I love these birds. The first ones I ever saw were in a bog in northern Maine, and they came quite close (they are pretty curious and friendly birds).
Just a quick study. I went to the art store the other day because I had run out of tape, and ended up buying indigo paint, and the tiniest brush in the store (both featured here). I am not kidding about the brush: thing has like 3 bristles, and I love it. Somewhere in the world, every art teacher I have ever had is suddenly mad at me and doesn’t know why. Tiny details forever!!!
Grey Jays have great calls. I encourage you all to check them out:
In this image the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope takes a close look at the spiral galaxy NGC 4217, located 60 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy is seen almost perfectly edge on and is a perfect candidate for studying the nature of extraplanar dust structures — the patterns of gas and dust above and below the plane on the galaxy, seen here as brown wisps coming off NGC 4217.
These tentacle-like filaments are visible in the Hubble image only because the contrast with their surroundings is so high. This implies that the structures are denser than their surroundings. The image shows dozens of dust structures some of which reach as far as 7,000 light-years away from the central plane. Typically the structures have a length of about 1,000 light-years and are about 400 light-years in width.
Some of the dust filaments are round or irregular clouds, others are vertical columns, loop-like structures or vertical cones. These structures can help astronomers to identify the mechanisms responsible for the ejection of gas and dust from the galactic plane of spiral galaxies and reveal information on the transport of the interstellar medium to large distances away from galactic disks.
The properties of the observed dust structures in NGC 4217 suggest that the gas and dust were driven out of the mid-plane of the galaxy by powerful stellar winds resulting from supernovae — explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: R. Schoofs
Simen Johan born in Norway in 1973, who darkly explores the human proclivity towards fantasy and our attempts, knowing or otherwise, to alternate realities for ourselves. Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan creates each of his images from as many as one hundred negatives, having first constructed or discovered each element and photographed it on film. Across his body of work, the viewer is urged to ponder the relationship between the real and the artificial or imagined.
At first I thought these were dioramas from a natural history museum (a frankly amazing natural history museum) because they had that unsettling combination of very real and very fake. I was a little relieved, but also a little disappointed, to get to the bottom and discover the truth.
In case you thought the Internet couldn’t become any weirder, one parent is on a mission to make the dinosaurs go extinct … again. The mother’s protest has gone viral, garnering the world’s collective side-eye with a bizarre rant about dinosaurs that’s so weird it sounds like a hoax.
“At my children’s school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs),
became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and
pretending to be a dinosaur.”
As an actual paleontologist I can assure all of you that people like this exist in spades and they show up to paleontological conventions with angry signs and need to love themselves more. I was once stopped on a sidewalk in Denver on my way into a conference by a man who told me that I was doing the devil’s work and ruining America by trying to, “reanimate God’s aborted creations.” Who hurt you?
Wait, God provides abortions now?? What will the anti-choicers say?
I will never forgive God for aborting the dinosaurs.
When I was a wee little cynic and my then-stepfather was a mega-fundie, I went to church camp that taught Young Earth Creationism and I put up my hand and said “But what about dinosaurs?”
Everybody else was allowed to go out and play freeze tag, but two counselors had me stay after so they could explain that God put dinosaur skeletons in the ground to test the faith of paleontologists.
This was a very foolish thing for them to say, for a lot of reasons, but primary among them was that asking a small child to choose between God and Triceratops does not end well for God. I had always wanted a riding Triceratops. (I did not have any opinion on riding gods.) And I had a lot of books about dinosaurs and furthermore, I knew a lot more about the topic than the counselors did, so my wee little cynic powers were engaged and I gazed beady-eyed at the counselors and even though I was a conflict averse child, I do not think I gave them the answers that they wanted.
I was eventually allowed to play freeze tag.
My mother was very angry to hear about this later, because she never bought into that particular God-is-waiting-to-yell-gotcha! philosophy.
(And the last time I spoke to my then-stepfather, it was to get into a knock-down drag-out fight about whether or not ammonites were really extinct. God, that man was an ass…)
My run-up to this story is that we didn’t have a lot of money and my parents had the vague idea that instead of running around in the forest covered in blood all day, they wanted me to meet other homeschooled children. So they sent me to the Baptists. (Religion costs nothing! Maybe she’ll… make friends!)
The Baptists sent me back.
I was 14. I was in university biology classes. I had a lot of rage. I was an awkward, brilliant, outraged little girl who was very very used to Defending Her Fucking Corner. (That’s where the pickaxe came in.)
So when a visiting preacher/lecturer came to deliver a Powerpoint on the perfidies of scientific evidence, I puffed up like an excited owl. MY TIME HAD COME.
“WHAT ABOUT THE DINOSAURS??!” was my creative and original opening gambit.
“What you have to understand,” the Christian lecturer told me gravely, “Is that after they were on the Ark -“
My mind did a handbrake turn.
I was completely disarmed.
DINOSAURS ON THE ARK?
DUDE.
LISTEN.
LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU THE PLOT.
YOU WANT YOUR DINOSAURS IN YOUR BIBLE FANFICTION?
