A Collection of Curiosities

In the end… the things that happened to you, become part of you.

However they absolutely do stop moving. In fact, hummingbirds hibernate! Overnight. Instead of sleeping. Because if they tried to sleep like a normal animal their hyperactive metabolism would mean that they starve to death before breakfast.

Franz Ferdinand after a successful tiger hunt during his visit to India, 1893

via reddit

It’s a hyperiid amphipod- a member of a group related to sandhoppers and scuds, but all members are fully pelagic and marine.

Many hyperiids have giant, translucent eyes with a sort of multifaceted retina inside. This guys’ dome- shaped head with a darker patch visible within is all eye.

Most species feed on salps or jellyfish- you might recognize the deep- sea genus Phronima from an episode of bbc’s Blue Planet.

(not my photo)

A more obscure but very large and bizarre- looking deep sea hyperiid, Cystisoma, takes both translucency and giant eyes to the extreme. The red spot is the aforementioned retina, which shows you just how much of this thing’s head is devoted to the eyes.

(also not my photo)

The one I found (1st pic) appears to be a member of the genus Themisto, which are both very abundant in temperate waters and somewhat unusual among huperiids in that they prey on smaller crustaceans such as copepods rather than gelatinous animals. You can’t see it very clearly in my picture, but their longer pairs of legs are mantis- like raptorial limbs, lined with spikes suited for snatching copepods out of the water.

small-mammoth enthusiasts, however, will avidly remind people that they are not in fact a dog, and their organs, although shrunken to the size of a dog’s organs, are still wooly mammoth organs. you actually have to seek out special vets for the small wooly mammoths because even though it looks remarkably like a dog to the untrained eye, when you’re faced with the internal anatomy it’s so far deviated from anything living today that it’s difficult to understand and work with. 

this is because there is, quite literally, no animal anatomy quite like the small woolly mammoth’s left alive on earth. this means that there’s no living approximation of how their organs work, or what the fuck is going on in there, even though they look like a dog from the outside. the closest living relative of the small woolly mammoth is so far deviated from it’s anatomy that’s literally of no help to anyone to compare the two, because the only thing they have in common is how they reproduce. scientists studying the wooly mammoth’s anatomy are forced to debate with each other constantly about what a certain organ might do, or what it at least used to do based on the fossils of the giant wooly mammoths that once dominated the landscape, but they just…have no idea. 

so the small woolly mammoth is not at all like a dog, even though it looks like one. how it works, how it reproduces, how it functions on a basic anatomic level are so utterly and completely prehistoric that they’re not at all like any other living animals. this makes them the subject of infinite fascination to paleontologists trying to approximate the biology and ecology of the giant woolly mammoths that once lived…but it’s incredibly challenging. it’s also incredibly challenging to explain why they’re different to people who just don’t care, or just see them as dogs because they look like them, because the significance of something like it is so easily lost when something looks ‘normal’.

isoetes –Quillworts– are that tiny wooly mammoth. their ancestors lived 400 million years ago and included the giant prehistoric spore-reproducing trees lepidodendron, which made up the bulk of massive prehistoric forests that were eventually compressed into the coal we’re still using today. they’re so old that the roots aren’t roots, they’re leaves, and it took botanists 100 years of bickering to finally confirm this. they’re so old that the change that weeded out all the giant 100+ foot tall members of the lineage was literally the original shifting of the continents, as in, like, when pangea split. they’re so old that it reproduces through ENORMOUS spores contained in spore packets on it’s leaves. they’re so old that we just have no fucking idea how to process it. 

quillwort anatomy is, quite literally, that of a comically small 400 million year old spore tree with the trunk squished into a woody structure so small that you could miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for on a dissection. the anatomy of this genus doesn’t function like any other modern plant genus on earth. quillworts have organs and cell structures that we still don’t understand in the year 2019. 

quillworts are incredibly valuable finds to paleobotanists because they’re so easily passed over in botanical surveys, and their habitats are constantly being threatened, making a great deal of species endangered. although they’re still around on almost every continent– see the earlier point on them evolving before the continents split– there are a lot fewer of them out there now; like anything, they can be more common in some areas than others, but my state has only found one recorded colony in the past 50 years to give an idea of what we’re dealing with here. 

and yes. they look like grasses.

Short answer: They don’t!

Longer answer: It’s actually light diffracting around the four arms (called spider legs) holding up the secondary mirror of a telescope! For the stars above it’s four spider legs from the stars because the Hubble Space Telescope took these images and its secondary mirror has four arms holding the secondary - for other telescopes the diffraction could be different depending on how the secondary mirror is held up.

Here’s apicture of the Hubble’s secondary mirror design:

Three of the four “spider arms” are visible and I drew red lines next to them so you could see what they look like.

This is an image of M101. It *looks* like a true color image, but it’s not. That is because it is a composite of these two images: 

The top one is an exposure taken through a B (”blue”) filter while the bottom one is taken through a “V” (”visible”) filter. The B band is centered on 445nm or blue wavelengths whereas the V band is centered on 551 nm or yellow/green wavelengths. These two images when overlaid would not make an easily viewable image, so I made the V image orange so they became complementary colors.

But! It gets more complicated still. You see, when you take an image through a telescope, the CCD (your “camera”) always produces an output in greyscale. The greyscale image’s appearance can be further altered by changing the way the counts on the CCD are displayed as values on your computer screen.

This here is a linear stretch. It would look very different with a histogram equalization stretch, while still actually being the same image.

You can only get color images by combining two or three different greyscale images, and dyeing them different colors. Sometimes, you take an image through a red, green, and a blue filter, and then when you combine them, it roughly approximates a “true color” image. However, as you have control over the intensity and contrast of each component color, the resulting image can be made to look differently.

Two ways of making a composite.

Sometimes you want to combine images taken through filters that focus in on specific spectral lines. Sometimes these spectral lines are in the same region of the color spectrum. For example, the famous Hubble “pillars of creation” image actually contains two red spectral line components, one due to hydrogen, and one due to sulfur. To make the composite image easier to read, one of these red wavelengths was recolored blue.

The image would basically be mostly red if they didn’t do this.

And of course, as @antikythera-astronomy said, there are always false-color images of light wavelengths we cannot see, such as this radio image of mine:

So, what does this all mean for images being faked or not?

The Answer: None of the images of space taken by telescopes are what they would look like to your eyes, but that’s okay, because what is the point of a telescope if it just mimics what your eyes see?

The human eye cannot distinguish colors at all for low surface brightness objects such as galaxies or nebulae. If you ever look through a personal telescope at a galaxy, what you see is a faint smudge. That first galaxy whose image I posted? I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and it looked like a blurry grey blob with faint grey spokes. Even if you were in a spacecraft blazing your way through the Orion Nebula, you wouldn’t be able to see its colors. The surface brightness is just too faint.

Even though none of these images is a “true color” image, none of them are faked either, because each is actually visualization of a scientific measurement. They are merely ways we can use our computers to present to us the results of measurements of photon counts, wavelengths, and position on the sky, it’s like changing the scale on a graph, or a map. It’s not fake, just…different. Hopefully this has been…enlightening.

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.