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2 mo. ago

Bone worms are cool, I could learn about them forever. They have an endosymbiotic bacteria in their roots that secrete acid that dissolves the bone to allow the worm to absorb the collagen, which it digests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osedax

And even though a symbiont plays a critical role in its life cycle, the genus Osedax doesn't appear to be named after Dax from Star Trek DS9 (which was released before the genus Osedax was even discovered and categorized in the early 2000's), as Osedax is latin for "Bone Eater".

Polychaetes in general are just so damn cool. That's the same class that contains the fairly famous Pompeii worm that lives at the deep sea hydrothermal vents.

Have you been following them for a while? Some of my favorites are about the various whale-fall research they do. The ecology of whale-falls and how it changes over the course of decomposition is just so interesting to me. I actually witnessed one being discovered live on stream back in ~2020, which was really special. During lockdown when I was working from home I had a dedicated computer set up to play the stream 24/7 in my apartment, with the volume turned up, so I'd never miss any action.

For other enjoyers of deep sea shenanigans, EV Nautilus is a vessel that travels all over the planet to perform deep-sea research with their ROV Hercules.

They live-stream the video from their rover on Youtube and the chat can ask the scientists questions, etc. It's really cool, I've been following them for several years. Sometimes it's hard to catch the streams during the dives, though, as the nature of global time zones usually puts it at an inconvenient time...

They're diving in the Marianas Trench this month, actually, what a coincidence. The expedition just started yesterday! https://nautiluslive.org/cruise/na172

Huh, I've actually read NONE of those things, and none of it even looks familiar from the lists I saw.

Over the last 2 years since I started reading again I've blasted through Hannu Rajaniemi, Poul Anderson, Peter Watts, Richard Morgan, Amy Thomson, William Gibson, Dennis E. Taylor, Robert L. Forward, qntm...

The only authors left in my reading list are Alastair Reynolds and Vernor Vinge.

Looks like my reading list is about to expand significantly! Thanks! I'm not super picky with what I read, and I tend to enjoy pretty much anything. I think the only thing I haven't enjoyed to the point of not even finishing the series was Liu Cixin's trilogy. I read The 3 Body Problem because everyone says you just have to read it, but it just felt like a slog to me and I never picked up the next book, I think mostly just due to the way the novel translates to English.

A couple years ago I moved from desktop to laptop. Now I'm moving back to desktop. Building a humble sleeper in an almost new-old-stock Dell Dimension 4600 case (that black and grey one they modeled the CS Source pc after) to fit in with my pile of beige Windows 95/98/XP machines.

I recently learned that Asus still makes motherboards with green PCB's, which is amazing for this kind of build, and I just bought one today. The motherboard also has a full regular DB9 serial port on its rear I/O, a second COM port header, and a PCI slot (not PCIe... the original PCI, which is excellent because I have so many weird interesting PCI cards)... All that retro/vintage goodness, but it's rocking an A520 AM4 chipset, and a PCIe gen 3 x16 port (with 2 more x1 ports). They also make an AM5 and several iterations of Intel socket versions! The AM4 board was on sale for ~$70 USD, and I happen to have a Ryzen 7 2700 kicking around. (Which I just now discovered that isn't compatible with the A520 chipset... oops. Cheap Ryzen 5 5500 it is!)

I'm keeping the floppy drive since I actually still do a lot of work with floppies, I've got a floppy-to-USB board for that, and also picked up a SATA DVD burner, and have 1 additional 5.25" bay that will likely host a rotating cast of random vintage nonsense.

Thanks for the detailed response! I'm really looking to keep Lemmy as no-frills as possible to try and prevent myself from getting addicted to something again. The default web skin and interface is pleasantly bland, I'm liking it so far.

I'm finishing up Permutation City, then onto Distress (both by Greg Egan), then the Revelation Space series is next in my list! It's been there for a while, looking forward to reading it.

Have you read any other hard sci-fi lately you can recommend? I'm getting close to the end of several lists I just scraped off the internet for "best hard sci-fi", so I might have already read it, but in case I haven't, I'm always looking to add things to my reading list!

When I run out of other things to read, I already have all 6 Dune books on standby...

I'll have to figure out where to do that, it sounds like what I'm looking for. (Edit: Well, that was easy. Found it in the settings. Love that it's so simple.) I finally decided to let my reddit account drift off into the void a couple weeks ago, it was really hurting my mental health. I'd had the account for over 10 years and have high 6-figure post and comment karma, but like... I recognize that doesn't really mean anything, but the way it's gamified, whenever I'd make a controversial post or say something stupid or wrong and get even -1 karma, it'd ruin my day in a serious way. I felt tied to the platform, like I constantly had to "perform".

I was getting kinda lonely after leaving, since I also don't really have any social media outside an instagram that I just post my photos on, which is when I stumbled across Lemmy. I am feeling really nostalgic for the old days of forums, but sadly it seems outside super niche communities, forums are dead.

Anyway, very long story short, I'm a reddit castaway looking to just chill and talk with a smaller community of strangers for a bit. This casual conversation community seems nice.