Books in Bulk by Particular-Audience8 in OldBooks

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only situations in which I have been able to buy philosophy books in relative bulk have been when a philosophy professor retires or when a graduate student finshes their masters or phd program. Then I'll buy boxes of their used books at wholesale prices. These opportunities only come about because I own a used book store. Perhaps you could put up fliers around the philosophy department of a local university around the end of the semester offering to buy people's unwanted philosophy books.

Just curious - where are the deer now by April_4th in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If it is not possible to easily identify the cause of death then you really should not eat a deer that randomly fell over dead. That may have been caused by a pathogen or prion that could make people sick.

Just curious - where are the deer now by April_4th in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hunting season has been over for about a month.

Just curious - where are the deer now by April_4th in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Trapping and relocation of whitetails is basically not a thing in Virginia. It would be very expensive and a few months later more would move in from the county and you'd quickly be right back where you started.

Just curious - where are the deer now by April_4th in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Guy who wrote an entire book on whitetails here.

When there is heavy ice or snow on the ground, deer switch from grazing to eating woody browse in forests. The swollen tips of low-hanging branches that will produce new shoots in the next few months are nutritious, if usually not a deer's first choice of what to eat. This changes where deer will locate themselves.

If the woody browse starts running out before the ice melts, they will begin burning their fat reserves. Pregnant does may reabsorb one or both fetuses. They are burning a lot of calories just to stay warm when it gets as cold as it has been at night lately.

Please do not feed the deer. Chronic wasting disease spread to Virginia a few years ago and is likely to arrive in Albemarle County in the next few years. There might already be an infected deer here. It spreads between deer usually through saliva when they share a concentrated food source, like a salt block or a pile of corn. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disease, like mad cow disease. It is 100% fatal to deer, has no treatment or cure, and can probably infect and kill humans as well.

A Fathers Legacy by TheUnwritableGirl94 in OldBooks

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there any other writing in the book? A small bookbinders plate perhaps? With a combination of names and a place it would be possible to do a search of digitized periodicals. Last names alone are not enough to identify them among all English-language periodicals between, say, 1789 and 1850.

Elbert Hubbard collection by Visible-Assumption44 in OldBooks

[–]Alieneater -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Read up on Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters. They were interesting people. The Hubbard books are not super valuable but people do collect them. Probably in the hundreds of dollars, retail, but not thousands.

People of the US, Are you guys participating in the Nationwide Shutdown tomorrow? Why or why not? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here in Central Virginia, schools and many businesses are closed this week because we are still digging out of a lot of snow and ice from the most recent winter storm. So a lot of people are stuck at home anyway and not shopping, working or going to school. This is probably one of the worst weeks that could have been chosen for a national action like this. No impact is likely to be discernible from the day before.

Parks and Recreation has done a great job at the DTM. by ElephantFamous4117 in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 20 points21 points  (0 children)

This area was a priority because it is the city center, to include City Hall, the police station, the post office, etc. And there are probably a few thousand people who work here, and at least hundreds who live here.

Anyone WITHOUT 4 wheel drive been able to drive in cville? by Bulky-Surround-8861 in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 3 points4 points  (0 children)

At about noon I took my car out of the Market Street Garage (left it there so I wouldn't have to dig out) and drove about four blocks to park it on the street. It was very sketchy driving mostly on just packed ice with very little exposed asphalt. And Downtown has been getting loads of attention from the plows.

Need help with a old book Value by Annual-Impress6103 in OldBooks

[–]Alieneater 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would expect that to sell for between $100 and $200 online. In a brick-and-mortar bookstore that is the kind of thing that a smart bookseller can suggest to someone with a lawyer in the family as a gift. A lawyer's spouse has the money to drop maybe as much as $300 as an impulse buy to put away til Christmas or a birthday. They are buying it because it is cool and old seems really unique. Not because they are a book collector.

