Monday, October 13, 2025

Can You Take a Shortcut to Putting Fish in a Pond?

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/mosquito-fish

No — you can’t just buy “fish eggs” from a grocery or pet store, throw them into a pond, and expect fish to hatch and swim around in a few days. Here’s why:


🧬 1. Most “fish eggs” sold aren’t viable

  • Caviar or roe (like salmon eggs or tobiko) are unfertilized and usually salted or pasteurized — they will never hatch.

  • Even if you somehow got fertilized eggs, they would need very specific conditions (temperature, oxygen, flow, pH, and protection from predators) to survive.


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🌡️ 2. Fish eggs are extremely delicate

  • They can die within minutes if they dry out or are exposed to the wrong temperature.

  • They usually need constant aeration and clean, stable water — conditions that hatcheries carefully control with special tanks and filters.


🐟 3. Even live eggs from hatcheries require permits

  • Many fish species are regulated; moving or releasing them into the wild without a permit can be illegal, especially for non-native or invasive species.

  • Hatcheries that sell viable eggs or fry (baby fish) are licensed and follow disease-control protocols.


✅ What actually works

If you have a pond and want to populate it:

  1. Buy fingerlings or fry (already hatched young fish) from a local licensed fish hatchery.

  2. Match the species to your pond’s ecosystem and climate.

  3. Acclimate them properly to the water temperature before release.

  4. Ensure your pond has oxygenation, shade, and balanced nutrients.

What can you use to ensure mosquitoes don't breed?

  • 🐟 Mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis) — the gold standard. Each can eat hundreds of larvae per day.

  • 🐟 Other fish: guppies, mollies, koi, or goldfish will also feed on larvae.

  • 🦋 Dragonflies and damselflies — attract them by having some shallow plants around the pond’s edges; their larvae eat mosquito larvae too.

Best natural method: stock a few mosquito fish or guppies; they thrive even in small ponds.

  • 🦠 Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) — a safe, naturally occurring bacteria that kills mosquito larvae but is harmless to fish, pets, and humans. (Walmart : Mosquito Beater WSP)

  • 🧼 Vegetable oil film (tiny amount) can suffocate larvae in small stagnant containers, but don’t use oil in a pond with fish.

Bti dunks are the go-to solution for ornamental ponds and rain barrels.

Then how does a lake that completely dried up during a drought end up with fish later once it's full of water again (naturally, I mean)? 

Fantastic question — and one that actually puzzled early naturalists for centuries!
How can fish “reappear” in a lake that completely dried out?
Here’s what’s really going on — several natural restocking mechanisms working together:


🐣 1. Fish Eggs That Survive in Mud (Diapause / Dormancy)

Some fish species — especially annual fish like African killifish, South American rivulus, or desert pupfish relatives — have eggs that can:

  • Withstand complete drying for months or even years,

  • Stay dormant in the dry mud (a state called diapause), and

  • Hatch when rain or floods return and re-wet the sediment.

These eggs have special protective coatings and internal chemistry that keep embryos alive without oxygen or water.

🟢 This mechanism explains “miraculous” fish reappearances in small desert ponds or seasonal wetlands.


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🌊 2. Recolonization by Flooding or Underground Channels

Even if all fish die in a drought, new ones can arrive naturally:

🟢 Especially common in floodplain lakes and oxbows along big rivers like the Mississippi or Nile.


🐦 3. Egg Transport by Birds (Passive Dispersal)

This one sounds myth-like but has experimental evidence:

🟡 It’s rare but real — studies have found viable fish embryos in waterfowl droppings and on their feathers.


🪱 4. Hidden Refuges That Didn’t Fully Dry

What looks “bone-dry” on the surface may still have:

  • Deep pockets or springs underground,

  • Shaded channels or burrows holding a few surviving fish.

Once rains return, those survivors multiply rapidly and repopulate the lake.

🟢 Common with hardy species like catfish, carp, or mudfish that can tolerate low oxygen or even burrow into mud.


