Then comes the flood

We're right there where it's at 15+ inches (the black circle).

Big freakin' spider day

 

 

 

At least the second one wasn't in my house. Both were at least 2 inches stretched out, probably more.

Test Your Knowledge: Common Materials

Explain what the following materials are:

• concrete


• fiberglass


• gasoline


• plastic


• steel

We all discuss and think of many things with a lot of familiarity, but we don't necessarily know a lot about them.

Arboralopecia

We had a freeze last night. Our pecan tree reacted strongly. When I straggled out of bed this morning, I saw it dumping its leaves on the ground. The leaf fall has basically ended because there's nothing left to fall. I didn't see it start, but I don't think it took more than a couple hours. The lawn under it is now under many layers of leaves. You can hear the leaves falling.

Gotta rewrite the song: "Leaves are falling, loudly falling, tumbling to the ground. Yellow yellow green brown yellow, tumbling to the ground."



ISN'T THIS EXCITING?!?!?! I'll bet this is totally what Chen, Hurley, and Karim had in mind when they founded YouTube. I am at the forefront of 21st century journalism! I'm gonna be on Oprah!

Spider and web

 

 

 

I've never seen a spider like that before. It looks more like a crab to me.

 

When we came back later, it had snagged a bee.

Black beetle

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the macro mode on my subcompact point-and-shoot.

A flock of (not) seagulls

 

 

 

Saw these this past evening. I couldn't get a good shot of them because I was in the car. They were awesomely close at one point, just a couple hundred feet overhead. They were some kind of large wading bird (my favorite kind).

Big ol' turtle

 

 

 

Saw this one at Northwest District Park. There's not much in the pictures for scale. I think it was a very solid 18 to 24 inches in length. I'm guessing it's old. Are turtles one of the animals that never stop growing?

NOM NOM NOM NOM

 

 

 

In front of our neighbor's house this morning. The snake is alive and twitching. I don't know what kind it is.

Birdwatch update

 

 

 

Note the down side of having such a nest at your house. The piles of brown I think are the indigestible remnants of crawfish.

Heron chick sighting

 

The blanket octopus

Yikes:

The male blanket octopus spends his existence drifting along waiting to meet with a female. If the male meets a female, he fills one of his tentacles with sperm and tears it from his body. He gives this sperm-filled tentacle to the female which she then uses to fertilize her eggs. Afterwards, the female leaves the male who floats away and dies.

Double yikes:

An unusual defense mechanism in the species has evolved: blanket octopuses are immune to the poisonous Portuguese man o' war, whose tentacles the female rips off and uses later for defensive purposes.

Sound perceptions

You must try this.

Optimism: On the 10,000th try there was light.

I've seen this billboard from the Foundation For a Better Life, an organization that I find vaguely suspicious for no discernible reason. This billboard is historically inaccurate, or at least misleading. It implies that it took Thomas Edison by himself 10,000 attempts before he made a working light bulb. If that were true, it would be stupid. Only an idiot would keep trying after 5,000 complete failures.

Incorrect implication the first: Edison didn't invent the light bulb. The light bulb was actually invented in 1802, decades before Edison was even born. It just wasn't a practical one. Just getting light out of an incandescent bulb wasn't hard. What was difficult was making it bright and durable.

Incorrect implication the second: Edison worked alone. Edison had an army of (underappreciated) assistants doing much of the work (as described in the biography The Wizard of Menlo Park). He also built on the work of others (as detailed in the afore-linked Wikipedia article), including the key innovations of the evacuated glass bulb and the carbon filament.

What Edison and his team of assistants managed to do in the late 1870s was to perfect the state of the art in electrical lighting. It was a valuable effort, but it isn't nearly the grand leap the billboard implies. I'm not even convinced they really did try 10,000 different types of filaments. Even a thousand seems unlikely, but I don't have a better number. Regardless, the billboard is deceptive.

Test Your Knowledge: The electromagnetic spectrum

Name the 7 main components of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Giant crystals in Mexico

Amazing pictures of enormous crystals found in an underground mine in Mexico. It looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude. You can read some words, too. If you're into that.

Black and White Mothography

 

This neat moth was just outside my door when we came home from a walk on Saturday. Actually, it's still there. I wonder if it's dead...

Test Your Knowledge: the Sun and the Moon

Within 10%, in the units of your choice (but not AU), how far away are the sun and the moon?

Test Your Knowledge: Einstein's Miraculous Year

For a long time, I've been wanting to post a sampling of things that I think you should know off the top of your head if you consider yourself well educated. Test Your Knowledge, or, Things Y'oughta Know. I know, it's rather presumptuous. Who am I to say? Of course I'll pick things that I already know. But you're here, so...

First up, Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis," 1905. In that year, Einstein published not one, not two, but four amazing and ground-breaking papers in physics explaining physical phenomena or proposing new theories. What were the topics of at least two of the four papers? I only remembered three; only when I was checking my answers on Wikipedia did I learn of the one published September 27. I'm reading a book that mentioned the second one listed in the Wikipedia article, which prompted this post, but I would have known that one anyway.

Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimp, a.k.a., stomatopods, are some freaky creatures. They're neither mantis nor shrimp, but a different kind of arthropod in the crustacean sub-phylum. What's so special about them? They're weird-looking, they can attack prey with the force of a bullet to literally smash their shells (or the walls of an aquarium), and their amazing eyes can perceive a form of light that I didn't even know existed. Who needs science fiction with these things around?