Three-year-old plays the piano

Via The Music Man.  Note this is done entirely by memory without looking at any sheet music.  I think I was eight years old before I could stumble my way through "Für Elise" (which I have just learned is one of two melodies played on Taiwan garbage trucks to alert residents of their presence).

Nudibranch and feather grass

Posted for the beauty of the images. 

Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes in 1973 - his "tremendous machine" performance

 

Everyone who watched the Belmont 40 years ago will never forget Secretariat's race that day.  He had already won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness; this was his bid for the Triple Crown, and he was so good that few owners wanted to enter their horses against him in the Belmont - that's why there were so few racing that day.   The track didn't even take "show" bets, and it's an interesting (?unique) anomaly that Secretariat was so favored by bettors that he would have paid more to show ($2.40) than he did to win ($2.20).  

Over 5,000 winning tickets were never redeemed because the holders valued them more as souvenirs than for their cash value.

And to this day his speed for 1.5 miles has never been equaled.  Even if you have no interest in thoroughbred racing per se, you owe it to yourself to watch this 3-minute clip to see one of the iconic moments in the history of sport.

Reposted from 2013.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader demenace07, who offered this link with more information about the economics of uncashed winning tickets for a more recent race:

Some enterprising horse bettors are selling their tickets on eBay, where such tickets are selling for $20 to $30. Other sellers bought up many of the cheapest Belmont Stakes gambling tickets. One seller is selling a lot of 500 such tickets. Another is selling 150 tickets in a lot.

Tickets for the Triple Crown wins of Secretariat (1973) and Seattle Slew (1977) sold for big money on the collectors market.

Rovell said that the tickets are simply worth more to collectors than the cash-in price. He said, “Whether you want to keep it for your memory or resell it, it’s worth ten times more than if you cash it in. So people are making good bets.”

Reposted again in 2026 because I found it while looking for other stuff.  I don't follow or even enjoy watching horse racing, although I did see some dressage events during my years in Kentucky, but this race is so iconic that it's worth preserving here in the blog.

Why mosquito eggs float

This hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph was the favourite of the jury in the section "Best Scientific Image". The image shows the surface of a mosquito egg (from Culex pipiens), which generates a water repellent network by connecting microscopically small structures to trap a thin layer of air. The vitally important structures avoid immersion and enable the egg to float and aggregate with neighbouring eggs.

The website of photographer Martin Oeggerli.  Reposted from 2013 because I had my first encounter with mosquitoes this week in the woods behind our house.

Tessellated pavement tiles in Granada

It just absolutely fascinates me that each of these hexagonal tiles has the same pattern, but that the resultant overall result can be so variable.

Tessellation longread in Wikipedia.

Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes)

This one eclosed late this afternoon; when I photographed him, he was still fanning his wings to dry and stiffen them. (Males are characterized by prominence of the yellow pattern on the forewing and subtlety of the blue spots on the hindwing above the eyespots).

This one is a little small in body size, as is typical for the late-season ones which overwinter here as a chrysalis (the caterpillars often don't get very fat in the fall before the cold weather forces them to pupate), but the outstanding beauty of the wings is wonderfully characteristic of the species - click to enlarge to bigger-than-screen size.

He will spend the night on our screen porch, then warm himself in the sunshine before heading out for whatever adventures await. Five more chrysalids from last autumn's batch are still waiting to hatch.

Reposted from last month to add a photo of the latest one to eclose:

The color patter on the underside of the wings is truly remarkable and not usually visible when you see them soaring around your garden.

Reposted from 2022 to add the first BST of the year for 2026:

This fellow showed up in our garden as a caterpillar on the rue by our mailbox (see link for pix including cat and chrysalis).  Last autumn he was wandering on top of the rue looking for a place to form a chrysalis, so I brought him into a terrarium in our screen porch and within a day or two he did his magic transformation into chrysalis form (file photos below):

He then proceeded to tolerate late-January temperatures to -20 degrees Fahrenheit on the unheated screen porch.  My only contribution to his welfare was to spritz the chrysalis with water mist on those days when in nature it would have been snowed or rained on.

The photo above on the wire porch screen was taken with the wings backlit by the morning sun while he was drying the wings and letting them harden.  After about an hour I moved him out to a branch of an oak tree that extends over our back porch and took another photo -

This time the full afternoon sun was behind him and me.  Note he has those wings spread horizontally to the max to soak up the solar energy.  And note how the color spots are more vivid with reflected light rather than the transmitted light in the earlier image.  That color pattern is different from that of the female, who has more subtle coloration presumably to make her less susceptible to predation.

