pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
Cosmic Funnies
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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titsay
Monterey Bay Aquarium
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Game of Thrones Daily
will byers stan first human second
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JBB: An Artblog!
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d e v o n
RMH
Product Placement
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
seen from Malaysia
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@kuraness
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
pride month!!!
Is that a miette?
Pride for you! Pride for a thousand years!!
you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!
Kinda funny story: we took our cat for a check-up back in 2024 and things went smoothly but when we got the documentation I think there was a slight miscommunication about when he was last weighed and how much he weighed.
He is... dust...
Congratulations on your 95 year old domestic short-air.
Mountain weasel (Mustela altaica)
#it fucken sumny (via @mindfulwrath)
the wemther brothers
"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.
That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.
Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.
Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.
Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?
Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”
The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."
- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
this is beautiful
Never doubt that there is so, so much beauty and strangeness and infinite complexity in the world, so very much of which we are still to discover.
Below is a link to the book, which is by renowned and Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong, and here's a link to the corresponding young readers version.
How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
ok i am curious. how long is the longest song in your library (not counting tracks that are like several songs in one file like a full album mix or symphony recording or whatever) (also if it is longer than 20 minutes say the name in the tags i am curious)
how long
< 3:00
3:00–3:59
4:00–4:59
5:00–5:59
6:00–6:59
7:00–7:59
8:00–11:59
12:00–15:59
16:00–20:59
21:00–24:59
25:00–30:00
≥ 30:00
ok i would like to clarify it has to be music and it can't just be a short song that's been looped a bunch. that still counts as several songs in one file, it's just several of the same song in one file. no audiobooks no podcasts no plants vs zombies theme 2 hour loop
pourquoi du pain est masculin mais la baguette est féminine....... la baguette est transgenre ?
je vais laisser la communauté parler:
la baguette, icône trans?
oui
non
eh bah
10k notes pour un post francophone sur tumblr macron où est mon poste de ministre de la culture
It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!
If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):
Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.
psst do any of y'all know of any insects/invertebrates/small sea creatures that would be found in the Arctic Cordillera? I'd like to include at least one insect- or insect-adjacent creature in each of my Ecoregions patterns, but the the Arctic doesn't... have many of those, so there aren't any in my survey data thus far
also if you or any of your friends/family have ever lived or researched stuff in the Arctic, please fill out my survey of the animals and plants you saw and loved
also if you lived anywhere else in north america and especially mexico you can fill it out too! I want to someday make patterns for the whole continent 😤
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
— ERIN BOW
You can replace [ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY] with [SCROLLING] but watch out. This sucks bad 👍
Some things about this post since getting quite a few notes:
1. If you see this post, highly recommend taking it as an opportunity to set a timer for 15 minutes and switch over to ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY. if after those 15 minutes, you want to go back to scrolling, that's okay!
2. Huge shout out to this popping up in my notifs often, bc I do go back to activity.
3. I think there are times where scrolling is fine. Right now, for example, I'm being connected to a machine for two hours to donate plasma and platelets. Yes this is a brag but it is also a time where scrolling is one of the few things I can do. (Though I will probably also read or watch something on phone lol)
hmmm, this seems to be some kind of curse breaking spell… be free ye reader
Paul of Scotland, Destiny Is In Your Hands, 2020 pencil on white paper, 11.69"x16.54"
DO NOT SCROLL AWAY. THIS IS NOT A PHOTO. THIS IS NOT OIL ON CANVAS. THIS ISN’T EVEN ACRYLIC ON CANVAS. THIS IS PENCIL ON WHITE PAPER!
PENCIL?!?
Mimodactylus libanensis was a small pterosaur that lived in what is now Lebanon during the late Cretaceous, about 95 million years ago.
It was the latest-surviving known member of a group of pterosaurs called istiodactyliformes, closely related to the Chinese Haopterus.
The only known fossil specimen had a wingspan of around 1.3m (~4'3") — but it was still a juvenile and the full adult size of Mimodactylus is currently unknown. Its long narrow wings were shaped much like those of modern seabirds, suggesting it used dynamic soaring over the shallow sea and scattered islands that covered the region at the time.
Its fairly broad snout and strong pointed teeth may have been used to forage for shrimp at the water's surface similar to some modern albatrosses, a previously undocumented feeding style for pterosaurs.
———
NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon
What's everyone's favourite flowers that aren't like. The normal ones. Like everyone's a fan of roses and sunflowers what's a more niche one. One you don't get in gift sets. Mine's sweet peas
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
So you know.
This might be the real one, y’all.
I could use some luck
