An electrical plant

“There is something wonderfully unsettling about a plant that feasts on animals. Perhaps it is the way it shatters all expectation. Carl Linnaeus, the great 18th-century Swedish naturalist who devised our system for ordering life, rebelled at the idea. For Venus flytraps to actually eat insects, he declared, would go ‘against the order of nature as willed by God.’ The plants only catch insects by accident, he reasoned, and once a hapless bug stopped struggling, the plant would surely open its leaves and let it go free.”

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Cryosphere

“The Extreme Ice Survey is the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography. EIS uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography, and video to document the rapid changes now occurring on the Earth’s glacial ice. The EIS team has installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains. EIS supplements this ongoing record with annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps, and Bolivia.”

Lots more here.

Spirit

“So disadvantaged, the Rover can now only scratch at the dirt, becoming the first Dickensian character on another planet.”

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Hangul

Subtitle: This post is not about snow.

“[King Sejong] began work on a replacement writing system in 1420. His reasoning was simple. Korean didn’t exist in written form at all; there was a very rich language being spoken out there, but no one could read or write in it because there was nothing to read or write it in. Those few people who could write had opted, some centuries before, to use Chinese characters—characters that, as a writing system for Korean, were entirely unsuitable.

The two tongues are wholly unrelated: Korean is a Ural-Altaic language, linguistically connected, though only rather vaguely, to Turkish, Mongolian, Finnish and Magyar. Chinese, on the other hand, is a Sino-Tibetan tongue, with ties to Burmese and Thai and Tibetan.”

-Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, Simon Winchester

It’s everything that I love

“Advertising slogans characteristically rely on catchy, memorable expressions that push the boundaries of formal language. Trying to capture that sort of grammatical insouciance in another language may sometimes be too much to ask.”

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Thoughtfully chewed.

“This time, he had with him a judge and a vast memorial tablet. Gilbert offered to take them back to the place where Hubbard had died but, on the way, their canoe tipped up and the tablet was lost. Instead the party said their good-byes in canoe-paint with a brush made of Gilbert’s hair. Then, as they left, they picked up the remains of Hubbard’s effects, including the last of his shoes.

Somehow these had ended up at the local store, which is where we found them. Looking parboiled, of course, and thoughtfully chewed.”

-Theatre of Fish, John Gimlette

Se also here and here. I really cannot recommend this book enough.

A stupid prudery

“Figuring out how to put sex in the dictionary—which terms to include and how to define them—is actually one of the most challenging tasks we face.”

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The article linked above is Not Safe for Prudes.

The angrier they are, the more vibrantly beautiful they become

Walking from the cafe to his apartment to look for a rare book on octopuses in Haida mythology, I asked Dr. Anderson what draws certain people to cephalopods. The way he talks about them suggests an interest than runs deeper than science—he talks about why people don’t care about them as much as otters and killer whales and sharks, animals with “charismatic megafauna effect,” and the edges of his voice take on a tinge of resentment. “Nobody’s looking at octopuses besides me,” he said. “There are two species, maybe three, living in Puget Sound. The Enteroctopus dofleini and the red octopuses, which like to live in beer bottles. Nobody knows how many there are of those, either. I once found eight in eight beer bottles in a row. On a night dive, I saw 12 in one spot. But nobody seems to care.” He talked about how octopuses have personalities and maybe even emotions. “Nobody has proved that yet,” he said. “It might be up to me.” It takes a special kind of person, he suggests, to devote a life to the study of cephalopods.

He paused. “You have to be different. They’re not cute and cuddly. Some would say they have a cold intelligence.”

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Appreciation

The Cloud Appreciation Society has seen fit to use three of my photos thus far, and I am, yes, appreciative.

It’s a neat site, particularly if you find weather fascinating or indeed notice it at all. The originals are here, here, and here.

I always wondered about this.

“Also two brothers named Newse came there to make a plantation. Once before, in Ireland, they had founded a town, naming it Newcetown, where it still stands. So now to their new settlement they gave the name New, and since it had an anchorage they called it Port, and it became New Port Newse. The brothers were unfortunate, and men forgot them soon; but men remembered Captain Newport, who had done much to found Virginia. So they began to think and write Newport’s Newce, perhaps even to confuse the second part with Neuse River. Then in trying to make sense they wrote Newport News, and so it remained. Thus with men and names, as with fishes in the sea, the greater often swallow up the smaller.”

-Names on the Land, George R. Stewart