The following question has given me so much trouble. Could someone with a knowledge of Ecological calculations help me out with some explanation?

A 50g salamander ingests 2.5 g C/d with assimilation efficiency of 0.50 (50%). If PE = 10%, what’s net production (g C/d) in the salamander?

I mean like suppose you have a world occupied with three limbed animals, then another group emerges that has 6. do the hexapods need the tripods to die out before they can take over their niches?

A German next to me was washing dishes after himself. The water was not running when he soaped the plates, which makes sense and that's how I do it now. It makes the washing up liquid more concentrated, plus saves on water heating costs. Of course, the norm that I noticed is to have running water when washing up and be wasteful.

Some countries don't dub/voiceover their foreign TV shows. It positively influences general foreign language knowledge in those countries by passive exposure. I just decided to watch arte.tv to get passive exposure to German/French. And it helps a bit, I know now what some words mean, which I didn’t know before.

UK has often two separate taps for hot and cold water. I looked it up online, and apparently cold water is as good at hand washing as warm water, as far a bacteria removal is concerned. I learned to wash my hands with just cold water, whereas before I always used warmish water.

I read somewhere on a British website (NHS one perhaps) a recommendation to not use water when brushing teeth, except for when washing the toothbrush after brushing. This is done to not flush out the fluoride, or water-down the toothpaste. Now I don't need to store a cup in the bathroom, nor keep the cup clean, as it's not there, which is also a plus.

Turkey seems to be a country low on furniture - the type of - don't use chairs, as you made your table's legs shorter, and you sit straight on the floor.

In some countries (ex protestant), more often than in others just don't bother with window curtains/covers. More often not meaning it's common, but it still happens more often. This saves both money as well as time spent to open/close/clean/install the curtains.

Kosher laws require to wash vegetables by soaking them with a bit of dish soap, and not just water. I got food poisoning once on a freshly made acidic salsa, even though I had washed all ingredients with water. It's common knowledge that a reson behind many food poisonings are greens (letuce etc). Since using soap when washing food, I have no poisonings.

Swedish interiors seem to be often very light/white. White interiors are simply lighter, this can be quantified with a lumen meter. I had seen a comparison on youtube where a guy filmed in the same room, with the same light source, but with different colored walls. White is the most efficient color when it comes to lumens.

In some European countries bidets are common.

Poland - temperature regulation on radiators is at about one meter h

I need a new washing machine but i was wondering if second hand actually is more environmentally conscious or not. i know that with electric cars its better to buy a second hand efficient gas car. but does anyone have a study or calculation that can show which one would be better for the enviroment with washing machines?

edit: i just found a UK based study that states that replacing a washing machine with a more efficient one is very often worth it ecologically as long as the washing machine lasts.https://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Washing_machine_summary_report.pdf
i just don't know if that also goes for if i don't have a washing machine yet. do i buy second hand efficient washing machines and don't know whether or not its damaged or has been abused causing a shorter life? this is a difficult topic imo.

Hey everyone, sorry this is late! I was travelling the last few days. I have another open ecology article of the week, and this one is another from the journal Ecology.

You can find the open access link here: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.2929

Please feel free to discuss this article in the comments below if you like. Questions, comments, or anything remotely relevant is fair game!

Abstract: The ongoing global change and the increased interest in macroecological processes call for the analysis of spatially extensive data on species communities to understand and forecast distributional changes of biodiversity. Recently developed joint species distribution models can deal with numerous species efficiently, while explicitly accounting for spatial structure in the data. However, their applicability is generally limited to relatively small spatial data sets because of their severe computational scaling as the number of spatial locations increases. In this work, we propose a practical alleviation of this scalability constraint for joint species modeling by exploiting two spatial‐statistics techniques that facilitate the analysis of large spatial data sets: Gaussian predictive process and nearest‐neighbor Gaussian process. We devised an efficient Gibbs posterior sampling algorithm for Bayesian model fitting that allows us to analyze community data sets consisting of hundreds of species sampled from up to hundreds of thousands of spatial units. The performance of these methods is demonstrated using an extensive plant data set of 30,955 spatial units as a case study. We provide an implementation of the presented methods as an extension to the hierarchical modeling of species communities framework.

EDIT: Precisions on the intent of the post: This post is not aimed at capitalism itself, but at the two hypothesis in question, supported by some capitalists from different ideologies. I am aware that this position is marginal among capitalists and is not the position of classical economics. This post is not opposing capitalism and socialism either, it's opposing unregulated markets to everything else, regulated markets included.

I will try to show an apparent contradiction in recurrent capitalist arguments, especially used by those who advocate for minimum or no regulations (the orthodox neo-classical economy is not really concerned here). I’m taking ecology as an example but the same argument would hold for pretty much anything involving externalities (e.g. the carbon footprint), common resources (e.g. the fish population) or pretty much any game theory scenario where competition is not optimal.

