Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.
You know how you can “fake write” on a page, and produce a line of ink with a pen that looks kind of like words but isn’t really? There’s a name for that: Asemic writing.
Most images of butterflies you see represent dead butterflies – pinned to better show the wings, and in a posture they rarely are found in nature. Once you notice the difference, you’ll see this everywhere. I originally found this article at least a year ago and I’ve thought about it every time I see a picture of a butterfly.
nabeelqu on understanding: This is a great article about what it takes to understand things. I really, highly endorse “ask dumb questions” as a step for understanding things.
The rate at which new genetic sequences are added to GenBank (an international database for genetics, relied on heavily by biologists) follows Moore’s Law. I have no idea what this implies. [Source]
Niche subreddit of the day: r/VisibleMending. For mending clothing and more with visible, often lovely repairs.
There are a lot of ways to learn about the wonders of aquatic ecosystems. You can watch documentaries, like the Blue Planet or Shape of Life series. You can watch videos from ocean exploration projects, like the EV Nautilus youtube channel. You can go scuba diving, or just go to a beach and whalewatch and collect shells. You can go tidepooling.
Second niche subreddit of the week: r/FridgeDetective, where you post a picture of the inside of your fridge, and other people try and make deductions about you based on it.
Covid Dash is a project for tracking progress on treatments and countermeasures for COVID-19, and finding out where you can volunteer to help with clinical trials.
The vast majority of the ocean is completely lightless. Fish react by evolving to be extremely, extremely black.
Finally, a request: I really like sidenotes or margin notes on websites, like Gwern’s. Does anyone know of a blogging or general website platform that currently allows these without being totally handbuilt? I’m not ready for fiddling with CSS yet.
Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.
Also, semi-intentionally, none of the links in this harvest are COVID-19-related. If you want some interesting distractions, you might like this post.
First, an eternal recommendation for the SCP Foundation’s Antimemetics Division series. (“Antimemes” are information that resists sharing.) It’s smart, creepy, mind-bending fiction in which a variety of clever protagonists try to save the world from an enemy who they can’t remember exists. The final story in the series is being posted very soon, and you’ll have a lot to work through before then.
Relatedly, you should be following BLDGBLOG, a blog about buildings and so much more.
If you can’t find dreamy labyrinthine architecture in real life, you can make your own. Artbreeder.com is a wonder and free to use. If you’ve tried it before, check again, because in addition to the table-deer-mop hybrids of your dreams, it now allows you to make landscapes and disturbingly realistic human portraits to your desired specifications. Wondering where I got the cover image for this post? I’ve picked up oil painting during self-isolation, I call this one “Lost Carcosa” – just kidding, an AI and I made it in five minutes.
John J Audubon recorded a species of giant eagle he’d occasionally seen in the American midwest. To date, nobody else has found that bird.
Here’s a species of fungus that is found in a little region in Japan, a little region in Texas, and literally nowhere else on earth.
First major use of deepfakes in an election was surprisingly not terrible (“translating” a video of an Indian politician into another language, as though the politician were speaking it himself.)
I’ve harbored a longtime fascination with domestic life, housekeeping, cooking, etcetera – both modern and past. This surprises a lot of people. It was actually a large part of my interest in working on The Funnel of Human Experience – so much of human history was spent by people, mostly women, keeping the home running and the fires hot and the children clothed. In the late 1800s, Ellen Swallow Richards turned the art of home economics into a science – people studying the most time-effective way to make a bed, the best nutrition for a family, sanitation and food safety at home and standardization. There was the 1870’s MIT Women’s Laboratory, and later there were universities with actual living orphan “practice” babies, who the students practiced caretaking on. There are whole books’ worth of history here. (And if you know any good ones about anything on this topic, please let me know.) Anyway, Efficiency is Everything – Industrial engineering applied to life is a re-discovery of the topic for the modern age.
Explorable.es: Some delightful interactive scientific/technical concept-explainers.
We’ve had sci-fi. There’s worldbuilding fiction, of whole planets and cultures and sentient species. Some of my friends are interested in “soc-fi”, fictional plausible societies. There are con-langs and alternate histories and speculative biology. There’s even time-fi. And now, finally, we have food fiction – fun recipes with beautiful results that don’t work! Unfortunately, it’s masquerading as those short viral videos from Blossom, Five Minute Crafts, So Yummy, etc, that you see all over facebook and youtube, and it’s also known as “lying for profit.”
Why does a tiny spot in rural Maine produce as much light at night as some cities? Identification of unexpected light sources from a global map of light pollution. (Fun game: try to guess each source before you learn what the answer is.)
A very intense online “game”: Look at videos of lifeguard rescues in swimming pools. See if you can find and click on the drowning kid before the lifeguard rescues them. May be good if you spend a lot of time around kids (or adults?) in water.
