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NomadWarMachine
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·NomadWarMachine
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I blogged my responses to the TDC thoughout August, and I kind of missed doing that today so here’s this one. Today’s TDC says:
Today is the first day of meteorological autumn in the northern hemisphere. Make us something autumnal – maybe a picture or a poem.
I don’t have any autumnal photos for this year yet – though we noticed that the trees were starting to drop their leaves when we visited Mugdock earlier this week I didn’t take any pics. But here’s a pic I took yesterday of a fat, juicy, ri…
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Lucky Instar
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August 30, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then read up on it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee is:
Genus: Megalopta
Family: Halictidae
Subfamily: Halictinae
Tribe: Augochlorini
check out the huge ocelli - the extra eyes on top of the head. by Ajay Narenda.
Megalopta are super cool tropical bees that are active at night. Because this is so weird for a bee, they…
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Lucky Instar
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August 29, 2026
Welcome to Genetic Linkage, a series where I share updates and interesting links for the week.
noctule bat eating a bird, from a 16th century painting.
Hi fellow bloggers, not much to report this week.
Reading:
Finished The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of scifi short stories, some of which are centered around the same universe in The Left Hand of Darkness. I am a big fan of Le Guin. I thought the title story wasn't even close to the best one in the boo…
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Lucky Instar
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August 28, 2026
this female is carrying eggs. by Ian Gardner.
I have good news for you: clam shrimp exist nearby almost no matter where you live. As long as you can find at least at temporary body of water or pond, that is. Even in the southwestern US desert, there are emphemeral pools that form during the monsoon season in summer. So if there are clam shrimp even here, I can almost guarantee there are clam shrimp where you are, too.
What the hell are you talking about?
Clam shrimp are branchiop…
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Lucky Instar
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August 27, 2026
a crazy-looking animal. source.
This is part II of a series discussing the largest monkey species, mandrills and drills. Part one covered mandrills. This post will cover drills.
Drills (Mandrillus leucophaeus) are closely related to mandrills, as they are in the same genus (Mandrillus) and the same family Cercopithecidae. Drills live in similar areas as the mandrill, being restricted to western Africa in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. As the wikipedia points out, the e…
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Lucky Instar
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August 26, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then read up on it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee is:
Genus: Dasypoda
Family: Melittidae
Subfamily: Dasypodainae
Tribe: Dasypodaini
beautiful baggy pants. by Jeremy Early.
This family, Melittidae, I know little about. It is a small family (for bees), with 14 genera and 200 species. The genus Dasypoda is one of the m…
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Troy Press
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Running Colossal Cave as a setting recently reminded me that I once got a delightful three sessions of play out of the following notes. These were for a dungeon underneath a seaside city, with three traps from James Introcaso’s 20 New Traps and assembling the dungeon on the fly using tiles from The Sorcerer’s Cave (get your own set of tiles for this out-of-print game from here).
I made sure that every monster was foreshadowed, using Monty Hall Prep, to give players agency over their decisions. T…
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Lucky Instar
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August 25, 2026
18th century illustration by Charles Reuben Ryley. source.
Everyone knows monkeys but I think most people think about cute white-faced capuchins or macaques or the langurs of India. Monkey have a lot of diversity and live in many different habitats.
The largest monkeys are especially interesting and consist of the mandrill and the drill. People may assume mandrills are baboons and they do look pretty similar (both are monkey species), but mandrills are their own group. I think mo…
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Lucky Instar
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August 24, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then research it and do a short write up.
A note on random bee:
This is the sixth genera of bees we have covered so far, and with about 425 bee genera existing total (the actual number is debatable), that means we have covered 1.4% of all bees known! Yippee!
If I cover three genera every week, then it would only take just over t…
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The Ghastly Mirror
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Remember when earlier this month I talked about frogs living in y watering tank. Well there has been some new developments
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Lucky Instar
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Welcome to Genetic Linkage, a series where I share updates and interesting links for the week.
you activated my trap card.
The university semester has started for me this week, so things have been crazy. I'm mostly upset that I had the whole campus to myself all summer and now its overrun with people! Get out of my library!
Actually I've been irritated at everything in general. I'm at a stressful time in my career, things are not good in the US for scientists right now, it's too hot, there is a…
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aneeshsathe.com
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Bookmarked: Bonsai reconstructs tree representations for distortion-free visualization and exploration of high-dimensional data - Nature Biotechnology I wonder how well the bonsai approach will work for image embedding data
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Lucky Instar
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August 21, 2026
I'm back with you today on another episode of "small brown mammal I've never heard of".
infinite small mammals are found in the tropics. source.
required listening for today: Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne.
Chevrotains are small mammals in the order Artiodactyla and the family Tragulidae, and are also called mouse deer. They are the smallest hooved animals that exist. Kind of funny that there are also deer mice, which are a group of mice species.
