It's abacuses all the way down.
Careful observers have decoded the honeybee's waggle dance. It's a vector message. The dancer is telling her hivemates about a good source of honey. She repeatedly forms a figure-8 pattern, with the message in the middle.

The direction of the dance is relative to the main honeycomb wall of the hive. The angle between the central motion line and the wall represents the vector of the food source relative to the sun.

Transposing the viewed dance to a position on the bee's internal compass is complex, but using the memorized template can be hardwired in an insect with compound eyes that cover most of the compass. The template is assigned to one radial set of lenses, and the bee keeps the sun centered on that group of lenses.

The distance component of the vector is conveyed by the number of waggles in each central run.

This reminds me of the glial abacus that keeps track of numbers in short-term memory. Astrocyte cells serve as a kind of scorecard or abacus outside of the neurons. The neurons click up the astrocytes, and when the number of raised beads reaches a threshold the neurons tell the body to stop swimming or flying.

Let's try to imagine how this feels to a forager bee watching the dance.

Polistra has a hive near the mill...



Looking downward inside the hive we see one scout telling one forager about her find:

The forager observes the direction of the dance with respect to the hive, and forms a template for where the sun should be when she's flying.

Taking the important part in slow motion:



Each waggle ticks up the beads of her astrocyte abacus. For a simple animation we'll assume she's a Babylon Bee who counts in base 60. For each of these five waggles she brings in one 12-bead astrocyte. The total of all the counters tells her how many wingflaps she needs. (Obviously the real multiple of wingflaps per waggle would be far more than 12.)

She then launches out of the hive and turns until the actual sun matches the template position supplied by the dance. As she flies, each wingflap clicks down a bead. When the astrocytes have all reached threshold, she's there.




= = = = =


Even better: The clover is also an abacus!



What looks like a blossom is actually a cluster (inflorescence) of a few dozen tiny florets. Each 'spike' is a complete little flower, with a green cup (calyx) containing a white crown (corolla).

Why are some pointing down? Those are the florets that have already been touched by a pollinating insect. The clover detects the touch and removes nutrition from that floret, allowing it to drop down and turn brown.

Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 3:41 PM

  Fills in a square
This is an interesting observation! The jaw part of a Venus flytrap emits a magnetic field just after it snaps shut.

Magnetic fields had previously been observed in other plants; algae in one study, bean plants in another. The previous magnetometers, called SQUIDs, are large and run at very cool temperatures, and the team needed something more convenient for their use. Different actions on or by a plant can elicit the fields—from being wounded to trying to snap at food within its reach, as was the case with the flytrap. The magnetic field doesn’t correspond with the act itself but the action potential that precipitates the plant’s next move.

I've been puzzled by the missing square in the otherwise orthogonal pattern of inputs and outputs.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Nature uses magnetic and static fields and ion currents ALMOST universally, but there are some exceptions. Why?

Static fields are used for internal communication EVERYWHERE. Inside a cell, between cells, in the nervous system, inside muscles, EVERYWHERE.

Static fields are used for external communication more narrowly, but one of the narrow uses is common. Plants communicate with pollinating insects by fields, telling the bugs which flowers are ready for pollination and which are used up. Mud-dwelling fish use static fields for radio communication, in FM Stereo.

Static sensors are part of the communication systems in above paragraph, and more broadly used by just about everything to detect nearby objects. (Even dull humans use the hairs on our arms for this purpose!)

Static fields are used directly for motion in two ways, one of which is nearly universal. Cells drive their flagella with a synchronous motor, using phased variation of static fields. Spiders alter their charge to move away from walls and toward plants when hanging from a silk fiber.

= = = = =

Ion currents are also EVERYWHERE for internal communication. The nervous system is all about ion currents.

Bacteria use ion currents to communicate via miniature wires, and some plants send currents through fungal wires.

Ion currents are sensory as part of the wire systems above.

Ion currents are NOT used for motion as such. Currents are a vital part of muscle action, but the current isn't what moves the animal.

= = = = =

Magnetic fields are used by EVERYONE for sensing 3d position, but NOT used for the other purposes. It's possible that bees use magnetic motion for communication in their waggle dance, but this doesn't seem to be established.

= = = = =

	Static field	Ion current	Magnetic field
Internal communication	Yes	Yes	0
External communication	Yes	Yes	0
Sensory	Yes	Yes	Yes
Motor	Yes	0	0

Seems like an oddly non-orthogonal chart. Nature normally uses all resources to the max. Empty spots in a chart should invite closer observation to see if those spots are actually full.

