I got an email from Bernard, about knee pain which gmail put into spam. Looked a little funny and was not from the account I expected.
Wrote back to the account I do have, to tell B that his account may have been hacked. And immediately got a response that was even stranger. Sob stories about niece etc. I had requested some info as confirmation, and of course this was not mentioned.
I was surprised that two email counts had been compromised, but I guess this makes it easier to see what is going on for the scammer.
The english was fine, but somehow was without character.
I am not sure how Bernard can ever set up his email again, without resorting to the telephone.
looked up AI and spam on google, and this was all foreseen earlier this year.
I do not think that the scammer had linked the two accounts of B together. There was no evidence that the second letter, knew anything about the first. Since I have not responded directly to the scammer, I am not sure I will be a person of interest.
Not sure how I can send anything to Bernard now, and will have to wait for him to contact me, directly or indirectly.
martin
The nail fungus finds on old lodge and an episode of the monkeycage made me wonder about how you count their population and understand survival strategies.
Nail fungus spores are eaten by exmoor ponies and then poo'd out where the fruiting bodies appear, and subsequently shoot out their own spores.
I dont know the mechanisms but it seems likely that the ponies stomach stimulates the spores to develop into their myceliae, which then develop fruiting bodies, that fire out their spores. This maybe just digesting the outer covering of the spore, for just the right amount of time. Different species or varieties of grazers may get the timing wrong. Or even getting the mycelia starting to develop inside the stomach.
But does one spore produce one fruiting body on one pony poo?
The mycelia could develop and divide while in the ponies stomach, and therefore have several segments in several poo's. And similarly once in a poo, a single mycelia could also divide there. Or could one contected mycelium have more than one fruiting body?
The best strategy is not obvious. You obviously would like one spore to be capable of quickly multiplying to many spores. So maybe there is splitting so the one spore infects multiple poo's with multiple seperate treads of mycelia, each producing a sack of spores. Indeed one would like some mycelia to have a long life in the gut, producing an endless stream of infected turds.
The mycelia could also split in the turd itself.
I feel my observations support the view that no splitting occurs inside the pony, and any splitting occurs outside. An individual turd often has more than one fruiting body, but mostly one poo only has one turd with fruiting bodies. This rather implies post defication splitting.
The top open layers of the fungi often merge to form a big surface area, and that might imply very closely related origins, but i am out of my depth here.
Martin
