The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Other creatures in our world
I spotted this bit of engineering while riding on the Dutchess Rail Trail at Lake Walton:
Evidently, the beaver stopped just before the tree toppled, because the last cut looks very much like a chainsaw.
I didn’t spot their lodge out in the lake; they may have tucked it under the bank below the railroad bed.
If they keep this up, they’re sure to get trapped and moved somewhere they can’t interfere with our enjoyment of the natural landscape along the rail trail. [wince]
Our back yard serves as a wildlife thoroughfare, but only after a snowfall can we see who’s been afoot overnight.
Gray squirrels hop across the driveway:
When they’re not busy raiding the bird feeder, that is:
Red foxes leave widely spaced tracks:
Even quadrupeds have trouble maintaining their footing on an icy driveway:
Turkeys travel in flocks:
And sometimes monsters stride the Earth:
Seeing as how it wouldn’t be a suitable blog post without some numbers, here’s a 1 foot / 30 cm scale with fox and turkey tracks:
Those are scary-big birds!
Merry Christmas to all!
My father obviously devoted considerable time to drawing the gills on this critter in his Sophomore Biology Notebook:
The stomach and nervous system seem sufficiently stylized that they’re not drawn from a specimen; I’m pretty sure a real crayfish doesn’t come apart quite so neatly.
Our Larval Engineer reports that the lab sessions for her second quarter of Anatomy and Physiology will involve dissecting sheep hearts and eyeballs (which arrive in plastic buckets festooned with hazmat stickers for the preservative). She regards this as more than making up for having to sit through A&P lectures and memorizing all those bones & muscles. Must be another generation-skipping trait, is all I can say…
Another page from my father’s Sophomore Biology Laboratory Notebook:
This time he got dinged five points for being late, so that’s not anything new with kids these days…
A detailed look at the frog (clicky for more dots):
They really don’t do labs like they used to…
This looks like a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk, perched high atop that tree. It seems the pair we spotted last year had a successful hatching!
We always wish “our” hawks, whatever and wherever they may be, good hunting…
This came from the first set of real pictures using the repaired Sony DSC-H5 zoomed to 12× with the 1.7× tele conversion lens, cropped down a bit: plenty of artifacts to choose from.
My father drew this in his Sophomore Biology Laboratory Notebook:
Can you imagine the attention span required to draw that with no obvious errors? The next four pages contain a hand-written discussion of the grasshopper, with two corrections; he filled the entire notebook using a pen and four colors of fluid ink.
Here’s a closer look at the grasshopper (clicky for more dots):
I cannot imagine assigning that task to present-day students…
Things were different in 1927, when he was 17 years old. They were about to get really different; 15 years later he was in the South Pacific.
August was the month for giant orb weaving spiders; a pair of thumb-sized monsters took up residence under the gutter over the patio. One started by anchoring its web to the handrail by the steps:
While we like and encourage spiders, that anchorage didn’t last long and, yes, I must strip and repaint that railing…
There’s a horizontal web at the corner of the gutter over the back door:
Changing the exposure to favor the spider loses the web strands:
Cropping that one down around the spider shows they really are the stuff of nightmare:
The other spider prefers a vertical web attached along the gutter and anchored to a patio chair, which means I can get between the house and the web to see the spider’s tummy:
We leave the lights on in the evening for their benefit…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 