For instance, I'll bet somebody ejects a stream of ions like a reaction rocket engine. We haven't spotted it because we aren't looking for it.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

This new observation is another case of not finding because we weren't looking. The usual magnetometers used superconducting magnets, so the room had to be cold. When they used a magnetometer that can function in a warm environment where the flytraps were happy, the flytraps obligingly did their thing and emitted the field.

It's not clear from the article if the magnetic field is just the natural result of a fast-changing electrostatic field, or generated directly by moving ferric molecules around.

Labels: bee, Carver

  ¶ 2:21 PM

  Bees do it best.
Here's a quick chain of thought that led to an unexpected place.

Profs are getting ready for fall semester, and most of them will be "teaching" online. This is not good for the students, but it is good for the courseware business.

The publisher has been passing along requests for improvements and corrections as profs start gearing up. I enjoy dealing with these requests, partly because I enjoy MAKING THINGS, and partly because I enjoy serving.

Enjoy serving? That's a new thought and a surprising thought. You're not SUPPOSED to enjoy serving. Everyone is supposed to be aiming ever upward! Everyone MUST want to be president!

I know the latter is nonsense, but I never spontaneously thought "I enjoy serving" before.

In fact normal humans are built to be servants. Like normal dogs, we ENJOY BEING USEFUL and we need to be needed. "Slavery" is normal. We've been taught to reject the better and more secure forms of slavery so our masters can keep us in maximum panic and fear.

The monsters who enjoy being bosses are psychopaths, and we're seeing right now what happens when psychopaths are given ALL power with no Natural Law restraints.

How does Natural Law restraint work?

= = = = = PARTIAL REPRINT:

500 years ago the Circassians solved BOTH problems at the same time. Unsurprisingly, Turkmenistan is part of Circassia.

Circassian girls were a major export product. They were especially beautiful, and the psychopathic sultans of the Ottoman Empire bought them for a good price.

Unfortunately, many of the girls were disfigured by smallpox, decreasing the profit. Presumably by serendipity, the Circassians figured out that a small dose of cowpox prevented smallpox. They developed inoculation into a science.

Selling their daughters to sultans solved the psychopath problem and provided a better life for the pretty ones. A harem girl gets the best food and the best clothing, and has ample opportunity to display her beauty through dancing and ceremonies. She takes her turn occasionally in the bedroom of the blubbery oversatiated Sultan, who can barely find his dick amid the rolling mountains of fat.

If the pretty ones had stayed at home, they would be milking cows, pulling plows, weaving crude clothing, losing their beauty, and enduring daily sessions with a strong muscular farmer. Some would enjoy the sex, but most wouldn't.

So the Circassians used REAL SCIENCE to solve both of our current problems in a SYNCHRONOUS AND BALANCED WAY. The pretty daughters had a better life, the people were protected from smallpox AND protected from the worst excesses of the psychopaths, and the people received PAY FOR VALUE.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Who does the best job of Natural Law restraint? Bees. Workers know they're meant to serve, and they spend tremendous amounts of energy keeping the queen GROSSLY FAT AND OVERSATIATED. In human terms the queen is as large as a locomotive, and does nothing but churn out eggs. She has no opportunity to start wars or commit genocide.

Labels: bee, Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 12:35 AM

  Wildfires or bees. Pick one.
Interesting article on wildlife habitat. Some ecologists in New England took off their theory goggles and LOOKED at reality, and found:

The decline of New England farming in the 20th century dramatically diminished the open acreage of what we ecologists call early successional habitat, which provided unique plants and cover for wildlife. Successional habitat is land like old pastures, fields and beaver meadows where grasses, small shrubs and trees grow. In New England, for example, they contribute to the persistence and resilience of many species such as spadefoot toads, box turtles, New England cottontails and birds like towhees.

When you eliminate farms, forests recapture the land. Without farmers, who maintains open land suitable for bees?

Despite being separated at times by a mere 30 feet, forests and transmission line corridors differ tremendously. In a recent study, we found that the sunny, open corridors held nearly 10 times the number of bees and twice the number of bee species as compared to forested plots, where nectar becomes scarce by the end of May.

The diversity of bees found along the corridor was eye-opening. More than 200 species of wild pollinators, half the known species for the entire New England region, were buzzing around the 27 survey plots.

Power companies, that's who.

