The Loneliest Whale in the World. In 2004, The New York Times…

The Loneliest Whale in the World.

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

(via erickimberlinbowley)

I shut the lights off at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore last night, but it’s not…

I shut the lights off at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore last night, but it’s not so easy in a large landmark like the tower, where there are five completely separate timers and control mechanisms, spread out over twenty-two stories, so my Earth Hour started at 8:25, 8:29, 8:35, 8:38, and 8:42 and ended with a similar spread. The worst part was that the mechanical timer for the lights in the clock faces is a brutal heavy brass steampunk-looking thing that I taped up with eight layers of tightly-bound duct tape, and it still managed to break loose early and restart the clock lights at some undetermined time without my intervention.

Seeing as I was on the verge of fainting from climbing the last seven floors on steep ladder/stairs, I opted to stay on the roof of the tower, 288 feet over Lombard and Eutaw Streets, for the duration, and watched the city going on its way around me. No other large building killed their lights, alas (particularly the old Baltimore Trust Company tower/Bank of America building, our only real rival for pride of place on the skyline, the brightly-lit SOBs), making me wonder if people would just assume some kind of electrical failure was involved and blame the facility manager (me). The air was clean and brisk and the sky as full of stars as you can expect in Baltimore, so I put on my mp3 player and a nice playlist of mid-seventies funk and spent an hour dancing over the disco-ball tabletop of the city, surrounded by helicopter fireflies.

Fire trucks came and went, in one case racing to a fire in West Baltimore that I could see clearly from my vantage point, and the Shock Trauma helicopter lifted off from the hospital below to rescue someone, and the funk kept on keepin’ on. Almost at the end, a single police helicopter buzzed the tower, catching me in the twitchy blue-white light of the perp-spotter beam, and a stern voice barked out of the beating cacophony of the churning blades—

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged and yelled back, “I’m dancing!”

I’m sure they didn’t hear me, but they buzzed off nonetheless. I grooved along till 9:29, then switched over to “One More Night” by Can and started the long, slow climb back to earth.

– sonascope’s earth hour contribution, MetaFilter

yerawizardharry: An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in…

yerawizardharry:

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before – but they also report that there are now less mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitoes are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

A Fembot living in a Manbot’s Manputer’s world.

Little-known fact: The first computer programmers were all women. ENIAC was programmed by Jean Bartik, Marlyn Meltzer, Kathleen Mauchly Antonelli, Betty Snyder Holberton, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence.

Bartik and her colleagues debugged every vacuum tube and learned how to make it work, she said. Early on, they demonstrated to the military brass how the computer worked, with the programmers setting the process into motion and showing how it produced an answer. They handed out its punch cards as souvenirs. They’d taught the massive machine do math that would’ve taken hours by hand.

Jean Jennings Bertik and Francis Bilas Spence

what is this thing you humans call... love?

Littler-known fact: Many of the first computers were also women! In the days before ENIAC, ‘computer’ was a job, not a machine, and thousands of women were recruited by the US Military to do ballistics research to supply weapons trajectories to soldiers and bombardiers. Top Secret Rosies, a documentary about WWII’s female computers, was released last month.

Erickson’s documentary focused on women plucked from high schools and colleges to work at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. They moved into dorms and apartments and went through a rigorous introduction to ballistics calculations in order to do the job. It paid well, and the women were close. They played bridge, shared dinners and danced together in the university gardens when the war in Europe ended.

[08/30] Of cities in dust

Day 08 – A moment, in great detail:

It was snowing now, light flakes betraying the morning sun’s promise of spring. I took a long moment in the doorway before I joined the crowd, fifty people moving in a hundred directions. To work. From work. To a friend’s home. To pick up the baby. To start a new job. To break up with their lover. To light the fireplace at home.

I feel insulated, now. The crowd protects me from the snow, the snow protects me from seeing anything too far away, and anything too far away doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense anyway.

I duck into a coffee shop for caffeine and quiet reading. I’ve spent so many hours of my life here, but it’s somehow different now, and there isn’t a flicker of recognition in the faces of anyone who looks up. I’m still insulated by the snow, by feeling like you’ve come home and found some other family watching your TV and eating off your plates.

I make my order and open the book to page one. It’s a beautiful place to be — fresh coffee, crisp pages, a new story in a familiar setting.

Toronto.