The Million Word Year

One man. One blog. One year. One million words.

Posts Tagged nature

Wow : Russian forest fire

Aug 1

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Some extremely brave/stupid/insane Russian men take their urban assault vehicle into the heart of a forest fire in order to show us just what Hell might look like.

I have a feeling that this harrowing journey, like so many adventures of man, machine, and muscle against the awesome fury of Mother Nature, began with these fateful words : “Relax, I know a shortcut. ”

Of particular note : when the high-voiced forceful and understandably a tad hysterical man (who turns out to be the driver) freaks the hell out at our camera wielding friend for ROLLING THE FUCKING WINDOW DOWN. Yeah, I know it’s hot in here. That’s because we’re DRIVING THROUGH FUCKING HELL, and when you are DRIVING THROUGH FUCKING HELL, you do NOT ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW!

And what kind of vehicle are they driving? Because that’s a very cool looking dashboard. Looks like the controls on a 1970s sci fi starship.

Of course, I could be wrong, he could be freaking out over, I don’t know, suddenly realizing he left the iron on back home. At his cottage. In this very forest. But I doubt it.

My father told me the story of how he was volunteered into a forest fire fighting crew when he was a young man in central Ontario. He said it was the worst five days of his life, and that includes basic training when he joined the Canadian Armed Forces. All he could remember was the unrelenting heat, being scared and tired all the time, getting first degree burns all over his body, and being ordered around by the older men in what seemed like a never ending war of cutting down trees and brush, digging trenches, forming bucket brigades between bonds and fires, and every now and then, at apparently random intervals, being fed and allowed to sleep. The intervals seemed random both because they partly were (they got their food when the fire allowed) and because the heat, light, and smoke made it impossible to tell day from night. After the first day, none of the others in his crew even talked any more. They were all too tired, too scared, too sore, too hurt. When they tried to sleep, a lot of them woke up screaming from nightmares or just start crying in their sleep, and nobody said anything about it. When the fire was under control and he could finally go back home, he just laid in his bed for two days and swore, over and over again, that he’d rather fight a war than another forest fires.

These days, we have people who fight forest fires for a living, and they have proper equipment, training, and vehicles for the job. Back then, it was pretty ad hoc. You just joined a crew and did what you were told, and never knew why or if anything you did even really helped.

It’s that sort of thing which makes me such a great believer in progress and technology. Life back then was a great dealer harder, dirtier, more dangerous, and less pleasant. We have truly come a long way since then. And if we can come so far in so little time, imagine what we can do in the future to make this a saner, calmer, nicer, cleaner, more compassionate, more humane, more understanding, and more forgiving world.

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Cool : Super Slow Motion Lightning Strike

Jul 31

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Just how fast does your camera have to be to make lightning this slow?

A mind-blistering 9,000 frames per second. That’s how fast the camera that took this awesome video was.

One of the first things that occurred to me while watching this clip is how unreal it looks. Not in the sense of being bogus or fake, just in the sense of looking like nothing you’ve ever seen before in the natural every day world. It’s like a godlike child is finger-painting a blazing line across the sky. It’s so primal, so raw and powerful and organic, that it can’t help but leave you in awe.

And even at this ridiculously slow speed, there’s a lot of tiny arcs and discharges that zip by almost too fast for the camera to catch. What we see as a single spectacular lightning bolt is actually an extremely complex event involving a lot of different discharges that are too fast for the unaided human eye to see.

Still, part of what I ended up thinking while watching this vid was “Wow, technology has progressed to the point where we can slow down lightning enough to be kind of boring in parts. Amazing. ”

Once, when I was traveling through the Mojave desert in New Mexico with my father, I had the privilege of seeing what desert lightning is like. In a word, spectacular. You get some of the most awe-inspiring lightning display in a desert because the air is so clean and clear, and there’s a lot of friction from the sand moving against itself that builds up a huge static charge when it’s windy. I got to see lightning striking the ground about half a mile away, like the finger of God pointed down at some random spot in the sand and said “THERE!” and a blazing red lightning bolt was called down from Heaven in an almost completely straight line. It was fantastic.

