I don’t have any recommendations, unfortunately. But this is very interesting! I have gotten into software-defined radio recently and radio astronomy seems like a good direction to continue learning. Hopefully someone has some good advice.

An instance for nature and science related content. It is intended to be an instance to share photos of nature, scientific articles, ask about plants, science-related hobbies, etc. I make some effort to avoid politics and charged topics, although some small amount is tolerated, mostly because it is difficult to always enforce this without being too aggressive with moderation.

Here is the side bar:

An instance dedicated to nature and science.

We follow Lemmy’s code of conduct.

Please be respectful to each other.

The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

As a member of the fediverse, you can create your account here and interact with any other federated community!

To find communities all over the Lemmyverse you can use a community browser such as: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

To fetch a community, simply copy and paste the community’s URL into the search box in Mander.

Hey! Thanks a lot for offering help with this, and I am happy to hear that you like it here :D

Financially: At the moment I am paying approximately ~$60 per month for the instance, which is an amount that I am more than happy to contribute to the fediverse in addition to donations to the dev team. If you have the means and want to contribute, my suggestion is to donate directly to the development: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

As for other kinds of help: Moderating a community (or communities) is a lot of help. Users are free to create their own communities or can reach out to me and I can make them a moderator in any of the communities I moderate 🙂

Nice idea! Hello!

At some point I was looking into whether I could add a simple IRC-like web client and point chat.mander.xyz at it, just as an exercise if anything.

I found an open source web client called “The Lounge” (https://thelounge.chat/). I was looking into how to host it in a way that the same authentication could be shared between mander.xyz and chat.mander.xyz, but it is became one of those unfinished projects. If there is some interest I could give it a try again.

A masive hug back to you! Thank you for being such an amazing contributor and bringing lots of laughs and memes to share.

I was no aware of the magnitude of your chronic pain issues! I am happy to learn you are feeling better, and best of luck finding some very cool insects while touching that grass 😄

Ooooh, fascinating!

If they can send me over the second half of my thesis I would appreciate it enormously! 😀

The analytics tools that I am personally uncomfortable with involve dynamic, changing forms of data. I run GPSLogger on my phone (without a SIM card) and continuously log the GPS data to a text file. This data is then synced to my computer when WiFi is available. I can display this data on a map using gpx-viewer, and show very detailed tracking data of myself.

I have explored this map with some friends/family. They get to see a time-stamped movie of my life - my trips to work, to the shop, when I go out, if I go on a trip, etc. The data displayed in this manner is somewhat intimate, personal information. Anyone I have shown this to has said that they would not be so comfortable with such a map of their lives existing… Well, if they are carrying a active phone with a SIM card, it does.

To think that a company like Google can own such a map for a very large number of people makes me uncomfortable. On top of that, each of those map trajectories can be associated with an individual and their personality… They have the ability to pick out specific trajectories on the basis of the political ideologies or shopping behaviors of the personas behind them. This is extreme. I am of the opinion that the convenience afforded by a these technologies does not justify the allocation of that super-power to the companies that enable the technology.

A few years ago Facebook enabled a “Graph search” feature. This allowed users to create search queries such as"Friends of friends of X who like the page “X” and went to school near Z". That tool seemed super cool on the surface, but it quickly became obvious how something like that could be easily exploited. Later on in Snowden’s book I learned about XKeyscore from the NSA, which is like an extra-powerful no-consent-needed graph search that is available to some people. This is not just targeted ads.

I guess that what I am trying to convey is… For me, making the privacy-conscious choice is about not contributing to the ecosystem of very concrete tools that give super-powers to groups of people that may not have my best interest in mind. In my mind it is something very tangible and concrete, and I find many of those convenience tradeoffs to be clearly worth it.

I don’t think I would be able to identify them, sorry.

Some specific information could help. The breaking veil of a young specimen showing the web-like cortina of Cortniarius (like in the first image here) would suggest that genus.

I think that the spore print you have shown rules out Tubaria.

A photo of the spores taken with a microscope could help definitely rule out Psilocybe. However, confirming definitely Psilocybe would still be difficult from the spores. If any of the specimens would show some blue bruising that would be a very strong argument for Psilocybe.

Very interesting list! I am especially curious about Matt Brown’s videos. Thanks!

Fresh from the Farm Fungi - he is a mushroom farmer from Colorado. He has a ton of valuable information on growing mushrooms and running a business. He also has a few series of videos on very interesting experiments such as growing boletus, morelles, and cordyceps.

Microbehunter - he is a biology teacher that runs a microscope channel. His videos are very useful for learning the basics of microscopy.

Huygen Optics - I’m not sure about this guy’s background. He worked in R&D for Phillips in the 90s and he knows a lot about optics and chemistry, but I don’t know much more. He has built some equipment in has garage for sputtering metals on surfaces and has some pretty cool videos.

