the victory of atom and romance
screwworms, snakebite dude, and getting stigmericly borked
Screwworms have returned to Central America. (via)
so look, we have a problem - you probably really don’t want to read up on why we cared so much about eradicating them in the first place. But ignoring the gross awfulness, there’s actually a really interesting story here about the history of how we’ve pushed screwworms out of north america since the 50s!
“The man who came up with the scheme, and believed in it most passionately, was Edward F. Knipling, a USDA entomologist who, in the 1930s, spent long hours watching screwworms mate.” (The Atlantic)
and then he figured out how to sterilize them using cobalt-60 radiation. bless.
for decades, we’ve maintained a screwworm wall in Panama by airdropping sterile males there weekly. Females mate only once in their lifetime, so if they waste that opportunity on a sterile male, boom, no next generation. This was the Neutral Zone - the air gap - keeping screwworms from spreading back up from South to North America
“You just can’t castrate enough flies,” his colleagues would say, but they were wrong. You CAN castrate enough flies!
but then, as with so many things, we let down our guard + climate change + cattle-smuggling = trouble
“They needed screwworms that were damaged enough to be sterile but not so damaged that they could not attract a mate in the wild.”
this guy (Tim Friede) is definitely NOT too damaged to attract a mate in the wild, come on, look at him, dude suffered for science to save lives (an antivenom researcher was “calling vivariums hoping for a clumsy snake researcher” before finding Tim and his awesome blood), how is that not lady catnip
early on: “I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days.” so we know he knows how to get right back on the venomous horse and all that.
i’m also reminded of Wolf Hall:
NPR on Tim Friede: “These snakes may be dangerous but he's often found them easier to understand than people. The relationship is clear. ‘They want to kill me,’ he says. ‘I want to survive.’”
Hilary Mantel’s Thomas More: “Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take it from me. You cannot reasonably believe I will yield it.”
Friede doesn’t wander around getting bitten by snakes anymore (bc he was told not to, for science!). But he says he misses "just knowing where you can take your mind… To know you can beat that and keep your calm and keep your cool, it's a wonderful thing." (NPR)
other assorted entertainment
Dominus’s toy octopus vs a corrupt Philly traffic court judge
perfect sentences
“you are a visitor here, and what that means is, you don’t have to fit in” - Min Lew’s father
“This review is ostensibly about a Japanese man who makes overpriced traditional ethanol. But it is actually about a Western man who makes overpriced traditional essays.” - gwern
“Irrespective of their age, they were able to get a lot of ants.” - Samuel Mutua (via)
speaking of ants, sometimes their pheromone trails get stigmericly borked and they end up following each other round and round in an army ant death spiral
someone could write a novel based on the North Korean remote employee thing where they fraudulently get jobs as devs for western tech companies and supposedly send their salaries to fund the government or something. Ideally crossed with some of the dystopian space settlement ideas from Ozy / City on Mars.
you used to be able to buy heroin from the Sears catalog (via)
you got this far, you deserve a photo of young hot Stalin just as a treat