There’s a bit of a persistent rumour getting around on internet and extranet circles. Actually far too many, but today’s lucky topic is the notion that plants produce oxygen from carbon dioxide.
It’s a simple enough story. We know that photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide, and produces surplus oxygen. Since CO₂ quite obviously contains O₂, well, there’s not even anything to question.
Except that photosynthesis has a few more aspects than just these two gases, and the whole system isn’t an atomic process.[1] Fortunately you don’t need to be within arm’s reach of …
Let’s suppose you have a box. Ideally this is no mere supposition but you actually have a box nearby right now. If you don’t, you’ve surely had one at some point, so in that case we’ll talk about that box.
Boxes are made for storing things. You can put all sorts of things inside your box. You could even put another box inside it.
And you needn’t stop there. Another box can go inside your boxed box, or you could even put multiple boxes alongside each other inside the original box. All manner of boxes …
27 May marked a momentous Monday for people who ascribe significance to the interval between 22 December and 19 January everywhere, as it was on this day that Capricorn left Capricorn.[1]
“What?”
For those suitably stocked up on the applicable jargon, it was on this date that the point on the ecliptic with right ascension 20h referenced to B1875, and demarcating the western edge of Capricornus, now has an ecliptic longitude greater than 300°. Armed with this knowledge, you can go do something else now.
“Huh?”
Okay, so we need to step back a bit. Then step back another …
In the last few years I’ve moved more and more towards theming my general online presence around horseshoe crabs. There’s a general reason for that, and to properly honour horseshoe crabs for what they are, it deserves to be explained.
First, we have to start at the beginning. Or, the best we lesser specimens can know of the beginning. Back around the late Ordovician, at least 445 million years ago[1], there was a chelicerate currently called Lunataspis, which looked something like this:
Reconstruction of external exoskeletal morphology of Lunataspis aurora. Figure 5 from [Rudkin2008].
It’s been a long, long time coming – years, really – but at long last I have a site I can maybe take enough pride in to use seriously and keep everything together. At least, theoretically; because strictly as I write this the site for it to appear on does not quite yet exist. I have spent weeks on development and testing though, with uncharacteristic productivity, so it should be all ready to go live more-or-less pending only these words.
For a while I’ve wanted to bring my various shenanigans together in a unified site that would present it appropriately …
It’s no secret that I like and respect horseshoe crabs – for reasons that deserve to elaborated on some time. So when someone shared this CRABTCHA, I had no choice but to respond “Front and centre where it belongs 🧘♂️”
Happy World Ocean Day now prove you are not a robot.
(This CRABTCHA is brought to you by @jopabinia.bsky.social and yours truly.)
A silly idea I’d had for a while, made manifest over the Easter weekend.
This particular picture holds the dubious honour of being suspected to be “AI art that somehow knew how to make hands.” Or “probably traced off a real image.”
I confess – as a possessor of two hands, I did dare to glance at them a few times throughout.
This picture began all the way back in April 2023. I painted the rock fairly quickly and sketched some bits of station stuff, but it didn’t look all that great and was forgotten not long after. Fast forward to the very end of that year when it was spontaneously unforgotten, and I reworked the sketch into something decent. Then kept on sketching and outlining until, in the end, the actual process of painting the complex amounted to duplicating those hours of effort by doing little more than colouring in the fairly rough lines. Oops.
