Actually these links come from Saturday night and Sunday only. I spent most of Friday in town, and spent all of that day's online time looking up fun facts about butterflies.
Readers, please weigh in with your opinions! Do you, who read the link logs, also read the butterfly posts? If so, do you prefer a short, simple search of the best known facts, or a more thorough investigation or more scholarly sources?
I ask because I had assumed that, as their publicity suggests, Google's infamous algorithm was designed to yield the most "sciency" search results for animal and plant studies, at least when Latin names were used as search terms. Wrong! Google's algorithm yields fewer scholarly studies (and more paying commercial sites, where applicable!) than the other search engines. And there's no way, when hunting for whatever is out there, to tell Google to behave itself and deliver material for a solid research article. Google reports thousands of results and displays only a few hundred, in which many of the "science" links connect to different places on the same page and different sites that have acquired the same papers, and it will not go further. Google has admittedly listened to commercial site sponsors' pleas to keep people from scrolling down through a thorough search, to "force traffic" to the top-ranked sites...and in the case of butterfly studies, those top-ranked sites may include places that sell dead bodies rather than studies of the survival benefits the butterflies' species traits have for them.
It's almost as if they were saying outright, "You're only a woman! You don't need to read all those big words in the science articles! Here, Schnookie, look at these shopping sites! Hmmm...nice bottom!" Because, of course, Google's algorithm is customized to any Google account into which you might be logged while searching. And Google is actively trying to keep informative posts on personal blogs from being noticed and read. The self-anointed "gatekeepers" of the Internet want individuals' blogs to be read only by (1) personal friends and (2) marketing people who want to use the information about bloggers they can gather in efforts to sell things to bloggers. Or, perhaps, personal enemies who want to know where we live.
Attention marketing types: Bloggers have no e-money, or if we do we have enough sense not to mention or spend it. The only way you can sell us stuff is admittedly slow: Pay a few bloggers to try and blog about your merchandise, then wait for the rest of us to be looking for that sort of product, which will probably take years, and offer us a real bargain price. Further applications of marketing psychology are wasted. From a turnip you can't get blood. Allow your products to be seen only in blog posts about them. Don't shove advertisements in among any web page's main content--that's negative publicity. When we're interested in the product, we'll look for it.
Real scientists are not the ones trying to segregate the Internet. Real scientists observe that we amateurs sometimes observe things that are useful. It's the global-totalitarian Party of Censorship who want to prevent private individuals from seeing even the first-page-and-sales-pitch for a new scientific study.
So, are you satisfied with a Google study of a butterfly, as I did with Battus polystictus, or do you prefer a different search engine, as I used with Battus polydamas?
Music
Don't take the daydream too seriously! I just happened to find a song that came out when I was little, but that I discovered and loved in university. Nostalgia trip.
Philosophy
(Lens traces this popular meme to a dozen or more social media sites; no hope of finding the original artist.)
Poem
Melissa Lemay probes the life of the fish character beyond The Cat in the Hat:
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