 

Sunday, October 12, 2025

You Want More Out of chatGPT? Be Rude (Say Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar)

Don't take my word for it :)

Using ChatGPT 4o, we evaluated responses across these conditions and applied paired sample t-tests to assess statistical significance. Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts.


Read the paper on Arxiv

And the boss:

Prof. Akhil Kumar of Smeal College @ PSU

"To assess whether differences in model accuracy across varying politeness levels were statistically significant, we used the paired sample t-test. This test was best suited for our experimental design, wherein the same set of questions was presented to the language model under different tone conditions."

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Drills You Can Use to Boost Focus

Visit for tips from Harvard

Here’s a compact but effective set of exercises, divided into mental, physical, and environmental drills.


🧠 Mental Endurance Exercises

1. Pomodoro Expansion

  • Start with 25 min focus + 5 min rest.

  • Add 5 min each week until you can sustain 90 min deep sessions.

  • Track distractions; notice patterns instead of fighting them.

2. Monotony Meditation

  • Sit quietly and watch your breath or a candle flame for 10–15 min.

  • When your mind drifts, gently bring it back.

  • This builds mental return-power—key to staying seated for hours.

3. Single-Task Drill

  • Pick one task (e.g., reading a long article).

  • Disable all notifications, keep only one window open.

  • Each time you switch context, mark a tally.

  • Try to reduce tallies each day.

4. Attention Ladder

  • Practice expanding your focus from micro → macro:

    • 2 min on breathing

    • 5 min on a soundscape

    • 10 min on a paragraph or page

    • 20 min on a project section

  • Teaches smooth transition into deep work without fatigue.


💪 Physical & Behavioral Reinforcements

1. The “Sit Still” Challenge
Sit at your desk for 30 min doing absolutely nothing but maintaining posture. No phone, no fidgeting. This strengthens your postural stamina—the bodily half of sitzfleisch.

2. Cold-Start Routine
Before each session:

  1. Stretch shoulders & wrists (1 min)

  2. Slow 3 breaths

  3. Write: “Next 60 min = one small win.”
    It conditions your brain to enter focus mode on cue.

3. Endurance Reading
Read 20 pages of dense material (philosophy, math, history) daily without skimming.
The aim is mental load tolerance, not comprehension speed.


🧭 Environmental & Lifestyle Aids

1. The “Focus Island” Setup

  • Clear your desk of everything not needed for the next task.

  • Have a single beverage, no snacks.

  • Put the phone physically out of reach.

2. Nutrition + Hydration
Steady glucose = steady focus. Prefer protein + slow carbs (nuts, eggs, oats) before long work.

3. Sleep Regularity
Sitzfleisch collapses under fatigue. Protect bedtime consistency more than total hours.


🔁 Weekly Challenge Plan

DayExerciseDuration
MonPomodoro Expansion3 × 25 min
TueMonotony Meditation15 min
WedSit-Still Challenge30 min
ThuEndurance Reading20 pages
FriSingle-Task Drill60 min
SatAttention Ladder30 min
SunReflection + Rest


Saturday, October 04, 2025

You're Kidding. Who Has the Time or Money to Capture these Boats for Evidence?



On paper, it was tidy: a well-meaning government weary of violence on its shores, a coastline threaded with coves and reed-matted estuaries, fishermen who mended nets in the evenings, and an economy that could not stomach the clandestine commerce of drug cartels turning the sea into a highway. The cabinet met under fluorescent lights and slid thick binders across lacquered tables. Photographs of pockmarked wooden launches and satellite tracks lay beside a budget line that read, simply, “Interdiction  Capture & Evidence.”

Capturing the boats was the gold-standard answer. Boarding parties, chain-of-custody, prosecutions that turned wave-battered men into paper-bound criminals  it was justice with a lot of steps and a lot of expense. The coastguard would need new vessels, forensic teams, long legal fights. The administration calculated the cost: money, time, political capital. Not enough done in six months to keep the right wing constituents happy.

So they chose a different plan.