YOU GOTTA KILL THEM IN THE FLOOD.
BENEFITS OF HAVING THE DINOSAURS KILLED OFF IN THE FLOOD:
explains why dinosaurs could be BEFORE
explains why no dinosaurs NOW
geology
ties in with very inarguable palaeontological evidence in a satisfying way
you ALREADY have a built-in extinction myth here HITCH YOUR STORY TO THAT
GEOLOGY – DUDE LISTEN YOU COULD CONCEIVABLY LAY DOWN ALL KINDS OF STONE DEPOSITS WITH A FLOOD
HELL CATACLYSMIC FLOODS WOULD EVEN EXPLAIN SOME OF THE FUNKINESS OF THE FOSSIL RECORD
THIS LITERALLY GIVES YOU A LEG TO STAND ON
DUDE
I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU
He did not believe that I was trying to help him.
sir please think of the children please please sir if you’re gonna do this you gotta play within the bounds of a reasonable mythopoeic framework
i ain’t asking for the Hero with a Thousand Faces, i ain’t asking for a religious praxis seamlessly melded with a framework of scientific evidence here
I JUST CAME HERE TO FIGHT
I AIN’T READY TO REWRITE YOUR ORIGIN MYTHS FIRST
I am only a tiny scientist now but someday I will be big and strong
please do not leave me with THIS as an origin story
but he left me with that as my origin story
oh man I’m still so upset about it.
all of the evo-bio/geology/palaeontology friends have these really solid “and THAT was when I realized THEIR GOD WAS NOT MY GOD” stories and I’m just like
“I COULDN’T EVEN FIGHT WITH HIM. This wasn’t even him bringing a knife to a gun fight! This was him throwing down his knife, going “bibble-bibble-bibble” and then flinging himself into a river. And what can I say? It worked. It disarmed me. Like some kind of Christian weasel war dance.”
Dear saints and martyrs and assorted other holies, I may have had problems with oher people in my childhood but they were never THESE problems.
…Just as well because I too was one of those “I know what is true and this crap you’re feeding me is NOT TRUE” children.
They really are gorgeous. When I come across them it just feels like a magical moment. So thank you for helping to spread that lovely photo of them, such that I had a version of that moment while scrolling through my dashboard. :-)
“In my opinion, based on something over thirty years of working with cetaceans in captivity and the wild, there should be no place for a discussion of the “value” of keeping small cetaceans in captivity. To a very great degree it is done only for the profits displaying cetaceans for entertainment produces.
As a result, a discussion of captive environments and how captive environments meet the needs of these highly complex social mammals is oxymoronic. Clearly the ocean (and in a few cases, flowing rivers) are the natural habitats of these organisms and anything less, especially for animals adapted to being on the go almost constantly, is unsatisfactory. This does not mean that we cannot build concrete tanks where these animals can be housed, and in some cases even reproduce. But the point here is that some people (another group of highly complex social mammals) live in highly confined habitats for many years, and sometimes reproduce while in those habitats (we call them prisons), but I can’t imagine anyone who would suggest that people in prison live anything like a normal life.
In the case of killer whales, especially considering all we have learned in the last 20 years about how complex, structured and well defined their social organization is, I find it impossible to believe that housing a male and female captured from separate pods in the Atlantic Ocean with a female from the Pacific Ocean could be thought to have taken any of the known social structure into account. Those actions are simply warehousing the animals wherever convenient. So it should be no surprise when we read of aggression and injuries, even death, occurring when animals from different pods or oceans are housed together in small, noisy concrete habitats. We know quite clearly that most killer whales in the wild stay with their natal pod for essentially their entire life. This means that calves are born into a family group (a subpod) and spend, at the least, many, many years, if not their entire lives in that pod. Yet in captivity it has become a normal procedure to remove a calf from its mother when the calf is only a couple of years old. In some cases calves have been removed from their mothers when they were only 6 months old. That some of these calves might physically survive the separation is not the point.
The point is that in the wild, and we need to remember that these are wild organisms, not in any way domesticated animals, these animals live to be 30 to 50 years old, on average, and have developed a remarkably complex social structure. When we separate calves from their mothers we are ensuring that the normal social structure will never be developed. In my opinion, meeting the basic physiological needs of complex social mammals such as killer whales does not meet our responsibilities to these animals. If we are unable, or unwilling, to meet both the physiological and well documented social needs of these animals we should not hold them in captivity. To do so substantially shortens the life expectancy of the animal in captivity as compared with the same species in the wild.
Many aquaria have put forth the argument that by keeping cetaceans in captivity, and breeding them there, the aquaria are meeting some sort of perceived need to provide a gene pool for the future. Yet in the case of all the cetaceans commonly held in captivity there is not one species in a single aquaria that is considered threatened or endangered. There are, to my knowledge, no Species Survival Plans for captive cetacea and no recognized studbooks being kept by aquaria in order to avoid inbreeding. As a matter of fact, by the late 1980s all the bottlenose dolphin calves born at one aquaria in southern California had apparently been fathered by only two males.
