It’s way too late at night for all those directions, somehow ended up creating my own blind spot by sticking my thumb in my bum.

I’ve kind of been on both sides of this.

For me, returning to and then leaving my home town triggers feelings of melancholy but also relief. I didn’t grow up in a stable, solidly middle-class (or higher) lifestyle, so I’m sure that’s a factor.

While I had a good childhood and loving parents, things got complicated the older I became. And even when I happen upon a reminder of the good times or a fond memory, way too often it’s tainted by how fucked up things were at the time.

On the other hand, “the kids” … it’s wonderful when they’re home for summer. When they’re at my house, at least I know they are safe, happy, and that all their needs are being met, in as much as possible. It’s sad to see them go, when I know it’s going to be months before they’re back.

But also, it’s a sigh of relief when my life can go back to being on my terms sans drama and chaos. It’s almost total bliss when I can go out to the kitchen in my undies for a cup of coffee fully confident that the milk jug won’t be sitting in the fridge completely empty (or with a minuscule amount of milk remaining so as to be practically useless but also technically not empty).

Almost every depiction of Anomalocaris, particularly in those CGI documentaries, make members of this genus look like enormous hideous sea monsters.

But in reality, these things are small, all less than 40 cm (like the largest ones are slightly more than a foot for us in the USA).

Giants of that era I guess and certainly an order of magnitude or more larger than superficially similar modern day relatives like sea monkeys and fairy shrimp. But they’re like the size of a lobster, we’d probably be eating them to extinction these days if they weren’t already extinct.

Since this is Science Memes, I’m feeling emboldened to geek out a bit.

In my part of North America, there are a lot of pollinators besides bees “sexing up” the apple trees. I’m guessing it’s that way in many other parts of the world, too.

On the coolest days, you might not see any bees at all, but the flower flies (aka hover flies) will still go for it. On the warmest days, bees may even be in the minority of pollinators. I see all kinds of different fly species, a multitude of different wasps, many types of beetles, and sometimes even moths and butterflies – weather depending. Plus, even that time of year, there are often other bee species which are active besides just the invasive non-native honey bees.

If I’m being completely fair and objective, not all birds eat “bird seed” and not everyone is well-informed about the diets of various types of bird. But also, at least where I live, some parks have signs that specifically say not to feed the ducks/geese at all, and I can totally understand how that might lead people to conclude that it’s not safe to feed them.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of the time that I was at an insect exhibit when one of the educators running the booth referred to “these animals” and the woman behind me asked something like “bugs is animals?” And it still leaves me perplexed that otherwise seemingly fully functional people make it to adulthood thinking that insects are not animals.

I have doubts that any credible and serious scientific discovery would involve this degree of anthropomorphism when it comes to assigning motivation to an animal’s behavior.

But let’s say I ended up with a hecking case of brain worms who devoured the vast majority of my critical thinking skills and was able to completely ignore that first point, this still doesn’t quite compute. If you’ve ever had cats and/or dogs in your life, then you are probably also aware that each one has its own unique personality and behaviors. Even if we assume that they have human-like rationalizations and emotional capacity, does it even make sense to believe that they all uniformly perceive people in the same uniform manner?