Golden flying salamanders? In your redwoods? It’s more likely than you might think!

When I was in college, a fellow student bought several “flying” geckos to look into how much they actually steered while in the air. I honestly don’t recall what the verdict was, but I think they did fall differently when blindfolded. Helping with this research project also gave me a small insight into the exotic pet trade. These geckos were all wild-caught, and they all had worms when they arrived. In the end, seven of ten died before an effective treatment was found, and one not long after that. I’m sure that the stress of capture and transportation made everything worse. At the end, I took the two surviving geckos as pets, and they lived with me for about another year before dying.

It was always fun to see them catching the moths I gave them, and to watch them seemingly teleport from one side of the terrarium to the other, and it was fascinating to watch them steer towards the best landing spot (either the slanted sheet that was used as a net below the balcony, or the person holding that sheet). The way various lizards and frogs have evolved to be able to glide and navigate in the air has always fascinated me, but I have to admit that I never expected to hear of an arboreal, gliding salamander.

Salamanders that live their entire lives in the crowns of the world’s tallest trees, California’s coast redwoods, have evolved a behavior well-adapted to the dangers of falling from high places: the ability to parachute, glide and maneuver in mid-air.

Flying squirrels, not to mention numerous species of gliding frogs, geckos, and ants and other insects, are known to use similar aerial maneuvers when jumping from tree to tree or when falling, so as to remain in the trees and avoid landing on the ground.

Similarly, the researchers suspect that this salamander’s skydiving skills are a way to steer back to a tree it’s fallen or jumped from, the better to avoid terrestrial predators.

“While they’re parachuting, they have an exquisite amount of maneuverable control,” said Christian Brown, a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa and first author of a paper about these behaviors. “They are able to turn. They are able to flip themselves over if they go upside down. They’re able to maintain that skydiving posture and kind of pump their tail up and down to make horizontal maneuvers. The level of control is just impressive.”

The aerial dexterity of the so-called wandering salamander (Aneides vagrans) was revealed by high-speed video footage taken in a wind tunnel at the University of California, Berkeley, where the salamanders were nudged off a perch into an upward moving column of air simulating free fall.

“What struck me when I first saw the videos is that they (the salamanders) are so smooth — there’s no discontinuity or noise in their motions, they’re just totally surfing in the air,” said Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and an expert on animal flight. “That, to me, implies that this behavior is something deeply embedded in their motor response, that it (falling) must happen at reasonably high frequencies so as to effect selection on this behavior. And it’s not just passive parachuting, they’re not just skydiving downwards. They’re also clearly doing the lateral motion, as well, which is what we would call gliding.”

I always love it when scientists discover something new about a species they thought they knew. I also love discovering animals with cool metallic coloring – just look at this little amphibious gold nugget!

A blue-gloved hand holding a salamander. The salamander looks to be a little bit longer than the width of the hand, and its skin is mottled black and metallic gold.

A wandering salamander found in Humboldt Co., California. (Photo credit: Christian Brown)

I think this story is really cool, and there’s more in the article I linked. I wanted to focus on one bit in particular. See, I’ve noticed that when it comes to discerning the evolutionary purpose for a given trait, I feel like one of the questions on any dichotomous key would have to be “does this conserve energy?”

Brown suspects that their aerial skills evolved to deal with falls, but have become part of their behavioral repertoire and perhaps their default method of descent. He and USF undergraduate Jessalyn Aretz found, for example, that walking downward was much harder for the salamander than walking on a horizontal branch or up a trunk.

“That suggests that when they’re wandering, they’re likely walking on flat surfaces, or they’re walking upward. And when they run out of habitat, as the upper canopy becomes drier and drier, and there’s nothing else for them up there, they could just drop back down to those better habitats,” he said. “Why walk back down? You’re already probably exhausted. You’ve burned all your energy, you’re a little 5 gram salamander, and you’ve just climbed the tallest tree on Earth. You’re not going to turn around and walk down — you’re going to take the gravity elevator.”