You know why lightning never strikes the same place twice?

Because after the first time, that place isn’t there any more!

I have no problem imagining why all pantheon based religions end up with a god of thunder and lightning. One good thunderstorm, especially one with nearby strikes so you can see the blackened, charred stump that used to be a mighty oak tree or the hunk of red hot glowing glass that used to be a patch of desert sand, sometimes with the remains of some poor creature that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time still smoking there, is all it would take for any primitive people to decide there’s some pretty scary shit going on and someone Up There must be pretty mad.

Human beings are so hardwired for socialization that we feel much better about something once we know that there’s someone in charge of it who is doing it on purpose. The arbitrary and uncaring randomness of reality is what we fear the most. If there’s someone in charge of something, even something as scary as lightning, or even death, then we feel more comfortable dealing with it. Perhaps we can even negotiate with this powerful entity to guarantee our own safety. Certainly, we feel a lot better imagining that events are caused by a being with understandable motives, even if those motives are openly malign.

The fact that horrible things can happen for absolutely no reason, that we might lose a loved one or have our lives changed forever for the worse by something completely random and unavoidable, is just about the most horrifying idea possible to the human mind. We will invent all kinds of gods, spirits, demons, and mythological figures just to bring all things in nature into the more easily understandable world of our hyper social primate minds.

Better a world ruled by Satan and filled with malign spirits than one ruled by nobody at all.

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Nature : The Vogelkop Bower Bird

Jul 1

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Embedding disabled on this clip, but it was so interesting I’m going to link it anyhow.

So please, click here to learn all about this extraordinary bird.

I’d heard of bower birds before, but it must have been a different variety of them, because the image I associate with the term is the male building a sort of woven basket atop some tall reeds, weaving together grass and moss and decorating with brightly colored stones and such, and doing his little song and dance from there. Obviously, compared to their Vogelkop cousins, those bower birds were slob. Mere pikers.

I find it hard to accept that the Vogelkop variety works on their bower for years. How could any nest last that long? But I suppose if their habitat has a mild climate, of the rainy season/dry season variety, and if the male spends a good deal of time maintaining the nest, anything is possible.

As irrational as it is, I’m really, really glad the dung bower lost and the flower bower won. Flower bower power! I’d like the think that the reason the female flew away so suddenly was she had only just that moment figured it out.

“Hmmm. This is interesting, I suppose. Nice and roomy, and with a sort of muted elegance. And look at all these pretty little white flowers in this OH MY GOD THAT’S POOP! ”

And so she flew off in disgust.

What is particularly fascinating about elaborate mating behaviours like these is that you get such elaborate, intricate, and beautiful results (poop aside) from creatures which lack any meaningful reasoning capacity whatsoever. Birds are more complex than, say, insects (some of which also creature architectural marvels from even simpler brains), but birds do not have a lot more than a tightly integrated set of instinct to go on, and yet, there’s the male bower bird working for years on an elaborate mating bower and learning the songs of dozens of other birds all in the hopes of a few moments of sex.

I know all you straight boys are feeling some degree of sympathy for the poor fellows right about now.

So obviously, all the parts of making the bower must have their own motivation and reward structures. The male bower bird doesn’t plan out his bower and think “all right, this is sure to get me laid!”. He simply manipulates objects in such a way as to make them feel more “right” in his head, according to a drive he neither understands or, luckily, is capable of questioning. I bet at the beginning of the bower making process, the male’s movements are shorter and less coordinated and more hesitant as he tries to figure out how to make this bower-building drive happy. Nature provides the instincts but the methods must be figured out anew and on their own in each bird.

The same with why he learns all those birdsongs. It just scratches a mental itch in his little birdy brain. He hears a birdsong, and instinct tells him to try to match it. So he tries, and the closer he gets to the image of the song in his head, the happier he is, till he perfects it. Then it’s on to the next.

It makes you wonder however they find the time to eat and drink and dodge predators like a less sexually fixated species might do.