In the West where the envirogenocidists have total murderous control, power companies must leave trees growing into their wires. The PRIMARY result of this idiocy is massive wildfires. Now this research shows a SECONDARY result: No bees.

Carver:

LOOK ABOUT YOU.
TAKE HOLD OF THE THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
TALK TO THEM.
LET THEM TALK TO YOU.

= = = = =

Sidenote: Bees depend on sensing magnetic and static fields. There's a strong magnetic field around a powerline. Contrary to my guess, this clearly doesn't repel the bees ... maybe it's an advantage, a guide for navigation?

And speaking of wildfires and envirogenocidists....

Labels: bee, Carbon Cult, Carver

  ¶ 12:31 AM

  Possible answer to missing chart point
Yesterday I mentioned that some specific frequencies resonate with specific atoms, potentially disrupting certain proteins or chemicals. AFAIK this isn't a real problem with our all-pervasive electromagnetic radiation, but it got me to thinking along similar lines.

As I detailed here, Nature only transmits electrostatic waves, not magnetic waves. When humans started to develop radio, we mainly used inductive or electromagnetic transmitters and receivers. Dolbear's capacitive system was an exception, but he didn't pursue it.

Why does Nature prefer to communicate with static fields instead of magnetic fields? Most animals have magnetic sensors for navigation, so it would seem efficient to re-use those sensors for communication. But nobody does.**

Two answers pop up immediately.

(1) Blood cells contain iron. If an internal antenna is creating a strong magnetic field, it could 'permatize' the blood cells, leading them to clump or repel each other.

(2) Navigation is too important and subtle to tolerate interference. The earth's field is much weaker than the radiation needed to communicate, so the communication would overwhelm the geosensors, and again possibly 'permatize' them.

** Partial exception: the bee's waggle dance, which is a sort of vector compass pointer based on the earth's field. "Go 30 degrees left of North for five units, then go 80 degrees right of North for three units."

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, bee

  ¶ 3:32 AM

  How sweet thy voice
A massively important discovery about plant intelligence by an Israeli group including Chamovitz, who literally wrote the book on smarty-plants.

In short: Plants hear with their petals.

It's been known for a long time that plants respond to mechanical vibration by insects walking on stems or chewing leaves or touching flowers. Many of those responses (Venus flytrap, mimosa, snapdragon, clover) are quick and visible. There has been a lot of speculation about true hearing of airborne sounds, but no firm evidence until this set of experiments.

Hypothesis:

A possible plant organ that could relay the airborne acoustic signal into a response is the flower itself, especially in flowers with “bowl” shape. If this is the case, we expect that part of the flower (or the entire flower) would vibrate physically in response to the airborne sound of a potential pollinator. We further predict that nectar sugar concentration would increase in response to the sound.

The researchers used all sorts of tricks to isolate the sensor and check the frequency response. The hypothesis was verified. A sound similar to the wingbeats of a plant's preferred pollinator causes a temporary sweetening of the nectar. The sweetening takes a few minutes to develop, so the first bee might not receive the signal. But the first bee is often a scout, so the sugar trap is fresh just in time for the mass of bees who respond to the scout.

The next step in research is to find the mechanism. If the petals are the tympanic membrane, where is the cochlea? More likely the petals ARE the cochlea, directly transducing pressure change.

I discussed this parallel in my earlier piece on Chamovitz, but at that time the basic question about airborne sound hadn't been answered. I was thinking in terms of acoustic response by roots and stems. Now that the petals are known to be the sensors, the parallel is blatantly clear.

The cochlea is a logarithmic spiral because frequencies are sensed logarithmically.



Many flowers are also log spirals.



How about the opposite parallel? Do animals sweeten their pheromones on hearing the voice of the preferred mating type? A preferred sound certainly creates a whole-body pleasure via the vagus nerve and parasympathetic system. The vagus controls many secretions in the skin and gut, and also picks up olfactory signals from incoming pheromones.

So this is highly likely but not yet determined.

= = = = =

Later astonished thought: The delayed sweetness is truly remarkable. It shows that the plant's intelligence is ANTICIPATING a future event and STRATEGIZING to match the beehive's strategy. Other plant responses are much faster and simpler. The snapdragon bops the bee on the head to knock it down into the pollen, and the clover ticks each floret out of the way after it's been consumed.

Labels: bee, Carver, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 2:25 AM

  Constants and variables 114, Godprofit vs Satanprofit edition
The biggest Switchover of all.