I’m of the opinion that life exists because it’s better at breaking things down than non-life. On a cosmic time scale, the entropy “lost” in the development of life is “regained” as we break down our environment to survive. That said, conserving energy is still a big concern for most organisms, so if there’s gonna be an arboreal salamander, it absolutely makes sense that controlled falling would be preferable to all that bothersome climbing.

Beyond parody…

We live in the shittiest, most obnoxious timeline.

For those who can’t see, the image in the top tweet is two images pf a bomber dropping bombs. The first, labeled “Republicans”, is just a photo of a bomber. The second, labeled “Democrats” is the same bomber, with a rainbow, a BLM sign, and a “Yes she can!” sign photoshopped onto them. The bottom tweet is from the United States Marine Corp, and it’s a digital camo helmet with six rifle shells held by a band. The bullets are painted with rainbow colors.

It reminds me of a folk song I heard a while back, pointing out the absurdity of the military’s resistance to having specifically homosexual soldiers killing poor villagers for the U.S. empire, except now instead we’re supposed to celebrate that. It is progress, in a way. The advancement of civil rights, even within a flawed society, is 100% a win, and we should be glad that it’s gotten to the point where the marines of all organizations wants to be seen as supporting Pride.

But holy shit does this feel like a grim commentary on our society.

Is it June already?

As my long-time readers are well aware, this whole “posting daily” thing is a new development for me as of 2022. I’m figuring out how to manage my ADHD, but I’ve had some difficulty balancing daily posting with other things, like writing posts that are actually good, writing fiction, housekeeping, and so on. All of this is to say that I’m still not great at delivering on themed content as much as I’d like to, so I’m going to do some of that this month.

In our rather interesting tradition of designating months for awareness of particular causes, it seems that June 2022 is the month for at least three issues that I feel I ought to address. The first (in order of my becoming aware of it) is Pride Month – an international celebration of the diversity of human gender and sexuality, and a time for furthering the cause of ensuring human rights for LGBTQIA people. In particular, I want to talk about the ways in which the United States is becoming more dangerous for trans people, because there’s a lot happening in that area, and it’s quite frankly horrifying.

The second is Canada’s National Indigenous History Month, for which I’ll be writing about the contents of one or more of these reports. Someone I follow on Twitter made a general request that settler types do so, and that’s a good enough reason for me. That said, it’s not the only reason. There’s been a lot of news in recent years demonstrating just how much of a façade Canadian “niceness” turns out to be when it comes to its indigenous population, and I think that the citizens of one or two other countries would do well to consider how these lessons might apply to their own homes.

The third is Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month in the United Kingdom. I have to admit I know very, little about these groups of people. For one thing, in the U.S. and other parts of the world, “Gypsy” is considered a slur, but apparently it’s been reclaimed by at least some groups in Europe, similar to how some Native Americans refer to themselves as “Indians”. Terminology is important for interacting with, and talking about people, but in my opinion it doesn’t count as learning about their culture, so much as showing the bare minimum of decency to one’s fellow humans. So I’m going to learn more, and write about it.

I think I had intended to have one of these published today, but subjects like this fall into the category of “if I’m going to do it, I should take the time to do it as well as I’m able. For me that means allowing myself to not rush the job, so instead you get this I.O.U. for posts on these topics some time this month.

In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing as well as possible as we head into the summer. News about the state of the world continues to feel relentlessly grim, so I hope you are all taking time to do things that are important to you. We’re fighting for a better world because we believe, at least in part, that those humans who come after us deserve a habitable planet and a just society, in which to lead fulfilling lives. That means that we also deserve to lead fulfilling lives, to whatever degree we can in the world as it is today. Do things that are fun. Do things that make you proud. Do things that give you meaning. It’s part of your duty to yourself.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tegan Tuesday: Disabled activists are using South Korea’s lack of accessibility to fight for human rights

My first introduction to disability rights was at a mock trial when I was a teenager. For those unfamiliar with the structure of mock trials, schools all across the US are given the same fake trial, and students must prepare both prosecution and defense against other school districts. It’s an introduction to the law process in the US and an interesting bit of mental competition. I remember one of the years that I was competing, the plaintiff was a disabled newscaster suing a news network for discriminatory hiring practices, stating that the network was not interesting in working with a newscaster in a wheelchair.

