By Neale Van Fleet on November 6th, 2024
Today I learned about the existence of oxbow lakes. These are pockets of freestanding water left over when a river meanders away, leaving an echo of the river from a previous course.
By Neale Van Fleet on November 5th, 2024
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, writes an intriguing piece about plant cognition in The New York Review of Books. She writes:
Several recent books contend that the latest discoveries in plant cognition are so significant they force us to rethink our view of life itself. Depending on how you look at things, this prospect is thrilling to contemplate or nothing less than tragic.
It goes on to describe some examples of complex plant behaviour:
Plants communicate with animals as well, sometimes honestly, sometimes not. Corn plants that are being nibbled by caterpillars release chemicals that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, killing them
By Neale Van Fleet on November 4th, 2024
A silly diversion before a very important election.
See also: Powers of Ten.
By Neale Van Fleet on November 3rd, 2024
From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.
By Neale Van Fleet on October 29th, 2024
Randall has a way of making me think about things I never considered before. Now when I turn on the tap that provides near-infinite clean drinkable water I’ll think about how crazy it is that it just works.
By Neale Van Fleet on October 26th, 2024
Here is a classic short film from one of my heroes, Scottish/Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. It’s haunting, beautiful, and was groundbreaking for 1968.
Four years earlier, in 1964, McLaren (with Grant Munro) used essentially the same technique of overlaying film to create something with the complete opposite vibe, which is one of my favourite short sequences of film, the second half of his hodgepodgey film Canon. The relevant bit starts at exactly the 4:30 mark:
The difference in these two clips shows one of my favourite aspects of McLaren’s work: his flexibility. They both use essentially the same technique in different ways to create a very different effect.
By Neale Van Fleet on October 25th, 2024
By Neale Van Fleet on October 24th, 2024
The state of news media in Canada, and elsewhere, is certainly not at a good place. Newsrooms are closing, or contracting across the country. A Canadian law designed to get social media companies to share part of their revenue with news outlets backfired spectacularly when Facebook decided to remove news outlets from all of their feeds rather than share their ample profits with them.
I would never have predicted what would happen next. Facebook banishing news made an already dire news vacuum even worse. In the small prairie city of Regina, a literal dumpster company with a penchant for sharing local news on their social media accounts has stepped into the void, and has become one of the biggest sources of local news in the city. The company has amassed tens of thousands of followers for their
In writing this post, I’ve rewritten the same basic joke about media these days being ‘trash’ or ‘a dumpster fire’ over and over, but honestly it’s more exasperating than funny.
Read More (and listen to the story in Podcast form) at Canadaland →
By Neale Van Fleet on October 21st, 2024
Bees are incredible. Just a bunch of ladies hanging around flowers all day and making candy. Did you know when they fly they beat their wings at over 230 beats per second?
Thomas Seeley has spent a lifetime studying bees, and though his book also gives a good overall sense of how amazing bees are, it centres itself on one tiny facet of their behaviour—how they choose where to live. When bees need a new place to live, they form a swarm—a big bundle of bees which gather on a tree branch, or building, or other temporarily safe spot with their queen in the middle.
What they do next is fascinating, they send out scouts to look for suitable places to live. when these bees find a spot, they return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance for their peers. The angle and duration of their dance, similar to those they do to tell their hive-mates where to find sources of food, expresses both where the potential new hive is and also how suitable it would be to live it. Bees have a number of criteria for their abode, including the size (15 litres or more), size of the main opening (15cm square or less), height above ground (10-15 feet off the ground is best) and direction (Southward-facing if possible).
As the scouts return and perform their waggle dances, a sort of debate takes place. Competing spots are advertised, visited, and if found suitable, other bees will waggle dance in advocacy for them. Over a few days, the swarm slowly reaches a consensus, and eventually sets off for their new home.
This is the sort of book that could only be written by someone who has made their life studying bees. The author seems to be positively overflowing with the sort of deep knowledge that you only get after a lifetime of studying, and loving, something very specific. The book feels like it can barely contain all the author has to say on the subject—as if the author could have gone on for hundreds more pages on the subject. Paul Stamet’s Mycelium Running about all matter of funguses seems like a worthy comparison.
