Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Howlers

This isn't the most recent Ecosophia entry anymore, but it's worth reading and rereading. I do like learning that the wolves that have moved onto the land once occupied by the Chernobyl reactor are living and doing their thing without showing the cancerous effects of the radiation that so many expected. You never know with life.

As for Yuval Noah Harari, sheesh, I dunno. His much quoted provocation about how human rights are a fiction isn't as bad as it sounds when looked at in context, but I don't think it stands for anything good either. At the end of the day he seems to be in the business of assuring the managerial class that they can and should control their fellow humans. As someone who would prefer to evade control I'm not really down with that.

Monday, March 25, 2024

UnRed

I find perception to be a highly interesting topic. When I first started attending college I intended to major in psychology. I changed my mind, but I did love the class in perceptual psychology. And colorblindness is a reminder of why.

Note the two color wheels at this link. On the protanopia wheel blue and yellow aren't much affected. Red is greyed out. Orange becomes yellow and purple, blue. But what's strange is what happens to green. Its essence is leeched out, so that it's barely identifiable as greenish.

Now if you see the two versions of one photograph above―the one depicting a redhead kid in a field―you'll notice that the grass is green in both. So apparently people with protanopia aren't entirely incapable of perceiving green. But it seems a complementary opposite does make something more noticeable.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Any old port in a storm

Fact 1: We get a lot of crows in this area. Certain streets and stretches of parkland, especially. And being a big fan of crows, I like to see them fly and congregate, and listen to them caw.

Fact 2: We had a heavy rainstorm today, pretty much all day.

Put together, these two facts made me wonder where crows go during a big storm. And according to this, what they do is take cover within conifer trees and shrubs. Sounds like it makes sense for them, anyway. And it's good to know they can keep relatively dry.

As for the picture of a marabou stork in a bathroom, it's a neat bonus.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Phil speaks

The story of Groundhog Day is colorful and interesting, and not just because part of it takes place at Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania, hands down the filthiest-sounding place name in America. It's a little bit of Americana that coincides with some older European traditions. The truth is, though, that the question of whether Punxsutawney Phil is right or wrong in his predictions is rather subjective.

As I write this, we're weeks past Groundhog Day. And in fact we just passed the Vernal Equinox. It hasn't been a particularly chilly March. But the temperature today barely got over the freezing point, and it's a few degrees below it outside now.

It actually doesn't mean much for a rodent or anyone else to predict a long or short winter, because everyone won't agree on when winter ended even after it happened, due to it happening in fits and starts. That's not to say the tradition's not fun, though.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Gentleman's agreement?

Pinterest is sort of a microcosm of how the web has gone downhill. The original idea of it had a definite appeal: the opportunity to "pin" images from around the internet to a public or private board so that you'd have them for future reference. Obviously it didn't meant that you owned them, just that you liked and approved of them.

Over the years, though, they've just degraded the whole experience. Features have been disabled, and it's not a tradeoff where you lose one thing and get another. You just lose options one by one. Also their content and censorship policies have tightened to the point of just nuking entire boards out of existence.

Not a great humanitarian disaster, but it makes you wonder. Another company could probably have huge success just by offering what Pinterest did, say, twelve years ago. Nobody's going there, though.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

It's the little things

It's funny how things just come back to you sometimes. When I was a little kid I had a book, or someone had it, and I could look at it. Ownership isn't really my point here. But the book was this poem, The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast. Even as someone who gets a little antsy ha-ha when a lot of insects are around I'd have to admit the illustrations were gorgeous. 

Now if you'd asked me when this had been written, I'd have said probably the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Couldn't be from before Victoria's time, right? But as it turns out that it was first published in 1802, when George III was still King. Also that the poet, William Roscoe, was an influential abolitionist, which is pretty cool.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Discordant message

While I'm sometimes tempted to use ad blockers on sites like YouTube, I generally accept ads as the cost of doing business. So a lot of times I let them play through, hitting "skip" when they turn out to be long or really annoying.

There's a weird one I've seen lately. It's for Stop & Shop. A voice over says "Uh-oh (couple names I can't remember) are shopping hungry again!" And the man and woman go nuts throwing things into their cart.

The weird part is that it looks like they're supposed to be high with the munchies. Like, I'm pretty sure that's the intended effect. But it doesn't quite come off because they're so skinny and cadaverous that it genuinely looks like they haven't had solid food in weeks. The ad creators landed on something more disturbing. Maybe someone was feeling prankish.