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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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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. |
| This is a few weeks old now, which matters in this case, but I wanted to share this anyway. From BBC, something new under the sun: A powerful new telescope in Chile has released its first images, showing off its unprecedented ability to peer into the dark depths of the universe. You know why I didn't become an astronomer? It involves going to high, cold, remote places. Well, I'm okay with remote, but fuck those other two qualities. I'm perfectly content staying below a few hundred feet above sea level, in a relatively warm spot, and reading about it. And, of course, looking at the pictures. Seriously, go look at that picture. Chances are, you've seen it already because, like I said, kinda old news now, but it's still awesome. The Vera C Rubin observatory, home to the world's most powerful digital camera, promises to transform our understanding of the universe. I'm going to address this because the article doesn't: the name of the telescope isn't "woke" or "DEI" or some doggy treat for feminists. Vera Rubin was one of the most important astronomers of the 20th century. I'd put her right behind Edwin Hubble in terms of discoveries that shattered our worldview and helped us build another one, and Hubble, as you might know, already had a telescope named after him. To be more specific, Rubin was the astronomer who figured out that galaxies weren't behaving like they should if you only accounted for the visible matter in them. This led to the dark matter hypothesis, which also turned out to fit other observations and can be used to make predictions, so it's very important to astronomy and cosmology. While they don't yet know exactly what dark matter is, it led science down a more productive path. That's oversimplified, of course, and she obviously did more than just that, but the point stands. If a ninth planet exists in our solar system, scientists say this telescope would find it in its first year. Pluto fans seen turning red, smoke pouring from ears and nostrils. It should detect killer asteroids in striking distance of Earth and map the Milky Way. It will also answer crucial questions about dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up most of our universe. That last bit being, as I mentioned above, the most fitting. But the other stuff is important, too. This once-in-a-generation moment for astronomy is the start of a continuous 10-year filming of the southern night sky. This is completely off-topic, but "filming" is exactly what the telescope doesn't do. It features, as the article goes on to explain, a very large digital camera. We have words for recording images that no longer describe what's being done; "filming" is one of them. So is "footage" used to describe video images. I have invented a word for these words that describe processes that are now as obsolete as the floppy disc or punch-card computers. Here it is: Anachronyms. Of all the words I've coined, I like that one the best. Anyway, the rest of the article goes into some of the technical capabilities of the telescope, and what they expect it to be able to do. It's all very cool, and I look forward to hearing about the results. |
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There's so much information that I'm not sure how they'd begin.
Thanks for posting this. I love stuff like this.
