Cake White

Piranesi

I finished my book and I am sad. I want another book to continue its momentum but every book is different.

Alex read the same book this week; I will call him and talk about it with him and I guess that continues its momentum, in a way.

4 January 2021: Swoose and snake oil

Swans and geese can mate and their offspring are called “swoose.” Swoose!

Nostrum
Innos·trum | \ ˈnä-strəm \

1: a medicine of secret composition recommended by its preparer but usually without scientific proof of its effectiveness… is put to work at county fairs, promoting a quack nostrum for pain relief.— Patrick McGrath

2: a usually questionable remedy or scheme : PANACEAan audience eager to believe he had found the nostrum for all of society’s ills— Warren Sloat

21 Dec. 2020: bird penises, mantis shrimp

I’ve learned a lot recently.

But most importantly, today I learned that only 3% of modern birds have penises. I didn’t know that the cloaca is employed by both male and female birds as a means of fertilizing eggs; I thought that male birds had both a cloaca and a penis. I was wrong!

I also learned that mantis shrimp have 16 photoreceptor cells in their eyes but don’t actually use them to see color the same way that other animals make use of rods and cones which seems like a bit of a bummer to my human-centered perspective. The amount of colors that we are able to see and appreciate with only red/green/blue is pretty amazing and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to see colors +13.

8 Dec. 2020: Apple propaganda, cladoptosis

A few weeks ago I learned that the “apple a day” thing started as propaganda to encourage people to eat excess apples during prohibition because they could no longer be made into hard cider.

I also learned that a lot of trees naturally shed their branches (cladoptosis) when they deem them an inefficient use of resources. We don’t have to prune trees to keep them healthy; we only prune them to satisfy our own aesthetic taste.

It takes 40-50 gallons of maple sap to make a gallon of maple syrup.

6 Dec. 2020: fall leaves

Today I learned that a few factors trigger the change in color that gives us fall leaves. Changes in temperature is obvious, but changes in moisture and the amount of light affect the process as well.

What was really interesting to me is that it’s not necessarily an addition of some chemical that changes the leaves from green to red, orange, and yellow, but the removal of chlorophyll. As the weather and amount of daylight changes, trees, halt the process of nutrient production via leaves and the chlorophyll that masks these brilliant fall hues disappears. This process coincides with the tree slowly shedding its leaves as they are effectively dead wood (pun intended) if they are no longer photosynthesizing.

1 Dec. 2020: leaf insects, crocodiles

Today I learned that many leaf insects display strong sexual dimorphism, i.e. the female looks very different than the male. The New York Times published an article today about scientists that had the chance to rear a rare species of leaf insect (Phyllium asekiense) from eggs for the firs time–when they saw both sexes hatch and mature from the same clutch of eggs, they discovered that what they had previously thought of as two separate species (from separate genus, too!) were one and the same. The new joint species is called Nanophyllium asekiense. I also learned that they like to eat guava.

I learned that crocodiles can weigh up to 2,200 and live for 70 years. The longest saltwater crocodile on record was 20 feet and 3 inches long.

30 Nov. 2020: Manzanita, 8 Bears, Indian Protests

Today I learned that the tree whose bark sheds into red paper ribbons is called Manzanitas (Spanish for tiny apple). Species of Manzanita belongs to the genus Arctostaphylos (Greek for bear grape), alongside three species of Bearberries. Manzanita grow in the chaparral; Bearberries are adapted to arctic and subarctic climates. I wonder when in time the two groups diverged–their respective climates are so different. Living in California, I’ve seen Manzanita my entire life but never knew what they were called. The hills behind Orinda are covered in a handful of species, both tree-sized and in low shrubs.

I also learned that there are only eight species of bear, and six of them are endangered. For some reason both parts of that statement shocked me, though it makes sense for there to be so few species and individual bears–it seems to be the fate of most large mammals in the modern world.

Brown, Black, Asiatic Black, Andean, Panda, Sloth, Sun, Polar.

250 Million farmers and laborers protested against new anti-worker laws in India on the 26th. I’d venture to guess this is the biggest protest in history.