Category Archives: metablogging

Woodblock print of swimming prawns

Eukaryote in Asterisk Magazine + New Patreon Per-post setup

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Eukaryote elsewhere

I have an article in the latest issue of Asterisk Magazine. After you get really deep into the weeds of invertebrate sentience and fish welfare and the scale of factory farming, what do you do with that information vis-a-vis what you feel comfortable eating? Here’s what I’ve landed on and why. Read the piece that Scott Alexander characterized as making me sound more annoying to eat with than I really am.

(Also check out the full piece of delightful accompanying art from Karol Banach.)

Check out the rest of the issue as well. Favorites include:

A new better Patreon has landed

This blog has a Patreon! Again! I’m switching from the old per month payment model to a new pay per post system, since this blog has not been emitting regular monthly updates in quite some time. So if you get excited when you see Eukaryote Writes Blog in your feed, and you want to incentivize more of that kind of thing, try this new and improved system for giving me money.

Here’s the link. Consider a small donation per post. Direct incentives: Lots of people are fans. I’m no effective charity but the consistent revenue does have a concrete and pleasant impact on my life right now, so I do really appreciate it.

It’s important to me that the things I write here are freely available. This will continue to be true! I might think of some short bits of content that will be patron-exclusive down the line, but anything major? Your local eukaryote is here to write a blog, not a subscription service. It’s in the name.

Helpful notes

  • To be clear, the payment will trigger per substantial new post. Updates of content elsewhere, metablogging like this, short corrections, etc, won’t count.
  • You can set a monthly limit in Patreon, even with the per-post model. For the record, I think it’s unlikely I’d put out more than 1-2 posts per month even in the long term future.
  • And of course, you can change your payment or unsubscribe at any old time you please.
Woodblock print of swimming prawns
Excerpt of Horse Mackerel (Aji) with Shrimp or Prawn, by Utagawa Hiroshige, ~1822-23. Public Domain.

From the Month of Halloween – The Devil’s Hoofprints

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UPDATE: I actually posted this to the wrong blog. But I’ll leave it up as a reminder that October has started, and as a taste of what’s happening over at the Month of Halloween 2018 for the rest of the month.  Thanks for your patience!

The story tells of a chilly February morning in 1855. Smoke from the night’s fires puffing up through chimneys. Villagers across the countryside of Southern England woke up to a strange sight: trails of large hoofprints in the thick snow, in single file. These trails crossed the county back and forth, making about a hundred mile journey. The tracks crossed rivers, wound through cities, and most disconcertingly were seen going straight up houses, across the roofs, and going down the other side, without a break. What or who would have left this one-legged gait?

hoofprints.jpg

This text and image is reproduced from Mysteries of the Unexplained, a 1982 publication of The Reader’s Digest Association

This is the first of a few Month of Halloween treats you’ll see drawn from Mysteries of the Unexplained. An early childhood staple of mine (originally making its appearance in my elementary school library), it contains a vast variety of mysterious news reports and anecdotes on a variety of subjects. The concept and some of the entries were borrowed wholesale from Charles Fort, a 1930’s writer who collected such stories as well and knit them together with his own bizarre philosophies. Mysteries of the Unexplained may be less original, but it at least pretends to maintain some objectivity, so there’s that.

(I’ve skimmed over some snippets of Fort’s writing and it reads like 1910’s newspaper journalism mixed with an advertisement for a salt lamp that purifies WiFi – which is to say, delightful.)

So as per everything that comes out of Fort and Mysteries of the Unexplained, I must clarify that this story possibly isn’t real. All of these accounts in this book came from someone and are written down as if infallible, and probably a large number of them were invented wholesale. Or are at least garbled versions of something real. We know that drawings and a description of the event were published in a London newspaper in 1855, and evidence was collected by a vicar in the area around the same time.

It was certainly enough to scare me in middle school. And it’s a good story, right?

Eukaryote Writes Blog resource pages

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The same way I sometimes get interested in a topic and go learn a bunch about it, I tend to collect useful links and resources.  So I’ve put some of those collections here. (The meta-resource page is linked on the sidebar.)

Current resource pages are:

Talking at EA Global

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I’m speaking at both lightning talk sessions (Saturday and Sunday afternoon) at the Effective Altruism Global conference SF this weekend. Catch me talking about evolutionary innovation and extinction on Saturday (5:15), and diversity in teams on Sunday (4:00).

On the off chance that you’ll be at the conference but haven’t already met me, or perhaps know me and want to chat more, feel free to comment on this post or send me an email at eukaryotewritesblog (at) gmail.com to arrange meeting up and saying hello.

I was at a party the night before and got into at least six different conversations about the existential risk / biology overlap, so I’m expecting this weekend to be a really good time. See you there!

(If you can’t make it, I’ll post the talks and longer versions of what I talked about here afterwards.)

Metablogging

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Some housekeeping notes (not your monthly blog post):

I changed the format because I didn’t like the text settings on the old one. Let me know if anything looks broken. (In particular, the main type looks weird to me, but it’s ostensibly the same font and size, so I’m not sure why.)

I added a blogroll to this blog. A short version appears in the sidebar, a longer version appears on its own page.

The official tumblr of this blog is eukaryotetumbles.tumblr.com.

A couple pages on this blog you may not have been aware existed: The commissions page, the “List of online literature I like” page.

This is a really cool video of a jellyfish I thought you might like. (I didn’t take it.)

Suggestions for new posts, feedback, fact-checking, spambots, etc., are always welcome at eukaryotewritesblog (at) gmail.com.

As a human with bills to pay, I’m vaguely considering ways of monetizing my writing here. I know that Patreon is a thing people sometimes use successfully. I think another interesting approach would be one where I provide a list of post topics that are in my to-write queue, and people commit some money towards whichever ones they want to read, and I get the money once the post is published – but I don’t think a mechanism there already exists, and it sounds like a pain to set up. If you have any thoughts or ideas in this area, I’d be curious to hear them.

Finally, I’m still looking for ways to make a nice-looking online dichotomous key. Let me know if you have ideas!

My research on Sentience Politics & metablogging

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Stygiomedusa gigantea was discovered around Antarctica, and has been spotted about once per year over the past century. It’s one meter in diameter, and its tentacles are up to 10 meters long. It’s apparently sometimes known as the “guardian of the underworld”. Image from a Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute ROV.

I wrote two research summaries for the organization Sentience Politics.

How many wild animals are there?

Which invertebrate species feel pain?

The Sentience Politics research agenda (plus supplementary documents for my pieces) is here.

Sentience Politics describes itself: “Sentience Politics is an antispeciesist political think tank. We advocate for a society in which the interests of all sentient beings are considered, regardless of their species membership, and we rigorously analyze the evidence to assess and pursue the most effective ways to help all sentient beings. Among other activities, we organize political initiatives, publish scientific policy papers, and host conferences to bring forward-thinking minds together to address the major sources of suffering in the world.” I think their work is valuable and recommend checking them out.

Metablogging

You may not be aware that I have an about page. If you want to commission me to do some research for you, or have suggestions for future posts, let me know.

If anyone has suggestions for ways to make an online dichotomous key, let me know. (Workflowy has been suggested, but I don’t think it’s flexible enough to make a nice-looking large dichotomous key with a lot of options.)

I’m planning on looking through old posts and updating them factually, or at least adding a disclaimer on top to reflect any information I no longer suspect is accurate.