Here are two claims I hear from free markets advocates that I think contradict each other:

P1: Hard efficient-market hypothesis: I’m not talking about the usual “mainstream” efficient-market hypothesis, but the radical version of it often defended by deregulations advocates (yes this one was a bit of a click-bait). Not only is the market the most efficient given a certain info, and cannot be beaten by someone with access to that info, but the market is also the most efficient at gathering raw info in the first place. That is, you cannot beat the market at all, every info relevant for economic efficiency is already accounted for in the most efficient way by the market.

P2: Homo Economicus hypothesis: This one is not always fully explicit but it’s implicitly assumed pretty much anytime corporatism, cartels, trade unions or other types of “unfair competition” are brought on the table. If there are no regulations, who will ensure fair competition and prevent price cartels ? Without the state who would prevent a corporation of workers to get unfair privileges by blackmailing the other corporations with strikes or other collective strategies ? The usual answer is that no regulation is needed because in True Capitalism^TM , without state structures to protect these cartels, Human Nature^TM will prevent such behavior, or limit it to a point where it’s not really a problem. Each agent involved in such a coordinate effort or conspiracy have always an incentive to back stab their comrades and reap the market by smashing prices, break the strike by asking fo

In a discussion of Tolkien's lack of regard, One Tree Bucket writes that:

> "I guess Dune is built around examining the things we do to survive. The desert hawk eats carrion, the Fremen drink poop water, and the nobles have all their kanly forms to obey. Dune asks us to consider which of these we consider more or less good or disgusting, and why. Herbert keeps asking if ecological drives and pressures are tools for humans to use, or laws for humans to transcend, or an inescapable tragedy to which we can only respond by singing something sad with our baliset....

> Meanwhile LotR was written by a WW1 veteran. Tolkien came from a civilisation that had also asked "what shall we do to survive?" and decided the answer was to spend half a decade funnelling a few million of their best and brightest into an industrial meat grinder, as efficiently as possible. The West's pursuit of power, efficiency, knowledge and order had culminated in a sixteen year olds coughing up their lungs as green foam in a muddy hole somewhere.

> So Tolkien hunts for alternatives. He knows, in a visceral sense, that "survive" is not enough. Tolkien loves- well- the star and the soil, high transcendent beauty and the simple earthly happiness of eating a huge pile of food in a pub with a few friends. A civilization which has ceased to value these things isn't a civilization at all: it has become pragmatic and organised and powerful, aka, Mordor.

> So I can see why Tolkien disliked Dune. There is no happiness in Dune. No one enjoys a meal (except for the baron, prior to his "pleasures") and no one finds the stars beautiful (except possibly Leto, once) and no one celebrates together (except for the Fremen, after murdering a bunch of enemies.) Dune's characters spend the whole book seeing through everything and wind up blind; it is a cast of Sarumans and Saurons.

> I imagine Tolkien found Dune to be a 300-page exploration of what the trenches had already taught him: humans need more than survival."

Do you agree or disagree? Do you think there's anything important this analysis is forgetting?

First - Previous

Captain Amanda Trent was seeing double.

The creature that had hold of her ship somehow pushed its voice directly into her brain. The process had not been pleasant. It also had not been particularly enlightening. Whatever it was trying to say, she couldn't understand.

"What the hell was that?" Tactical officer Weber was shaking and slapping his head, like he was trying to get water out of his ear.

"We didn't respond to its radio signal, maybe it thought we couldn't hear it." Comms officer Tran seemed relatively unfazed by the mental assault.

"Damage Report."

"EMP, but no explosion, so not a nuke. The only damage so far seems to be fried electronics." Tran was listening in on the damage control teams as they began their work. "No hull breaches, that thing has wrapped us up nice and tight with its tentacles, but either isn't strong enough to squeeze us apart, or doesn't want to."

"Why is the reactor offline?" The reactor was hardened against nuclear strike, which of course also meant against EMP. All of the ship's critical systems were. But right now the only systems that were working were those with local battery backup power.

"Unknown ma'am, engineering says they'll report when they figure it out."

Captain Trent was blind and useless sitting on the bridge. She kicked her mag boots together to activate them, then released her harness. "I'm going to the observation deck to see what the hell is going on out there, keep me updated."

The bridge was located near the center of the ship. Alliance design philosophy was to put the important stuff behind as much metal as possible. So it took the captain a few minutes of climbing and walking to reach her destination.

The observation deck had the largest window on the ship, but Amanda couldn't see much of the creature. She pressed herself against the glass to try to get an angle up and down the ship's outer hull. An enormous eye stared back at her. The creature shifted until the eye filled the entire window in front of the captain. For a few moments they simply stared at each other.

The silence was broken by a screeching sound, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. A deep groove was carving itself into the floor of the room, with no apparent mechanism behind the damage. Then another groove and another. It was carving bl

Spoiler Warning!

Edit: Really like how the Pokemon Sub hivemind immediately thinks I'm a shill for Nintendo/Pokemon lmfao if you even knew how much mud I flung at Sw/Sh, LGPE and BDSP you really wouldn't expect a post like this from me.

I'm excited about Legends Arceus because it's finally a genuine positive original change for the Pokemon franchise that is sorely needed. I also see that this post made some people think twice, and that's fine. I made this post more as an information dump because GF/Nintendo have basically showed NOTHING to the general public, and I've had a lot of people assuming this was just another generic Pokemon game.