Via RT:

“Our country is, as they say, destined by the heavens to feed the whole planet. And we’ll try and do that,” Medvedev told journalists... Apart from being the country’s “destiny,” the foods plainly make “nice export goods,” the prime minister added. Russia’s agriculture has expanded greatly over the past few years, becoming a solid and profitable industry, unlike the way it was a couple decades ago.

This video shows the new approach in action. The title mentions wheat, but the most significant innovation is year-round tomato production.



Russia is breaking Graybill's Law massively. Every new US blockade and sanction lets Russia develop a new skill and a new industry to world-leading levels.

Before the Switchover US was feeding the world. Now we're bombing the world and Russia is feeding the world.

You couldn't ask for a sharper distinction between good and evil. Our bombing and Russia's feeding are both capitalist ventures aimed at profit. Bombing is profit for Satan, feeding is profit for God.

= = = = =

Later and more complex thought: Well, the constant part isn't really constant. Both ventures are capitalist, but the payment side is different.

The people who eat Russia's food are paying Russia in plain old capitalist style. Product out, money in.

The people who are dying from our bombs can't pay for the privilege of being dead, and we don't even bill their governments for the privilege of having a dead population and a ruined country. Instead, American taxpayers are forced to pay the Pentagon and defense contractors for our bombing. So we're more like a non-profit demonic charity financed by paycheck deductions. United Way for genocide.

Labels: bee, Constants and Variables, skill-estate, switchover, things worth doing

  ¶ 11:34 PM

  Not a mystery
A nice example of REAL SCIENCE, with REAL EXPERIENCE for students, and a nicely written article.

In an unprecedented study of a solar eclipse's influence on bee behavior, researchers at the University of Missouri organized a cadre of citizen scientists and elementary school classrooms in setting up acoustic monitoring stations to listen in on bees' buzzing -- or lack thereof -- as the 2017 eclipse passed over. The results... were clear and consistent at locations across the country: Bees stopped flying during the period of total solar eclipse.

"We anticipated, based on the smattering of reports in the literature, that bee activity would drop as light dimmed during the eclipse and would reach a minimum at totality," says Candace Galen, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri and lead researcher on the study. "But, we had not expected that the change would be so abrupt, that bees would continue flying up until totality and only then stop, completely."

Shouldn't be unexpected. Perception is logarithmic. As the intensity dropped linearly, the bee's sense of light stayed nearly constant for a while, then dropped off abruptly.

Labels: bee, Carver, Experiential education

  ¶ 1:57 AM

  Non-orthogonal Nature
Convective thought.

Nature uses magnetic and static fields and ion currents ALMOST universally, but there are some exceptions. Why?

= = = = =

Static fields are used for internal communication EVERYWHERE. Inside a cell, between cells, in the nervous system, inside muscles, EVERYWHERE.

Static fields are used for external communication more narrowly, but one of the narrow uses is common. Plants communicate with pollinating insects by fields, telling the bugs which flowers are ready for pollination and which are used up. Mud-dwelling fish use static fields for radio communication, in FM Stereo.

Static sensors are part of the communication systems in above paragraph, and more broadly used by just about everything to detect nearby objects. (Even dull humans use the hairs on our arms for this purpose!)

Static fields are used directly for motion in two ways, one of which is nearly universal. Cells drive their flagella with a synchronous motor, using phased variation of static fields. Spiders alter their charge to move away from walls and toward plants when hanging from a silk fiber.

= = = = =

Ion currents are also EVERYWHERE for internal communication. The nervous system is all about ion currents.

Bacteria use ion currents to communicate via miniature wires, and some plants send currents through fungal wires.

Ion currents are sensory as part of the wire systems above.

Ion currents are NOT used for motion as such. Currents are a vital part of muscle action, but the current isn't what moves the animal.

= = = = =

Magnetic fields are used by EVERYONE for sensing 3d position, but NOT used for the other purposes. It's possible that bees use magnetic motion for communication in their waggle dance, but this doesn't seem to be established.

= = = = =

	Static field	Ion current	Magnetic field
Internal communication	Yes	Yes	0
External communication	Yes	Yes	0
Sensory	Yes	Yes	Yes
Motor	Yes	0	0

Seems like an oddly non-orthogonal chart. Nature normally uses all resources to the max. Empty spots in a chart should invite closer observation to see if those spots are actually full. For instance, I'll bet somebody ejects a stream of ions like a reaction rocket engine. We haven't spotted it because we aren't looking for it.