Among the many things our team had to learn to work on this case was what counts as discrimination, and what categories of people counted as a “protected class”. In the U.S., race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and age are the current protected classes. Partial protection from disability discrimination was from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, with additional protection from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Our fictional law case had the news station only paying attention to the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, which only protects discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. As an able-bodied person with no disabled people in my immediate family, I hadn’t ever considered the discrimination disabled people face. My mock trial team knew about how much effort went into getting the Civil Rights Act, and we assumed that a similar amount of effort was put in for all subsequent additions. And that’s where we left it; no actual research was done on the disability activists who made the relevant law happen.

The next time I heard much about disability activism was 2017 when activists were arrested outside Mitch McConnell’s office. The activist group ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) had staged “die-ins” with wheelchair users abandoning their wheelchairs, making it harder to force the protesters to leave, as well as making the visual impact of removing said protesters stronger. In the many discussions and articles I read about the activists in 2017, I learned of how throughout much of the last fifty years disabled activists have been fighting. Not just for their lives, although they certainly have fought for that, but for the right to exist in public, to have jobs, to have families. One of the actions that ADAPT is known for are the protests throughout the 1980s for accessible buses. A quick summary from Wikipedia states:

Throughout the 1980s, the campaign for bus lifts expanded out from Denver to cities nationwide. ADAPTers became well known for their tactic of immobilizing buses to draw attention to the need for lifts. Wheelchair users would stop a bus in front and back, and others would get out of their chairs and crawl up the steps of an inaccessible bus to dramatize the issue. Not only city buses but interstate bus services like Greyhound were targeted. By the end of the decade, after protests and lawsuits, ADAPT finally saw bus lifts required by law as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

As anyone who has ever seen or experienced the process of getting a wheelchair user onto a bus will know, the current system is still not particularly good. It varies from place to place, but it generally requires the bus to laboriously lower a ramp, let the rider wheel on, then equally-laboriously raise the ramp. The process is repeated when the rider needs to exit. It takes time, which delays the schedule, and there is often only space for one or two wheelchair users on a bus. But, technically, officially, wheelchair users are able to ride the bus with the non-wheelchair-using populace. There’s just the implied and hoped-for expectation that most wheelchair users will avoid the bus. In a world where punctuality is often so important, and time is often so short, the setup almost seems designed to focus attention – and impatience – on disabled people just trying to go about their day.

This situation isn’t limited to just the US. In both Scotland and Ireland, my experience has been that anyone requiring a mobility aid has had to make an ordeal of their entering a bus. Cue my lack of surprise to find that South Korea has a similar issue with public transit. Since mid-December, Hyehwa station in Seoul has been the center of a new fight for disability rights.

Disability rights activists, many of them in wheelchairs, have been staging subway protests to demand accommodations on public transit. And on [April 15th] the demonstrators chained themselves to each other and to a portable ladder, reenacting a 2001 protest where activists chained themselves to the subway tracks. Now they shouted, “Pass a budget for disabled citizens! No rights without a budget!” They boarded trains in groups, which requires transit workers to install and uninstall wheelchair ramps, thus causing delays. A few of the activists had recently shaved their heads in public, a monkish ritual of sacrifice.

Lee Hyoung-sook, who leads a local advocacy group, was among those with her head shaved. At Gyeongbokgung station, she tried to board the train en route to Hyehwa station. Subway workers brought out a ramp so her wheels wouldn’t get stuck in the large gap between the platform and the car. Four more wheelchair users waited their turn to board in other sections of the train. While workers moved their one ramp around to get every wheelchair activist on board, the subway doors kept closing in on them. “Fellow citizens, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” Lee told her fellow passengers.