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“If we cannot arrest them, we will erase their passage,” said the Secretary of Defense, and he used the word erase like a single, clean stroke across a map. The plan had a name that suggested minimal fuss: Scythe. Planes would fly low at dusk and dawn; missiles, precise and surgical by the brochure’s glossy design, would sever hulls and scatter wreckage into the deep. The message would be unambiguous: the sea will not be a corridor for violent trade.

 Hegseth signed the operational orders with a hand steady from years of golf. He had a grandson who loved tide pools and collected sea glass. He did not like the cost estimates either, but he liked outcomes that were neat. The pilots rehearsed in simulators; rules of engagement were written and rewritten. They rehearsed languages of restraint: avoid civilians, verify the manifest, strike authorized targets only. The media called it “targeted maritime denial.” The public called it “keeping our kids safe.” The cabinet smiled into cameras and promised fewer dead in the cities.

The first strike was cinematic. At dawn, a patrol plane tracked a launch moving with purpose through a channel that opened to an archipelago. The missile found wood and fuel and a cargo that blurred in the press release as “contraband.” The defense secretary held a press conference on the tarmac. He showed a photo: half a boat collapsing into the sea, an arm of spray frozen by the shutter. “We will not allow these vessels to return,” he said. The applause was polite and big-eyed; the cameras liked the symmetry.

For the cartels, a problem had been solved by force. Their models, like all good ones, adapted. They moved to fiberglass hulls, then to composite rafts that splintered into pieces too small to be effective evidence. They began using uncrewed drones launched from the shore, skimming the water with payloads that shook when they hit the waves. The sea, which had previously been a line for men to cross, became an algorithm to exploit. New routes opened through reefs, under the cover of weather forecasts that the administration could not command.

Worse, the cost of “precision” came in ways the binders never accounted for.

Fishermen named Mateo found his lobster traps full of splinters. His friends’ skiffs  the same kind the cartels sometimes borrowed  were often the first casualties of a misidentified radar blip. An old woman named Rosa lost the small outboard she used to ferry grandchildren to school; when she moored it with a rope of ribbon and prayer, it came home a heap of charred timber. Lawsuits began: punctures in insurance claims, ripples in legal aid clinics. The administration introduced compensation funds; they were slower than the tide.

A different kind of erosion started in the psyche of the coastguard. The pilots who fired the first rounds began to dream in flares  flaming shapes they could not always track. Rules of engagement were not a shield against moral fatigue. “We can’t stop everything,” one pilot told a journalist, “but we can stop this.” The journalist wrote, and the piece carried the pilot’s exhaustion like ballast.

A child in a cliffside village found a fragment of painted hull: inside it, a small sealed tin with a child's drawing and a name  not a cartel name but a fisherman’s child’s scrawl. It traveled from hand to hand in the village like contraband of memory. The drawing showed a boat smiling under a sun; the child had labeled the boat “Nuestra Casa.” The villagers decided to keep the fragment, and they hung it in the townhall beside a map that now bore more red Xs than it did roads.

Years passed. The cartels ceased to operate the way the administration had assumed they would. They learned to use what could not be captured and to place lives and cargo in hands that the administration did not want to see as human. Where once there had been centralized launches, now there were small local brokers, families in rented shacks, boys who ferried packages in hollowed coolers under outgoing fishermen’s catches. The violence the administration had meant to prevent receded from the headlines but arrived in other forms: corrupt port officials, new criminal entrepreneurship on land, micro-trafficking that braided itself through neighborhoods with the quiet, steady persistence of ivy.

There were unexpected gains. The docks were safer for the large, honest trawlers; some cartels lost ships and profit. The cameras caught smugglers less often. Yet the sea did not accept erasure so cleanly. Fishermen learned to repair, to adapt, and to hide nets, and with that knowledge came a small black market of its own  whispered agreements over beer, a barter culture of tools and labor and silence.

