Do you mean the pistil? The stamen is the part of a flower that creates pollen.

Assuming yes, it grows a tube down the pistil into the ovary, then sends sperm to fertilize the flower’s ovules.

Yep! Pollen are haploid, but technically they’re actually monoploid (or equivalent, depending on polyploidy) given they’re a fully functioning organism.

This is surprisingly common. All the pollen, male bees and ants (and actually a bunch of males in the order Hymenoptera grow from unfertilized eggs), and algae, for example. Certain fungi go through most of their lifecycles haploid and have a brief diploid phase, which undergoes meiosis to get right back to haploid, albeit for gametes this time. Tons of stuff! Nature is fucking wild.

Edit: haha, I just saw my Dad pun.

I was about to respond Jarvis to continue the chain, then realized the name sounded familiar. Yep, right in the comic.

It’s me. The comic is about me.

Ask me about microbes!

Totally. Each pollen grain is a more or less self-sufficient organism, at least for its task, which is being transported to another receptive plant, then producing sperm for fertilization.

The closest analogy would be if humans had loads of tiny testicles that they sprayed everywhere, hoping one would hook up with a female so it could produce sperm in them for fertilization.

Thank you! I was looking for this comment before posting about it. Almost every grain can be cooked in large amounts of boiling water, like pasta.

We’re going to need a Butlerian jihad at the rate this is going.

I really dig that they often "show their receipts"and I’ll always take someone with citations more seriously than those without. I think it’s prudent to be even more sceptical of those replies, though, as it’s far more likely they have an agenda. That agenda might be as benign as educating others (it’s often why I cite), but it’s still best to think critically about the context, text, and subtext of their narrative.

Hoooooly shit you weren’t kidding!

I too am looking forward to 90% good info with 10% really questionable shit. Actual tankies (not the “leftist I don’t like” variety) remind me of the type of movies where the grandkids find their amazing, sweet grandparents are actually secret cannibals or clowns. Maybe both.

I’m totally on board, then the authoritarian, murdery shit comes out.

There has been a lot of talk about their intent to change, but I fear I still see them leaning hard on the same maladaptive coping mechanisms that helped get us here. It’s still early yet, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. I drew up a plan that I’m following, so I’m just waiting until I have enough info to know to continue or divorce.

I’m sorry you’re feeling frustrated and hopeless about your relationship. It’s really demoralizing when the other person doesn’t want to hear there’s an issue, or understands but there are issues with them working on it. I’ve experienced both from both sides and understand it’s often more complex than it seems, but it still comes down to if they have the commitment and follow through necessary to make positive, sustained change, because that’s hard to do. Really hard.

If I may provide some unsolicited advice, couples counseling can be great. If you go that route or have already and want to try again, I’d recommend seeing a therapist that specializes in couples and is experienced in providing therapy for any conditions present, like ADHD, borderline personality disorder, or PTSD. The Gottman Method is great. Couples counseling is also most effective in conjunction with individual counseling, so partners can really dig into their own experience and what they bring to the relationship.

Better! We’re working it out, so that’s good, but we have over a decade of things to go through, plus working on ourselves as individuals. It’s exhausting.

My partner was the one to pull the divorce card, actually with no warning whatsoever. It’s so appropriate for a relationship that turned out to be significantly defined by poor communication.

In retrospect, the critical signs were pretty obvious, but we both mistook them for other things. We had become very emotionally disconnected, but we were preparing for a huge move out of the country with a small pack of house pets so each of us thought that’s why the other was stressed. This actually was true for me while my partner was stressed because they wanted to run screaming but didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.

We had both been withholding some major concerns about the other throughout our relationship, so each had a second, secret narrative that wasn’t being discussed or challenged in couples counseling. Plus we both have CPTSD from shitty childhoods and have cross-reactive behavior. Lots of angst here.

This stuff can sneak up on you if you don’t have healthy habits that help identify and prevent it, but it’s clear as day once you learn. We’re getting there and we’ll be better people for it, but it’s brutal sometimes and we’re just at the beginning.

I highly recommend solving the important ones and learning to let the rest go, speaking as someone whose marriage just exploded over exactly that.

excel as an relational database

That reminds me of a story. I used to do IT consulting, years ago. One client was running their 5 person real estate office off a low quality, consumer grade, box store HP desktop repurposed as a server. All collaboration was through their U drive, plus every profile had their desktop folder redirected there.

The complaint was the classic “everything is slow”, which turned out to be “opening my spreadsheet takes 10 minutes then it’s slow”. Yeah, because that poor little “server” had a single 100 Mb jack and the owner had a 1.5 GB excel spreadsheet project where he was trying to build a relational database and property valuation tool. Six fucking heavily cross referenced tabs, some with thousands of entries. He was so proud when I asked him to explain what was going on there. He fired me when I couldn’t fix his issue without massive changes to either his excel abomination or hardware.

If you got two up votes, I’d wager at least twenty people also viewed your content without down voting. That’s a big win.

I’m a microbiologist. That’s pretty normal. Things that look smooth and even when viewed normally frequently look different when significantly magnified. Your eyes can’t resolve the fine details so your brain fills in the gaps.

Just like my ochem lab partner. We just huffed diethyl ether on the sly and tried not to fuck up too much.

How about this one?!

Also “Turned out my father isn’t my real dad” is BS. Genetic test results are useless for determining such.

Wait, what now? The AncestryDNA test isn’t WGS, but it analyzes 700K loci. One can infer relatedness with an insanely high degree of accuracy with that number. For reference, the standard US paternity test uses 20 loci and it’s more than 99% accurate.

Or do you mean one needn’t be a biological parent to be a real father to a child? I agree with that 100%.

TOAD! TOAD! TOAD! TOAD!

I love jellied eels and I will die on that hill.