These subway protests are being led by the largest disability-rights activist group, Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD). This is far from the first time that SADD has been in the news. In 2016, the group was protesting the 6-tiered disability system that ranks the amount of support any individual can receive. The activists were visibly pulled from chairs and dragged out of an international social work conference. Current South Korean president, Yoon Seuk-yeol, is the head of the conservative People’s Power Party, and the official response from the government has been as helpful as 2016’s sanctioned violence. The head of the political party – and the president’s right-hand-man – Lee Jun-seok, has claimed that the activism is illegal, an “uncivilized backward strategy” and that the activists are “playing the minority card” to villainize the majority. My, that’s certainly a familiar conservative refrain.

According to 2020 surveys, 32% of disabled Koreans don’t have access to medical care, 85.6% of disabled Koreans have been unable to pursue higher education, and the majority of the people surveyed stated that lack of accessible transportation was the primary reason. The transit activism runs parallel to efforts to improve conditions in residential facilities, as current statistics indicate that fully half of disabled Koreans living in care homes die before age 50, and a third of them don’t even make it to 30. But care home residents are not as visible as subway stoppages, so awareness has to come from without. SADD’s demands are simple: they want the rights of disabled citizens guaranteed, same as any other citizen.

SADD currently has been demanding the government to draw up four major bills relating to the basic rights of disabled. The disabled advocacy group has been also asking the government to secure budgetary funds for disability rights in the 2023 fiscal plan, in addition to an official meeting with the new administration’s finance minister.

Laws protecting the rights, freedoms, and safety of people have always been written in blood; I hope the South Korean government sees the value in the lives of disabled people before more blood is shed.

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I learned two new things about termites today!

Ok, so the first thing I didn’t know was that termites are a type of cockroach. I had no idea.

The second thing – and this honestly makes a lot of sense, given what we know about termites – is that they apparently cross oceans every now and then.

Termites are a type of cockroach that split from other cockroaches around 150 million years ago and evolved to live socially in colonies. Today, there are many different kinds of termites. Some form large colonies with millions of individuals, which tend to live in connected tunnels in the soil. Others, including most species known as drywood termites, form much smaller colonies of less than 5000 individuals, and live primarily in wood.

Researchers from the Evolutionary Genomics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), alongside a network of collaborators from across the world, have mapped out the natural history of drywood termites—the second largest family of termites—and revealed a number of oceanic voyages that accelerated the evolution of their diversity. The research, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, shines light on where termites originated and how and when they spread across the globe. It also confirms that some species have, in recent centuries, hitched a ride with humans to reach far-flung islands.

“Drywood termites, or Kalotermitidae, are often thought of as primitive because they split from other termites quite early, around 100 million years ago, and because they appear to form smaller colonies,” said Dr. Aleš Buček, OIST Postdoctoral Researcher and lead author of the study. “But very little is actually known about this family.”

Dr. Buček went on to explain how, before this study, there was very little molecular data on the family and the little understanding of the relationships between the different species that was known was based on their appearance. Previous research had focused on one genus within the family that contains common pest species, often found within houses.

To gain overarching knowledge, the researchers collected hundreds of drywood termite samples from around the world over a timespan of three decades. From this collection, they selected about 120 species, some of which were represented by multiple samples collected in different locations. This represented over a quarter of Kalotermitidae diversity. Most of these samples were brought to OIST where the DNA was isolated and sequenced.

Every now and then, I learn about a research project, and am given a new appreciation for the amount of work some scientists will do to expand our knowledge. There’s a degree to which some of this sort of thing can be less work than it necessarily sounds like. If I said I caught and measured hundreds of turtles every year, that could be just a couple weeks of work. That would be followed by a much longer period of analysis and whatnot, but a fairly small team can collect a lot of data in a very short time, if they know what they’re doing.

Doing it over 30 years, however, requires patience and persistence that I find admirable, not to mention reliable access to resources (funding educational and research institutions should be treated as a public investment in the future).

