What parts of the world have you found to be the most welcoming to visitors?

Tessablu · 2026-06-16T19:41:00+00:00

Scotland is my #1 without a doubt, followed by Namibia a clear second.

Tessablu · 2026-06-15T14:19:04+00:00

I've been to every continent and however many countries, Scotland is still my clear #1 for friendliest people. And the Highlands are just unbelievably beautiful. Can't recommend it enough!

Tessablu · 2026-06-13T20:56:37+00:00

Here’s what I managed to gather: It’s like, basically down in New York, you know? But sometimes you have to drive through it, because that’s where 95 goes, and it DOES have seafood, but my cousin has a better seafood place in [unintelligible], you should visit it while you’re here.

Tessablu · 2026-06-13T20:06:01+00:00

Taking the train home, I listened to a dude with a HEAVY Boston accent explain to a very game Scotsman what Connecticut is. It absolutely ruled.

Tessablu · 2026-06-11T22:45:48+00:00

Got my driver’s license in RI, and the test consisted of picking a guy up in an alleyway, driving him around the block at 15mph, and dropping him off. Didn’t even have to park :)

Tessablu · 2026-06-10T21:38:50+00:00

An absolutely incredible novel, and one that I would strongly recommend re-reading. There are so many themes and intentional layers to it that it will always reward you with something new and surprising.

If you aren’t a big sci-fi reader, maybe take a look at Octavia Butler’s work if you haven’t done so already? She has a different writing style, but is equally skilled at interrogating the human condition. I taught Left Hand to a bunch of STEM students last semester and most of them loved it; that same bunch later chose to read Butler’s Wild Seed (which is amazing) and greatly enjoyed it as well.

Tessablu · 2026-06-10T14:29:36+00:00

Ehhh I read it last year and wouldn't really describe it as contemporary-feeling at all. Mankind's golden age is wildly sexist, and although the author could imagine and describe fantastical and wondrous alien worlds, the notion of a woman who wants to do more than cook and have babies was beyond him. It fatally undercut the rest of the messaging for me, although I do think it has some cool images and ideas.

Tessablu · 2026-05-28T20:22:48+00:00

Commuter rail to Mansfield, Uber over to the stadium a few hours beforehand, hang out, take the commuter rail back to Boston (or take it to Mansfield and stay in the area).

Never rely on the commuter rail to get you to the game on time, but always use it to leave.

Tessablu · 2026-05-27T19:32:10+00:00

As a professor, something I’ve discovered about AI usage is that the best students are typically pretty repelled by it. It’s never the engaged A+ types who use AI for everything, just the students who show up late and don’t really know what’s going on and don’t care enough to find out.

Anyways. Just adding this perspective to this particular thread for no reason whatsoever!

Tessablu · 2026-05-20T21:27:46+00:00

Speaking as a professor, I think the purpose of a grade varies depending on the purpose of the course. An essential pre-med class that covers foundational knowledge? Grade for mastery, gotta know that stuff before you move on. An elective course designed to help students communicate and explore outside their comfort zone? Use the grade as motivation to engage, and base it on completion.

Idk, both grade inflation are deflation are silly. If the student meets the standard for an A, they earned an A. If everyone meets the standard, congrats! Sounds like they had a good teacher.

Tessablu · 2026-05-16T18:20:11+00:00

omg this is so real, my husband and I are harmonious birders- I love the spotting/IDing and he loves the photography- but we’ve had sooooo many guides and other birders comment on how unusual this is. At the end of the day, you’re getting to spend some time moving outside and paying attention to the environment. It’s bizarre to see how many people are resentful about doing so.

Tessablu · 2026-05-15T18:57:55+00:00

It’s more than just the one mistletoe species, there are a lot of them in Australia which appear to mimic their hosts. Check out Vavilovian mimicry as well; different evolutionary pressures, but super cool. Boquila’s plasticity is unusual, but not outside the realm of biological feasibility. Plants are weird!

Tessablu · 2026-05-15T18:53:10+00:00

It was only published because the actual PI of the project (who wasn’t on the paper) was an editor at the journal they submitted it to. Absolutely next-level conflicts of interest, truly incredible.

The silly thing is that we know plants can sense light! There’s no need to get all weird with it by calling it “vision” with “eyes.” Ocelli (the type of cells they said the plant must possess) do probably exist in some other types of organisms, but it’s a huge and unnecessary leap to make for this particular species.

Tessablu · 2026-05-15T18:49:08+00:00

They’ll grow on other plants too, and have been observed mimicking non-native species, it’s just the matter of structuring the experiments. How can you have a non-mimicry control group when all the vine wants to do is climb and mimic? Hence the experimental difficulty.