Do you know about David Goodsell’s biology art? He makes gorgeous drawings of cells, molecular mechanisms, etcetera, that are also considered good representations of how much stuff there actually is in a cell. A lot more than the sort of sterile, structured drawings you saw in intro biology textbooks.
“What I find fascinating is that birds can hit the drone in such a way that they don’t get injured by the rotors,” said LeBaron [of the Audubon society]. “They seem to be whacking the drone right in the centre so they don’t get hit; they have incredible visual acuity and they can probably actually see the rotors.”
Humans, of course, only see rotors as a blur – LeBaron suspects that the eagles can make out the complete movement and thus have no trouble avoiding injury. It doesn’t hurt, either, that attacking a drone the way a bird might attack another bird is usually effective. “Their method of attack is always going to be to hit it in the middle of the back; with the drones they perceive the rotors on the side and so they just go for the rear.”
This is fascinating and also checks out with the observation that smaller animals, notably birds, seem to have a much faster perception than humans.
It seems like smart speakers, bluetooth headsets, and the like can be hacked to produce harmful levels of sound. Great! That’s another entry for the bestiary.
First, a quick note and call for aid. For my final semester in George Mason’s biodefense program, I’m working on a capstone project. I’ll be researching and writing about list-based biosecurity in the US – places where biodefense systems identify risks based on a list of known pathogens.
I see why the systems work this way, and this was probably sufficient in the past – yet as far as I’m aware, it’s all but an unspoken consensus in the field that these won’t protect against engineered organisms – recombinant or genetically altered pathogens that are either totally novel, or “resemble” a harmless organism in most ways while posing significant danger to humans. I want to explore where list-based biosecurity shows up, what the risks are, and possible alternative systems. Ideally, this’ll eventually be published.
If you have thoughts on any of the above, or you know things that I should know, I’d love to chat. My email, as always, is eukaryotewritesblog (at) gmail.com.
Alright, on to the bounty. Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs.
I’m interested in feedback on what you think of the section, or the links therein. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.
Are you following the Wuhan coronavirus/nCoV outbreak? Yeah, me too. This is the first major world event that I actually know anything about that I’m watching unfold live on Twitter, and the misinformation situation on a lot of the hashtags is so much worse than I thought. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is publishing regular updates on the outbreak’s progress, and they know what they’re talking about.
An update to the colorful visual Euclid textbook in the last internet harvest: A gorgeous web version.
A confusing Youtube project: “meaningwave”, which features glitchy visuals, soft electronic music, and clips from motivational speakers. Notably Jordan Peterson, but also Alan Watts and Mr Rogers. Dozens of videos, all made by the same person. I don’t like Jordan Peterson but I can recognize when the universe drops something bizarre and beautiful into my lap. This one is my favorite, featuring Naval Ravikant on habits and clips from the Moomin TV show.
My views on gendered pronouns as a mainstay of language are well-exemplified by this classic Douglas Hofstadter essay (yes, the Gödel, Escher, Bach guy), Person Paper on Purity in Language. (Content warning: Lots of ironic racism.)
Speaking of racism, a horrific aspect of it in the US that I didn’t know much about: Sundown Towns. The linked research project includes maps and how to identify if a town was one. (Content warning: Discussion of intense racism, mostly anti-black, and antisemitism.)
Escape a frankly soul-sucking social media ecosystem, and make 2020 the renaissance of the personal website. If anyone wants to set up an unironic webring with me, hit me up.
This month’s podcast recommendation is The Dream, on multi-level marketing schemes. It’s compassionate and cutting at the same time, as well as interesting and informative. I don’t come from an environment where these are common, so it’s boggling to see the scope of these – though I expect if you’re already more familiar with MLMs, you’ll still get something out of this.
You know about moon snails, right? Look ye upon moon snails. (If you live on the west coast of the USA, you can go find these guys on sandy beaches at low tide.)
Inspired by some other favorite bloggers, I’m trying a new post type: a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs.
I’m interested in feedback on what you think of the section, or the links therein. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.
Instead of a video loop of a crackling fire, why not put on BBC Earth’s “Deep Ocean: 10 Hours of Relaxing Oceanscapes” in the background of your winter party? Zero narration, just faint water sounds and lovely footage of spectacular seascapes and bizarre animals. (There are other videos for Open Ocean and other ocean environments.)
“She sells sea shells by the sea shore” is frequently held to refer to Mary Anning, a major figure in palaeontology who found dinosaur and other fossils in Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England. I hold that it would also make sense if it referred to the Seychelles.
I very much enjoyed the Bellingcat Podcast. If you like investigative journalism and careful analysis of fraught political situations, you may as well.
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