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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
After doing a bit on color earlier this week (see "Blue My Mind"  ), I found this related 2022 article/interview from Knowable Magazine. Color is in the eye, and brain, of the beholder The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water Now, I don't have a whole lot to say about it; I consider this to be more of a follow-up. I didn't expect it to follow-up so soon, but such are the perils of random number generators. Some people are color-blind. Others may have color superpowers. The former seems to be linked to a Y chromosome; the latter, to an XX pair. Make of that what you will; I call it semirandom genetic variation. Like how the gene complex for calico cats is linked to the XX. For whatever it's worth, I seem to have perfectly standard color vision, but I have two friends, both male, both with Irish ancestry, who are colorblind to different degrees. That's not science, by the way. That's an observation of a couple of data points. To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex... And the rest of the article is an edited transcript of that interview. As I said, I don't have much to say, for once. So I'm not going to reproduce parts of the interview. I will note that they do make mention of The Dress, which I also covered in an entry fairly recently, but that was in the old blog. There's also some reinforcement of what I said before: that the spectrum is, well, a spectrum, with way more than seven colors. Some say there are millions. I'm pretty sure the actual number is finite, at any rate. To reiterate, the "seven colors" thing can be traced back to Newton, who associated them with other mystical sevens like the Sun and Moon plus five visible planets. And at the end (spoiler alert), it reiterates the philosophical question (I say philosophical, because we don't have a scientific means of testing this yet) that Kid Me posed: do I see the same colors that you do? I don't know. I also don't know that it matters except in terms of satisfying one's curiosity. So, maybe tomorrow I'll have more to say. We'll see. And we'll see in different colors. |
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However, I seem to be able to discern various shades of the same color easily. Because of this when asked my advice by my wife for an opinion of a color to paint a room, I acquiesce only under duress. I figure she'll get the color she wants anyway.
