I Am Completely Serious

Bugs don't actually ever "develop a resistance" to pesticides, right? The fleas aren't actually "getting immune" to the old pet flea meds? These things aren't antibiotics, they're poisons that eat through the little things' chitin and eggshells and stuff. How exactly are you going to overcome that?

Bacteria are able to develop immunities to antibiotics that because their life-cycles are really, really short - they evolve really fast. Also, because huge populations of them are constantly being bomboarded with huge quantities of antibiotics due to Industrial Shit I Do Not Actually Understand, so there's plenty of opportunity for one bacteria to come up with a helpful mutation to resist a specific antibiotic and reproduce a lot.

Bugs don't live long, but they live at least a few days, which means population-wide genetic changes are going to take orders of magnitude longer than they do for bacteria. And they've got other places to live than on crops and domestic animals, and we're not spraying pesticides in the forest or giving flea pills to deer.

So I feel like if bugs are "learning" anything on a genetic level, the majority of survival-conducive mutations that actually get passed on are going to be the ones that tell them to stay away from humans and our stuff, rather than tiny changes that make their exoskeletons a little tougher in the face of something corrosive.

Evolution likes path-of-least-resistance shit like that, right? Even if a flea all of a suddem mutates up a total resistance to pesticide X, and that mutation doesn't impact them negatively otherwise, and that flea survives contact with said pesticide and breeds, it's not going to do as well reproductively as another flea on a deer in the forest that's got another mutation that tells fleas to slightly prefer deer/raccoons/bears/etc over dogs/cats/horses/etc. The forest flea has plenty of potential mates because no one's given its deer any Frontline-or-generic-equivalent-thereof; the house flea, in a house where most of the other fleas just got massacred, obviously has fewer opportunities.

(I feel bad for the mutant flea now...)

The only way I can see the "fleas get used to pesticides" narrative making sense is if some of the pesticides actually are antibiotics, and they function by messing up a symbiotic bacteria that lives on/in fleas, and that bacteria is actually the thing that mutates...?

But even then, it would have to be slower, because so few fleas ever come in contact with flea killer in the first place.

Anyway, I refuse to buy still-under-patent flea killer anymore because the generic stuff is fine.

Is there any general overall difference between shiny, smooth-skinned apples and matte, rough-skinned ones in terms of taste and texture? Or am I just an Apple Hipster who thinks shiny apples are gross because Aesthetic?

Is there any quick way to vectorize some simple raster line drawings like this? Or otherwise scale them up smoothly?

Like, there's definitely an appeal to just throwing my opus up on Amazon all pixelated, but I feel that such a stylistic choice would obscure the qualities of my art style. I want it to be appreciated for what it is, y'know?

Where can one order reasonably-fresh whole fennel seeds and licorice root online?

(The local chain grocery stores do not appear to carry these things, and I do not live anywhere near an international or Indian or Chinese grocery, or a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's, or any other business which might be more likely to have them. This is rural Appalachia, we barely even have grocery stores to begin with.)

Academic stuff, pop history, fiction, whatever. I've read Elizabeth Wein's novels (of course!) and some of Richard Pankhurst's academic stuff.

What I'm looking for in particular:

* Stuff by people who are actually from the region. And uh, preferably not white people. Yeah.

* Anything about Gudit/Judith. Or Bani al-Hamwiyah, or the Queen of Sheba, for that matter! Women in positions of political power.

* Primary sources that are not puzzled European Christians. Puzzled Muslims from anywhere would be interesting, though.

* Details about day-to-day life stuff for normal non-aristocrat people.

* Details about diplomacy with other nations, particularly primarily-Muslim ones.

Does there exist any sort of browser extension that will, if both I and Otherperson have it installed, do this:

I type an email to Otherperson. The extension automatically grabs Otherperson's public key from a server or my keyring and encrypts the message, surrounding it with tags like [Message Encrypted Using SuchAndSuchExtension]. Otherperson receives the message, their copy of the extension sees those tags, and it is automatically decrypted.

The extension I want needs to do this automatically and silently, without prompting, without throwing up any garish pop-ups like it thinks it's the FBIses and the cyber-hacksers have hacksed all the nodes to steal all the Presidents. There should be at most a subdued little inline note at the top of the textbox, saying "This message will be encrypted with Sane Normal Encryption, the sane and normal encryption extension that was not designed by an unusually stupid twelve-year-old boy."

Does this exist? If not, why not? I mean, what is this, 199-fucking-2?

Other desirable features:

* It would be excellent if this didn't work merely in email: like, you could set it up to automatically encrypt and decrypt Facebook messages! Or you could encrypt bits of blog posts so that only specific people could read them. In this case, it would be best if the encrypted text were hidden, so people for whom it's not intended don't have their screens cluttered up with a bunch encrypted prattle. Something vaguely like this, I guess?:

<
a href="http://sanenormalencryption.com" title="[Message Encrypted Using SuchAndSuchExtension]hkjdfhaksjdhfksahdfsk[/Message Encrypted Using SuchAndSuchExtension]">[Message Encrypted Using SuchAndSuchExtension]<
/a>

* Inline encryption and decryption of attachments would be preferred.

* It would be good if step one also saved a copy encrypted with my own public key in some fashion - by sending a second copy of the email to oneself, by saving to local memory somewhere, or by saving to a specified cloud destination.

I need a mean word for a socially and/or economically upwardly-mobile person. The text calls this "群民上がり". (That is stupid.)

This can be, like, a ridiculous-sounding Victorian word. It's being used in the context of one of those obviously-doomed anime societies where everyone's kind of albino-looking and wears winter colors.

We were cleaning out the basement.

1) Mom has a bunch of old Star Trek fanzines from the seventies, which she'd like to donate to a library that would know what to do with them, or else a fannish conservation project. Any suggestions?

2) Suggestions for good ways to digitize VHS tapes?

Thanks to my excellent taste in fiction, I am just as capable of saying the following things as I was the day I left Japan:

"Even if you're not human, you're still capable of being killed!"

"I still haven't wiped the blood off from the last one."

"It will be as if this train had never existed!"

It is to be hoped, however, that none of this will be necessary at Mo's wedding. Is there a good book or website just for polite conversational stuff, without all the hyperbolic threats?