Labels: bee, Carver, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 2:30 PM

  Ought vs nought
Headline: Bees are first insects shown to understand the concept of Zero

The researchers trained the bees to associate a platform that had fewer shapes on it with the sweet reward, until they made the right choice 80 per cent of the time. The bees were put through further tests with differently shaped objects to confirm that they were responding to the number of shapes and not their appearance.

Next, when given a choice between two or three shapes and “zero” shapes, bees picked zero most of the time.

Good experiment. Not hugely surprising, despite the tiny brain. Intelligence is turning out to be independent of neuron count or brain volume.

I'd argue that this isn't about Zero in the sense of roman vs arabic number systems. This is more about establishing a template and knowing when reality violates the template.

Immediate example: My kitchen faucet has developed a leak at the rotator joint for the spout. Until I get around to ordering a new gasket, I'm trying to avoid the positions that leak the most. Last night when washing dishes I left the spout over the soap-holding pan instead of turning it to the right over the egg pan as I normally do after filling the soap-holding pan. When I finished the stuff in the soap-holding pan and dipped the washcloth into the egg pan to start scrubbing, ALARM ALARM ALARM SOMETHING IS WRONG! Oh. The water in the egg pan was room temperature instead of warm, because the faucet hadn't been over the egg pan for the previous three minutes as it usually is.

Every minuscule detail of a well-developed habit is ALARM ALARM ALARM when any sensed measurement is off by more than a difference limen.

When the bees have formed the habit of expecting some shape objects on the platform, the absence of shape objects is ALARM ALARM ALARM! Brain expects things on platform! No things on platform!

Etymology of NOUGHT: Middle English noght, from Old English nōwiht, which in turn comes from ne-ā-wiht, which was a phrase used as an emphatic "no", meaning "not a thing".

Zero in numeration is a more abstract concept, which developed separately from seeing and marking a NO-THING where things are expected.

Few minutes later: Ordered the gasket. ALARM can be useful.

Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint, Real World Math

  ¶ 11:36 PM

  So much for bees
The unimaginably infinitely hyperevil dysgovernment of USA STRONG has just added seven species of bees to the kill list, thus guaranteeing their extinction. When an animal is on the kill list (appropriately called the "endangered list" because the animal has now become both endangered and a danger to humans) no responsible property owner wants to have the animal anywhere near his property. The animal has become a tyranny virus, giving the dysgovernment a perfect reason to destroy your property and kill you. The only sane and survivable response is to quietly eliminate the animal, and eliminate the flowers or food that might attract it, BEFORE the dysgovernment realizes the animal is there.


SOROS DELENDA EST.

Labels: bee, defensible spaces

  ¶ 6:36 AM

  What are they on about?
Convective thought. FBI and Applesatan are engaged in pointless battle over a source of useless information. Clearly more of a pissing contest than a tech dispute.

Meanwhile, GCHQ is quietly telling us where the real action is. Their Christmas puzzle is nominally intended to bring in a few good recruits who wouldn't have answered the official advertisements. The latest puzzle is uniquely puzzling on all levels. The questions don't make sense as questions, and the answers aren't logically connected to the questions. The quiz has a whole lot of pictures and not much math.

What are they on about, as Brits would say? Looking for brains capable of handling steganography. They're tacitly admitting that they have 'back-doors' to all practically usable digital crypt methods. They know it and the adversaries know it. So digital encryption isn't the problem that GCHQ needs to solve. Steganography is the problem.

Labels: Asked and answered, bee

  ¶ 4:54 PM

  Bad Ig
The latest Ig Nobels seem to be declining. Presumably because the source material is declining. In previous years the Ig was able to find lots of good science dealing with trivial or silly-sounding subjects. This year only a couple of the awards fit the standard.

This one is the worst:

MANAGEMENT PRIZE — Gennaro Bernile [ITALY, SINGAPORE, USA], Vineet Bhagwat [USA], and P. Raghavendra Rau [UK, INDIA, FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, JAPAN], for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that — for them — had no dire personal consequences.

Reversed logic, like all "social" """""science"""". I'd guess that more than half of all adults have been in or near disasters without being killed or injured. The vast majority of survivors develop a sensible avoidance of risk after such events. Leader types are innately risk-loving, whether they had an experience of survival or not. Every experience makes a risk-lover love risk more, because he's a risk-lover who loves risk. The survival experience is the fucking CONSTANT and the innate risk preference is the fucking VARIABLE.

If you call yourself a scientist you should FIRST OF ALL be able to distinguish constants from variables. And even morer firster of aller, you should understand that


= = = = =



At the other end, this item....

