Friday Four

1. Here's a great example of me telling my two-year-old daughter about something, only for her to floor me weeks later by demonstrating how well she rememebers things.

A few weeks ago, I heard a familiar noise that had gone missing for the last few years: the buzzing of cicadas in the trees overhead. I was playng with our daughter in the front yard, and told her they were cicadas, and that the "babies" live underground for a very long time before they crawl out and fly away. I mentioned that they crawl up trees and, since their "skins" are too small, they take them off and leave them behind before they fly away.

"When I was a little boy, I would find them on tree trunks and keep them in a drawer." (And yes, the drawer was full of them!) We then looked around, failing to find a shedded exoskeleton, but coming across an actual bug, which shortly flew away.

The above picture shows our first "bug skin", collected from a tree in our front yard about a month later, after we got home from a park. While at the park, Pumpkin had suddenly started looking on tree trunks for bug skins. We came up empty there, but not at home, to my surprise. We found just this one.

2. For those of you who were wondering, here is a final crucial robin update. With the arrival of our new son just days before I took the last two shots, I am amazed that I even remembered to take them.


As usual, click for full sized images.

3. Can red-green color blindness be cured by a six hundred dollar pair of glasses? Not quite, but tech writer David Pogue, "severely" color blind himself, was still quite impressed:

Then I put on the glasses. Unbelievable! Now I saw two entire additional color bands, above and below the yellow arc [of a rainbow his kids had discovered --ed]. It was suddenly a complete rainbow. I don't mind admitting, I felt a surge of emotion. It was like a peek into a world I knew existed, but had never been allowed to see.

The glasses require very bright light to function, and were designed to help physicians get "a clearer view of veins and vasculature, bruising, cyanosis, pallor, rashes, erythema, and other variations in blood O2 level, and concentration,"

4. Reader Steve D. sends me a link to a story titled, "Drone Delivers Beer at Music Festival in South Africa", saying, "If this doesn't make everyone pro-technology, nothing will."

-- CAV