This time-lapse drone video following the climbing route up Mount Everest does more to make clear the sheer scale of Everest, and in greater detail, than the eponymous 1998 documentary I first saw in an IMAX theatre—which wasn’t exactly a slouch. This video, however, uses a commercially available drone that starts at around C$2,750 (and it’s no coincidence that it was posted by the drone manufacturer, because oh lord does this advertise what the kit can do). [Kottke]
Pretzel, 25 Years On
Over the past few years we’ve lost most of our snakes to old age. It’s slightly nuts that our oldest snake, Pretzel, is still with us. She was the first corn snake I got, 25 years ago today, and the first snake I got as an adult; and she’s managed to outlive most of the snakes we got since then, to the point where she’s also our last corn snake: we lost Trouser last year at the age of 23 or so, and LMA (aka Ella Mae or Little Miss Adorable), who was a lot younger than that, earlier this year. Despite health issues from Giardia to seizures, Pretzel has turned out to be Little Miss Indestructable; she’s what Martha Argerich would be if she were a corn snake. See the above photo, taken this afternoon: at some point she lost a bit of her tail tip (which isn’t surprising or worrying).
I’m not actually sure how old Pretzel is, because she was at least a young adult when I got her, which means she’s 27 or so at a minimum. That’s a lot for a corn snake. She’s ridiculously hale for the moment, but in our experience snakes can go downhill awfully quickly and without much warning. It’s unlikely that she’ll be around in five years’ time, but neither is it impossible; it’s at least theoretically possible that she ends up being our last snake, period. I’m not sure that would surprise me.
See the post I wrote for Pretzel’s 20th gotchaversary, most of which is still applicable; it also has a bunch more photos.
A Robin’s Nest
A robin decided to build her nest behind our front porch light this year. In past years we’ve had phoebe nests up there, but robins build their nests differently (more grass, less mud) so we knew something different was up this time. The blue eggs were kind of a giveaway too. I don’t know why birds keep nesting there: it’s pretty sheltered, but they bolt and cuss us out every time we enter or leave. In any event, the cowbirds didn’t get to the robin’s nest the way they did with phoebes’ nests in previous years, and all the chicks hatched. Every so often Jennifer takes a no-look shot, as unobtrusive as she can, to mark their progress. Like most birds, robins grow fast: I’ve read that chicks leave the nest after two weeks, which means they’ll be gone some time late next week. Robins build a new nest for every brood, so with any luck we’ll soon be able to turn on the porch light, or leave the house without scaring a bird.
As some of you know, we live on nearly an acre of partially forested land. We’ve encountered lots of different species of wildlife since we moved here in 2017. Here’s a page that lists the ones we’ve been able to identify so far. It’s a work in progress and not remotely exhaustive: there’s still lots to add on the insect, mushroom and plant front (the word “Sisyphean” comes to mind for some reason).
Bluesky, Patreon and Other Platforms: An Update
I’m now on Bluesky, about which I am so far cautiously optimistic: for better or worse, it seems to have recreated a lot of the Twitter vibe, but with less of the Twitter horror. Said vibe is looser and freer than Mastodon’s (which to be sure I’m still posting to), again for better or worse. It’s an oversimplification and subjective as hell, but as I posted at one point, near as I can figure, Bluesky is for people who miss Twitter and Mastodon is for people who don’t.
I’m hardly ever on Twitter any more and I certainly don’t post. I could shut down my accounts at some point, I suppose. I’m no longer mirroring these posts on Tumblr either; I am, however, still mirroring them on Dreamwidth.
After musing about it for more than eight years, my Patreon finally went live last week. The goal is to move The Map Room, the map blog I started back in 2003 (!), to a reader-supported model so I can turn off the ads (which, honestly, have gotten to be a bit much) but still pay the bills. (My Ko-fi page also works for monthly as well as one-off contributions.)
The Ninth at 200
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the debut performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A lot has been written to mark the anniversary, and about the Ninth in general, but rather than linking to any of that, or adding to the verbiage, how about we let the music speak for itself. Earlier today, WDR broadcast a concert that recreates the original performance from that night in 1824: the musicians of the Orchester Wiener Akademie are playing the exact same repertoire, and with period instruments. They could only have matched that first performance more closely by performing it at Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor, but it was torn down in 1870; they’re making do with the Stadthalle in Wuppertal.