By comparing the genetic sequences from the different species, the researchers constructed an extensive family tree of the drywood termites.

They found that drywood termites have made more oceanic voyages than any other family of termites. They’ve crossed oceans at least 40 times in the past 50 million years, travelling as far as South America to Africa, which, over a timescale of millions of years, resulted in the diversification of new drywood termite species in the newly colonized places.

Furthermore, this study has cast doubt on the common assumption that drywood termites have a primitive lifestyle. Among the oldest lineages in the family, there are termite species that do not have a primitive lifestyle. In fact, they can form large colonies across multiple pieces of wood that are connected by tunnels underground.

“This study only goes to highlight how little we know about termites, the diversity of their lifestyles, and the scale of their social lives,” stated Prof. Tom Bourguignon, Principal Investigator of OIST’s Evolutionary Genomics Unit and senior author of the study. “As more information is gathered about their behavior and ecology, we’ll be able to use this family tree to find out more about the evolution of sociality in insects and how termites have been so successful.”

“They’re very good at getting across oceans,” said Dr. Buček. “Their homes are made of wood so can act as tiny ships.”

The researchers found that most of the genera originated in southern America and dispersed from there. It takes a scale of millions of years for one species to split into several after a move. The research also confirmed that, more recently, dispersals have largely been mediated by humans.

A good portion of my life has been spent learning about the ways in which humans move other species around, and the damage that can do. It’s neat to learn about species moving themselves around, over such vast distances.

Video: Humanity is not a parasite, and why we need social ecology

With fascism and climate change both looming large on the world stage, I think it’s important that we counter the narratives of ecofascism specifically. It’s not currently the dominant form of fascism, but the second fascists see environmentalism as a path to power, they will try to use it. Worse, the rhetoric to support a turn like that is already deeply embedded in society. Talk about overpopulation, humanity being “the real virus”, doom being inevitable, or (and I can’t imagine why this one has been used less in recent years), “we need a new plague”.

This is why a number of people have said that the only thing more dangerous than conservative denial and obstruction will be when conservatives decide to admit that climate change is real, and to impose their solutions to it. St Andrewism is someone I think you should keep an eye on in general, and this video is no exception. We need to get better at adapting our population centers to work with their surrounding ecosystems, not against them.

 

Video: Let’s talk about armed teachers

After 9/11, amid things like the Patriot Act and the new “War on Terror”, there came a bill that really caught my attention as a teenage Quaker – the Universal Military Service and Training Act of 2001. This was a proposed law that never made it to Bush’s desk (thankfully), that would have required all male citizens of age to enlist for basic training (including Pentagon-approved history lessons) and a term of service. The authors of the bill very kindly provided for contentious objectors to opt out of weapons training and direct combat roles. Needless to say, this freaked me out. I think it freaked out a lot of people, and I feel quite certain that if conditions allow, the idea will come up again.

So that’s something to look forward to…

Another way in which conservatives are trying to create the society in Starship Troopers is proposing that all teachers be armed. As usual, Beau of the Fifth Column has some words worth hearing on the subject, and on what that might actually look like.

This is not a solution. The problem is, that’s not going to stop conservatives from trying it. If you haven’t realized by now that reality is no barrier to the laws they want to make, then I’m afraid you’re very behind on your political education. The fact that they’re happy to legislate based on how they think reality ought to work, makes me think we need to consider that they’ll keep pushing for armed teachers until they get armed teachers. And if it comes to that, the scenario Beau discusses isn’t the only way that could go. There’s another possibility for what this could look like, and it’s a very, very grim one:

They could start requiring that all teachers either be veterans, or have completed basic training, or some other government-sanctioned combat training program.

At the end of the day, conservatives – and that’s not a category limited to Republicans – want to control things. They want hierarchies, and they want those hierarchies to be enforced. The tools they use for this – police, debt, redlining, etc. – are varied and sometimes fairly subtle, but they all seem to aim at creating a populace that will do as they’re told, and won’t rock the boat. It seems to me that this push to arm teachers may be closer than we realize to requiring teachers to undergo formal military training.