MissOrchidGirl - she is more popular than the others. She has great info about caring for orchids and a fantastic orchid collection.

Ben Felix - he is a portfolio manager with very solid financial advice. He supports his claims with research articles.

Nice photos! I am finding it very difficult to ID with confidence.

If I would see even a tiny speck of blue bruising I would be more inclined to agree with P. cyanescens, but I don’t see any at all, which makes me very suspicious.

Some alternatives I looked into: Cortinarius, Inocybe, Tubaria, Psathyrella.

The “Slur filter” is a server setting. The filter makes use of a “regex” (a text matching algorithm) to automatically remove any text that matches those words. An admin needs to explicitly set the rules for that regex. The regex does not take language into account, it is a simple text matching algorithm.

The box is in the Admin settings page and looks like this:

I know that lemmy.ml makes use of a strict set of regex rules. The translation of the french word for “late” matches an ableist slur in English, and so it is removed by lemmy.ml. I am not sure about whether you can check regex for each individual server, but I believe that most instances don’t filter that specific word out.

EDIT: Ah, I found out how to check the regex. You can check an instance’s regex by going to the the URL https://{instance}.{TLD}/api/v3/site and looking for “slur_filter_regex”. For example, for lemmy.ml you would go to:

https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/site

Haha So True!

If you don’t mind sharing, please do!

I looked a bit more into it and discovered that some people do use UV lights for inducing stress responses on plants. Most of what I found is from cannabis growing communities that make use of the UV light to increase the potency of the plant. I don’t know how effective that is, but that did signal to me that some shops might sell UV lamps as grow lamps.

An example of a specific lamp I could find is the MIGRO UVB 310. If you follow that link and look through the images you will see that the bulb is clearly labeled with “UV BOOST”.

These lamps are meant to be used as supplemental inputs to stress the plant. It is not very likely that you ended up with such a lamp by mistake as it is still a niche type application. But it is good that you are making sure.

I don’t know how to set up a specific image captcha, but I like that idea! I have added that to the registration form 😛

Does the bulb have some model written on it? If you tell us the specific model we may be able to find the properties of that light.

There is a good chance that you do not have a “UV lamp” but instead a purple grow light that does not emit a lot of UV. The purple grow lights have an emission that is tuned to the regions of the spectrum for which green plants absorb the most light - so, the lamp emits mostly in the blue and red, which is why they look purple. There is no need to worry about that light, it is perfectly safe.

If you do have a UV lamp and are using that lamp for a plant: Then we really do need more information to estimate the level of risk. Chances are that, if that UV lamp is harmful to you, it is also harmful to the plant, and it is better to swap it for some other type of lamp.

It is not very likely that you are using a one of the more dangerous UV lights - like a mercury-vapor lamp with a quartz bulb - which will produce smelly ozone and can burn your eyes if you stare at them. Those lamps tend to be specialized items that you are unlikely to end up with by mistake. More common lamps would be the blacklights with common variants that produce 365 nm or 395 nm light. Continuous direct exposure of moderately intense 365 nm carries a low risk inducing skin cancer and is better to avoid. 395 nm is relatively safe but I would still not want to expose my skin continuously to it as it may still cause oxidative stress to the skin. These are used ornamentally for making things glow, but they are not the best choice for plants.

Very cool!! My opinion is that it is a thin gila monster

I found another image of a Gila monster with a similar color pattern - with the small black dots inside hexagonal orange patches: https://btarboretum.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/20230410_102910-1536x1536.jpg

Certainly a fun fact 😄 Reminds me of the painful sandspurs that stick one’s feet while walking through the beach.

Good question. The green pigment is biliverdin, which is a product of the breakdown of heme. But more specifically I am not quite sure, I’ll have a look.

I have found this open access article from 2020:Taboada, Carlos, et al. “Multiple origins of green coloration in frogs mediated by a novel biliverdin-binding serpin.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.31 (2020): 18574-18581.

This article goes into more specificity about the protein that binds the pigment and allows it to become concentrated inside of the body and bones. In this article they point out that green is a difficult pigment to make using vertebrate biochemistry. Multiple frogs have evolved in parallel this mechanism to sequester the green biliverdin within the body, develop a translucent skin, and become green this way (for camouflage).

However, the common milk frog is not very green. It could be that the biliverdin-binding protein is a trait that is derived from an ancestor and is now vestigial. In the cited article, near the end, they do include a section “Other BBSs Functions”. In this section they point out that some frogs with green bones do not look green, and suggest that the protein could be involved in inflammation pathways and behave as an anti-oxidant. But nothing conclusive.

I quickly skimmed for other recent papers but I can’t find anything conclusive.

Careful. Big Taxa doesn’t mess around.