Yesterday I was herding snakes.
Uncategorized
2
Posts
1
Posters
3
Views
-
Yesterday I was herding snakes. There were multiple dead small snakes and three still alive ones in the roadways on my lunch bike ride. Two were the eastern black neck garters I'm used to, tiny and docile. I didn't recognize this one, but @MLE_online identified it as a terrestrial garter. They're the only ones in this area that constrict prey, and the only that are sufficiently venomous to cause local irritation and discomfort if they bite.
-
Yesterday I was herding snakes. There were multiple dead small snakes and three still alive ones in the roadways on my lunch bike ride. Two were the eastern black neck garters I'm used to, tiny and docile. I didn't recognize this one, but @MLE_online identified it as a terrestrial garter. They're the only ones in this area that constrict prey, and the only that are sufficiently venomous to cause local irritation and discomfort if they bite.
Things I just now learned: garter snakes have mildly neurotoxic venom, AND ALSO can ingest many toxic amphibians and reptiles and accumulate their toxins in the garter snake's organs, thus making garter snakes both venomous and poisonous.
(All of this was only discovered in the last 20 years.) -
undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic on
Feed RSS
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
-
なんだかんだ言っても、ActivityPubの開発はとにかく面白い。
-
You know, I think that this could be adapted for infosec purposes pretty easily.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hierarchy-of-controls/about/index.html
-
@Chigaze that seems like a big thing.
-
Still validating CLI option relationships with if statements? Your type system can do it for you.
-
ActivityPubに問題があるというのは概ね共通認識とは思うけど、じゃあそれを改善したものを作ろうというと歓迎されない
-
Got to the country and I had set a fire in the fireplace before I left. Lit it up and it was blazing in minutes. Good, because the rest of the house is at 5C!
-
An Animated History of Cheese: 10,000 Years in Under Six Minutes
-
MagQuest: Measuring Earth’s Magnetic Field with Space-Based Quantum Sensors
Recently the MagQuest competition on improving the measuring of the Earth’s magnetic field announced that the contestants in the final phase have now moved on to launching their satellites within the near future. The goal here is to create a much improved World Magnetic Model (WMM), which is used by the World Geodetic System (WGS). The WGS is an integral part of cartography, geodesy and satellite-based navigation, which includes every sat nav, smartphone and similar with built-in GNSS capabilities.
Although in this age of sat navs and similar it can seem quaint to see anyone bother with using the Earth’s magnetic field with a compass, there is a very good reason why e.g. your Android smartphone has an API for estimating the Earth’s magnetic field at the current location. After your sat nav or smartphone uses its magnetometer, the measurements are then corrected so that ‘north’ really is ‘north’. Since this uses the WMM, it’s pertinent that this model is kept as up to date as possible, with serious shifts in 2019 necessitating an early update outside of the usual five-year cycle.
Goal of the MagQuest competition is thus to find a method that enables much faster, even real-time updates. The three candidate satellites feature three different types of magnetometers: a scalar-vector magnetometer (COSMO), a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum sensor, and the Io-1 satellite containing both a vector fluxgate and atomic scalar magnetometer.
The NV quantum magnetometer is quite possibly the most interesting one, featuring a new, quantum-level approach for magnetic sensing. This effectively uses a flaw in a diamond’s carbon matrix to create a quantum spin state that interacts with magnetic fields and can subsequently be read out. The advantage of this method is its extreme sensitivity, which makes it an interesting sensor for many other applications where measuring the Earth’s magnetic field is essential.