Michael L. Smith, for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful.

....is simply GOOD SCIENCE, and is NOT trivial or silly. Variables and constants properly separated, useful information. I suppose he could have used a mechanical stinger instead of live bees, but bees are not known for individuality. It's reasonable to assume that the bee will always optimize her sting. ETHICS rules make it impossible to run such a study on anyone but yourself. Aside from ETHICS, pain is so subjective that the only way to get a reasonable scaling is to keep it on yourself anyway.

Good science and serious science. Pain is not trivial. Shouldn't be an Ig.

Labels: Age of Stings, bee, Blinded by Stats, Ethics, Loughnerian Logic

  ¶ 2:34 AM

  Finally doing some Shepardson!
Ever since I read Shepardson, I've been thinking about doing some real but non-serious science on the subject of plants and static charges. Before the year-long courseware project I ordered some parts from Jameco, thinking that a physical project would be a good balance for the mental strain of coding. This balancing act had worked nicely on previous iterations of courseware. Didn't work this time; I'm older, the coding was intrinsically harder and heavier, and the only balance I needed was sleep, which I didn't get nearly enough of. Still catching up.

After the coding was done in late Feb I picked up Shepardson again with the notion of using it as a re-introduction to electronics, ultimately returning to ham radio.

This online article shows a super-simple negative charge detector or electrometer. Basically a Jfet in series with a battery and an LED. I soldered it up, but it didn't seem to work; also, I really wanted more than a binary indicator. I wanted an analog meter and a sensitivity control.

As part of setting up an electronics workspace, I cleaned out a drawer that had been gathering computer junk like RS-232 cables, floppy drives, and obsolete mice for 25 years. At the bottom of the drawer was a completely forgotten little VOM. Must have bought it in 1990 and never used it.

Well, good. This will let me test the basic charge-detector principle before I buy more parts that might not be useful. So I soldered wires onto the three leads of a Jfet, then poked the source into the neg jack of VOM and the drain into the pos jack. Turned the switch to Ohms, put my hand near the gate lead, and the needle jumped! So the principle does work after all...

But wait! Serendipity calls! This isn't just a proof of concept, this is exactly the circuit I want! Sensitivity pot, analog meter, battery. No need to buy more parts.

I stuffed the Jfet inside the case, soldered the source and drain wires internally to the VOM's terminals, and brought the gate wire out to an antenna from a dead transistor radio. Now the VOM's range switch turns the detector on, and the ohms adjust pot is the sensitivity adjuster. The VOM is no longer usable for its original purpose, but since I never used it for its original purpose this is not a loss.

Effective ckt looks like this:


= = = = =

Some initial pictures:

Near the computer:



A little farther from the computer:



Left side of living room. This house is packed with 60 cycle hum, so this is probably more of a signal-rectification effect than a static effect. The middle of the room seems to be 'colder' than the walls.



To prove that it's not solely picking up 60: About a foot from a pile of plastic trash bags:



And then an inch from the bags:



Okay, now let's get closer to Shepardson. Outside is less contaminated by 60, but it's also sunny, which means my crappy camera and non-existent camera skills get in the way. You can almost see where the needle is on the first two pics, and I accidentally got a usable picture on the third.

Far from a dandelion:



About 6 inches from dandelion:



Touching the dandelion:


Yay! Science, sort of!

Note that I have NOT added the 'Metrology' tag to this entry, because this crude gadget is wildly uncalibrated.


More readings here.

Labels: bee, coot-proofing, Grand Blueprint, new toy

  ¶ 4:12 AM

  Winterheimatkunde [repost]
The nesting drive grows strong in winter. As I walked this morning through gray air with a few snowflakes, I noted woodsmoke from chimneys and lights in windows. Though the technology changes over the years, those two markers of specifically human homes remain constant. The hearth and the lamp.


More from Richard Elwood Dodge's 1903 Home Geography:

Every child who goes to school spends his days partly in school, partly in playing or working, and partly at home. At home he eats, sleeps, perhaps plays with his brothers and sisters, and gets the clothes that keep him warm and dry. ...

People are not the only dwellers in homes, however, for the small birds and the wild animals have homes, but they do not always live in the same home all year.

Every country boy knows the homes of certain birds. He has probably watched them build the homes and seen the way they live and the way the old birds feed the young birds and teach them to fly. ...

