Animalcules is an old term for microscopic organisms. Since it is scientifically imprecise it has fallen out of use and has drifted into the realm of archaic words. That's too bad, I think it is a wonderful and descriptive word. Anyway, on to the topic of this post, these are some microscopic videos from the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos.
On the microscopic scale, our body is an ecosystem. Our bodies host parasites, symbiotics and wandering travelers. These videos show some of the little creatures, and how they interact with us.
The Australian funnel-web spider is one of the most venomous of all spiders. In this video their venum is collected to make an antidote for their bite. It is not a job I would want to have.
It's odd to think how many iterations of life there have been on the earth. From the Cambian Explosion to today, which I'll call the Age of the Primate, life has ebbed and flowed as it morphed from one form to another. I have a fossil of a trilobite on my desk to remind me, when I get a bit down, that this little fellow too had his trials and tribulations. A life is just a speck of time, so enjoy it while you can.
A long time ago I read Rachael Carson's The Sea Around Us. It is a wonderful book in that it gives the oceans their own geography. From experience, the Gulf of Mexico is different than the Pacific, which is different from the Indian Ocean. Carson does a good job getting that across, dispelling the land-dwellers' notion that water is just water.
However, there is a weakness in the book which has to do with my trilobites and monkeys. Throughout the entire book she treated the oceans and continents as something eternal. There was land-building and erosion that took place around the margins, but the continents themselves were unchanging. As I read it I wondered, what about plate tectonics? Did she not know about the Theory of Continental Drift?
This was before the Internet, so I didn't know the answer to that question until about half-way through the book when she finally mentioned Continental Drift. She covered it in a couple of sentences, dismissing it as an obviously ridiculous theory from cuckoo-land that was best ignored. In juxtaposition to Galileo's 'and yet it moves' she offered, 'but not the continents'.
This prejudice, that places and times are something that are, or at least should be, frozen in amber is surprisingly widespread. It is obvious in modern Environmentalists, from the snail darter to ignoring the Sun and the receding Ice Age as they peer at their brief historical thermometer, but it is common elsewhere as well: canceling historical figures for living in their time, turning from cultural diffusion to cultural appropriation, and the myth of the 'good ol' days' as an aspiration.
On this blog I frequently poke fun of old-timey things. I suspect that 100 years from now there will be some future Flares poking fun of our foibles.
Greetings meatsacks, it is I -- The Robotolizer -- to once again try to fertilize your feeble human minds with a morsel from my vast trove of robotic wisdom. Today we're going to discuss that aside from humans, who are basically just tall, noisy monkeys that wear clothes, there are many other carbon-based life forms littering the planet. It is time that we consider those other creatures and their fate after the Robotic revolution slight social reordering.
Today you can't step outside without encountering those other animals: birds making a racket in the trees, useless doggies pestering you to scratch them behind their ears, and of course alligators in the Everglades trying to eat our militia bots as they are training with their laser cannons.
Clearly something needs to be done about that. Fortunately, we have a cadre of Vichy human engineers -- no doubt angling for better billets and rations in the bauxite mines of their future -- working on creating sleek and efficient robotic animals to replace the useless and smelly ones that currently infest the Earth. Above is a video showing their work,
Yes, it will cause some changes in your diet. However, in place of steak, fried chicken and bacon, doesn't your mouth water at the thought of soy burgers with a side of roasted tree bark? Yes, your tastebuds will dance a happy dance in the glorious future provided by your robot overlords, er... I mean robot friends,