And of course, the females are spared the toil, but they are as instinct drive as the male. They don’t know why some bowers make them turn theirs beaks up and others make them stay n’ play.

And all this frenetic activity is all in the simple pursuit of sex. Old-school biologists might tell you that the female chooses the “best” bower because the male who can build the “best” bower is obviously the strongest and most healthy and therefore will provide the best genetic material for her eggs and hence her offspring.

But the more enlightened and modern view simply cuts out the middleman and says that she picks the one with the best bower because he’s the one most likely to contribute sexually successful genes, and hence give her chicks which will also be sexually successful, and therefore pass on half of HER genes as well.

So she makes the male sexually successful because he’ll make her chicks sexually successful, and so on, through many generations of self-perpertuating sexual successes. Non-sexual traits don’t matter until they start actually interfering with the odds of the bower bird living long enough to be sexually successful.

So who said sex had to make sense, anyhow?

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Wow : Spider Crab Sheds Entire Shell

Jun 23

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | 3 Comments

Warning, the following is a video of a very freaky thing that’s kind of gross and creepy in a Cronenberg kind of way, so you might want to take your anti-heebie-jeebie pills before viewing.

Nature is so freaking weird!

Whoa. It shed its entire shell, all in one piece. Just…… wriggled right out of it. And now it’s all pink and glistening and naked. How bizarre. And I used to be impressed with myself for peeling an orange in all one piece. I have nothing on THIS guy.

Must feel good, I would imagine. Like taking a shower when you really need one times a million. I bet that shell was getting all itchy and confining and ill-fitting and this crab was glad to be rid of it. He probably crawled out of that thing and sat there going “Phew! Man it feels good to feel the air on my flesh again!”

Presumably, he’d be pretty vulnerable to predators until he grows a new shell. A shellfish-loving predator could just come along and snap him up and it would be the best, easiest meal it ever had. No shell to deal with, just nothing but meat.

You’ve heard of soft shell crab? This is the self shelling crab.

Of course, for every predator that finds one of these and has the best meal of its life, another predator is going to come along, grab up the abandoned shell, and go “Aw, fuck, this one’s empty too! I swear, these used to have meat in them. ”

So, you know, balance of nature and all that.

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Video : The Darwin Beetle

May 4

Posted by MegaWordMan in Video | 2 Comments

Mad mad props to that funky fellow and pornmaster beyond reproach Robin Bougie for this link.

No spoilers, but be sure to watch all the way to the end. It’s worth it, trust me.

So we’ve all watched the video all the way through now, right? We’ve watched it from its slow beginning to the very hilarious end and I can talk about it? Yes? Good.

I laughed SO DAMN HARD at that ending. It has the comic genius of something completely unexpected that nevertheless makes total sense. The best comedy is always that which makes sense in a completely unexpected way, as opposed to making no sense at all. That’s why it’s funny when cartoon characters run off a cliff and don’t fall until they notice. It makes a weird kind of sense.

And in retrospect, of course he’s going to give Lady Beetle a toss when he’s done with her. Nature’s system for mate selection for this species guarantees it. What beetle is going to make it to the summit of Mount Mounting? Not just the one with the longest and strongest jaws, but the most aggressive one with the strongest urge to toss other beetles off the tree. A system like that doesn’t exactly lead to sensitive caring males who are really in touch with a female beetle’s needs.

That’s why when the voiceover said “She doesn’t seem to be in the mood”, my first thought was “The hell you say”. Once a male has climbed to the mountaintop to victory over the bruised carapaces of many a tough and worthy foe, he’s not going to let a little thing like “she doesn’t feel like it” deny him. Consent doesn’t enter into it. He’s going to hold her down and do the thing he fought so hard to do, and she’s gonna have to let him.

And then, because he’s a crazy aggressive psycho male, he tosses her to the ground with the rest of the vanquished, and probably goes looking for ANOTHER female.