In the capital, debates grew thorny. Philosophers and retired generals lined up in op-eds. A young law professor pointed out international legal precedents and treaties that required capture over annihilation, not because law was a romance but because it encoded the possibility of truth  that a man in a waterlogged jacket might one day tell a judge something that could unravel an entire smuggling ring. An elder in a coastal commune wrote a letter about dignity: “Destroying boats is like burning houses before you know who lives in them.”

The defense secretary listened to polls and to grandchildren. He slept poorly, a habit that made him look more human to those who watched him on television. He did not enjoy the way the policy felt when he looked at the tin fragment at a village exhibit and read a child's name in shaky ink. He stood on a cliff and watched the sea, and the sea watched back, indifferent.

Then came the day when a storm arrived  a hurricane that weather models had not quite caught. It rolled over the archipelago with an appetite and left in its wake a coastline rearranged. The administration’s sensors went dark in some places; the pilots could not fly. The cartels’ routes were disrupted for months, not by missiles or policy but by wind and current and the stubborn work of tides. The village that had preserved the tin fragment lost its seawall; houses leaned like old men.

In the aftermath, volunteers  coastguard, fishermen, lawyers, strangers  rowed into the same coves they had once watched with suspicion. They pulled both wreckage and people from the water. Among the debris, a half-sunk hull held a sealed cooler that, against all odds, contained paperwork: ledger books with names and coordinates, inked in a handwriting that belonged to someone who had expected to be captured or at least to be questioned. A judge in the capital opened the evidence and started a chain of prosecutions that had eluded capture-by-missile.

The prosecutions were messy and necessary. They were slower than the defense secretary liked and more costly than his earlier budgets had allowed, but they revealed something the Quiet Harbor Initiative had missed: evidence can be more than broken planks and charred engines. It can be testimony, collaboration, a ledger in a storm. It can be the long work of communities learning to report, to trust, and to hold each other accountable.

In a small hearing room, an elderly fisherman named Mateo sat and told the court about the first time he had seen a strike, about the night he helped haul men from a fragmented skiff. He told the judge about the fear of being mistaken for a smuggler when the government’s weapons broke boats with such certainty you could not tell a guilty launch from a poor neighbor’s skiff. He testified about loss  of time, of nets, of the slow accrual of bitterness  and about a different kind of safety, one that arrived when neighbors chose to speak up rather than hide.

The policy that began as a single-minded belief in removal became, over years, an uneasy lesson in layered responses. The administration amended its doctrine. They invested in cheaper boarding capabilities, in local courts, in programs that gave fishermen legal counsel and better insurance. They learned the expensive arithmetic that favors capture: it costs money now but yields facts later.

By then, the sea had become its own teacher. It offered no final judgement, only cycles of loss and repair. The defense secretary retired and lived by a quieter shore, where he visited the townhall and saw the little painted hull fragment and the children’s drawing pinned beside it. He sometimes spoke with Mateo about nets and weather and the way the ocean remembers, no more moral than the sky.

The Quiet Harbor Initiative remained a lesson scrawled in administration minutes and in the margins of court transcripts: that safety cannot be bought in single gestures of destruction, that crushing a thing to make it disappear often does not make a community safer  it only hides the mechanisms of harm where they can recombine. That sometimes, evidence matters more than fireworks because evidence binds the present to the past in ways that let responsibility be carried forward, like a rope from ship to sho1re.

And on certain evenings, when the wind was soft and the gulls argued over scraps, a child would run to the cliff and press her forehead to the glass of the townhall case where the fragment lay. She would trace with a finger the faded name on the tin and imagine a boat smiling under a sun  Nuestra Casa  and she would ask the old men, “Why was this broken?” They would tell her a story that was not a simple moral but an honest one about choices that ripple, about the stubbornness of the sea, and about how a community learns to be its own evidence.

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Why?

Because the Read aloud thing wasn't showing up on the mobile version, I went into settings and told it to use the Custom for the mobile settings. But now, when I go to View Web Version (on mobile) it no longer shows me the search box. So, on mobile, there is no way to search.