Truly magnificent creatures.  I don't know how anyone can not be in awe of their beauty and the incredible transformations they undergo in their life cycles.

Undersea data cables as wartime leverage

The United States has been learning some unpleasant realities about "asymmetric warfare" in which the country with the most bombers and aircraft carriers is not necessarily a guaranteed winner.

The embed above comes from an article last week in Reuters, which begins by discussing accidental damage during wartime -

"In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage," Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.

- and then the difficulties of repairing during wartime, and the impossibility of switching to satellites:

"It's not as though you could just switch to satellite. That's not an alternative," Mauldin said, noting that ​satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.  Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are "a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time," Kotkin added.

But it's an article in The Eurasian Times that more directly speaks to the possibility of aggressive attacks on undersea cables -

Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz and controls long stretches of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. These waters host all the major cable routes that link Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This geography gives Tehran physical access to infrastructure on which the world economy depends.

In fact, disrupting undersea cables is a low-cost, high-impact option that can cause global disruption without a direct missile strike. A damaged cable in the Gulf can slow internet traffic from Mumbai to Frankfurt within minutes, delay international banking settlements, and degrade cloud services used by hospitals, airlines, and power grids.

Significantly, it could also cripple military communications for US CENTCOM, and regional partners would be forced to rely on backup satellites with limited bandwidth.

But the situation in the Middle East is such that people are not even talking about overt operations to damage the undersea cable networks on the seabed. They are apprehensive that Iran will resort to doing so openly, which it has the capacity to do, aided by its geography. This additional maritime disruption will only add to its strategic leverage against not only the Gulf countries but also America.

But for an in-your-face salty appraisal of the potential, read the post in the "I Fucking Love Australia" substack of April 26:

A few days ago, Tasnim, the IRGC’s tame mouthpiece, published what looked like a harmless technical explainer. Maps of undersea internet cables. Locations of cloud infrastructure. Landing stations in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. A polite little observation that the southern Gulf relies on these routes far more heavily than Iran does. No podium. No death to America chant. No uniformed general doing the finger wag. Just a map. Because when you have already put drones through 3 AWS data centres and an Oracle facility, you do not need to threaten anything out loud. You publish the coordinates. You let the insurance market translate for you. You let the CEOs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh shit their expensive trousers in private. That is how grown-ups signal escalation, and it is a mode of communication that requires a functional prefrontal cortex to receive, which is why the sunburnt Big Mac wrapper in the Oval Office has completely missed it.

So let me lay out who actually holds the cards in this pissing contest, because if you have been listening to the cable news lizards you could be forgiven for thinking it is the side with the aircraft carriers.

It is not.

Iran’s internet runs overland. Turkey to the north, the Caucasus to the northwest. If every single submarine cable in the Persian Gulf gets severed tomorrow morning, Tehran checks its email over lunch without noticing. The southern Gulf, by contrast, is a data peninsula. UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. Every banking transaction, every AI cloud workload, every ride-share app, every oil trade settlement, every fucking everything gets to the rest of the world through a handful of fibre bundles running through one of the most contested bodies of water on the planet. 99 percent of international internet traffic travels over submarine cables. The Red Sea corridor is already effectively closed because the Houthis have made it a no-go zone for repair vessels. The Gulf corridor is now being mapped by the people who just put drones into Amazon’s racks. That leaves the entire southern Gulf with precisely 0 safe options for getting their data to Europe, to India, to Africa, to anywhere.

And here is the kicker. The cables do not need to be bombed. They do not need missiles. They do not need a full IRGC naval sortie. They need a fishing trawler dragging an anchor in the wrong place..."

Do not rely on my excerpts from sources.  Do your own research, make your own conclusions.

Lusitano stallion

One of the winning photos in the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards open competition.

Celestial Dance. Shortlist, Motion. This young Lusitano stallion was allowed to move freely during a photography session, enabling the photographer to capture its powerful and graceful movements.

Credit Lorea Hausheer, via The Atlantic.  Posted so I don't end the blogging day with a damn war story at the top of the column.

Light pillars and sun pillars - updated x4

An Astronomy Picture of the Day from Finland, explained at the link and in my previous post on the subject.

Reposted from 2013 to add this awesome Astronomy Picture of the Day taken over Whitefish Bay:

"...vertical lines of light over a ground source that reflect from falling ice crystals. As the ground temperature was above freezing, the flat crystals likely melted as they approached the ground, creating a lower end to the vertical light pillars."

Reposted from 2018 to add this photo, via. 

And reposted yet again to add this remarkable image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, which depicts a sun pillar.