Mouse deer are restricted to Africa…
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Brennan.day
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·Brennan Kenneth Brown
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It's been a while since I allowed myself to just pour freely onto the page. I admit I've noticed myself getting rut-barrelled into the ground again—getting caught up in the formula of writing, standardized. The desire path becoming the only road taken. Has it been good? Maybe. But the sputtering is present and becoming louder. Oil leaking from the engine.
It's the 20th day of August, and the 21st day I've written consecutively. I've always taken a day or two break each week for the past year, bu…
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Lucky Instar
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August 20, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then research it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee is:
Genus: Brachymelecta
Family: Apidae
Subfamily: Nomadinae
Tribe: Melectini
a little wasp-looking for a bee. source.
Good timing on this one because I recently just learned about this genus! To get any further though, we first have to discuss cuckoo bees.
People migh…
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Lucky Instar
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August 19, 2026
When a person thinks of hippos, they usually think of two things: 1) hippos are the most dangerous animal in Africa (true), and 2) Moo Deng (the baby pygmy hippo internet sensation). This is kind of hilarious considering these two concepts are in opposition to each other. But this article is instead going to argue that you should think of a more important third thing: hippos are the beavers of Africa.
the duality of hippo.
What is an ecosystem engineer? It's when a species physic…
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Lucky Instar
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August 18, 2026
A list of some of my favorite nonfiction science books I have read.
I read a lot of nonfiction, and I read it more often than I do fiction. A lot of the time I'm reading two books at once: one fiction and one nonfiction. But over the past few years I've gravitated more towards nonfiction for some reason. It's because there are so many things I want to learn about. I can easily come across a nonfiction book in a variety of topics and find it interesting.
I'm a lot slower reading n…
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Lucky Instar
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August 17, 2026
armor like tenfold shields. source.
The sungazer (Smaug giganteus) is the largest (~8 inches) girdled lizard species in the family Cordylidae and lives in colonies in eastern South Africa, where it digs burrows. It is so named because it tends to bask in the sun at the burrow entrance, lifting the front half of its body up and keeping the head up, as if its gazing at the sun. Compared to the other girdled lizards, its much bigger and unique in being a burrowing species, because t…
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Inventory Full
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I absolutely would not be posting today if not for Blaugust so whatever this is - and I have no idea yet what it's going to be - it'll just have to do. I'm great at handing out advice about not worrying about getting your 31 posts in and being ready to stop when it's not fun but I'm not so great at taking it.
Then again, scrabbling to meet deadlines, especially when they're coming at me like trains down a tunnel, is fun for me. Always has been. It's like playing chicken. Which, I am going to say…
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Lucky Instar
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August 16, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then research it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee is:
Genus: Neofidelia
Family: Megachilidae
Subfamily: Fideliinae
look at the leggies on this male. by C. Ritner.
This genus has a very restricted distribution that is limited to the western deserts of South America. It is mostly only found in northern Chile and souther…
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Lucky Instar
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August 14, 2026
Get in, loser, we're stealing nectar.
this paper relied on iNaturalist photos for evidence of robbery on flowers. Valdivia & Orellana, 2026.
Today we are diving into the wonderful world of ecology, a field of biology that deals with the interactions between organisms and their ecosystems. It is a large field that overarches biological networks, population genetics, species interactions, and many others.
Like any science, it is full of jargon. Here I'm going to describe some terms…
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Ubergeek Kelly's World
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·Kelly Adams
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We have had no rain in the Castlegar region since early in July: almost a month of totally dry weather. This was made worse when a high pressure zone moved in to the area two weeks ago, trapping the forest fire smoke from half the province in our valleys. Rain has finally arrived, and I am relieved.
Breathing
When the smoke gets as bad as it has been I become largely home-bound. I have allergies and used to have asthma. Thankfully the days of having to carry an inhaler are behind me, but smoke i…
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Sheri42.net
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·Sheri Edwards
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The article discusses the worsening fire season due to climate change, highlighting drought impacts, wildfire frequency, and governmental issues.
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Lucky Instar
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August 13, 2026
Welcome to 'random bee', a short writing series where I choose a random page in the book "Bees of the World: A Guide to Every Family" by Laurence Packer, then research it and do a short write up.
Today's random bee is:
Genus: Dufourea
Family: Halictidae
Subfamily: Rophitidae
showing the bulging antennal segments. female on left, male on right. from Dumesh & Sheffield 2012.
This is a group I don't know anything about!
There are 160 species in the genus Dufourea. They're found all…
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vanderwal.net Off the Top
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Moving to the Washington, DC area to start grad school had me arriving with my dad from a cross country drive from San Francisco that took 4 days and arriving in mid-August. We parked the car at my apartment complex and unloaded and went into Georgetown to get something to eat. My dad suggested Houston’s (now gone) and my dad was a foodie and knew places with all types of good food most everywhere, so a suggestion was rarely not taken as a must do meal. As we were walking down the block toward H…