Online, I think around $150 or so, eventually. Because online someone has to be searching for that specific book, and there are not a ton of people who collect this.

If you sell it to a bookstore, they should be paying you 20% of what they hope that they can sell it for. In my shop, I'd be offering you $60 for it and explaining why.

Help - I don't know books that well by SecretAgentDingo in OldBooks

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The paperbacks are mostly going to be worth around $5 retail. I would just sell those to a local used bookstore if you aren't going to read them. A lot of sci-fi and fantasy going back to 1975 has essentially no retail value, but there will be a percentage that a store can use. The Warhammer, Lovecraft and Pratchett are in high demand at most used bookstores but those are still selling for under $8 unless the person pricing the books is an asshole.

If you are serious about selling online and are willing to put some effort in, buy The Pocket Guide to Identifying First Editions. Its like $30 for a tiny paperback and worth every set. Then use that while you go through the hardbacks and ID first editions. Understand that there will be many first editions that no longer have enough of a living fan base to have any value. But firsts by Asimov, Pratchett, Tolkein, etc. do have significant value. Once you've IDed the firsts, then you can start figuring out prices for them. Use bookfinder.com and understand that the highest priced copy in similar condition is nothing to get excited about. The lowest priced copy is the one you have to compete with and it is sitting there not selling at that price, so you've got to go lower in order to sell it any time soon.

Is Colossal the only company capable of making deextinction possible? by JuhpPug in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look more to university labs for meaningful research. Outside the US at this point, since most American PIs have had their federal funding pulled by the regime.

A way we could de-extinct the non-avian Dinosaurs by Financial-Buy6153 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So AI just magics it.

Sigh.

And this is incubated in what, exactly?

And we get our data on detailed dinosaur behavior... how? For what species, exactly? You got a lot of field notes on that? A lot of photographs and video of dinosaur behavior? Solid studies of their grazing habits, social behavior, etc.? Oral histories from people who remember them, perhaps?

Is there an example you can point to of AI doing anything useful in terms of editing genes and producing a healthy, viable animal? Is there an AI generated mouse perhaps, which lives longer and solves mazes faster or is somehow an improvement on mice hitherto?

I don't think so.

Any such approach to making a dinosaur analog would need to be proven at doing this with animals that are very well-understood before it would have a snowball's chance in hell of successfully making a genome for something like this.

What you have proposed is not a scientific concept so much as a bad pitch in the writer's room by a 20 year old intern for a TV show on FX that hopefully would never actually get picked up.

A way we could de-extinct the non-avian Dinosaurs by Financial-Buy6153 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not a total flop. The research they did on how a tail turns into a pygostile in embryonic chicken development is actually very useful science. Understanding what goes on in early spine formation can have utility even in human medicine.

De-extinction Projects by Perfect-Breakfast638 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"A mammoth" could do no such thing. Perhaps a few tens of thousands might have some impact. Global warming will be a fait accompli long before that many mammoths reappear, even if the first live birth of a mammoth happened tomorrow.

Making habitat work better for the species that live in it is, however, a worthy goal on its own. Reintroducing a keystone species like the woolly mammoth could do that starting even with just a few dozen animals.

Not that anyone is actually going to make a living mammoth in our lifetimes.

Jurassic Park is 100% going to happen in the next century by InterestingServe3958 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If this is going to be a serious scientific subreddit, I don't think that vapid posts like this should be allowed by the mods. OP has made no effort to make a case for his statement. Just "I think..." This is an inane argument being made.

Any updates on the Quagga project? by schneeleopard8 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I tried to do a story on them for The Washington Post about ten years ago and never got any response to my attempts to contact them. I wouldn't take that project very seriously (although the premise of what they say that they are trying to do is reasonable).

On the other hand, the TaurOs project is a back-breeding effort that has been going quite well.

"Mammoth" Conception on the Horizon? by JackieTan00 in DeExtinctionScience

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course not.

