scientists always have to have a new toy to understand new theory

A cautionary tale. There is a small land-dwelling crustacean known variously as a pillbug, roly-poly, woodlouse, or potato bug. One day, I decided to eat one to see how it was.

It turns out that pillbugs store their wastes as ammonia inside their body, so they taste like stale pee. Therefore, do not crunch them up in your mouth.

Determined, I tried again. This time my plan was to swallow the pillbug whole, so to avoid the ammonia. I picked it up, and it rolled into a ball - "Nice" thought I. "Convenient for swallowing."

Halfway down my throat, the pillbug unrolled. Now pillbugs are designed to push their way through dense litter and detritus. They have a rounded, smooth exterior, and multiple legs. Also they can tell "up" from down". So the pillbug decided to walk back up my throat. Every single step.

Turns out pillbug determination is WAY more powerful than a human's puny peristalsis, so I felt that pillbug move its way slowly up my esophagus minute by minute, until it emerged into my mouth. Feeling it had earned its freedom, I spat it out into the garden intact.

There. Now I have told the story and eaten a pillbug, so you don't don't have to. A public service from Sandy Petersen.

Imagine this is a pic:

"I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2^100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of "points" of that length. There is the obvious "draw the line" objection, asking where in 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, … , 2^100 do we stop having "Platonistic reality"? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 2^1 and asked him whether this is "real" or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 2^2, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 2^3, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2^100 times as long to answer yes to 2^100 then he would to answering 2^1. There is no way that I could get very far with this. "

— Harvey M. Friedman, "Philosophical Problems in Logic"

Australia: We have so many different, exciting and beautiful animals. A lot more than you.

UK: Not to brag, but...

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/31241953

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

https://explainxkcd.com/3056/

/s