love & taxes & electrostatic ecosystems
It’s pretty neat how static electricity is such a huge force in tiny lives.
“…animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.”
- Max G. Levy, The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology
oh but sorry little dudes, the platypus has electroreceptors in its bill which it uses to hunt tiny prey
(“Saccades” are those rapid jerky movements our eyes (and insect bodies) do to improve vision. The word comes from French, where it referred to jerking on the reins of a horse. something something harnessing my gaze and attention)
well this wrecked me:
“brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in it, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they’re going to be a big part of how they remember you.”
- inbabylontheywept (via brainwane)
romance is not dead
Babylon and the Duck of Butter (same author as wrecked me above)
this short story is awful and messed up and I absolutely recommend just taking the leap and reading it - The Promise of God by Michael Flynn
“Who wouldn’t want to be woken in the middle of the night, as Simon Kimmins was by his flatmate Ventris, and asked whether they would like to be ‘the second person in four thousand years to read this script’?” - Tom Stevenson, Beyond Mesopotamia (not technically a romance, but feels very romantic to me!)
it’s no sourtoe cocktail, but
“While dining out one evening at Lord Harcourt's residence at Nuneham in 1848 he [William Buckland] was shown a silver locket containing an object resembling pumice stone. He popped the object in his mouth, perhaps to try and find out what mineral it was, and swallowed it. It was in fact part of the mummified heart of Louis XIV of France which had been taken from the royal tomb by a member of the Harcourt family.”
oh yeah and it’s tax season
There’s a $10,000 tax deduction for whaling captains. (so that tension between wanting to preserve species and wanting to preserve diverse forms of human society, that’s a thing, huh.)
and it’s still very easy to get a property tax break in NJ by raising tax sheep.
the things I learn...spins my brain...deeply Indebted