zur farbenlehre oder roy g. biv

Marine biologists studying a specific species of mantis shrimp (Fangschreckenkrebse) that inhabits coral reefs—an explosion of colour, shade and shadow, have found that these crustaceans have some of the most advanced eyes compound eyes in the animal kingdom. These shrimp have sixteen distinct photo-receptive cells, ommatidium whereas human eyes only have four to filter for red, green and blue and contrast, to differentiate, to tune for three times more colours and perceive polarised light and across different spectra.

It's difficult to truly understand what this exponentially higher range of visual acuity means and hard to make parallels, it's not as simple, I think, as looking at a thermal image of something, donning night-vision goggles or being Geordi La Forge or Superman. It's been long known that bees and butterflies and other inspects have advanced visual systems that humans cannot imagine, except as a bewildering kaleidoscope, but researchers now theorise that the ability to perceive so many more aspects of the their environment, including time and tide and what's washed in with them, through their eyes, what humans know as reason and reflection, higher-level mental processes, are by the crabs and their kin just seen, intuited, with in their field of vision and require no further thinking.

menagerie

Beyond mermaids and unicorns—and even enjoying less widespread popularity than rarer chimeras like griffins, harpies or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (cotton, not so much a monster), there is a neglected bestiary, which the marvelous Atlas Obscura pays tribute to. My favourite creature enrolled here is the odd Lidérc from Hungarian folklore—a sort of familiar, hatched as the first of a brood from a black hen, after being incubated in a human armpit—according to some traditions.
This newly-hatched imp, industrious and loyal, eventually becomes also a curse and a liability. Though always at their master's disposal, such congress becomes a dangerous thing, but can be gotten rid of through a variety of equally specific rituals, like giving one's Lidérc an impossible task, like a logical feed-back loop that will eventually cause a fatal-error. It reminds me of the notion that vampires exhibit arithmomania and are compelled to count whatever is cast out in front of them, like grains of rice, or the Greek custom of setting out a colander during the Christmas season to trip up evil spirits, since they are obsessed with numbers and will try to count all the holes. They only make it as far as two, however, since three, the Holy Trinity, makes them disappear and start all over. It's interesting that monsters are framed with compulsions and I wonder what that means.

cold fusion

Kottke shares some interesting developments on the world-wide initiative to harness essential limitless energy with nuclear fusion by creating a wee constellation of tiny terrestrial (or at least mundane—that is, below the sphere of the Moon). The project has a commendable mission statement, as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor abbreviated ITER, or rather iter from the Latin for the way, it aims to bend physics to satisfy man's needs, like with Prometheus—punished for giving humanity the gifts and curses of fore-thought and fire, in a sustainable manner. Whether it is possible to contain this sort of power is uncertain, but progress seems in jeopardy due to the bureaucratic nature of such a collaboration.
Such a complex engineering project has even spawned its own form of currency to facilitate funding of grants, and I am sure that there are secreted cautions among the members, especially those who supply the world's traditional fuels—who spread rumours that bringing the CERN collider on-line would ingest the Earth in a microscopic blackhole. Kottke's posts are always value-added, waxing philosophical and triangulating with curious but cogent parallels, and wonders if in this case, it is not an effort better handed off to industry. Many of today's businesses, flush with money and not only interested in preserving the status quo (though dominance and vertical monopolies are not much different) might want their own stellar prestige project.

dimensionally transcendental

The ever facinating BLDGBLOG shares some images and background on an exhibit recently closed at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art of these elegantly crafted tables, desks, and bureaus from the workshop of Abraham Roentgen and son, active during the eighteenth century. These beautiful pieces of furniture transform—more than meets the eye, to reveal nested drawers and trays, ingeniously and economically taking advantage of hidden and folded space.

parallax view or high-noon

Slowly but surely creeping towards the hours where sunrise and sunset do not precede the work day, I found this map pretty keen, which globally illustrates how far time-zones around the world diverge from the true solar mean.

Of course, all these lags and accelerations are relative and governments and businesses necessarily must coordinate opening times, which do not always respect ones natural hour in the sun, but I do wonder if, for ones biological clock and circadian rhythms (from the Latin for about a day and having nothing to do with cicadas or locusts like I thought) there are long-lasting effects for individuals dictated to rise later and so on. What do you think—how close are you to real time?