The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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On May 25, 2010 at 17 :35 UTC, this was the weather off the North Pacific island called Isla Socorro: Partly cloudy with scattered spirals.

The interesting thing about truly chaotic systems is that sometimes they give rise to very orderly structures. Pleasantly swirly.

The photo was taken by Satellite: Terra, part of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team.

Handsome field crickets.

That’s not a name for them, just me admiring them. Gryllus is a genus of field crickets. Once, they were all put in the same species, but then people started taking a closer look and realized, oh, these guys are different from those guys. (And actually, I suspect these guys have, since then, been recategorized as fool, point-head, and range grasshoppers, Tropidolophus, Acrolophitus and Hadrotettix. Still handsome, though.)

I found the image in the New York Pub…

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Where the meteors come from in August and November, as pictured in A new astronomy for beginners, 1898, as found on archive.org.

Something about this diagram reminds me of hotels from the 1930s and cars from the 1950s. It’s an Art Deco scientific illustration.

This is a crinoid, a cousin to sea urchins, sea cucumbers and starfish. I suppose some of them have stalks like sea anemones, but these ones don’t! The image is from The Unstalked Crinoids of the Siboga Expedition gallery in the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr account, which is all taken from this book of the same name.

SONG: “Iron in the Sky”

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on sss, 19 Nov 2020, “50 years ago, scientists named Earth’s magnetic field as a suspect in extinctions”, as used in the post “Scientists suspect magnetic fields in mass extinctions”.

ABSTRACT:
This is a sea shanty, or I guess a space shanty, about prehistoric mass extinctions due to magnetic polar reversals, probably brought on by (or related to) solar flares.

The science here isn’t especially new – the article was mostly a…

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As described on Wikimedia Commons (who got this diagram from the British Library), the image was “taken from page 100 of ‘Grundzüge der mathematischen Geographie und der Landkartenprojection … Ein Handbuch für Jeden, der ohne Vorkenntniss der höheren Mathematik sich über den Gegenstand unterrichten will, etc’.”

It’s a lesson in how to read (or write) a map, specifically how to determine a meridian, or line of longitude.