"This was not a typical sun pillar. Just after sunrise two weeks ago in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, a photographer, looking out his window, was suddenly awestruck. The astonishment was caused by a sun pillar that fanned out at the top. Sun pillars, singular columns of light going up from the Sun, are themselves rare to see, and are known to be caused by sunlight reflecting from wobbling, hexagon-shaped ice-disks falling through Earth's atmosphere. Separately, upper tangent arcs are known to be caused by sunlight refracting through falling hexagon-shaped ice-tubes. Finding a sun pillar connected to an upper tangent arc is extraordinary, and, initially, took some analysis to figure out what was going on. A leading theory is that this sun pillar was also created, in a complex and unusual way, by falling ice tubes."

Might as well link to my previous posts on sun and light pillars in 2009 and 2010.

This schematic from Wikipedia -

- illustrates how the phenomenon is created.

Reposted from 2021 to add yet one more spectacular photo -

Some cycads attract pollinators using heat

"Plants usually attract pollinators using bright colors and scents, but some of the earliest plants use heat instead. A collaboration between professor of molecular and cellular biology Nicholas Bellono and Hessel professor of biology Naomi Pierce has shown that cycads, a division of cone-bearing plants that are ancient in evolutionary terms, warm their reproductive structures in daily cycles, releasing invisible infrared radiation that attracts beetle pollinators. 

Experiments showed that beetles are drawn to this heat even when color, scent, and touch are removed, proving that infrared radiation itself acts as a signal. The team also discovered that the cycad-feeding beetles have specialized sensory cells in their antennae that detect infrared heat, tuned precisely to the temperatures produced by their host plants. 

This heat-based signaling predates colorful flowers and likely played a key role in the earliest plant-pollinator relationships, long before bees and butterflies became dominant."

I find this fascinating.  The fact that plants can generate heat is not novel, as anyone familiar with skunk cabbage melting snow in the spring understands, and I suppose some modern plants can be warmer than their environment based on dark colored leaves absorbing solar energy, but all of this cycad science is new to me.  How do plants generate infrared radiation?  Maybe they just selectively reflect infrared radition from sunlight?  

Text and image (cropped for size) from Harvard Magazine.   I have not found the primary source publication, which is probably in Nature or Science, but I don't have time to search today.

Addendum:  Found the journal article in Science, but it's behind a paywall.

The most amazing musical instrument is the human voice

I don't really have time to blog today, but I wanted to share this video I found last night at Nag on the Lake (which I invite you to explore if you like TYWKIWDBI).  

It took a bit of searching to find the lyrics (excerpted from Psalm 84) at Light on Dark Water:

"How beloved is your dwelling place,

O lord of hosts,

My soul yearns, faints,

My heart and my flesh cry out.

The sparrow found a house,

And the swallow her nest,

Where she may raise her young.

They pass through the Valley of Bakka,

They make it a place of springs;

The autumn also covers it with pools."

You don't need the lyrics to appreciate the beauty of the harmonies.  Had I heard this music without the video, I probably would have assumed it came from a synthesizer, similar to the many programs I've recorded from Music from the Hearts of Space.  But these are human voices.  Awesome.

You are here

The European Space Agency is compiling a 3D map of the Milky Way, showing the color and brightness of 1.8 billion stars.  In this image, we are located where the lines for 180 degrees vertically and 90 degrees horizontally cross.  

If we were able to travel at the speed of light for the rest of our lives, we would not get out of the pixel we are currently in.  

The Milky Way is one galaxy.  There are about 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies... in the observable universe (via Hubble).   Note for comparison the small circle around us in the image designating the limits of what the human eye can see when looking at the sky.  

These are data that need to be considered if/when we ponder why we exist and what our purpose is/should be.

Want more?  There are over 600 images accessible via this link.

What did you do when you were 4 months old?

This 4-month-old godwit flew 8,000 miles across the Pacific from Alaska to Tasmania.

"The journey set what the agency described as the longest documented non-stop flight by any animal... The record-setting trip wasn’t a lucky guess based on sightings... To follow B6’s route, researchers used a 5-gram, solar-powered satellite transmitter attached to the bird’s rump... what makes this story stand out is the combination of distance, duration and the bird’s age. B6 was only about four months old when it completed the crossing..."

"A good pool player is a sign of a misspent youth"

My father used to quote that phrase when we played 8-ball.

I don't know the origin of the aphorism (?Twain, ?W.C. Fields), but I did find this while searching:

"I spent half my money on booze, women, and gambling. The other half i wasted." 

--W C Fields

(Reposted from 2014) 

Photo of the day

A sika deer with the severed head of a rival male that died in their battle skewered on its antler.  Photograph: Kohei Nagira/Wildlife Photographer of the Year.  Via The Guardian.

