Martin Jambon 🌍🌎🌏 @mjambon@qoto.org

It's interesting how non-scientists use the word "chemical" for any unfamiliar molecule or element rather than for products of the chemical industry. The term "coding" is another one that's used incorrectly by non-practitioners. Do you know other such terms that immediately identify a speaker as an (unknowingly incompetent) outsider of a field?

This is fog drip: fog from the Pacific Ocean crashing into trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains of northern California. Note how dry it is everywhere except under the tree where it's pouring. These are pretty much the only spots where we can find mushrooms around here in the Summer months.

#mushrooms #fog #california #summer

Updated my /robots.txt to block the big AI image scraping bots: https://martinj.art/robots.txt

PSA: It's fine and recommended to use the term "mushroom" to mean "mushroom". Don't use "fungus" when you're referring only to the fruit body because it would be wrong. The term "fungus" is normally used to refer to a whole organism* or a whole species/group of fungi.

*The notion of an organism in fungi is a bit special because the mycelium can freely be broken into isolated patches - but mushrooms are formed by many strands of mycelium (hyphae) from the same organism/strain getting together and making a beautiful mushroom with a single genome. Mushrooms are not chimeras, normally in most species (for what I know). However, if you mix multiple "individuals" i.e. mycelium from the same species with different genes, it's war. This can be observed on agar plates when growing mycelium from many spores that germinate and mate, resulting in different diploid patches that won't overlap and will slow each other's growth.

#mushrooms #mycology #fungi #biology #individuality

Don't Answer Me by The Alan Parsons Project (1984). I (re)discovered this song 3 weeks ago and then by chance, I watched 'Demon 79', a Black Mirror episode set in 1979 with which I've been obsessed since. This episode has great music from that time and I could swear "Don't Answer Me" was in it but it's not - of course since it was released 5 years later. I think it matches the mood of 'Demon 79' pretty well. The closest song in there would be Art Garfunkel's 'Bright Eyes'.

Even my favorite 70s songs were released in the 80s, isn't it great?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLvFbBR4XOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb2_w0JYFz4
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27731671/

#blackmirror #music #seventies #tv #movie

Don't be bored! Take my 5-min survey consisting in deciding between 10 pairs of my paintings. https://forms.gle/kUy9M5ymKgh2EzEB9
#art #survey #artistonmastodon

I have a soft spot for Albert Bierstadt's paintings that depict California's wilderness as he found it in the 19th century. The composition is romanticized but overall the elements of this painting - including the size of the trees - are realistic.
https://www.thehistoryofart.org/albert-bierstadt/giant-redwood-trees-of-california/
#art #painting #california #trees #giantredwoods #redwoods #nature #wilderness #conservation #bierstadt

How to write a negative product review that people will find useful:
- don't be a dick regardless of how much they deserve it.
- give an uncommon 2-star rating that shows some nuance over the overused 1-star minimum rating.
- describe the terrible things as if they were things that some people may not mind.
- describe the great things and why you don't care so much about them.
- conclude something like "it's not for me", leading others to realize by themselves it's not for them either.

#review #writing

Today, I realized I am my own husband-in-law.

A summary of my current interests: my hashtag column in Mastodon's advanced web interface.
It's missing something about artificial intelligence but I don't know a hashtag that covers what I'm interested in.