The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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It’s an avocado, an aguacate, also known as an alligator pear in English and a “lawyer pear” in Dutch. This is a Taft variety, an ancestor of the Lula cultivar, and may or may not still be around. In the 1910s, it was a well-known summer variety of the “Guatemalan race” of avocados. There are three races of avocados, did you know? The one you probably find in your grocery, the Hass, is a cross between Guatemalan and Mexican races probably. No one’s really sure because the fi…

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From the Library of Congress, we find a diagram of astrophysics equipment from the 19th century. It’s not a telescope. It’s a device designed to disprove the existence of the luminiferous ether, the stuff that we once thought filled outer space rather than the endless void we now know we’re all suspended in. The idea was that light needed something to travel through, some kind of medium, just like sound needs to travel through air (or water, or solid objects). The interfero…

SONG: “Small”

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on Science News, 4 Feb 2021, “A new chameleon species may be the world’s tiniest reptile”, as used in the post “Just discovered: world’s tiniest reptile”.

ABSTRACT:
I managed to write and record this entirely in one day, which pleases me. I was doing other things, too. I knew earlier that I’d do a song about the tiny chameleon, and I knew I’d write the song to be short, as befits the reptile’s size. But I didn’t really know how I’d structu…

As most folks know, today’s English bulldog is an animal that has been, as they say, “overbred.” They have beautiful temperaments as a rule, and can barely breathe, which gives them flatulence, can’t reach their own tails to groom themselves, have absurd wrinkles which get kinda gnarly and require human cleaning regularly, and are otherwise prone to skin conditions and a horrific thing called “cherry eye.” I know this intimately; we have an English bulldog we wouldn’t trade for the world. Sh…

Next week, on February 18, this little chopper will touch down on Mars with the Perseverance rover. Then, a little while later, it’ll take off for a few seconds. Then a few more. Then it’ll start whirring around the atmosphere. The Mars Ingenuity helicopter (you can see videos at that link) is designed to test how well a familiar flying machine can maneuver in the thinner atmosphere of Mars (and keep itself going with a solar panel and lithium-ion batteries) during a 30-day flight window. If…

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Pulleys and rope, arranged to make lifting heavy weights easier. I’ve been messing around with boats lately, lowering a 30-foot mast with a lot of help. Pulleys are an amazing invention.

These are pictured in the Manual of Military Engineering, published in 1905 by the War Office of Great Britain… but I found them over here.