Do I need to make the case for why that would be a bad thing? Do I need to explain who would be most hurt by this path?

Friday Film Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

So, uh, this movie is about me.

I mean, it’s not about me. It’s about fictional characters played by people who are nothing like me.

But it could be about me, or you know, it might as well be about me.

I’m gonna start over by going back in time about 45 minutes to when I started this blog post. Bear with me a sec.

When I first started dating Tegan, back in 2013, I had a well-established dislike of horror movies. I’d seen a few, but I didn’t enjoy them, or the visions that they planted in my brain. It just seemed like a way to torture myself for no real gain. Kinda like watching Requiem for a Dream. Tegan convinced me to watch Cabin in the Woods, which is absolutely a horror movie, but it’s also more than that. It’s an interesting story about the “true origin” of humanity’s horror, from ancient monsters to modern-day slashers, with quite a bit of comedy worked in. It changed my mind. It’s not that I don’t enjoy horror movies, it’s that I don’t enjoy the ones that are horror without a meaningful or interesting plot. Cabin in the Woods is currently tied with Tucker and Dale vs. Evil as my favorite examples of the genre, and there are a few others that I like. They’re all ones that have horror as one part of an otherwise compelling story. It’s a central part, but it’s not the only thing going on.

I have similar feelings about movies that deal with intense emotional trauma and/or suffering. The aforementioned Requiem for a Dream might as well be a horror movie like the Jason series. It’s a cautionary tale about drugs, but it feels more like one of the Hell Houses that Christian fundamentalists use to scare each other about Damnation- grotesque and empty.

Tegan has now convinced me to watch Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and it is a ride. The two paragraphs before this are the introduction because this movie starts out like it’s going to be about the grinding misery of a disappointing life. It shows us a person who’s constantly distracted, constantly in doubt, constantly failing, and seems to be unable to hear her family half the time when they’re talking.

It… It hit close to home. It’s not my life, but it’s what my life has felt like many times. I’m not going to lie – as the beginning progressed, I was very tempted back out. The thing is, it’s not not about that misery, but as with the best horror movies, there’s so much more that you only get a taste of that misery before things go in a literally improbable  and often hilarious direction. You never really have time to consider it again, except when it matters.

Which reminds me – have you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? If you haven’t, you should. I’m sure it has it’s bad moments, but it really is a phenomenal work of storytelling, comedy, and imagination. I also suspect that it may have been an inspiration for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Specifically, a ship called The Heart of Gold. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should at least read the first book in that series. Run along now!

Anyway, I was thinking about those similarities, but as the plot moved along, I suddenly felt like I was watching a version of the movie MirrorMask, but from a parallel universe, or maybe a universe that’s like almost parallel, but a little wobbly, so it bumps into ours from time to time.

MirrorMask, for those of you who don’t know, is a delightfully surreal fantasy movie from the mind of Neil Gaiman, in which a girl who escapes the turmoil of her life through art, finds her self pulled into a dying magical world populated by things she has drawn, and by strange, eccentric versions of the people in her life.

It sort of feels like a mix between Alice in Wonderland (I hope I don’t need to summarize that for you), and The Neverending Story (which would take far too long to summarize here), but it also has a bizarre and at times revolting sense of humor, as a multiverse of limitless possibilities vomits forth strange versions of the main cast that I guarantee you are not expecting. In a way, the sense of humor reminds me of what you’d encounter in a movie like Time Bandits.

Time Bandits is a movie directed by Terry Gilliam, starring the cast of Monty Python as well as a great many other people. It follows the story of a boy who’s caught up in a metaphysical heist, and is dragged through time, space, and different plains of reality. It’s a sort of zany, modern-day theodicy, with an ending that – to me – felt as unfulfilling (and entirely appropriate) as the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a – ok, this time it was a joke. You may have noticed a theme in this review, jumping from one thing to another? Each one forms a connection to the next, and that to another beyond it in a never-ending chain. Did I mention the Neverending story already? Yes I did. I’m very sorry, but I lured you in with a movie review, and ended up trapping you in a creative writing project about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I’m so very sorry, but this movie (you know, the single movie of which this is a review?) hit me pretty hard. It’s a phenomenal movie. The casting is amazing, and the acting is amazing from everyone involved (It also has a flavor of Kind Hearts and Coronets. If you know, you know.)