So the only reason for continuing to breed cetaceans in captivity, since none are endangered or threatened, is to produce the next generation for entertainment purposes. Since killer whales are reported to be responsible for at least 70% of all the revenue generated by large aquaria, it seems clear that breeding killer whales in captivity is being done only for continued profits and has nothing whatsoever to do with maintaining populations suitable for reintroduction. This is especially true because the large aquaria have made it clear that reintroduction of killer whales into the wild is a program they are opposed to. There are three species of highly endangered small cetaceans (vaquita, beiji and Ganges susu) whose populations are in terrible condition, yet I have not read of a single plan by any aquaria to work with any of these rapidly disappearing species in order to attempt to develop sufficient knowledge and provide an adequate gene pool so that the species might be maintained until such time as habitat again becomes available to support their populations in the wild.
Perhaps it is because all three species are small, cryptic and not very enduring or visually distinct, and would probably not draw large crowds eager to pay to see endangered cetaceans in a well designed recovery program. In the meantime the aquaria continue to crank out endearing bottlenose dolphins with their perpetual “smile” and killer whales with their fearsome teeth and reputations while the truly endangered species of small cetaceans slide ever closer to the pit of extinction.”
“DEAR EMILY,
It’s me, your pal Maggie. I wanted to write to you to tell you how my school year has gone, so far. I just started kindergarten. When we visited the Field Museum last spring, I told you about being scared to start school. You told me to remember that I had lots of knowledge to share with the other kids and that for this reason I should be excited about going to school.
Well, I took your advice and I am now the class go-to-gal for science information. My teacher relies on me for facts, and even pronunciation. I helped her to pronounce ‘capybara’ because she was unsure.
I love to share what I know in class. This past week I was excited because we were studying butterflies and I got to share what I learned from your ‘Brain Scoop’ episode about butterflies and moths.
My family and I have enjoyed watching the Kenya and Peru videos. I liked watching the bats – they are some of my favorite animals. And then there are big cats. Those are my absolute faves.
I hope to come visit the Field again.
Love,
Maggie
-age 5-
-with some help from her Mom-”
–
Maggie, age 5.
When I lose sight, buried deep in the annals of institutional roadblocks, I take some time to remember why it’s worth turning this slow, heavy ship.
Aww, thanks for watching Craftversations! Re: favorite podcasts, I should probably specify that I mostly just listen to the same couple of podcasts quite often, because they have a lot of backlog episodes and I spend a lot of time in my car by myself. Here’s everything I’m currently subscribed to:
You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes – this is my current favorite, in which comedian Pete Holmes interviews his comedian-type friends. His style is very conversational, and he always asks them about their thoughts on bigger grander topics, like what they think happens in the afterlife. I quite enjoy it, because they’re not answering the same questions we always hear creative people answer (“how did you start doing X”, “what advice would you give a young person” etc. etc.), but rather we’re just hearing them talk like people about things we probably all think about. There’s a terrific blend of humor and psychology and philosophy and really, what more can you ask of a podcast? My favorite episodes are Jeannette McCurdy, John Mulaney, Jenny Slate, Mike Birbiglia, and Chelsea Peretti. Average runtime: 01:30:00 – 2:00:00 hours.
Scriptnotes with John August and Craig Mazin – it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, from the writers of Big Fish and The Hangover (II & III). I really enjoy their banter, and it’s nice to have a good conversation about writing to listen to each week to remind myself to get back to it. Of all the podcasts on this list, it’s the one I’ve been listening to the longest. Average runtime: 01:00:00 – 01:30:00 hours.
The Moth Radio Hour– I’ve recently just discovered storytelling (I’m currently taking a class on it at the Upright Citizens Brigade), but it’s a really rad story form and The Moth is kind of the pinnacle of storytelling. They’re usually 5-10 minute stories from people who share snippets from their lives, and it’s a really lovely podcast that features about 3-4 stories an episode. It’s often funny and poignant and sonder-fying to the max. Average runtime: 00:50:00 – 00:55:00 minutes.
Serial with Sarah Koenig– I’m not sure what it is exactly about Serial that made it take off as such a podcast phenomenon, but it went far beyond the standard This American Life episode in terms of its reporting. The first “season” is over now, but I can’t recommend it enough if you haven’t yet listened to it. It explores in meticulous depth the events surrounding the 1999 murder of a Baltimore teen girl. What I appreciated most was its critical examination of the complexities and imperfections of the American justice system, in a way that we haven’t been conditioned to think about given the good vs. evil narratives we see in fictional courtroom dramas and even in history textbook case studies. Average runtime: 00:45:00 – 00:50:00 minutes.
KCRW’s The Business– Kim Masters from The Hollywood Reporter does a weekly roundup of entertainment news (the kind of headlines you’d read about in Deadline), as well as an interview segment often with a relevant filmmaker each week. I’ve stopped checking my entertainment news sites as diligently now that I no longer work in an office, so The Business makes me feel quite productive when I listen to it. Average runtime: 00:25:00 – 00:30:00 minutes.
