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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| While "fascinating" is a value judgement, and "facts" is questionable, I thought this Mental Floss thing was interesting enough to share. I just don't fully trust the accuracy. Well, first of all, did you know it's in the mint family? Oh, wait, you said time, not thyme. Did you know that a day on Earth used to be around six hours shorter than it is today? Yeah, like, billions of years ago. Or that Julius Caesar once implemented a 445-day-long year? That's not about time. That's about timekeeping. It's not like he slowed the Earth's orbit down, or that it affected anyone outside the Empire. Don't worry; I'm not going to comment on every single point. 1. Every person on Earth is living in the past. Our brains don’t perceive events until about 80 milliseconds until after they’ve happened. This fine line between the present and the past is part of the reason why some physicists argue that there’s no such thing as “now” and that the present moment is no more than an illusion. Which is what I've been saying all along. Except I'm shying away from using the word "illusion" (time itself is most definitely not an illusion) because it's been misused. I'd say the present moment is an infinitesimal. 2. Throughout history, different cultures around the world have experienced time in different ways. Those who read languages that flow from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, generally view time as flowing in the same direction. The Aymara, who live in the Andes Mountains in South America, consider the future to be behind them, while the past is ahead. In their view, because the future is unknown, it’s behind you, where you can’t see it. Some Indigenous Australian cultures, which rely heavily on direction terms like north, south, east, and west in their languages, visualize the passage of time as moving from east to west. Newsflash: different cultures conceptualize things differently. 4. Science has a number of different ways of defining time. To cover just a couple: There’s astronomical time, which is measured in relation to how long it takes Earth to rotate on its axis. In astronomical time, a second is 1/60th of a minute. And then there’s atomic time, which dictates the numbers that you’ll see on a clock. I feel like this section is misleading. There's only one official way to define a second, as the article goes on to note. The duration of one second was based on the length of an average solar day, but, as implied up there, the length of a day is increasing over geological epochs, and at some point, the Earth's solar day will average more than the current 86,400 seconds. To complicated matters further, there's the sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate with respect to some other star; this is different from a solar day because of the Earth's orbit. 8. Gravity is also the reason why our days are getting longer. Over a billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted around 18 hours. Our days are longer now because the moon’s gravity is causing Earth’s spin to slow down. A bit simplistic, but okay. In Earth’s earlier days, the moon wasn’t as far away, which caused Earth to spin much faster than it currently does. Causation reversal. Flag on the play. 15 yard penalty. 9. There are two ways to think of the length of a day on Earth. Though you probably learned that one day on Earth is 24 hours, it actually takes the planet 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.0916 seconds to rotate on its axis. Which I know I already said, but I'm glad the article acknowledged it. 12. At the same time, Caesar asked the astronomer Sosigenes to help reform the calendar. And Caesar took all the credit, as usual. To be fair, "Julian calendar" is a lot easier to say and spell than "Sosigenean calendar" would have been. 13. But Sosigenes made a bit of a miscalculation, so the calendar continued to be a little off. Yeah, well, this was over 2000 years ago, so I can forgive the miscalculation. It eventually led to George Washington having two birthdays  and the October Revolution taking place in November. 16. Even with the advent of standardized time, people still struggled to keep their clocks in sync. One London family used this to their advantage, and made a living by selling people the time. That story is definitely interesting. 23. Sundials read differently depending on the hemisphere you’re in. This one should be obvious, but not everyone thinks about it. Our concept of “clockwise” is based on the way sundials in the Northern Hemisphere told time. Yet another example of the Northern Hemisphere hegemonic conspiracy. There's more at the link, as one might expect. Most of these aren't about time, though; they're about timekeeping, which is not the same thing. |
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