Curious Topics To Follow Down The Rabbit Hole

I have a habit of deep diving for a couple of hours on topics that turn up in either my dreams, day or otherwise. This is just somewhere to share them with anyone else curious. Stay safe out there.

[memecucker]

Apparently one type of deer hunting practiced in the Middle Ages was using “stalking horses” which involves crouching behind horse in a forest and slowly guiding it towards a deer that’s been tracked because deer are not frightened by the sight of other tall quadrupeds and I like how “horses as a form of camouflage” is belongs to the list of uses for domestic horses

[elodieunderglass]

Thank you @chiropteracupola ! “Stalking horse” is still a phrase and one whose meaning is easy to remember, I think

[gallusrostromegalus]

NGL this was one of those terms I only heard instead of read and for the LONGEST time I thought it was "Stocking Horse" and was always wondering why the horses with white markings on their legs were so shifty.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Bridgey's Midgey: this species of lace bug has a distinctive dome-like structure on its back, and it was discovered just 5 years ago

This species has only been documented at the Cairns Botanic Gardens in Australia, where it was discovered by a photographer/tour guide named Bridgette Gower back in 2020. The strange-looking insect is also known as "Bridgey's midgey," and it's recognized as an undescribed species of lace bug from the genus Oecharis.

The distinctive "cyst" on the insect's back is actually part of the pronotum (the plate that covers the dorsal side of its body) and it's formed by two separate structures that meet along the midline of the thorax; these two structures part whenever the insect needs to use its wings, which are folded beneath the dome.

The entire pronotum is covered in dark, lacy patterns and translucent cells that make the "cyst" seem even more exaggerated.

The adults of this species measure roughly 3mm long. Entomologists have also documented and collected the nymphs, which have flat, shiny bodies that are completely black.

Lace bugs (family Tingidae) are tiny insects that feed on plant fluids, and their common name is derived from the fact that they often have delicate and extremely intricate structures on their wings and pronotum.

Sources & More Info:

iNaturalist: Genus Oecharis

Aussie Macro Photos: Finding Bridgey's Midgey

Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology: Lace Bug Genera of the World, Part II (PDF)

University of Maine: Lace Bugs

[sleepy-bebby]

Chinese giant salamander (娃娃鱼) a.k.a ‘baby fish’ due to the sound they make that sounds like a baby crying.

The Chinese giant salamander is one of the largest salamanders and one of the largest amphibians in the world. It is fully aquatic and is endemic to rocky mountain streams and lakes in the Yangtze river basin of central China.

The Chinese giant salamander is considered to be a "living fossil". Although protected under Chinese laws, its population has faced severe declined over the last 70 years and is currently (2022) listed as threatened. There are evidence indicating that the Chinese giant salamander may be composed of at least five cryptic species, further compounding each individual species' endangerment.

Here is a video of a 200-year-old Chinese giant salamander that was found in a cave.

[emwheezie]

20 years of Neil Banging out the tunes

I made this design to celebrate!

[calllynx]

More experimental animation. All done on paper, oil pastel and alcohol marker.

[lajadelmira]

Here’s another quick concept 😌 she’s a dryad inspired by many flowers! mainly blue wisteria. i made her for another character’s lore (Wynn’s lore), but she’s so pretty I feel like she deserves a nice backstory too

[its-funnytwittertweets]

[fish-facts-deactivated042926]

This is actually quite fascinating! Reading the article, you can discover that beneath our enamel we have something called Dentine — the thing that reacts to pain and sends that information to the nerves. When we were fish, we used to have exoskeletons with bumps that eventually turned into the teeth we have today! These bumps had dentine in them, helping our fishy ancestors sense their surroundings.

"Covered in these sensitive tissues, maybe when it bumped against something it could sense that pressure, or maybe it could sense when the water got too cold and it needed to swim elsewhere."

— Dr. Yara Hardy

There's a lot more interesting information on the article, which is here, if you want to read it!

[antiqueanimals]

Florida Wildlife; vol. 12, no. 1. June, 1958. Illustration by Wallace Hughes.

Internet Archive

[nonagalleryart]

In the Year of the Horse, let us all truly appreciate what this mythical creature has done for surrealist memes. I don’t think there is another animal that has inspired such unhinged internet images. We should all be both eternally grateful and forever afraid.

[dastaire]

[dastaire]

Do you think the older nurses on the maternity ward in the Addams family universe had told about newer ones about the gothic woman who didn't scream or even sweat during labour ? For her first child was scary enough but her second big bubba and with no medications?

And no one believes them - but then in comes Mrs Addams for the 3rd time with Pubert to really fuck with the newer nurses.

[labyrinthnook]

V&A East Archive Report: Two 'New' Labyrinth Songs Discovered!

(Apologies for my long absence from any meaningful posting here - I'd run out of things to say for a long while, but my discoveries today warrant a return to the world of Labyrinth!)

I had a fascinating visit to the study room at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East today, where I requested all their papers relating to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. I made one particularly exciting discovery: two completely ‘new’ songs Bowie wrote for the film. 

I can’t share the full lyrics for either song to avoid falling foul of copyright law, but the songs are titled ‘All in All’ and ‘Crystal Heartbeat’. Both songs have full lyrics, and are written in Bowie’s own hand. If you want to access either lyric sheet, the V&A archive reference is DBA/4/1/14/2.

