Insects Through My Window

I woke up this morning to see a crane fly splaying itself out on my window, thousands of these laughable insects have recently plagued the south of England, as I'm sure most of you will have noticed, but I stopped to look at this one and took a few photos.

Insects, whilst being annoying and entirely unaware of personal space, have a unique and undeniable beauty. Despite being so prolific and ubiquitous around us their alien, machine-like biology remains unseen and forgotten.

Enjoy.

(Click on the images for better resolution, it's worth looking closer)

Details:

These things are really interesting. They're called halteres and are the remains of wings, now used as gyroscopes. Here's Sir David explaining...

Our Tiny World

I've just spent about half an hour watching a three millimetre life going about its business.

Having just finished university, I am now planning a winter in the mountains and thinking about careers and the rest of my life. But whilst my plans are literally mountain-sized, it's easy to ignore the minuscule.

Fortunately, the nature of being a recent graduate means I have an awful lot of time of my hands, so I watched as this fly slowly drank a droplet of water, regurgitated it and drank it again (for reasons I can't fathom) instead of doing a day's work.

Anyway, the less said the better. These photos are cool.

And when it was done drinking it started talking to me - unfortunately, it's tiny voice couldn't penetrate the double glazing...

(If anyone wants to put a comedy voice-over to the video, you're welcome to)

Bread's Locomotive Potential

I feel as though I must have already written about Wikipedia somewhere on here before, but a special mention has become necessary.

I somehow stumbled across the Wikipedia article for the Buttered Cat Paradox, a logical conclusion born of two absolute truths; buttered toast always lands butter-down, and cats always land on their feet.

We can all agree that the system adopted on the website is pretty good; normal people survey the pages to ensure accuracy and good standards across the website. Something George Putland and I found to our annoyance when trying to make a Jono: The Musical article.

A handy label, indeed

The 'citation needed' label is something we're all used to seeing, and is an important part of the encyclopedia as it lets us use caution when reading supposed facts. Definitely a useful tool, it would be difficult to argue otherwise.

What I just found was an example of this that I couldn't really see as necessary. In typical, kill-joy fashion, the paragraph begins 'In reality...' and goes on to explain that cats would be able to land the right way up (as if anyone was in any doubt), but it's the ending that really intrigued me.

I'm pretty sure that should be taken as read. Imagine the citation that would be used if there was one;

2013, Hawking, S. The locomotive properties of bread in its myriad raw and cooked forms. Journal of Applied Physics, 113 (4).

I realise that for a second time I've further diluted the internet with writing related to cats, but if you can't beat them...