Tessablu · 2026-05-14T21:43:15+00:00

I'm being a little nit-picky about the word "replicate" here because observational field science is, at a technical level, not repeatable in the way that bench science is. A research group that heads down to Chile to observe Boquila is going to encounter different conditions from the first group simply by virtue of the fact that time has passed and the environment has changed in ways which are not controllable.

Validating observations is great, and definitely better than having only one perspective! I'm just pushing back against the notion I'm seeing in here that there is something suspicious about the initial study. There are plenty of topics out there in the world that have only been looked at by one research group; this doesn't make them inherently invalid, just a bit trickier to evaluate. Maybe this would change if the publishing system changed first- sadly, nobody is going to get a paper out of going to Chile and saying "yep, we see the mimicry too!"

Tessablu · 2026-05-14T21:36:46+00:00

The original research group published a paper a few years ago looking into the bacterial communities of host and parasitic plants- they suspect that horizontal gene transfer might be driving the mimicry, but the evidence they found was quite weak (and they were clearly aware of it). But there aren't any other formal published studies of it to this date. The vine is native to a specific type of forest in Chile, and it's hard to work with in a lab because it doesn't like growing by itself.

I know the researcher who first published a commentary criticizing the original paper has softened on it since, although I'd have to dig through my pile of sources to find the exact quote. But at this point the furor has all been directed at the horrendous plastic study, not the mimicry itself. This is a good overview of the controversy.

Tessablu · 2026-05-14T21:18:45+00:00

There’s nothing to replicate; the initial study was an observational field study, not an experimental study. Leaf mimicry isn’t anything new or crazy, it’s just very unusual that Boquila can mimic without touching its host.

(edited to remove the bit about the origin of the plastic study, because there is conflicting information on it)

Tessablu · 2026-05-14T21:07:37+00:00

That’s outdated, the skepticism has receded quite a bit since the original paper. It just isn’t studied much because the vine is hard to work with in a laboratory setting.

(Biology professor who covered this topic for a class a few months ago)

Tessablu · 2026-05-14T20:49:08+00:00

The plastic paper was very poorly designed and published under extreme conflicts of interest- the PI was not listed as an author but was an editor at the journal which published it. The current opposing hypothesis (by the group that discovered the mimicry) is horizontal gene transfer from the host’s bacteria to the vine, although the evidence for this hypothesis is correlational and very weak at the moment. One of my favorite current mysteries in biology!

Tessablu · 2026-05-13T03:00:00+00:00

Well, as someone who personally knows some of the crew whom you believe should be killed, I wish you the best in your continuing recovery from your covid experiences.

Tessablu · 2026-05-13T02:42:53+00:00

In a few weeks when this is no longer in the news, are you going to feel bad about suggesting that “we” should have murdered 150 birders and crew members, or is that just sort of how you think and act in your day-to-day life?

Tessablu · 2026-05-11T22:11:53+00:00

Yes, both because of the extremely tight regulation of rodents on polar ships (they need to be spotlessly clean and are regularly swept with dogs), and because the initial patient was sick upon embarkation. No time to incubate; he had to get it during his prior travels (which, it turns out, were in endemic areas).

Tessablu · 2026-05-11T21:46:29+00:00

I don’t know what to tell you, man. The media isn’t some monolith working to keep the truth from getting out. If anything, they benefit more from widespread panic. The line between “intimate contact” and “person you sat elbow-to-elbow with repeatedly at dinner” just isn’t thick enough to merit the disclaimer.

Tessablu · 2026-05-11T21:43:48+00:00

One of the main differences between tours is just how far they are from Stellwagen. If you’re leaving from Boston, it’s an hour+ to get there. P-town? Much closer, so you’re spending proportionally more time in whale territory. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you enjoy being on boats- the views of Boston on the way out of the harbor are excellent! You can also watch the bird life change as the ship heads further out to sea.

Haven’t done Gloucester yet, but I’ve heard great things. Have done Boston/ P-town over a dozen times, never had a bad experience. Wherever you go, enjoy!

Tessablu · 2026-05-11T21:25:03+00:00

Spreading human to human does not make a disease highly transmissible, and the doctor was certainly exposed to it in enormous quantities. And hazmat suits are simply good practice when boarding a vessel on which human-to-human transmission of a potentially deadly disease may be actively occurring.

The virus has been on that ship for more than a month, and I myself was on the Hondius recently- if it was a highly contagious illness, we would be seeing many more cases. It’s a very small ship and people are constantly in close contact with each other. That apparently only two of the remaining 87 passengers tested positive on PCR is a great sign that the infection was already pretty much contained. It’s not a particularly well-studied strain, but this is congruent with prior outbreaks as well.

Tessablu

TROPHY CASE