I enclose ‘new’ with quotation marks very deliberately because I have the impression that these are both draft lyrics for what would become ‘As the World Falls Down’ (‘All in All’) and ‘Underground’ (‘Crystal Heartbeat’). This is an educated guess on my part, but I believe it’s likely based on the lyrical evidence. 

Like ATWFD, ‘All in All’ (27 lines) is a love song with a woozy feel - it’s bombastic and filled with grand romantic gestures, and literally quotes the phrase “in the heat of the morning” (the title and refrain of an early Bowie song). IMHO, it’s easily the superior of the two ‘new’ songs. 

‘All in All’ seems well-aligned with the more didactic early drafts of the ‘Labyrinth’ script, which was written by Terry Jones to present Jareth as a more straightforwardly manipulative trickster hiding beneath a facade of physical beauty. It’s filled with Jareth’s overwrought declarations of love (unlikely as it may seem, his love is bigger than the sun that shines!) and invites Sarah to join him in a world of pretend. ATWFD is definitely better from a lyrical perspective, and certainly more nuanced, but 'All in All' isn't half bad.

‘Crystal Heartbeat’ (23 lines) is simpler and less lyrically complex, and has a similar theme of being lost in the confusion of adolescence to ‘Underground’. It’s highly repetitive and feels like an up-tempo dance track (thus why I think it’s an early attempt at the main credits theme).’Underground’ is vastly superior from a lyrical perspective, so it’s easy to see why this draft was ditched. 

There are also handwritten lyric sheets for ‘As the World Falls Down’ and ‘Magic Dance’ (on the same sheet), ‘Within You’ and ‘Underground’. These lyrics are mostly very similar or identical to the versions included in the film, though ‘Magic Dance’ has some interesting annotations on delivery (so “what could I do” had “fun” written in the margin).

The only song without handwritten lyrics is ‘Chilly Down’, though there are various storyboards and correspondence relating to that particular song in the archive. It was clearly one of the harder nuts to crack, given the technical complexity of the Fire Gang scene (with the puppets filmed against black velvet, and the sequence workshopped over many iterations). 

The collection is fascinating and completely free to access (though you have to book!) and I can’t recommend going along enough - I feel very lucky and privileged to have handled all of this with my own hands! You can contact the archive and book an appointment to see the collection for yourself here: https://vam.libanswers.com/archives 

[curious-wildflower]

[greyborn2]

Donate to Final Stretch of IVF, lets make Milo happen!, organized by Kes Byfield

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[curious-wildflower]

[greyborn2]

Donate to Final Stretch of IVF, lets make Milo happen!, organized by Kes Byfield

Hello, and thank you for taking a minute to read our page! We’re Kes and … Kes Byfield needs your support for Final Stretch of IVF, lets

[txttletale]

its so fucking funny that nuclear waste is such a contentious topic. like yeah those damn nuclear advocates need to figure out somewhere reasonable to put that nuclear waste. for now we will  be sticking with coal power because it puts its waste products safe and sound In Our Lungs, where they cannot hurt anybody,

[mc-cookies]

coal byproducts also give people cancer en masse is the thing though. coal smoke is a carcinogen that contributes to lung cancer, and ash and other waste products can also contain significant amounts of uranium and thorium, so coal as a power source can totally expose people to ionizing radiation as well.

[mangonetics]

The thing is that for every hazard of nuclear waste, pretty much the worst case scenario is that it might do something that coal power is already doing. You could aerosolize nuclear waste and just spray it out of a chimney and it would have less environmental and health impacts than coal because you’d only be spraying like a gram of it for every billion tons of coal smoke for the same amount of power.

[afriendofblahaj]

Im already pretty vocal about my advocation and belief in nuclear power and I have been for years, but I saw something a few weeks ago that just

It so perfectly sums up everything that’s wrong, but also it’s incredibly horrifying

So, basically, someone not very involved in nuclear science but still discussing it posed the question “could we retrofit coal power plants to be nuclear power plants?”. And on the face, this is a fairly good idea actually. Coal and nuclear power both generate electricity the same way (heated water turns to steam which turns a turbine) so you would only need to do some modifications, making new nuclear reactors much cheaper, and killing coal plants.

Well, someone actually involved in the nuclear industry (I think they were a researcher but I might be misremmebering) responded to the question with (paraphrased from memory)

“that’s something many of us have proposed in the past, and unfortunately we can’t do that, because coal plants currently have much higher radiation levels than the EPA allowed a nuclear plant to be operated at. And cleaning up the site would cost more than just building a new plant in an uncontaminated site.”

It’s fucking wild

Not only is coal so much more dangerous in so many other ways, but the very thing people worry about with nuclear power is higher because coal isn’t regulated at all.

[curious-wildflower]

[greyborn2]

Donate to Final Stretch of IVF, lets make Milo happen!, organized by Kes Byfield

Hello, and thank you for taking a minute to read our page! We’re Kes and … Kes Byfield needs your support for Final Stretch of IVF, lets

[curious-wildflower]

[greyborn2]

Donate to Final Stretch of IVF, lets make Milo happen!, organized by Kes Byfield

Hello, and thank you for taking a minute to read our page! We’re Kes and … Kes Byfield needs your support for Final Stretch of IVF, lets