Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
Well, for starters, every time I looked at it as an editing project, I found something less like work to do.
This is familiar. Yesterday, I wrote two poems - poems!, not songs - so I could enter "PromptMaster !" , so I could enter "The Contest Challenge" , which is a year-long commitment that was not included in my 2026 writing goals. All to avoid adding a new chapter to my novel. I'm maybe two scenes away from my midpoint crisis. I'm not if I'm dreading torturing my characters, or if my subconscious thinks it's not torturous enough. Either way, I have two poems now and can't even sing them. 😂
What can I say? "The story sounds great, get to editing!" No, I have the same affliction; I've written great stories, but when it comes to editing, they sit and smolder, getting colder by the year.
Shorter how? Shorter by saying "Don't go on social media."
I do think this suggestion has some issues, but I think that's because I've seen social media be a useful way to promote activities in Minneapolis that give people an opportunity to help others (e.g. informing people of food/essentials drives) and/or advertise events where people in the city can decompress for a bit. When used strategically, social media can shed light on things that may get overlooked with current legacy media incentives being more twisted than a tourniquet.
Oldest Son started dating a Chinese political refugee last year. The Chinese woman was kicked out of China for posting something critical of the government on the internet. They didn't exactly kick her out, but they are blocking her from being employed, rent an apartment, register a car ... they essentially blocked her from life.
Soooooo ... she lives with us now. And, yes, she is a fourth child to me. Although her English is very good, there remains somewhat of a language barrier. There are cultural differences. Oh, and don't get me started on China's One Child policy that has created a person who has no self-awareness because she was doted on by her parents and grandparents and never told to consider others. (Like chewing with the mouth closed. Like leaving some of the fun food things for others. Like not giggling loudly in the middle of the night when others are trying to sleep.)
Argh.
Well, she loves my son. Or she loves having a free place to live. I don't care. Even with all my above gripes, she is good company. She's easy going, funny, creative, and carries her own weight in the household. She has her own car and she's giving rides when the other cars are booked up.
And, and this is crucial, when I sit her down and explain life in a large~ish household, she immediately adapts and starts following the rules.
I like robots..but according to all the movies and books..they are going to be our downfall. They could really be a big help..but our government is going to turn them toward war etc.
Re #10: My first thought was of Data connecting with Locutus-Picard after he was rescued from the Borg. As for direct ad injection, of course it's going to happen, because it would be way better than subliminal advertising.
Well, I don't know. Is the Dead Sea really a sea? Are the Blue Ridge really mountains? Is the East River a river? And I won't get us started on Pluto again.
The sun is the biggest object in the solar system; at about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) across, it's more than 100 times wider than Earth.
Using linear measurements to compare celestial bodies can be misleading. Sure, you can try to picture 100 Earths edge-to-edge across the sun's apparent disc, or find one of the many illustrations of such that exist. Or you can look up a volumetric comparison to find that its volume is like 1,300,000 times that of Earth's.
This doesn't mean that 1.3M Earths would fit inside the thing. Think of a crate of oranges, and how there's always space between the spheres.
Despite being enormous, our star is often called a "dwarf." So is the sun really a dwarf star?
We could call it a "tank" if we wanted to. So is the sun really a tank star?
My point here is that, at first glance, this isn't a science question; it's one of categorization or nomenclature. It's like asking "is homo sapiens really sapiens?"
Dwarf stars got their name when Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung noticed that the reddest stars he observed were either much brighter or much fainter than the sun. He called the brighter ones "giants" and the dimmer ones "dwarfs..."
I do like knowing the history of science, and of words. Here, just as a wild guess, Hertzsprung was probably drawing on Norse mythology, which is absolutely crawling with giants and dwarfs.
Incidentally, there's some debate over the difference between "dwarfs" and "dwarves." Best I can tell, "dwarves" is generally used for the fantasy race popularized by Tolkien and blatantly stolen by D&D (Tolkien himself stole it from Norse mythology). From what I understand, humans of smaller stature prefer "dwarfs," and it's also the nomenclature for astronomical objects.
The sun is currently more similar in size and brightness to smaller, dimmer stars called red dwarfs than to giant stars, so the sun and its brethren also became classified as dwarf stars.
Like I said, it's a categorization thing. Also, "currently" is misleading. Yes, based on our best available information, the sun won't stay the same forever; it'll eventually blow up and turn red, or vice-versa. But "eventually" means billions of years from now.
Calling the sun yellow is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the sun's visible output is greatest in the green wavelengths, Guliano explained. But the sun emits all visible colors, so "the actual color of sunlight is white," Wong said.
One reason some non-scientists can't get into science is the nomenclature, though. For instance, the sun is also described, by astrophysicists at least, as a black body. As in black-body radiation. This confuses the fuck out of people, and they start muttering about "common sense," as if that were something that existed.
"The sun is yellow, but less-massive main sequence stars are orange or red, and more massive main sequence stars are blue," Carles Badenes, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.
One of the science things that confused me as a kid was that, with stars, red is cooler and blue is hotter. Our bathroom faucet was labeled with blue for cold water and red for hot. Thus began my journey of understanding.
Color is probably less confusing than "dwarf" vs. "giant," though one can take those descriptions as being "smaller than average" or "larger than average" without getting too far off track. And yet, as we've seen, color descriptions can be misleading, as well.
Whatever box you put the sun in, and no matter how much I mutter about "the accursed daystar," it's still the sun, and while I avoid its direct rays like a vampire, it would suck if it weren't there.
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