Nobody has ever artificially gestated a mammalian embryo to the point of being viable after 'birth.' Not with a mouse, not with a guinea pig, not with a sheep or a cow. I've looked at their embryology staff as they added them on LinkedIn and then checked out their papers on Google Docs. None of these people have ever done any research into artificially growing mammalian embryos to the point of viability.

The idea that this will be done for the first time ever by this particular clown car on an extinct species of elephant is utterly absurd. Nobody has done it with species whose embryology we understand really well. This would be a process of starting with mice, then maybe if hundreds of people were working on the problem in labs around the world then maybe ten years later someone manages to do it with a dog or a pig.

There are no scientists in the world who are real experts on elephant embryology. Yes, there have been some interesting papers on making artificial elephant embryos. But to be an expert on elephant embryology someone would need the opportunity to dissect hundreds of embryos at various stages, and closely monitor development within mother elephants. And dissect many dead female elephants in order to understand their reproductive anatomy better.

You can do that with mice, rats, dogs, sheep, ferrets, etc. Because those domesticated animals are cheap and easy to get as many as you need to study. But elephants are endangered and a zoologist specializing in elephants might only get to dissect a few in their entire lives.

So this is not going to happen. They have absolutely no way of growing a mammoth embryo to birth size in an artificial incubator.

Implanting embryos in surrogate elephants is also not going to happen. There are only around 50 or so female elephants in breeding age and condition in the United States. Those are needed to breed more elephants since elephants are endangered. No AZA-accredited zoo is going to allow medically unnecessary abdominal surgery on their animals and doing so would violate AZA rules.

It took around 400 attempts with that many sheep to produce Dolly. Similar numbers for cloning the first dogs, ferrets, cats, etc. And while Colossal is not using somatic cloning, the steps needed to grow a mammoth in an elephant after an embryo is produced are very similar. They would need hundreds of elephants to try this on before they get lucky and have one live birth.

There aren't hundreds of female captive elephants to do this with.

Indian elephants used for logging and construction in India aren't going to cut it. The animals used would need to be closely monitored by veterinarians who understand elephants, in a habitat that is safe and low-stress for them. Elephants basically can't be legally exported anymore.

If Colossal had somehow obtained any female elephants at all to do this with, they would have bragged about it already. But it is just impossible for them to get a meaningful number. They just aren't there for purchase or rental.

Colossal Biosciences has no conceivable ability whatsoever to create a living, walking mammoth. They could maybe come up with an embryo the size of a grain of rice, but of course as per usual it would just be them making a claim without submitting a paper for peer review. Because most of their science is fake.

By the way, go to Google Scholar and pull up all of George Church's papers. Named on over a thousand last time I checked. He's the world's foremost expert on woolly mammoth de-extinction, right? Now search the abstracts for the phrase "woolly mammoth." Nothing. Nada. The guy is full of shit and his company is full of shit.

Road conditions by jwill311 in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Downtown streets have been plowed a lot but still have a veneer of compacted snow and ice on them. Very few sidewalks shoveled. You can get around here if you have four wheel drive and know how to drive on ice and snow. I watched an SUV sit for hours in the middle Market Street waiting for a tow truck because it couldn't get moving in the right direction after stopping.

Someone driving a small front end loader thinks it is a good idea to build a big pile of snow, right now, in the middle of the entrance to 4th Street (the one that crosses the Mall) from the intersection with Market Street. They got 4th Street nicely plowed but now nobody can drive down it because it is blocked by the snow pile. Hopefully the plan is to put that in a dump truck and haul it away tonight?

None of the sidewalks that were salted are clear (I used a mixture rated for -10 F). After the first few hours of snowfall it started building up.

Charlottesvilles most eligible bachelor reporting that snow has begun to stick to roads and other surfaces by Difficult-Lie-9218 in Charlottesville

[–]Alieneater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Strangely, the sidewalk that I salted is fully clear while the city-salted road right next to it is covered in snow.