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about a mother and a daughter who both have ADHD, and don’t know it. I honestly don’t know whether either of my parents has ADHD, but looking back I can see how it affected my childhood. I don’t have kids, and I don’t expect to, but I can empathize with a parent’s desire to keep their children from making the same old mistakes. How could anyone not? Every time I learn something new, I want to tell the world, because knowing feels so much better than not knowing. I also want a world with less pain. I want a life with less pain. Who wouldn’t? If I knew a way to make that happen, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but in the meantime, I also understand the desire to just… be numb. To be at peace. Have the noise just stop for one damned second. This paragraph is what this movie is about.

As a kid, I lost myself in things. Things that put me into a state of flow. Things that made me forget who I was, and what my life was like. I want to be clear – my life was good, compared to a lot of people, even in the small schools I went to. This isn’t me saying I come from a background of hardship, because I really don’t. Looking back, I know there were times we were tight on money, but never tight enough that I noticed it. That shouldn’t be a privilege, and it doesn’t have to be. It can and should be the norm, and that’s basically the core of this blog. The-

Fuck. I got sidetracked again.

There’s one more movie I want to bring in, and that’s how we’ll wrap this up. I’ve talked about all these other movies that started playing in my head as I watched, but this is the one I really want to compare it to.

Arrival.

I’m not going to summarize the movie. You’re safe from that now. All I will say is that it is one of those rare movies that makes you feel like your mind is being opened to just a hint of how huge and strange our universe is. To harken back to The Hitchiker’s Guide, Arrival is a little bit like the Total Perspective Vortex (on the planet Frogstar B). It gives you a taste of what it would be like to remember your future as you remember your past, existing in your entire life at every moment. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is another Total Perspective Vortex movie, in more ways than one. It’s not a coincidence that I find this movie so relatable, and I’m not declaring it to be about ADHD just because it feels like this movie about a Chinese-American family is also about me. Like all original works of art (am I gonna get flamed for this?), the movie is about the people who who created it, and they say it’s about ADHD.

So I started doing some research. And then I stayed up until like, four in the morning, just reading everything I could find about it, just crying, just realizing that, “Oh, my God, I think I have ADHD.” So this movie is the reason why I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed, I went to therapy for a year and then went to a psychiatrist. And I’m now on meds, and it’s such a beautiful, cathartic experience to realize why your life has been so hard.

I’m intensely jealous. For those of you who’ve never tried, getting diagnosed with ADHD is still extremely difficult, at least as an adult. In Ireland, where I live, it’s functionally impossible for me, or for Tegan. The public system can’t accommodate, and the private system only gives a shit about rich people.

Watching Arrival for the first time was a revelatory experience. I consider it to be one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, and Everything Everywhere All At Once now stands along side it. I’ve never cared about the Oscars before (and I don’t really now), but I think this ought to win Best Picture.

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So stop me if you’ve heard this one. A Buddhist monk is walking down the street in New York, and seeing a hotdog stand, decides he will get one. He approaches the stand, looks at the vendor, and says, “Make me one with everything.”

Rebecca Watson on Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and domestic abuse

Like Watson, I’ve been doing my best to not pay attention to this particular bit of ugliness. I feel a bit callous saying this, but it’s none of my business, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. My instinct has been to believe Heard, and it was surprising to see an increasing number of people saying that actually she is the abuser. It never seemed compelling to me, but I’ve had my doubts, and when something is making this much news, it is going to affect a lot of people’s lives, and while this one relationship is far outside of my sphere of influence, I think that addressing the issue is important, because there are a lot of abuse victims who I believe could be hurt by the coverage and rhetoric around this case. That’s why I’m grateful to Rebecca Watson for digging into the issue. EDIT: Here’s the transcript for those who’re interested.

