Posted 2 years ago on July 29, 2021 17:35
I'd like to see this community grow, and currently there's limited opportunity to interact. Rather than sitting back and just hoping that improves, I'm going to make a dedicated effort to bring some action at least to the forum.
So here goes - at least once a week, hopefully, I'll put something here. If you're around, share a reaction or an anecdote or a picture of your favorite snail. IDK, whatever. I love bits of obscure knowledge, so I'll just share whatever is on my mind, and then pose a question (which may or may not be related, depending on how lazy I am) and you can respond to either. Or neither, but I'd prefer responses, since that's what this is about. Maybe if people have a reason to check back more often, we can push levels of engagement up.
So here goes - at least once a week, hopefully, I'll put something here. If you're around, share a reaction or an anecdote or a picture of your favorite snail. IDK, whatever. I love bits of obscure knowledge, so I'll just share whatever is on my mind, and then pose a question (which may or may not be related, depending on how lazy I am) and you can respond to either. Or neither, but I'd prefer responses, since that's what this is about. Maybe if people have a reason to check back more often, we can push levels of engagement up.
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Posted 2 years ago on July 29, 2021 17:51
Obscure knowledge #1:
Animal related, since we're all here because something about animals amuses us. Humans account for an estimated 350 million tons of biomass on Earth, with a population of about 7 billion. Just underneath us? Arctic krill, which are teeny tiny, so their population of about 500 trillion accounts for only 150 million tons of biomass. However, also often tiny in scale are ants. They are second only to bacteria in terms of biomass. There are so many ants that pound for pound, they outweigh us more than eight times over. Drumroll please...
Ants have a terrestrial population of about 10 billion billion. Accounting for 3000 million tons of biomass. So if it doesn't freak you out too much, imagine how many ants it must take to equal a single person in biomass. Yikes.
Question of the moment: If you could suddenly transform pound for pound into any animal(s), what would you choose? One smallish tiger? A billion bees? Some undetermined number of puppies?
Animal related, since we're all here because something about animals amuses us. Humans account for an estimated 350 million tons of biomass on Earth, with a population of about 7 billion. Just underneath us? Arctic krill, which are teeny tiny, so their population of about 500 trillion accounts for only 150 million tons of biomass. However, also often tiny in scale are ants. They are second only to bacteria in terms of biomass. There are so many ants that pound for pound, they outweigh us more than eight times over. Drumroll please...
Ants have a terrestrial population of about 10 billion billion. Accounting for 3000 million tons of biomass. So if it doesn't freak you out too much, imagine how many ants it must take to equal a single person in biomass. Yikes.
Question of the moment: If you could suddenly transform pound for pound into any animal(s), what would you choose? One smallish tiger? A billion bees? Some undetermined number of puppies?
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Posted 2 years ago on August 06, 2021 20:27
Obscure knowledge # 2:
Cultural context and experience shape our perception of colors - even in people who have no colorblindness. Most ancient cultures had no word whatsoever for blue - a color that shows up very rarely in nature except for in the sky, and cultures may not have seen the sky as a /color/, exactly. The ancient Egyptians were an exception to this, and were also the first ancient culture to develop a method for creating blue dye and pigment. Once it was a color seen for something other than the sky, it could be more easily identified and therefore named.
But even more incredibly, in modern experiments with a Namibian tribe, the Himba, who have no word for blue but a lot of words for different shades of green, identifying a blue square among green squares was a difficult task. When they identified the blue square as the odd one out, they still described it as a type of green. However, when given one green square of a slightly different shade in the array of green squares, the Himba were able to identify the odd one out right away, while those of us less familiar with the intricacies of green were very likely struggle and/or choose the wrong square.
Second question to the void - Favorite obscure color shade?
Cultural context and experience shape our perception of colors - even in people who have no colorblindness. Most ancient cultures had no word whatsoever for blue - a color that shows up very rarely in nature except for in the sky, and cultures may not have seen the sky as a /color/, exactly. The ancient Egyptians were an exception to this, and were also the first ancient culture to develop a method for creating blue dye and pigment. Once it was a color seen for something other than the sky, it could be more easily identified and therefore named.
But even more incredibly, in modern experiments with a Namibian tribe, the Himba, who have no word for blue but a lot of words for different shades of green, identifying a blue square among green squares was a difficult task. When they identified the blue square as the odd one out, they still described it as a type of green. However, when given one green square of a slightly different shade in the array of green squares, the Himba were able to identify the odd one out right away, while those of us less familiar with the intricacies of green were very likely struggle and/or choose the wrong square.
Second question to the void - Favorite obscure color shade?
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Posted 2 years ago on August 24, 2021 01:19
Puppies and deep rich purple like you see in some flowers.
I shall now go back to forgetting this site exists for several months.
I shall now go back to forgetting this site exists for several months.
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