Hydras to Humpbacks

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

please welcome: Brood X!

bonus

Totally here for bi squids. (full article here)

I couldn’t resist

The representation we deserve

fucking superb you funky little cephalopods

B-

bi-

bisquidual

you think you’re going to have a normal field trip and she shows up wyd (cw *slight* flashing images)

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so it’s not totally dominating the market yet but it’s worrying that we’re basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.

Does Firefox not count for anything?

about 10% and falling, but perhaps that can change, I just don’t see how.

Chrome edging towards 70% on desktop, Microsoft has thrown in the towel, Safari obviously rules iOS, Firefox exists only as insurance for Chrome.

Please, please I’m begging you, use firefox.

PLEASE install firefox as a mobile browser and then run adblock on your mobile browser it’s so good I promise.

Look.

Look.

I know I’m a total grind about open source stuff but browsers are the PERFECT place to learn to love open source software and for so long FireFox was a major part of the browser market and sometimes if you want to see what kind of fuckery google is up to it helps to see the kinds of things they block in firefox and just

There’s an organization that makes free, excellent, safe software that doesn’t collect and market your data but for some reason two thirds of the world uses a google product and most of the leftover population uses apple and just

I promise, firefox is so good - the extensions are incredible look - I can use lightbeam to see what sites I use and how they connect to other sites (bottom right should give you an idea how much time I spend on tumblr)

or I can look at ublock origin and see that it’s blocked over 2 million requests since I installed it or I can run the facebook container extension and stop facebook from tracking me and you know what I bet you can do a lot of that on chrome too but you’re doing that while chrome itself is tracking you and gobbling up your activity for google and

firefox is so fuckin great and it’s such a great ambassador for other open source projects please be a big old fuckin nerd with me and use firefox and run a bunch of funky extensions and customize the fuck out of your web experience.

Wanna be a hacker? Firefox.

Wanna use instagram on desktop? Firefox.

Wanna be a killer researcher? Firefox.

Wanna properly credit artists? Firefox.

Wanna read a whole shitload of books? Firefox.

Wanna make video responses to shitlord youtubers?

Wanna shoot cat lasers at bugs?

Wanna use youtube as a music streaming service?

FIREFOX.

I just love firefox okay.

hey guys

@marinebiologyshitposts

Copepod

Striped pyjama squid

Fish with spots

Sour worm meets real worm

Horseshoe crab

[twitter / insta]

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

I've been waiting for someone to do this, and I am not at all disappointed.

https://www.tiktok.com/@acapellascience/video/6918704058140265734

Currently watching my millipedes nibble from the same leaf. They keep accidentally brushing against each other, getting upset, wildly waving their upper bodies around, then going back to nibbling. Incredible. There are 300 other leaves available.

big clickbait lists of sea creatures that are like BIG SCARY WEIRD FREAKISH ANIMALS OF THE SEA – TRY TO SLEEP TONIGHT AFTER SEEING #8 and then they show this

required reading

It's my Birthday on Friday 😄

And yes I'm here to beg again. You see, due to being a teacher on winter break, i did not receive a paycheck for two weeks at the end of Dec-beginning Jan. I did not get the second stimulus check because of how horrible my mental health was last year, so apparently I forgot to file taxes for 2019 :/ seriously tho, trying to make sure I valued my life was kind of my priority, and taxes were literally not on my radar. Ill have to wait until after April to get it now.

All I want is a new bed. I thought they were relatively cheap, but apparently a decent mattress set is more like $400, not $200.

I "only" need $200 more. So please, if youve used my resources in the past, please consider donating any sum so I can start sleeping on a real bed, and get my rekt body something worth sleeping on, that isnt this weird hideabed.

https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=FE5J3X5MB42TQ