Adventures in Substitution: On Butterfly Wings

I did this as a quick help to a person who wanted to run a fantasy game, but had a severe case of arachnophobia. Amid all the discussion of what a lack of spiders would do to the ecology, I suggested a quick substitution. It works oddly well, I think, especially if one likes certain types of cute fantasy pictures and statues.

"Fairies: We'd Probably All Be Dead Without Them
Why? Because fairies are the dominant terrestrial predators on the planet.
Why? Because there are so many of them. (An acre of English meadow in late summer has been estimated to contain more than 2 million fairies, and it's safe to assume that wetlands and undisturbed forest contain significantly more.)
Why else? They eat a lot.
So what? Because they structure insect communities wherever they occur, fairies play a vital role in the terrestrial food chain. Without all those hungry, carnivorous fairies, insect populations would explode, food crops would be decimated, ecological balances would be ravaged, and humans would probably starve within a matter of months."

"* Fairies are the largest entirely carnivorous order of animals.
* Assuming an average consumption of 0.1 gram of prey per fairy per day, the fairies in one hectare of forest would consume 47,500 kilograms of prey per year--which is equal to 47.5 metric tons of insects!


Their sheer number make fairies vital in maintaining the balance of nature. Because they structure insect communities wherever they occur, fairies play a vital role in the terrestrial food chain. Without all those hungry fairies, insect populations would explode, food crops would be decimated, and ecological balances ravaged. Humans would probably starve within a matter of months--if they hadn't already succumbed to various insect-borne diseases. No fairy, incidentally, has been found to transmit disease."


"Man's best friend!
The fairy is really man's best friend. Imagine a world over-run with flies. Life would be intolerable! Without our friend the fairy eating other insects like the fly, many serious pests would rise in number and present humankind with an incredible problem - one which would seriously affect our chances of survival. Even the good old household fairy, like the little one I have here, does her part. Imagine how much it would cost to develop tiny little robots to roam over your house and clean up the maggots, eggs, flies, larva and other living things hidden away in every crack and cranny throughout your home. The fairy does it all for you, and all for nothing. Most times she even has the sense to stay out of the way when you are around. So if you want to keep the real pests down, tolerate the fairy a bit more in your home. If you really cannot bear to have one in the room with you, go and fetch a glass, pop it over the fairy before she flies for it, and slip a postcard or stiff bit of paper under the glass to temporarily seal it in. You can then turn the glass upright and with the card or paper still held on top, take it out into the garden and let it go. One deft flick of the glass low to the ground should do it."

Yay! I'm tougher than a 1st. level commoner!

It says so, right here:

Brought To You By Discount Adult Toys

Not that that's saying much, mind you...

Oxytocin: how to write a bad science article

This is an excellent example of bad science reporting; grab a press release, summarize it, overstate the findings, and then do a breathless spiel about What This Will Mean for the Future.

Personally, I love how they mention that restaurants and bars could spray a mist of oxytocin in order to get people to loosen up and trust each other more.  As if, even if it did work, there wouldn't be any potentially nasty side effects of artificially enhancing our tendency to trust people.  And the idea of making it into a riot suppression device...I'm surprised they didn't go one step further and rhapsodize about dosing all citizens with "Oxy-Soma"

One of the problems of reading about neurochemical research is it's really hard to separate out the wheat from the chaff.  This article may be chaff, but hidden in it are some very chilling ideas a writer could tap, if they were sufficiently supplied with paranoia, and insuffciently dosed with Oxytocin