Tunnel of Love (and Bones)

The nest of the male Great Browerbird, found in Northern Australia/nearby islands. I dare say this is the most elaborate of all birds nests, though there are others worth consideration. Note the use of color and most critically, perspective - they pile up more items further away from the entrance to the next to give the illusion of greater size.
What we do for love! The male of the species spends most of the time not eating/sleeping working on his nest. There's even some mild form of training that occurs when young males will watch/assist an older male with his nest. And all for the ladies, of course. She'll come by, inspect it, and if it meets her standards, SEXY-TIME. Otherwise, she flies off to inspect other nests, and the loser bird gets to work trying again.

You see this behavior in almost all creatures that reproduce sexually - display. Competition. Seemingly over the top behaviors. It's hardwired into us, and is one of the means that evolution works its way through our various populations.

I note for consideration that it seems to me it's the males of almost every species that engages in these elaborate courtship behaviors, or even more, biological displays - consider the peacock. Whereas the females of most every species are drab and/or uninterested in any courtship displays. Except in humans. Sure, males of the species must acquire money in order to acquire a rocking Camaro in order to obtain a mate, but the females of the species go to equally great lengths in order to woo a mate - think of plucking eyebrows. Perhaps greater lengths - witness the cliched sitcom couple of the fat loser man with the plucky, hot wife.

What gives, humanity?

Dick Smith Lies!

I'd like to see a chart detailing the use of the nickname "Dick". My assumption is it was once a fairly common way to shorten "Richard", but has fallen by the wayside over the last 30+ years, in favor of "Rick", "Rich", and perhaps even "Chard". Fallen drastically. Have you met a young Dick?

Who'd choose to be a Dick these days, really?

Also, this phone only floats for the first ten minutes in water. It's in the footnotes. The glorious footnotes - legal arcana to ward off evil magic (i.e. lawsuits). Another example: CAUTION! Coffee is hot.

Everything's Connected

Saturn's auroras in time lapse sequence, taken by one of the most important science tools ever invented - ever! - the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Fact! Every planet with a magnetic field (Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) has auroras. Saturn has particularly spectacular auroras, as witnessed above, and below:

Look at them! They're things - you can see their thickness in this pic. That's because auroras are actually things - particles from the sun, sent flying on the solar wind, wrapping down the magnetic field of the planet towards both poles (due to the shape of spherical magnetic fields - everything is geometry, someone once said).  Cool, right?

It gets cooler. Scientists recently discovered - and believe me, despite all the wingnuts and Heebie Jeebies, we are in a Golden Age of scientific discovery, because of our advancing technology - that the coolest moon in the Solar System - Enceladus - is electrically connected to Saturn. They form a circuit. Lookee here:

On the left is a spot just below Saturn's Northern aurora, with a stream connecting to a big spot in an aurora like phenomena on Enceladus. These two spots spin around, the proof that they are connected. Check it:

This is Saturn's Northern aurora from above - in the upper left, you see a white box with a red dot in it. The red dot is the electrical field of Enceladus, as you can see it move in this time lapse image.There is a corresponding movement in the bright circle above Enceladus.

Enceladus is electrically charged in part because of all the water it expels. It expels a lot!  Enceladus contributes several of Saturn's rings, as it spews water into space which then freezes hard as rock then orbits around Saturn in a ring for some millions of years in beauteous wonder.

We are learning more and more about the Universe we exist in and are part of every day. It's amazing - to think! It was the mid 1990's when the first Exoplanet was confirmed, and now we are over 400 and about to sharply spike way higher - conventional wisdom now holds that just about every star has planetary bodies of some kind orbiting it. Meaning there are hundreds of billions (trillions?) of planets in our Galaxy. And of course there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. And so on.

The point? We live in a miracle. As a PS, here's humble ol' Earth, our home:

Aurora Australis, y'all.

Ask and ye shall receive

Example #23 in the lesson "If it can be thought of, it's already been done".

Boorish Borealis

This rather striking pic is making all the space blogs today - technically, a picture of the Aurora Australis, but that didn't work for my joke, AND the educational opportunity of pointing out the different names for the same phenomena in the Northern (Borealis) and Southern (Australis) Auroras.

Anyways, this is one the best pics I've seen of this phenomena from space. Dramatic! So you know, all aurora represent solar radiation being channeled by the Earth's magnetic fields towards the north/south poles, and thus the lights. It represents the barest fraction of the entire energy being directed at us by these solar events, the vast, vast majority of which is deflected entirely by the Magnetic Field, which is really our sole provider and protector in this crazy Universe. So maybe say a prayer tonight for the magnetic field - it's weakening!

Uluru

Uluru, November 2007


Travel protip: If you ever visit, for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster buy and wear a bug net. There are legions of little flies that like nothing better than sneaking up your nostril or into your ear. They were maddening. Otherwise, awesome.