I find my self wondering how the impaled head became severed from the rest of the carcass.  Almost certainy not from the battle per se.  Did the victor have to drag the carcass around as he grazed until the flesh rotted, or did wolves perhaps scavenge the dead body up top the neck?

Addendum: found the answer in The Atlantic, which also posted the photo: "A local fisherman says the deer dragged the whole body for several days before finally tearing off its head."  Maybe he was able to stomp the neck area with his hooves.  (p.s. - both links have a bunch of excellent wildlife photos)

Timelapse of the development of Chicago

I have lots of concerns re AI, but I have to grudgingly admit that it can generate some absolutely awesome images and videos.  More re the concerns later, but first this embed of Chicago from 1870 to the present.  History Revived has lots of these.  I'll definitely do the Mexico City one later.  

Weather hell on the East Coast

When I started TYWKIWDBI in 2007, the first post indicated that the purpose was "to compile for the amusement of my friends an eclectic collection of gleanings from the internet..."  That's still the case, so this post today goes out to my schoolmates from the class of 1964.  

I've been exchanging emails recently with Pete W, who for education and career reasons became an expat from Minnesota and now lives in Roanoke, Virginia, near the foothills of the Appalachians.  I thought his comments the other day were informative:

"As far as our weather, I told the man who came to clear our relatively short driveway and spent FIVE hours doing only 70% of it, "I'm from Minnesota and I have never seen anything like this."

Saturday night past we had four inches of snow. Sunday at 1:00 we started 17 consecutive hours of freezing rain. End result was 4+ inches of frozen solid ice anchored to the sidewalks, streets, driveways, and ground everywhere. I've said for many years that 1/2 inch of ice is worse than a foot of snow, but this was 4 full inches of frozen solid (not just the top) ice. My yard is so slick it's truly like a skating rink that has just been Zambonied!  We are still digging out. No mail delivery until we clear access to our mailboxes, and today -- finally after 5 days -- I was able to pickaxe out that ice. Flat out brutal, and being a Gopher was of no use. Amazing. Schools still closed, of course, since buses can't go anywhere."

Apparently more bad weather is heading that way.  Just an FYI to classmates.  

"The Ark Before Noah"

Cultures around the world are awash with "great flood" myths.  Wikipedia has a list of flood myths that includes too many for me to count today.  It takes no leap of imagination to assume that ancient peoples traversing mountains and seeing fossilized obvious seashells on mountains used basic logic to accept that in ancient times a huge flood must have covered the world.

I have previous reviewed a very scholarly book discussing in details the great floods after the ice age and the submersion of Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in southeast Asia.  Also related is my old post on The Black Sea Deluge as a source of ancient flood myths.

This post is about another book, published in 2014 (Doubleday) and recommended to me by a reader many years ago.  The author has the awesome title of "Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures" at the British Museum.  He is the person in charge of the gazillion cuneiform tablets stored at the museum, and he can read those nicks in the clay the way that I can read cursive.  This book focuses on an "ark tablet" in the museum holdings that presents in detail a myth of a world flood and the survival of mankind thanks to a man who builds an ark.   Here is the tablet (more pix at the link):

And here are some of my excerpts and thoughts after browsing the book...

Modern scholars generally agree that the ark described in Babylonian times was constructed of reeds (which are huge and plentiful in Mesopotamian wetlands).  Jewish scholars recognize that the word translated into the Hebrew Bible as "gopher wood" if pronounced slightly differently would also mean "reeds."

While I was pondering this problem, I was simultaneously reading about ancient Babylonian versions of the flood story. Of course, there are different approaches regarding how to reconcile these with the Torah's account, which are not our concern here. But I suddenly realized that they describe the ark as being made of reeds - which, in Hebrew, is kannim, the very word that our verse uses, albeit vocalized differently. And this was apparently the standard technique used for creating boats in ancient Mesopotamia - they were made of reeds, sometimes hybridized with a wooden frame for greater strength. (Note that this technique would have been unknown to later generations in other parts of the world, where boats were made exclusively from wood.)

It is also clear from three different cuneiform flood tablets that the ark was round like a circle (p 129).  And see this 2012 post.

There are two Hebrew sources for the description of the flood ("J" and "P").  The "J" says forty days of rain and everything dies.  The "P" source says flood rose for 150 days to cover  mountains, then takes 150 days to go down.  (217)

The kingdom of Judea was conquered in battle by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 597 BC, and the people of Jerusalem were taken into exile in Babylon -"all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled workers and artisans - a total of ten thousand.  Only the poorest people of the land were left."  Those Judeans were then incorporated into Babylonian society, where they would have learned of the flood story. (227).  They would have seen the immense Tower (ziggurat) of Babel - seventy meters in height, way more than anything in Jerusalem.  It is incorporated into the 11th chapter of Genesis.

