Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org
Retired Analytical Chemist
League of Women Voters -voting methods, election security
Board Member Colorado Citizens for Science
Joined Oct 2022
Gaythia Weis
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Look closely and you’ll see this parasitic Anastatus wasp’s ovipositor penetrating one of the stink bug eggs.
Gaythia Weis
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@boby_biq @StillIRise1963
My elderly father and I are caring for my elderly mother, who has dementia. She cannot go to the bathroom by herself, and we are not women.
Lack of gender neutral bathrooms can be a great hindrance to us.
Gaythia Weis
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Colorado Becomes the First State to Limit Court Use of Family Reunification Camps
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A new bill restricts the use of reunification programs and requires domestic violence training for experts in custody cases. Lawmakers credit ProPublica’s reporting for exposing the need for reforms in the family court system.
#Colorado #Custody #Parents #Divorce #Kids #Courts Families #DomesticViolence #Reunification #FamilyCourt
Gaythia Weis
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On Monday, I wrote an essay about climate and biodiversity for Scientific American. I tracked proportional engagement, calculated as (likes + shares + comments)/followers, over six social media platforms.
The winner? MASTODON, by a landslide.
Second place? INSTAGRAM. It's harder to share posts on IG, but lot of people like things there!
The loser? FACEBOOK, also by a landslide. On Facebook, I've been shadow-banned since August 2018 when they listed clean energy and climate as "socially sensitive topics" so my page there stopped growing 6 years ago and now only about 1% of my followers there ever see my posts. It's actually too bad, because that's the platform where I reach the most conservative audiences through their connections to friends and family. So even though it's dead last, I still persist.
Gaythia Weis
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In absolute terms, both Mastodon and Instagram punch above their weight. Twitter and LI are just below. And FB is, no surprise, extremely low.
Gaythia Weis
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On formiculture.com one of the other antkeepers asked chat GPT to list all of the species in Tapinoma.
A simple task. Of course, chat GPT has made up species of ants that simply do not exist.
This is the key mis-match in expectations vs. what the software really does.
It's not about "knowing" things, it's about *seeming* like you know things. Can you spot the fakes on the list? (unless you are a HUGE ant nerd of course you can't! The list looks fine.)
Gaythia Weis
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Oh hey! I just had my first social media post to be taken down from any platform ever, on LinkedIn. Yay! My post about the flabbergasting amounts of racism in "AI" violated their "professional" community guideline. Indeed. Its quite professional to be as racist as possible, but not professional to call it out. Totally makes sense.
Osprey in Hailstorm Boulder County Fairgrounds: The female osprey at the Fairgrounds was relentless in protecting her eggs through a hail storm. She was pounded by pea-sized hail and never left the nest. The eggs remain intact and we hope to see chicks in a few weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xym5EOh5VY
Gaythia Weis
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Media should stop asking "how will DeSantis fare in the 2024 election?" and start asking "who will die if DeSantis is elected in 2024? Who will be purged from their job? Have their children taken away?"
This horserace shit is so done, so intellectually vapid.
Enbridge: "Federal judge says now isn't the time to shut down Line 5 pipeline" "The Bad River tribe argues Line 5 poses an unreasonable risk to the health and safety of its members" "In its initial filing, the tribe said the river's banks were 320 feet from Line 5 in 1963, but erosion had left only 28 feet in 2019. As of this spring, the tribe said erosion of the river's banks has brought the pipeline within 15 feet in multiple spots and 11 feet in one area at a winding bend in the river, threatening to expose and rupture the pipeline." https://www.wpr.org/line-5-pipeline-erosion-bad-river-judge-ruling-stops-shutdown-whats-next
Gaythia Weis
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New photo of one of our most abundant local ants, the acrobat ant Crematogaster laeviuscula.
Gaythia Weis
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Gaythia Weis
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The daily number of reported dengue cases has increased to between 300 and 400 in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰. The situation may further worsen in the coming weeks.
Gaythia Weis
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The Democratic Republic of #Congo is still coming to terms with the deadliest natural disaster in its recent history. Two weeks ago, torrential rains triggered floods and devastating landslides in a remote mountainous part of South Kivu province, destroying villages and farms, and killing more than 400 people. Local authorities report a staggering 5,000 people are still missing.
Gaythia Weis
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Kudos to #California.
What is your state doing to identify and avoid the #textbooks revised to ingratiate #Florida extremists?
Gaythia Weis
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Gaythia Weis
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A lot of communities have very old infrastructure (sewer, water mains, stormwater) that is beyond its useful life. Communities have not been keeping up with the required maintenance.
This problem is not going away.
""Who's going to be next?" she asked. "We have old infrastructure!"
St. Louis Park has 160 miles of water main, almost all made from cast iron meant to last 100 years — similar to many other suburbs its age.
Some may last longer, but some may corrode earlier, and the city is trying to get ahead of possible damage."
Gaythia Weis
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I’ve always considered the sweet potato in Polynesia to be the “smoking gun” when it came to Pre-Columbian contact between the Americas and the “Old World”.
Now, genetic evidence appears to back up this theory. The article below concludes:
“[We] find strong genetic evidence for pre-Columbian human trans-Pacific voyaging contact (at the turn of the twelfth century), contemporaneous with the Polynesian voyages of discovery in the remote eastern Pacific.“
Gaythia Weis
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A truly amazing and exhaustively cited act of investigative journalism by the phenomenal @zinnia
It turns out that virtually ALL of the sham "science" behind the anti-trans movement can be traced directly back to a very small number of purely ideologically driven "doctors" citing one another over and over again to try to give the impression that standard evidence based trans healthcare is controversial.
It's basically the scientific equivalent of writing a blog with nothing more than your own opinions, your friend writes an article citing your blog, another friend writes an article citing both of you, and then showing up in front of public health boards saying "see, here's 3 articles showing how I'm right!"
In any normal and reasonable political environment, these quacks would be laughed out of the room with such flimsy "evidence". Yet because the far right has captured statehouses across the country, they're laundering this junk science into "real" science.
Gaythia Weis
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Texas AG's investigation into trans care is based on illegal release of kids' medical records: report - Raw Story - Celebrating 19 Years of Independent Journalism
Retired Analytical Chemist
League of Women Voters -voting methods, election security
Board Member Colorado Citizens for Science
Joined Oct 2022