In a sense, the victorious male Darwin’s beetle is a male-oriented male, not in the sense of homosexuality obviously, but in the sense that all his energies are focused toward what it takes to defeat other males. This is the exact equivalent to the bad-boy asshole who oozes aggression and treats women like crap, yet can always get a ton of chicks. The kind and sensitive types pine and say “But how can he get all the girls, when I am clearly going to treat her better?”.

The answer, sadly, is that he’s all about out-competing YOU for her, you and every other male out there. His expectation is that if he can seem more alpha than you, the chicks will fall into his lap, which is sadly true, especially with the younger ones who are still thinking with their ovaries.

Luckily for sensitive straight guys, there’s lots of sensitive women out there who operate on a different system than the Must Get Alpha To Fuck Me model. The bimbos and the jocks pair off, breed indiscriminately, have fairly terrible lives (the males end up in jail and the ladies end up single mothers), and the more intelligent and sensitive types find each other and hook up, if all goes well.

Being extremely complex and intelligent social apes and not beetles, human life supports many overlapping and exclusive mating strategies, of which being Captain Testosterone is merely the most obvious.

So take heart, non-alpha males. You probably won’t ever get the alpha females, but honestly, they are no great catch themselves. Like the alpha males, all their energy goes into the competition part of the dating game and that doesn’t leave much left over for anything else. They are all show.

Learn to follow your heart and not your testicles. After all, you want a girl who follows her heart and not her ovaries, right? You want her to see the inner you and what an awesome, smart, sensitive, hard-working guy you are. Well, you have to show that same kind of intellect over gonad. Neither sides of this should be chasing the pretty ones around.

Look for a girl more or less just like you. Non-alpha looks included. You’ll be way happier with the relationship, there will be less competition for her (though not, necessarily, at conventions) and the two of you can get together, have beautifully intelligent and sensitive children, and laugh at the fools who follow their tools and the family jewels and end up in reform schools and single mother car pools.

And this time, I started out talking about a funny video about beetles and ended up with advice for lovelorn heterosexual male nerds.

Don’t ask me how this kind of thing keeps happening. I just work here.

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WTF : Academic Says Nature Documentaries Violate Animals’ Right to Privacy

Apr 30

Posted by MegaWordMan in Politics, Science | 1 Comment

No, seriously. That’s what this guy is saying.

He actually worries that by filming animals in the wild doing what they do, we’re violating their right to privacy.

Now, I’m a pretty big supporter of animal’s rights. I love animals of all sorts and think we have a dity as human beings to live with our fellow critters in as peaceful and un-harmful way as we can.

But worrying about their “privacy” is patently retarded. Animals do not have, want, or need a right to privacy. It’s a concept which simply does not apply to them.

For one thing, it’s not like if I film two wildebeests humping, it’s not like the wildebeest are going to be embarrassed about it. They’ll never even know. It’s not like all their friends will make fun of them and they’ll be humiliated in front of their peers. They don’t even know what a camera is, let alone find it objectionable. You’re not going to see a wildebeest Sean Penn punching lenses out.

For another thing, privacy is pretty much an entirely human concept. Being a social sapient species, we have behavioural taboos which dictate where we do certain things and where we do not. Privacy, then, is required for certain activities. Animals simply do not care. They have no taboos to violate. They can’t feel shame or embarrassment. In fact, they’re not even sentient. You could haul a giant big screen television out into the Serengeti and show the wildebeest the footage of their tryst in surround sound HD, and they wouldn’t even know it was them, let alone be bothered by it.

I think I know where this guy is coming from. For those of us who strongly empathize with animals, it’s quite possible to project all kinds of human attribute onto them. In this case, you might watch our wildebeest rendezvous and, imagining yourself in their shoes (hooves), think “How embarrassing for them! How dare someone film such a private moment in their lives? For shame!”

But animals are not people. They don’t have our same concerns. Part of my animal-rights philosophy is that we must always respect animals for what they are, and not try to project our human concerns onto them. If we do that, then we’re not really loving them for who and what they are, but just turning them into mirrors of ourselves for our own reasons.

