Ah thanks!! :)

I agree. Especially because Ornithogalum is definitely not an Asparagus kind of plant. If maybe Ornithogalum had been in the Asparagus genus before but got split, well OK. But calling any plant in this pretty diverse family “asparagus”, is wild.

The APG II system of 2003 allowed two options as to the circumscription of the family: either Asparagaceae sensu lato (“in the wider sense”) combining seven previously recognized families, or Asparagaceae sensu stricto (“in the strict sense”) consisting of very few genera (notably Asparagus, also Hemiphylacus), but nevertheless totalling a few hundred species. The revised APG III system of 2009 allows only the broader sense.

Asparagaceae includes 114 genera with a total of approximately 2,900 known species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagaceae?wprov=sfla1

Any idea what is the species in the upper right corner? It is super cute!!!

I guess in some parts of the world it already is wednesday, isn’t it?

The non-historicity of Jesus has never had traction in scholarship. Mythicism is rejected by virtually all mainstream scholars of antiquity, and has been considered a fringe theory for more than two centuries. Mythicism is criticized on numerous grounds such as for commonly being advocated by non-experts or poor scholarship, being ideologically driven, its reliance on arguments from silence, lacking positive evidence, the dismissal or distortion of sources, questionable or outdated methodologies, either no explanation or wild explanations of origins of Christian belief and early churches, and outdated comparisons with mythology. While rejected by mainstream scholarship, with the rise of the Internet the Christ myth theory has attracted more attention in popular culture, and some of its proponents are associated with atheist activism.

Anarchism is leftism, where is the contradiction? And I hope that most people in this community believe that nation states and their governments are not efficient to make the world a better place and on the contrary are one of the reasons billions of people suffer and die.

Yeah, I think both can be true for one person. It very much depends on the context if I’ll feel great or if I suffer during times of stress. Working in a café with many different orders to fulfill and things to do: nice!! Finishing assignments for university last minute and not doing a good job because you started much too late: feeling like a failure.

Maybe time to think about life choices then?

It is really tricky to genuinely discuss this topic. Many omnivores use this as a straw man argument to discredit vegans for not being fully consequential. On top of that, reasons for being vegan and where people draw the line also vary hugely.

Anyways, I would argue that eating plants and also fungi is very different to eating animal products. First of all, if you are vegan for ethical reasons (as I am) then usually the argument is that one can infer from one’s own feelings onto other animals. Sure, this isn’t always that easy and we will never know how other animals really feel. This includes fellow humans btw. But it is certainly very definitive that many animals feel pain, discomfort and many other emotions not unlike we feel them.

Plants and fungi on the other hand have completely different body plans. Plants are modular organisms and you simply cannot relate cutting your arm off with cutting a branch. We may deepen our understanding on plants and maybe we will find some form of conscience one day. But this is still far off and for now we can only speculate. Fungi are very different as well and we usually just eat their fruiting bodies anyways.

Secondly, as someone else pointed out, for ecological reasons and for the sheer quantity that is necessary to sustain humans, going vegan is always the better choice. Animals live on plants, too, and just use a lot of the plants’ energy on their own metabolism.

Well bees are definitely objectified and seen as industrialized honey producing machines. They’re starved of their own resources and are given mostly sugar water in return. Bee keepers are not concerned with their well-being other than for production yields. It is a form of factory farming. Isn’t this reason enough?

Wow, this is really neat!! I tried getting into vim some years ago but never managed to get it working smoothly with latex like this. But this looks really great!

Oh yeah, that brings up memories. We had to do the same experiments in genetics lab, too. I’ll never forget the smell of fruit flies :/

Considering the “milk” that the mushrooms of this genus produce it is a good name. And this particular one is really delicious! :)

Well, they actually do have their ecological roles and it is always a hard decision if one should interfere on such a large scale with biological systems. We might think that we understand it, but it could be totally wrong. Really hard to predict. Mosquitoes are an important food source for other animals and are also pollinators.

My point was that it is nothing like in kangaroos. The comparison is just misleading.

Except that in cangaroos the mother actually needs to be pregnant and birth its babies first. In sea horses the female directly lays the eggs inside the pouch of the male, impregnating it, and the male then undergoes pregnancy. So actually very different to kangaroos?

Usually animals are categorized as male and female based on what type of gametes their gonads produce. So male sea horses produce sperm.

Not sure how to count the “pregnancy” though, as these are fish and because of the following:

The male seahorse is equipped with a brood pouch on the ventral, or front-facing, side of the tail. When mating, the female seahorse deposits up to 1,500 eggs in the male’s pouch. The male carries the eggs for 9 to 45 days until the seahorses emerge fully developed, but very small. The young are then released into the water, and the male often mates again within hours or days during the breeding season

From Wikipedia

E: the wiki article goes on to talk about pregnant sea horses, so yeah, they are pregnant and they do get impregnated by female sea horses!

Oh nice! I crocheted this as well. Highly recommend all the patterns by the same author called Projectarian. Very cute crochet projects and really detailed descriptions :)

Haha yes, it is sometimes sad when other people around cannot really appreciate certain thoughts or concepts of one’s own.

One book that really got me excited about studying biology well over a decade ago was Evolution in four dimensions, which touches on some similar topics as in our conversation. Or maybe even in reverse, how language is actually some dimension of evolution in itself. Since then my knowledge on evolution and genetics got a bit rusty because I specialized in ecology. But I find it deeply fascinating how evolution works and what mind-boggling stuff it came up with.

Hm, I think I start to see your point. I guess the thought of language as something like human language is biasing a lot what we consider language. It feels kinda weird, but if I shake off this narrow view on what a language is, all sorts of alternative ways to look at it come to mind.

I think it helped that you mentioned a technical manual that is a form of language but that doesn’t count as a conversation. And having a conversation in itself is very much biased by our human form of language.

And now that you mention the proteome and metabolome, it really seems like a much richer form of information and that much more back-and-forth is happening. I guess epigenetics have shown that the DNA/RNAs are much more plastic than we thought, too.

Thanks for this conversation, it did actually help me get to explore this much more and change my mind :)