I get it, GF is incompetent. But unfortunately, they're the ones in charge of the games. If you want actual good change and series growth, you need to support the changes you want to see, and I also think it's really interesting to see how they created PLA using their crappy 3DS engine. It's interesting from a technical standpoint, but it's not like I'm condoning the game's graphics from an artistic standpoint. The fact is PLA is genuinely impressive when you take into the fact that it's running on a modified 3DS engine that wasn't designed to do any of this in the first place. Does that mean it wouldn't be immediately better if it was using a better engine? No. Heck, BDSP used Unity and while the game itself looked very barebones the water shaders in BDSP dwarf GameFreak's attempt at using graphics conventions from way back in the Wii era.

I personally have been burned by GameFreak since USUM when they removed Lusamine's fusion with Nihilego. I still wanted Pokemon Z. I was angry at LGPE because it didn't do enough. BDSP is a broken mess. But I can't help but laugh at the hypocrisy when people get upset at Pokemon for being stagnant and them immediately dismissing the very first time in so many years that Pokemon is finally undergoing major mechanical changes. And hell yeah, I'm going to advocate for that. I'm not saying buy the game, just wanted to let you know why I'm personally excited for it.

We're less than 3 weeks away from Pokémon: Legends Arceus' release, and the majority of this sub seem to not really be as interested in its existence as I would have expected, seeing as this is the Pokémon game that the "Pokémon never tries new things" crowd should really be paying attention to.

I know it's funny to meme about the bad graphics, but there are some legitimate GREAT changes to LGA that I fee

So here's the thing.

My default position is that anything that uses a blockchain is, fundamentally, a scam. To date, there is no function to a blockchain that a more traditional database system couldn't do more efficiently, both in terms of processing power, electricity use, and environmental impact.

Moreover, blockchain has become one of those buzzwords that tech capitalists feel compelled to throw out there to attract VC money. Because ultimately, venture capitalists are just as if not more vulnerable to hype and marketing as anyone else.

NFTs, being fundamentally a digital receipt for a thing that you don't actually 'own' in the sense of having any kind of exclusive rights to merchandise, license or control access too, also fall into this category.

AND, to get on my high horse here: the ecological impact of a blockchain/NFT depends on the electricity generation method used to power it. Even if a blockchain is run entirely on carbon zero power, its still bad, because blockchain doesn't do anything with real utility, and that power could instead do literally anything else.

So when Stuff decides to publish a puff piece on a "NFT digital carbon sponge" product my hackles go up.

The alleged scheme is to:

• Sell an NFT for $1000

• Use that money to do <thing> that will somehow remove 1 ton of carbon from the atmosphere (please note that <thing> is quite explicitly NOT planting trees)

• Residual royalties from future sales of said NFT supposedly fund future <thing>

So like... why... does the NFT matter, here? Why not just solicit funds for <thing> ? That way <thing> happens without the excess waste involved with running the NFT scam.

This strikes me as pure techno-fetish greenwashing so these bougie marketing people can feel good about themselves and line their pockets, but feel free to explain to me why I'm wrong.

What exactly is a culinary ethnography?

Food is many things, to many people. What exactly that thing is, says a lot about that group of people as a whole. What we eat is a huge part of who we are, who we’ve been, and what we experience as we encounter the new. In my 90 years, I have done my best to experience first hand the many, many ways that each denizen of the Forgotten Realms decides to break bread.

This is by no means a rule book, as if I am some sort of dictator of what is, and isn’t proper for a member of a race to do in the kitchen. Rather, it is a collection of observances in regards to commonalities and trends among members of the same race. While my own experience is obviously limited, and there are plenty of individuals I have yet to dine with and learn about, I would like to offer up what I have learned so far.

-Adelbert Boffin, Halfling Culinarian

First things first, as a disclaimer of all Culinary Ethnography entries, let’s set some caveats. Who are Elves? Am I including Half-Elves? Drow? All those of Elven lineage? All those of Elven parentage back to the Fae themselves? While I would like to eventually include more varied looks at the similarities and differences between all of these groups, for the purposes of this analysis, I will be looking at those Elves that live in, or near the Faewild in particular. As always, this is a look at some of the major trends I have seen occur. It is not a rulebook that one must follow to be a “proper Elf” in the kitchen. Food is as much culture as it is history, geography, necessity, community, and personal freedom. With that out of the way, let’s give this culture a respectful look.

Living off the Land

To truly understand the cuisine of the Elves, it is important to first understand where their sustenance is derived from. While this maxim is true of all races, it holds even greater weight with Elves. Food culture is derived from the culmination of necessity and environment and the environment that most Elves live in is one of true bounty, allowing for a more “particular” palate. After all, it is much easier to only eat things that taste good, when starvation is not on the line. Not many races can claim the same abundance, leading to a rather unique culinary culture.

The first subject of note is that Elves do not take part in animal husbandry. From Dwarves, to Humans, to Orcs, you can see some sort of animal that is a mainstay in their diet in some form or another. As always, this is co