The Sharkcano has erupted. I repeat: The Sharkcano has erupted. This is not B movie.

So I vaguely remember hearing about the “sharkcano” once before, but I definitely needed a refresher. It’s an underwater volcano in the Solomon Islands, and in 2015 it was discovered that there were a number of sharks and other fish living in the crater of the volcano, where the water is both hot and acidic. We’re talking temperatures of 40°C/104°F or higher, if I’m reading this paper right. Long-time readers will know that one of the concerns with a warming climate is that hotter water can hold less dissolved oxygen, meaning some fish – especially the larger, more active ones – will have to find cooler water, or suffocate. From what I can tell, the fact that the crater is near the surface, and there’s a lot of thermal activity there, means that the water mixes around more than usual, so I’d guess that that raises the oxygen level. I suppose it’s also possible that the fish there somehow need less oxygen? I really don’t know. Regardless, I hope the sharks and everyone else living there knew their home well enough to flee, because it has erupted. I honestly expect that they’ll be OK, because this isn’t the first time.

Named after a sea god of the Indigenous Gatokae and Vangunu people, Kavachi is located about 15 miles south of Vangunu Island, part of the Solomon Islands east of Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the most active underwater volcanoes in this part of the Pacific and has been erupting nearly continuously since at least 1939, when people living on nearby islands first recorded an eruption, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Global Volcanism Program.

The volcano is also known by the name Rejo te Kvachi, which means “Kavachi’s Oven”—a fitting moniker for the superheated lava, steam, particulates, rock fragments and sulfur that sometimes reach the water’s surface. Scientists believe the volcano’s summit is roughly 65 feet below the water; Kavachi’s base is on the seafloor, about three-fourths of a mile below sea level, per NASA.

Over its recorded history, Kavachi has created a handful of ephemeral islands that have spanned up to a kilometer in length. But the ocean’s waves have always eroded and washed these islands away. It also produces dramatic phreatomagmatic eruptions, in which superheated magma and water interact to create violent, steamy explosions.

“Sharkcano” earned its nickname after a 2015 expedition found two species of sharks, along with active microbial communities, living within the volcano’s crater. Using a baited drop camera, an international team observed scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) and silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) living in the hot, acidic water. Kavachi is a “fascinating natural laboratory” that “remains full of mysteries to explore,” according to the researchers, who published the results of their exploration in the journal Oceanography in 2016. NASA has been tracking Kavachi for some time, taking equally spectacular photos of eruptions in 2007 and 2014.

When I played Subnautica, I thought that the “lava lizards” that lived in and around underwater volcanoes were pretty far-fetched  as life forms went, but this is honestly closer to that than I realized could exist. The 2015 paper I linked above points out that higher temperatures and higher acidity are both major concerns for the survival of life in the ocean in the coming years. Last year’s heat wave killed hundreds of millions of sea creatures on the west coast of North America, and I think it’s fair to say we’re going to see more of that. It’s nice to know that life – even life that’s familiar to us – is possible even in an acidic stew like that.

Even so, I think I’ll keep trying to prevent those conditions from becoming commonplace around the world.

The image shows six images from the underwater volcano Kavachi. The top left image is blue, and shows streams of bubbles rising from cracks in the sea floor. The next image over shows a microbial mat, followed by a picture of a bluefin trevally. The bottom three images, left to right, are of red snappers, a scalloped hammerhead shark, and a silky shark. The fish pictures all show yellow, cloudy water.

2. (A) Oblique view of a line of bubbling gas along the outer edge of Kavachi’s crater with orange, cloudy plume fluids in the background. (B) Downward-looking view of a microbial mat on the summit of the Southwest Extension. (C) Bluefin trevally, (D) snapper, (E) hammerhead shark, and (F) a silky shark observed using a baited drop camera deployed inside the crater.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!