Colorized ponies

The eye plays tricks.

Perception is not reality?

Studies of itching and perception (warning: slightly disturbing) suggest "perception is the brain's best guess about what is happening in the outside world." It can be confused, tricked, or manipulated. Our brains are complex, amazing, and imperfect. Fascinating stuff.

Birds of Summer

Looks like the herons have taken off. Except one. An old, picked-over heron carcass appeared in our backyard today. I don't know how, because the thing was just feathers and bone now. I hope whatever happened doesn't keep the rest of them from coming back next year.

Update (June 27): Turns out at least one live bird remains. It's an adult.

An engineer's best friend?

The end is near for the diamond jewelry industry.

The largest single-crystal diamond ever grown in a lab is about .7 inches by .2 inches by .2 inches, or 15 carats. The stone isn't under military guard or at a hidden location. It's in a room crowded with gauges and microscopes, along with the odd bicycle and congo drum, on a leafy campus surrounded by Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. Russell Hemley, director of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Lab, started working on growing diamonds with CVD in 1995. He pulls a diamond out of his khakis. It would be hard to mistake this diamond for anything sold at Tiffany. The rectangular stone looks like a thick piece of tinted glass.

Emphasis mine. The whole diamond jewelry thing is rather absurd. I'll be happy to see it go, though it won't go down quietly:

The diamond-mining companies have been fighting back, arguing that all that glitters is not diamond. De Beers' ads and its Web sites insist that diamonds should be natural, unprocessed and millions of years old. "Diamonds are rare and special things with an inherent value that does not exist in factory-made synthetics," says spokeswoman Lynette Gould. "When people want to celebrate a unique relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old factory-made stone."

People might be dumb enough to buy that initially. I give that a few years. The thing is, you can't tell, especially from casual inspection, what's natural and what's lab-grown. All it takes is a couple of women in a social circle to be willing to accept a lab-grown diamond triple the size of their friends' natural rocks at the same price, and the levee will burst.

A flock of herons

Wednesday night, while I was taking out the recycling, I got stared down by no fewer than 7 Yellow-Crowned Night Herons. At least 3 of those were juveniles, one was still chicky, and 2 were clearly adults. They grow fast; it's been only a month since I found the barely-hatched (or hatched-on-impact) chick on my lawn. At least one of the juveniles can fly. I'm guessing they won't be around much longer; this is about the time last year when the initial pair of juveniles came and went.

Maybe next year will see a whole flock settling on my street. I don't know if that'll be a good thing; their poops are enormous. There's a gross white oval about 4 feet across on my front lawn directly underneath one of the nests.

I'm not easily distracted...

I'm wise. I have a "broad attention span." Now what were you saying again?

a carbon tax is more complicated than I thought

Very interesting analysis, especially re: non CO2 greenhouse gases and the incredibly difficult problem of figuring out exactly how big the external costs of coal or any other energy source are.

toilets and the coriolis effect

FYI, water in toilets in the Southern Hemisphere does not actually drain in the opposite direction. Just search for "coriolis toilet" for more.

chicka chicka boom boom

I dropped the chick off this morning at the Wildlife Rescue. It seemed no worse for its wear, though the volunteer discovered some flies had planted eggs on it. Ick. I was going to post a little video of it squirming in an empty mushroom box, but Google is being uncooperative. I don't think I got any recording of it peeping. It peeped in the car with me on the way over. I don't think it'll miss me.

Update: coincidentally, I just installed Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" on my work laptop.

Attempting a rescue

 

When I came home from work, the chick was still alive. I called Wildlife Rescue. They told me to keep it warm, and to bring it in tomorrow. If it was the wind that knocked it out, it's survived for two days; I hope it makes it through tonight. It's on a heating pad wrapped up in a towel. They told me not to feed it.

two dead chicks

The strong winds we've had recently appear to have blown one egg out of each of the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron nests in our front yard. It's hard to tell whether the chicks had hatched already; the egg shells were on the ground as well as the chicks. One was dead, the other soon to be so. Its futile strugglings were disturbingly similar to the weak, random movements of a young infant. I sure hope there are more in the nest. Wikipedia claims there are usually 3-5 eggs.

Kitties forever

Someone, somewhere, sometime in the next 20 years, is going to genetically engineer a cat that never grows up. Kittens are more fun than cats, after all.