Notices by Flick 🇬🇧 (flick@spinster.xyz), page 10

Suggestions for tomorrow’s lunch? (Hot or cold.)

@TinyHouse4Life Ooh, those sound good!

@TinyHouse4Life I must admit I was thinking “they’d be even better if they weren’t vegan”!

@thatguyoverthere Oh, never mind, it’s one of the poisonous nightshades, I’ll pass!

@thatguyoverthere What’s that? Very unusual flower.

@stingray @thatguyoverthere Yes, don’t want to risk the dog eating or, tbh, getting near it.

All species of Datura are extremely poisonous and potentially psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic syndrome, psychosis, and even death if taken internally.

Potato hare.

Big sky.

@ninapaley Definitely big sky country around here.

Not just the grouse but the deer are back too. I give up: it’s autumn.

@thatguyoverthere @11112011 Yes but: https://indie88.com/visit-sorvagsvatn-the-optical-illusion-lake-in-the-faroe-islands/amp/

Yep, definitely grouse time.

I thought I heard a little grumble from Grumpy’s favourite wall perch, too.

Hopefully this won’t be the full extent of my bean harvest for the year….

@thatguyoverthere @EmmyNoether @Funsizescot1975 @HebrideanHecate @PohlMe Internet tells me they’re harvest mites, in which case no: wrong land type here, and I had them at my old house with no trouble (for me, they put Very Elderly Horse through the wringer).

@HebrideanHecate @EmmyNoether @Funsizescot1975 @PohlMe I don’t know what the hell it is we have around here — they must be microscopic, I’ve never seen one — but there’s some variety of bitey bugger that comes out in the middle of the day.

They got me a couple of times last summer when I was painting the fence, and then the other day after building that raised bed I saw I had little 1/4” red marks on my arms. They’ve now turned into nasty lumps that are oozing slightly even without any scratching and with antihistamines.

@thatguyoverthere I heard recently that the woodchip / nitrogen thing is probably a bit of a red herring, you only need to worry about it if you dig it in not if you use it as a mulch.

32mins in: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001p7p4

Finally built the last raised bed! Probably going to be mostly ornamentals, including the alliums I bought at the flower show, but I dare say I’ll sneak some perennial brassicas in there as well.

(The fence is manky because the soil from levelling the shed base (which is now in the bed) got chucked there. I’m hoping the rain will wash it clean.)

This is disgusting and I found it hard to read but I think it’s important.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/16/how-pornography-forged-the-trans-movement/

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the sexualisation of surgery is the inclusion of children into the adult world of body-modification fetishism. In a depressing turn, Corey Maison, a young boy who was a viral sensation in 2016 at the age of 14 for declaring that he was actually a girl, now produces homemade pornography of himself. Disturbingly, the regimen of puberty-blocking drugs provided to him in adolescence has produced an eerie semblance of childishness that has continued into his young adulthood.

There are also surveys that have been conducted with the anonymous input of men involved in a paedophilic castration-fetish forum, where they write and host graphic fiction about chemical and surgical castration. Nearly half of the stories involved children, and the most popular stories depict the forcible castration of minors.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/science-fiction-the-crisis-in-research/

The vast majority of scientists are honest, but recent years have seen many cases of scientific misconduct come to the surface, implying there is a systemic problem. The financial and reputational rewards that come with headline-generating results make research fraud all too tempting. High–profile papers on stem cells, superconductivity, psychological priming, drug efficacy and ocean-heat content have been retracted.

Retraction Watch, an organisation that pushes journals to withdraw dodgy studies, estimates that 5,000 papers are retracted a year but that this is a tiny fraction of how many should be. And they argue that most scientists who retract papers suffer no career setback, while ‘the ones whose papers haven’t been retracted have even fewer worries’.