Day: June 7, 2018

myceliorum:

lilyvonpseudonym:

bi-trans-alliance:

bisexualbaker:

stilesisbiles:

bi-trans-alliance:

Bi & Pan solidarity ❤️

This tweet angered a lot of biphobes, panphobes, terfs, and general transphobes…must be doing something right 

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[Image: Tweet by Bi-Trans Alliance ( @BiTransAlliance ); transcript follows.]

If someone tells you they’re #bisexual, they’re bisexual.

If someone tells you they’re #pansexual, they’re pansexual.

If someone says they’re both bi and pan, they’re both bi and pan.

What label(s) a person uses, if any, is up to them, and should be respected.

Unsurprisingly getting angry “you can’t be bi AND pan” messages and demands that those who ID as both go on public internet trial to defend calling themselves that, and angry “bi means men and women only” messages.

Label policing never ends.

@ everybody in the notes thinking they are asking reasonable questions: google is free

I am afraid to use the combination of labels I prefer because people either think it’s impossible, that it implies things it doesn’t actually imply about the world, or that it indicates a specific ideology I definitely don’t hold in a million years.  Or sometimes all three.  Meanwhile the way labels are changing to become stricter about certain things shuts me out of places that would’ve welcomed me before.  

(Just as an example:  What used to be a lesbian group around here is now called something like a group for people with a female gender identity attracted to other people with a female gender identity.  That first off implies declaring your gender identity by entering thus either outing or closeting or shutting you out depending on what goes on, and second off is much narrower in scope than what lesbian usually means.)

All within queer communities.  Which – people … need belonging in these communities, not ever-narrower definitions.  When people stop discriminating against us based on whether we fit these narrow definitions of things then maybe someone will have a point.  No, not even then.  But seriously, until then, can everyone trying to say everyone else’s identity has some bearing on your own to the point you want to shut them out, please just stop!?  

Source: bi-trans-alliance

benefitscrounger:

ohnopicturesofanothercat:

This is Claude, a beautiful cat I met on my trip to the U.K. 

Two of the people I visited in the UK had cats hanging around their gardens that they said were neighbo(u)r’s cats, but that they fed and talked to, and in one case it came indoors and sat on the person’s lap, etc. Having more than one home and owner and caretaker seems to be a thing with cats in the U.K.!

i think that because our houses are closer together here, cats can easily wander into the neighbour’s gardens and houses and end up with like ten different owners that feed them and give them cuddles. for ages i thought one of the cats on my street lived in the house two doors down from me, but he actually lived in one of the other houses right next to his favourite hangout spot. i’ve known a lot of people who didn’t actually get their cats from anywhere, but instead the cat would just show up and walk into their house and stay there lol.

Source: ohnopicturesofanothercat

smile-suggestions:

Reminder that your worth shouldn’t be determined by how useful you are to someone else! Your friends and loved ones should love you for who you are, not for what you do for them. Don’t let yourself be taken for granted because you are so special. You’re a treasure, you should be cherished by them!

China’s Giant Salamanders Pose a Conservation Conundrum

rjzimmerman:

A Chinese giant salamander, in a glass enclosure in Zhangjiajie, China. There are as many as eight distinct species, but farming is muddling them into a single hybridized population.Credit Goh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

Excerpt:

The Chinese giant salamander, the world’s largest amphibian and a critically endangered species, has quietly slipped toward extinction in nature. Following an exhaustive, yearslong search, researchers recently reported that they were unable to find any wild-born individuals.

“When we started the survey, we were sure we’d at least find several salamanders,” said Samuel Turvey, the lead author and a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London.

“It’s only now that we’ve finished that we realize the actual severity of the situation.”

Millions of giant salamanders live on farms scattered throughout China, where the animals are bred for their meat. But another study by Dr. Turvey and his colleagues shows that reintroducing farmed animals is not a simple solution for saving the species in the wild.

In the wild, Chinese giant salamanders were not just one species but at least five, and perhaps as many as eight. On farms, they are being muddled into a single hybridized population adapted to no particular environment. “The farms are driving the extinction of most of the species by homogenizing them,” said Robert Murphy, a co-author and senior curator of herpetology at the Royal Ontario Museum. “We’re losing genetic diversity and adaptations that have been evolving for millions of years.”

Given that, the best strategy for preventing extinction in the wild, he added, is to rescue genetically pure animals from farms, and then undertake carefully controlled conservation breeding to rebuild each species’ numbers.

China’s Giant Salamanders Pose a Conservation Conundrum

Hurricanes Are Lingering Longer. That Makes Them More Dangerous.

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

With wind speeds that can top 180 miles per hour, hurricanes are not usually thought of as slow. Yet tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes, have grown more sluggish since the mid-20th century, researchers say. That may mean bad news for people residing in their path.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature focuses on what is known as translation speed, which measures how quickly a storm is moving over an area, say, from Miami to the Florida Panhandle. Between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclone translation speeds declined 10 percent worldwide, the study says. The storms, in effect, are sticking around places for a longer period of time.

Lingering hurricanes can be a problem, as Texans learned last year when Hurricane Harvey stalled over the state, causing devastating flooding and billions of dollars of damage.

There is also the question of what is causing the slowdown. The new paper is a study based on analysis of observations, so it does not answer that question directly. But broader evidence suggests that climate change is playing a role.

Belts of wind known as steering winds are responsible for moving hurricanes along their paths. “Hurricanes are carried passively by the winds that they’re sitting in,” Dr. Kossin said. “It’s not quite like a cork in a stream, but not too different, either.”

The steering winds draw power from the temperature differences between the tropics and the poles. But because of climate change, that temperature difference is declining, weakening the winds. The slower steering winds move hurricanes more slowly. Adding to the evidence, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research compared computer simulations of 22 past storms with simulations of those same storms based on future climate conditions. They found that average hurricane translation speeds slowed in the future simulations. The Journal of Climate published their conclusions this year.

Hurricanes Are Lingering Longer. That Makes Them More Dangerous.