No matter where we go, we shall find people living in homes. So, if we can find out why we live in homes, and what we do there, we will be better able to understand other people who do many things that seem strange to us now, but who are busy earning a living in different ways.

An old deserted farmhouse, such as one often sees in the country, is not a home. Neither is an empty city house or a vacant apartment a home. But they would become homes if somebody moved into them.

People are, therefore, a necessary part of every home, and a house is only a place for a family to live in and to make into a home.

Note the emphasis on human presence, and the calibration to human scale. The rest of the book has the same focus. All is defined by the connections and relations between you and the rest of the universe. All verbs, no nouns. All about how you respond to the world and influence the world, nothing about raw facts.

We need to teach everything this way.

= = = = =

Wonder if bees feel the same longing, the same inward pull toward the nest, when they sense the bee equivalent of hearth and lamp? [Would those equivalents be Hexagon shapes and Larva smell?]


Artistic sidenote: I was going to use the iconic dome-shaped beehive in this picture, but a little googling convinced me that American and Euro bees don't build their hives in that form. Their hives are generally built into and around a hole in a tree. Using a realistic nest in the same image with toonish bees and toonish trees probably violates art rules... but I respect bees and want to give them a proper home in my picture.

= = = = =

[Posted last year, decided it deserves to be a regular Xmas item.]

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, bee, Heimatkunde

  ¶ 1:53 AM

  Shepardson again
This morning's science news about bees and ions adds another piece to the old Shepardson puzzle. Polistra has been following an old idea, written up by George Shepardson in 1901, that (some) plants live more by trading electrons than by absorbing sunlight.

Today's item indicates that (some) plants use negative charge intentionally to attract bees. When a flower is ready for bee service, the plant charges it negatively. Bees, who are always charged positively from the friction of flapping around in the air, sense the negative field and head for it. The contact of bee to flower discharges both sides, so the bee can tell which flowers are used up.



Shepardson's special theme was that pointy things act as centers for charge transfer. Pine needles have very little sunlight-absorbing area and excellent charge-absorbing qualities, so it's reasonable to assume that their main function is to gather electrons, not to gather sunlight. Similarly, bumblebees are hairy so they can sense the static signals from flowers.

= = = = =

Ancient sidenote, from 1816 'Encyclopedia Perthensis'.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, bee, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 8:07 AM

  Winterheimatkunde
The nesting drive grows strong in winter. As I walked this morning through gray air with a few snowflakes, I noted woodsmoke from chimneys and lights in windows. Though the technology changes over the years, those two markers of specifically human homes remain constant. The hearth and the lamp.


More from Richard Elwood Dodge's 1903 Home Geography:

Every child who goes to school spends his days partly in school, partly in playing or working, and partly at home. At home he eats, sleeps, perhaps plays with his brothers and sisters, and gets the clothes that keep him warm and dry. ...

People are not the only dwellers in homes, however, for the small birds and the wild animals have homes, but they do not always live in the same home all year.

Every country boy knows the homes of certain birds. He has probably watched them build the homes and seen the way they live and the way the old birds feed the young birds and teach them to fly. ...

No matter where we go, we shall find people living in homes. So, if we can find out why we live in homes, and what we do there, we will be better able to understand other people who do many things that seem strange to us now, but who are busy earning a living in different ways.

An old deserted farmhouse, such as one often sees in the country, is not a home. Neither is an empty city house or a vacant apartment a home. But they would become homes if somebody moved into them.

People are, therefore, a necessary part of every home, and a house is only a place for a family to live in and to make into a home.

Note the emphasis on human presence, and the calibration to human scale. The rest of the book has the same focus. All is defined by the connections and relations between you and the rest of the universe. All verbs, no nouns. All about how you respond to the world and influence the world, nothing about raw facts.

We need to teach everything this way.

= = = = =

Wonder if bees feel the same longing, the same inward pull toward the nest, when they sense the bee equivalent of hearth and lamp? [Would those equivalents be Hexagon shapes and Larva smell?]


Artistic sidenote: I was going to use the iconic dome-shaped beehive in this picture, but a little googling convinced me that American and Euro bees don't build their hives in that form. Their hives are generally built into and around a hole in a tree. Using a realistic nest in the same image with toonish bees and toonish trees probably violates art rules... but I respect bees and want to give them a proper home in my picture.

= = = = =

[Posted this a few weeks ago; decided it deserved to be a year-end or Xmas item, so moved it to this date.]

Labels: bee

  ¶ 8:18 AM

  Art buzz
Bees are excellent art critics.