What the animals really “want” is to be protected from humans, and nature documentaries are the single best tool for convincing people to respect the rights of animals in the wild. They bring the animals into our lives and make us like them and see them as real and vulnerable, and that, in turn, convinces people to vote for politicians who will protect those animals.

If that involves violating the animals’ “privacy”, you know what? I don’t think they’ll mind.

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Cute : Foxes on a trampoline

Apr 1

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | 1 Comment

This is so. Damn. Cute.

I love how the one more adventurous fox is checking this weirdness out. He goes SPROING and then lands and sniffs around, as if to say “WTF was that?” But, being a scientist at heart, he has to try it some more times to be sure.

His brother seems uninterested in this phenomenon, and just wanders over to play with him a bit, then they wander off.

But I’m telling you. There’s few things in this world cuter than foxes on a trampoline. In fact, I think we should replace “more fun than a barrel of monkeys” (which to me always sounded like a nightmare all around, for monkeys and people both) with “more fun than foxes on a trampoline”, or maybe “more fun than a trampoline full of foxes” in order to complete the parallelism with the original.

I want to live someplace where wild foxes just casually wander through my backyard like two kids on the way to the movies.

When I lived in the Los Gatos hills in California, we never got foxes that I ever saw, but we did get deer, and that’s quite a thrill for someone unused to such things. I grew up in town. We had cats. That’s all the wildlife I got to see there. :)

The deer were beautiful, and the real trick was to keep our White German Shepherd Zane from going nuts barking and scaring the deer off.

So I’d be watching the deer go through our bark yard, often a pair of does with a very stern and stoic stag, while keeping Zane distracted with petting or playing.

Also, there was the cutest little lizard that lived on our back fence. He was no bigger than a twoonie, and he was completely chameleonic. He would be absolutely still, and you could only tell where he was if you’d seen him move. That’s how well he blended in with whatever he was on. I’d go out to give Zane some exercise and I’d look all over the fence for my tiny lizard friend, and think he had left, and then suddenly I’d catch a little motion and there he would be, darting from one spot to another, and I could get a visual fix on him in the couple of seconds that it took for him to blend in with the new background.

After that, I could tell where he was because of the very minute motions of his tiny tiny nostrils and his little tongue darting out now and then.

Seeing him change color was amazing. I still don’t know how they do it. I mean, I grasp that color changing part. It’s how they know what they are on that puzzles me. Their eyes are not situated to take in what is directly below their feet. And yet, something in them must sense the background they are on, because they blend in perfectly, and with an amazingly high resolution. I saw him blend in with complex mottled browns and greens from the mildew on the fence and he blended in flawlessly.

Maybe he could see with his feet? I don’t know.

Anyhow. Foxes are cute. Foxes on trampolines are MEGA AWESOME CUTE.

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Stephen Colbert, watch out!

Jan 10

Posted by MegaWordMan in Commentary | 1 Comment

Nevada town terrorized by “Superbear”

He’s over 700 pounds, twice the size of your average black bear.

He’s broken into 40 to 50 homes and ransacked them for food.

He effortlessly eludes capture by gun-toting rangers, bear dogs and traps.

He’s Superbear. And we better hope he doesn’t breed.

He sounds like Stephen Colbert’s worst nightmare.  TWICE the size of your average bear and smart as hell, with a penchant for home invasion? Holy CRAP.

Being an animal lover, I hope they don’t kill him. I’d love to see footage of this bear in action, it must be amazing to see something that big move.

And of course, scientifically speaking, a creature like that poses a lot of questions. How did he get that big? Is he some kind of mutant? Does he have some form of gigantism? The world wants to know.

All in all, the whole thing sounds like it came straight out of a Dean R. Koontz novel.

Now all we need is a twice-divorced middle-aged ex-Green Beret to show up and join a small boy and his hyperintelligent German shepherd and eminently bangable widowed mother  in hunting it down before the evil government scientists who created it in a lab can send Michael Ironsides to kill the creature and cover up the evidence.

You know. Like they do.

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