Update: Well, that’s annoying: they’ve made the video private.
Rewilding the Internet
In “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon look at the current state of the internet through an ecological lens, and compare it to an overly managed forest whose biodiversity has been scraped away in favour of a monoculture.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests. […]
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. […]Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.
A French Rom-Com About Typing Competitions
A few years ago I opined, on the subject of international speed-typing competitions, that there really ought to be a movie or series about the subject. Turns out there already was such a movie: Populaire, a French romantic comedy that came out in 2012. The reviews seem to find it fun and frothy, which is likely another way of saying slight. In any event, as is often the case with recent French movies, it’s hard to find. The streaming services don’t seem to have it; I’ll probably have to grab a second-hand DVD or Blu-Ray and then hope it doesn’t have the wrong region code. [Robert Messenger]
A Challenger for the Title of Biggest. Snake. EVAR.
Titanoboa may have a rival for the title of largest known snake to have ever existed. Scientists at IIT Roorkee have reported the discovery of the fossil of a large Eocene madtsoiid snake in western India. Like most snake fossils, it’s a set of vertebrae (most snake bones are far too delicate to survive). Named Vasuki indicus, its estimated length of 11 to 15 metres is within the range of that of Titanoboa cerrejonensis (12 to 14 metres) and might even have exceeded it. Titanoboa is a boa from Paleocene Colombia whereas Vasuki lived around 10 million years later, and moreover madtsoiids were not boas, so there isn’t much in common between them except their preposterous size.
A Universal Antivenom?
Because venom is complex and differs from species to species, there’s no broad treatment for snakebite: only various monovalent and polyvalent antivenoms that target a single species or group (e.g. similar snakes by region, like North American pit vipers). A new study published in Science Translational Medicine raises the possibility of a universal antivenom, based on monoclonal antibodies rather than animal serum.
Researchers tested a human antibody against the venom of four elapid snake species—the many-banded krait, black mamba, monocled cobra and king cobra—and found that it was almost completely effective at blocking the three-finger toxins (3FTx) found in all their venom. Less so with king cobra venom, owing, the researchers think, to other toxic components found in that snake’s venom. It was still more effective against king cobra venom and black mamba venom than standard antivenom treatment, and just as good against monocled cobra venom. (Animal testing was involved, and mice in the control group did not have a good day. Look: snakebite kills 100,000 people a year.) This study focused on a single antibody and a group of toxins found in a single snake family, and there are a lot of other toxins to deal with (again: venom is complex), so that universal antivenom is still a ways off. But it’s looking a lot less impossible.
I can’t imagine an eventual treatment based on monoclonal antibodies to be cheap—the monoclonal antibodies currently used to treat autoimmune disease sure as hell aren’t—but then antivenom tends to be either expensive (in the U.S.) or scarce: there’s a global shortage of the stuff, and for some species there isn’t actually an antivenom available.
Is China’s Piano Bubble Bursting?
It was only a few years ago that China seemed to be in the grip of piano mania: tens of millions of children taking lessons, hundreds of thousands of pianos sold (something like 80 percent of the entire world market for pianos). But if this report, originally published in the Chinese-language Singaporean newspaper Lianhe Zaobao, is true, the Chinese piano bubble is bursting: “Weak market demand, worsening inventory pressure, declining birth rates, the ‘double reduction’ policy (reducing the burdens of homework and after-school tutoring) and other factors have led to a decline in the development of the entire industry.” Schools and stores closing, sales plummeting, millions of pianos sitting idle in warehouses.
So what happened? The report cites a number of factors, but what jumps out is a 2018 education policy change that eliminated the ability to gain bonus points from the arts for a child’s zhongkao (high school admission exam). Prior to that change, parents had been signing their kids up for piano lessons by the millions to take advantage of those bonus points and improve their kids’ chances of getting into a good school.
The ups and downs of China’s piano market show that the demand for pianos is dependent on the graded examination market, which is in turn largely driven by the public’s expectation that the ability to play the piano will help propel them into a higher social class. But the problem is that the vastly different economic and social situation now has dampened the dream of upward mobility, and impractical piano dreams no longer serve middle-class families.
In other words: the boom in piano lessons (and, as a result, piano sales) was less about music and more about class aspirations—something that Westerners ought to find familiar.
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