Not that way, of course... When trained in a Skinner-box setup with several samples of Picasso and Monet, bees continue to choose the 'sweet' painter when they see other paintings by Picasso and Monet.

This gives the lie to the art scholars who love to spew the nonsense that I put in the bee's mouth. Scholars claim that analyzing art is a high-level professional undertaking, requiring vast IQ and decades of training.

Nope. All it takes is an animal with eyes and a brain.



The first part of Reinhard's study is completely unsurprising. Bees are unquestionably good at spotting and remembering patterns. When working clover, they can instantly find and hit the upward-pointing florets. (Upward means full, because the clover lowers the empty florets.) The same bee can recognize and hit the sweet spot on a rose or daffodil. Plenty of varied patterns there, not to mention their famous navigation abilities.

What's surprising is the generalization from an initially learned distinction based on a pattern that has nothing to do with flowers. This eliminates reductionist ideas that the bees are just smelling the sugar or recognizing the color or matching instinctive templates. Clearly high-level pattern recognition is part of the available genetic blueprint for all critters.

= = = = =

Aside from the fascinating subject, the Reinhard article is an outstanding example of scientific method and writing, and sets the absolute gold standard for scientific availability.

The researchers tried everything you could possibly imagine to insure that only the style was influencing the bees. Processed the paintings for equal overall luminosity, switched to black&white to eliminate color preference, checked the 2d Fourier transform for basic frequency information.

The full article is blessedly available online FREE. Includes excellent illustrations of the training box and the paintings. (Usually the full article is behind a paywall, and usually the full article contains nothing that wasn't in the press release.)

Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 4:40 AM

  Zombees
News item:

Mark Hohn didn't pay much attention to the dead bees scattered outside his shop when he got home from vacation a few weeks ago. He just pulled out a leaf blower and blasted away the mess.

It took him a few days to realize he had an invasion of the living dead on his hands.

"I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house," said the novice beekeeper. The dead and dying honeybees from Hohn's 1.25-acre spread in Kent are the first in Washington confirmed to be infected by a parasitic fly that causes the bees to lurch around erratically before dropping dead.

The discovery expands the range of the so-called "zombie bees" first discovered in California in 2008 by San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik. Unlike healthy bees, which spend the night tucked up in their hive, infected bees fly after dark and tend to congregate at lights. Hohn noticed bees buzzing around the light in his shop, flying in jerky patterns and finally flopping on the floor.

He remembered hearing about the zombie bees, so he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a Ziploc bag. "Curiosity got the better of me," he said.

The fly's life cycle is gruesomely reminiscent of the movie "Alien" — though they don't pose a risk to people. Adult females, smaller than a fruit fly, land on the backs of foraging honeybees and use their needle-sharp ovipositors to inject eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. "They basically eat the insides out of the bee," Hafernik said.

My first impulse was to do an animation ridiculing the San Francisco bees, showing them staggering around with fat joints in their mouths. After rereading the above, I just couldn't do it. I've gotten fairly 'close to the soil' in the last year or so, and learned enough about bees and pollination to gain considerable empathy for the industrious critters. I like to watch them working on my all-clover back yard.

So my only thought now is: Jesus, what an awful way to die. Pushed to exhaustion in darkness by an internal demon.

Labels: bee

  ¶ 11:57 AM

  All because of one day on the calendar
Drought? What drought?

A new government forecast says alfalfa hay production is up 15 percent in Kansas after a huge spike in harvested acres.

Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service reported Friday that Kansas growers are expected to harvest 2.25 million tons of alfalfa hay. The expected yield of 3 tons per acre is the same as a year ago, but it is coming off about 750,000 acres.

Kansas farmers planted 100,000 more acres of alfalfa hay this year in response to record hay prices last year.

Kansas always has droughts. Alfalfa doesn't seem to be bothered by this year's drought. Could we learn something from this? No, of course not. We're EXCEPTIONAL. We don't learn.

The current problem is a classic agricultural mistake: monoculture. Corn production is required by the Gaian national suicide laws, and corn production is subsidized by the Gaian national suicide laws. So farmers grow lots of corn, and ag research focuses on corn. Alfalfa fades into the background even though it's more adaptable, enriches the soil and encourages honeybees.

In terms of both government subsidies and the natural cycle, corn is 'taker', alfalfa is 'maker'.

But we keep growing more corn. All because the fucking Iowa caucus comes first on the calendar.

Labels: bee, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 2:40 AM