under the purview of register, and therefore we have prestige dialects. So language “mistakes” just become another way to separate classes of people, because for a long period of history the only people with any power sounded one way, and they decided it sounded “better” than what other people sounded like. Those distinctions are less rigid these days, but I don’t think we can say they’ve gone away entirely.

As an aside, if you’d like to discuss countable vs mass nouns, I had a bit of a dive into those when I tried to teach them to an EFL class and I’m still not sure how to explain a lot about certain aspects of the topic, but things weren’t nearly as simple as I thought before I started talking about it at the front of the classroom.

The US doesn’t fall for anything; the pols are paid to not work for the people. It’s greed, not idiocy.

The 2nd one was pretty good too. 3 and 4 went kinda off the rails. But then the Bean series was interesting again.

It’s like the reporter went out of his way to not mention ff at the end of the article:

uBlock Origin will continue to work as usual across other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and more.

I wouldn’t mind so much if there were a way to see duplicate posts across instances. I guess it’d be hard to implement but as it stands unless it’s specifically a crosspost you can’t find other discussions of the same media

I like this poem
its tone and rhyme
it show us squid
not see much time
science fun
it help us dream
so pls keep posting
the science meme

Huh, TIL that not all slugs use love darts

The love dart is not a penial stylet (in other words, it is not an accessory organ for sperm transfer). The exchange of sperm between both of the two land snails is a completely separate part of the mating progression. Nevertheless, recent research shows that use of the dart can strongly favor the reproductive outcome for the snail that is able to lodge a dart in its partner. This is because mucus on the dart contains an allomone (pheromone-like) compound that promotes sperm preservation mechanisms in the female.

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

rime

The ancient mariner did

When I was a kid my folks bought the TI 99/4A for some ridiculous reason. It’s interesting to look back at the weird hardware that never made it, like the cartridges that thing used instead of 5¼" floppies that were also out at the time. Maybe it reminded them of inserting 8 tracks.

That’s why he doesn’t want to debate. All she has to do is say that he doesn’t have the mental fortitude to live in reality.

et. al

I wouldn’t mess with her, she contains multitudes!