It is during this time of exile that two important shifts occur (pp 240s).  The Judeans incorporate the ark story into their own heritage, because all the intelligent young men of the society are being educated in Babel.  Conversely the Babylonian society, famously polytheistic, begins to view the gods in a more monotheistic arrangement (in accordance with the strictly monotheistic Jews).  The second commandment of the Judean Hebrew bible states "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" indicates a recognition of the existence of other gods.  But the Babylonians conversely start blending their various "gods" into Marduk - previously the "king of the gods" but now viewed as a single god with multiple manifestations:

The Judeans life in exile in Babylon is arguably the reason for their creation of their bible, nicely delineated on page 247:

"In the years before Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC the Judeans certainly did more than sit about and weep.  They adjusted and settled.  In time they became Mesopotamian citizens.  By the time Cyrus arrived by no means all of Nebuchadnezzar's displaced persons wanted to go "home" to Jerusalem.  However, the Judeans' ancient and somewhat ramshackle religious identity had meanwhile been crystallising into permanence due to their encyclopaedia of history, custom, instruction and wisdom.  They became literally the people of the book.  From this angle it can be argued that the Babylonian Exile, far from being the disaster it is usually judged, was ultimately the process that forged what became modern Judaism."

And that eventually led to the formation of Christianity six centuries later.  A fascinating idea.

There is more in the book than the ark story, including some discussion of the Babylonian Map of the World (the earliest known map of the world):

Inside the inner circle are the great rivers and the major cities.  They are surrounded by a great sea, beyond which are huge mountains.  The resemblance to the famous T and O map of the world is compellling.

I'm going to stop here.  If you are interested, the book should be in most public library systems.  It's TMI regarding cuneiform lettering and texts, but fascinating in its overall scope.  I highly recommend Chapter 11 (excerpted at length above) and Chapter 14 ("Conclusions: Stories and Shapes") for the TL;DR readers.

Found on a Scotland beach. At home it started giving off smoke and a burning smell

Here are several comments from the Minerals subreddit thread:

Around the baltic sea, but also north sea, phosphor remains from bombs of the world wars are found on the beaches and are mistaken for amber and cause injuries because it starts burning. So now that you know that and you can take some precautionary measures, you could have some fun with that one.

Does it smell like almonds? Keep it in water. If it has white phosphorus in it, it will have a smoky layer on the surface and give off a faint mist like a model train engine. It will smell like astringent almonds. The stuff is the most extreme substance that I've ever handled by far and I've worked with nuclear weapons. White phosphorus makes a brine with the water like Satan's piss. Leave it out in the sun. Ultraviolet will convert it into red phosphorus which is stable albeit slowly. The real nightmare is that it heat upon contact with air, melts into a paste like soft butter, eventually drips like candle wax and everything it has touched is about to burst into flames as hot as he sun. White phosphorus is truly the stuff of nightmares. I took on the responsibility of handling 100g of it a few years ago and I regretted every second of it for the months it took me to convert it into 60g of red P I keep as a reminder to never do that again.

Just another little thing to add here. White phosphorus is also extremely toxic. It's a little more toxic than potassium cyanide. Where the median lethal dose for white phosphorus is between 50-100mg, vs 140mg for potassium cyanide.

After reading the comments, the original poster left a followup:

Once the hazardous waste team arrived, they took a small sample and ran some tests. Nothing showed up on their equipment to confirm what it was. They then burnt a small sample in their mobile fume cupboard and seemed satisfied that it was phosphorus.

I think they made contact with other specialist teams that deal with unexploded ordnance. They then took the decision to burn the rest. Initially they set up a small stove and gauze but the small sample they lit burnt straight through the gauze and damaged the stove. The decision was then taken just to burn the phosphorus on the ground. They touched it with a naked flame and off it went. Continued burning for nearly 10 minutes. Can see much damage it could have done if indoors (or in a jacket pocket!).

Every day I blog I learn something.

Related: Evidence of Israel's unlawful use of white phosphorus in Southern Lebanon (Amnesty International, 2023)

Also related: What Visual Evidence Tells Us About Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon (New York Times, 2026)

A dangerous guide to beachcombing (Chemistry World)

Centuripe

I previously posted an aerial image of this Italian mountaintop community about five years ago, but this evening image enhanced by city lights is much more impressive (click to embiggen).

This image (credit Fabrizio Villa / Getty), was one of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic.