Some more photographs of our mystery bee-wasp, which I think will clinch its species. The puzzle only really begins there however.
Here from the back, it’s difficult to distinguish Hasdrubal from a honeybee. With her deep brown abdomen you can only just make out the wasp markings. Lookit her little stinger! You can hardly see that with the naked eye. Which is perhaps as well considering how much I had to handle her.
Sorry about the soft focus incidentally, this was really pushing the Note’s 8Mpx camera to its limits. Though I have to admit it’s not technically impossible to take sharp close-up pictures with it, merely humanly difficult. Depth of field becomes negligible while shake is amplified.
From the front it’s a different story, there’s zero doubt that this is a wasp. The face is absolutely typical. As are the antennae and slender legs.
And, incidentally, the hair. In my mind wasps are as smooth as spray-painted steel, but this research has shown me that they’re really quite fuzzy. I guess it’s the (normal) black-and-yellow markings; nature’s alarm signal makes you oblivious to a wasp’s cuddlier aspects. Or at least keeps you too far away.
We also see where H.R. Giger got a lot of his inspiration. Brr.
What species of wasp though? Thanks to Bruce Ruston of Blue Platypi Photography who sent a link to this great wasp ID chart, I’m almost certain that Hasdrubal is a common wasp. She has the distinctive “anchor” on her face. The only other variety that looks a lot like this is the red wasp, but its thorax markings are quite different – as we see in the shot below.
So Hasdrubal is almost certainly a common wasp – except she’s simply the wrong colour. The question then is whether this falls within the normal variation of the species, or if she’s some sort of freaky mutant.
That it’s possible to get tolerably sharp macro shots with this camera is demonstrated by this final one, in which I thought to ask Hasdrubal herself what sort of hymenoptera she is.
Any entomologists in? I came across a curious thing. The rest of you, don’t scroll down if close-up pictures of stingy insects disturb you. Or indeed offend you – it is naked after all. And dead. I really wouldn’t look.
OK now the wusses are gone, what do you think is going on here? It’s a wasp, coloured like a bee. Definitely vespine in its shape and features, with the pronounced segmentation and aggressive I-am-nature’s-attack-helicopter angles. But instead of the usual biohazard yellow it has the warm goldie-browns of a honeybee.
Well, makes a change from all the cartoons you see of bees coloured like wasps.
I don’t have a camera for macro photographs, but got surprisingly good results with the phone. The problems were holding it steady and getting the background right. In the end I put it in a glass jug; this gave me something to rest the phone on and allowed me to shoot over different surfaces. As the phone compensates to keep an average brightness, the creature looks a lot brighter when shot against a dark background. (I could’ve tried different camera apps that allow you to meter light more precisely, but this was quicker.) In the first one here therefore it actually looks a lot more yellow than it really is, and so more like an ordinary wasp. But it brings out the detail well.
White backgrounds on the other hand make Hasdrubal – I call her Hasdrubal, for reasons which remain unclear to me – look virtually black. The woodgrain one to the right (taken without benefit of the jug) probably gives the best impression of how she appears to the naked eye. If anything, a little darker than a honeybee – but with similar golden hair.
Which is the odd thing. Whoever heard of a hairy wasp? Bees wear a fluffy bolero but wasps, so far as I’ve noted, are shiny-shaven. As you can see, particularly in the first pic, this one has no end of fuzz. I can find no species that fits the description. The European Hornet is a little hairy, but a lot more wasp-coloured. A mutant? Diseased? I have no idea.
Something isn’t right about this picture. The colour of the sky looks wrong. Too… pleasant.
You won’t believe what I’ve just been doing. Watering a garden! With a hosepipe yet. It must be four or five years since I last needed to do that. It may be too soon to interpret this as the end of our appalling run of summers, but it’s a great feeling.
Sunny Ireland. Seems almost an oxymoron, like quantum vacuum or a healthy treat. The first real summer days seemed evanescent, illusory. As if the fates were teasing and testing, daring us to bare the vulnerability of hope. Then as soon as you accept it’s true, you find yourself wondering if this is what you really wanted. It’s not easy to get used to heat after so long. It is… hot. Not just warm and cosy, hot. And bright. It makes you sore. I’m sitting inside now, itching mildly all over, glowing pink as a neon sign. You know when you’ve been irradiated.
It’s amazing how much there is to be done outdoors, now that it’s possible to go there. I have spent much of today destroying the unapproved plants and planting the approved. A border of verbena and ageratum, should be very pretty. Repairing the lawn – a cow had strayed into the garden and been chased around a bit. She must’ve been big, her hoof prints were inches deep. Tying up climbing plants, spreading grass food, cleaning paint brushes, and now of course this watering. So much done today.
And yet, I feel unworthy of sleep. I got almost no JavaScript studied, I’ve yet to even begin work on that old range, I’ve a client in Australia I promised to get back to about a sale, I’ve made really little progress with the design of a new website, I still haven’t… written this yet.
You know, what I need to do is pay someone to come around about midnight and just hit me over the head.
It looks just like this. Well it will when I’m finished. Or would if I knew what I was doing.
I’ve taken up paint stripping. That’s where you cover yourself in several coats of gloss and dance around on stage with a scraper. No it isn’t.
There was this old washstand hanging around my mother’s house, lookin’ ugly. I’d never restored furniture before, but I was varnishing the window frames and thought “Well it’s much the same job, may as well do this while I’m at it.”
The windows were finished a week ago.
They were nice fresh cedar wood, not caked in ancient brown paint. Actually I mistyped that as “cacked” first and it was better. This table was totally cacked in brown paint. A rub of sandpaper was not going to bring about meaningful change.
So I got me some Nitromors, the popular paint stripper, slapped on the whole tin, gave it time to do its chemical stuff, and went at it with a scraper. I might as well have attacked it with a sandwich.
Am Tip¹: If you’re using Nitromors on an encrusted piece like this, don’t get the “Craftsman’s” variant. No matter how art-and-crafty you’re feeling, use “All purpose”. It’s more powerful, it’s thicker, and it’s whitish instead of clear so you can actually tell where you’ve put it.
Also the scraper I was using flexed far too much for the job. In the end I got two – a multi-purpose painter’s tool that looks like a miniature seaxe, and the even more ferocious shave hook. Now this really was the business. Its one drawback: with its multiplicity of pointy ends it’s easy to damage the wood with it. Or yourself. Or passers-by.
But with it and the new stripper the paint finally began to move. About three layers down I find one of duck-egg blue. My first reaction – who the hell paints a piece of wooden furniture duck-egg blue? My second though was one of admiration. People who have duck-egg blue paint and just don’t care, that’s who. People with a fine disregard for conventions, appearances, notions of taste.
My third was “Glad I have varnish”.
So the chemicals and violence got the worst of it off, but left a sort of muddy patina. Next then, the scratchening; I dug out the old sanding attachment for the drill. Judging by the dearth of compatible discs in the hardware store this is pretty much an antique now, ousted by dedicated disc and belt sanders, but the drill attachment works well enough. Too well at times; while I was still getting the hang of it I managed to scoop huge depressions into the wood. Pretty lucky I’d started on the underside.
But though this does get you down to the grain with a pleasing speed, it’s only much use on flat areas – of which the washstand has few. The turned legs and grooved details will all have to be done by hand. Lord this is going to be a job. Pictures when it’s done.
¹Like a Pro Tip, except from someone who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing.
I didn’t speak before now about my last exam. The thing is, I’m really not sure how I did.
It felt good. I left the exam hall exhausted, elated, as if I’d given my all.
I just wish I could be sure that my all is the all they wanted.
I have no complaints about the paper. Couldn’t really have been better from my point of view. I was able to avoid the cost analysis question I dearly wanted not to do. It wasn’t a hard one; basically it’s just a sum. The problem was those two words – “cost analysis”. I had to stay alert through a whole exam, and just looking at them makes my eyelids droop.
The systems theory question on the other hand was all too exciting. Yes, seriously. It involved concepts that have interested me for a long time. Visualising the world not as discrete objects but in terms of interacting systems, flows of activity and information. Emergent phenomena – how all the complexity and wonder of life arises out of apparently simple chemistry, or indeed solid matter out of ephemeral probability. The danger with this was that I could easily blow the entire two and a half hours if I got hooked on a wild-eyed Idea.
So I began with the case study question, which retrod a lot of ground we’d covered in our projects. This made it easier, but had the downside that my head was preloaded with too many things I could say. And I think I said too many of them, because I spent over an hour on that one.
Thankfully, next was what’s known as a decision table. These distil a complex decision-making process into a simple table you can look up. You might – as in the example – be a college book shop trying to decide whether to keep some old titles in stock or return them to the publisher. There are a bunch of factors involved, how do you decide? Well here the table shows that if, for example, an edition is no longer current. but has been requested by staff, then the correct response is to keep it. Simplicissimo.
Condition
USER RULES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Edition Is Still Current
N
N
N
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Old Edition Requested By Academic Staff
N
N
Y
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Any Copies Sold In Last 3 Months
–
–
–
N
N
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
More Than 15% Of Stock Sold In Last 3 Months
–
–
–
–
–
N
N
Y
Y
Y
More Than 20% Of Stock Sold By Mid-Semester
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Y
N
N
Sales Manager Believes Book Will Still Sell
N
Y
–
N
Y
N
Y
–
N
Y
Action
Return Remaining Stock
X
X
X
Consider Returning 75% of Remaining Stock
X
Keep Remaining Stock
X
X
X
X
X
X
Why is the table so small? Having six conditions, each with two possible values – Yes and No – you’d think it would need (2x2x2x2x2x2=) 64 columns instead of 10. The trick is that some conditions make others redundant. Look at what happens if the Sales Manager decides a book will still sell. Their word goes, making all other considerations moot. By examining the logic in this way you can reduce the table to its essentials.
The problem then is making sure you’ve done it right. Do the rules really cover all possible situations? Could two different, contradictory actions be invoked by the same set of conditions? That latter is particularly significant because tables like these form the basis of computer programs, and when a computer is stuck between two conflicting responses it explodes.
Possibly.
Examining a table for logical consistency sounds scary, but when you boil it down it’s a puzzle not unlike a Sudoku. Having practised, I’d got the knack of solving them visually. Well, simple ones… That saved time which by now I badly needed. I’d left myself barely more than half an hour for all the theory. Things were now officially intense.
So I don’t recall clearly what I wrote… I do know though that somehow I got stuck on aspects of systems theory that bug me. Couldn’t I write a happy answer about the many aspects that I think are cool and interesting? No, apparently I can’t do that.
Really it was one particular lecture slide I was hung up on. This had compared science to the systems approach, contrasting them as analytical versus holistic, qualitative versus quantitative, so on. In other words presenting the systems approach as a counterbalance, even an alternative, to science. That struck me as just wrong; overshooting the holistic and heading into homoeopathic country. Or “needlessly messianic”, as I described it. (Which incidentally was the second entirely pointless Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy reference I found myself slipping into these exams.)
In particular it described science as “reductionist”, which to me is to misunderstand it completely. Sure, science takes things apart and examines the components. But it doesn’t do that to understand the components; rather the objective is to see how they all work together – as a system. As a whole.
Holism is right there in science. To claim otherwise is to traduce humanity’s most important philosophical tool for one’s own obscure – or obscurantist – motives.
OK I didn’t say that last sentence, thank God. I was having a bit of a head rush but I still knew better than to condemn the subject I was being examined in as an evil conspiracy. I’m not doing English lit any more. And I don’t think that of course. What I hope I managed to convey is that I find systems theory attractive, but at the same time worry that this very attractiveness may make it dangerous. Is it a useful way of looking at the world, or a friend to fuzzy thinking? Well, I’m not sure – but I want it to be useful.
Maybe my suspicions were refreshing, maybe I’ll be marked down for insufficient imbibing of the Kool-Aid. In short, yet again I am certain that I either (a) did a really good exam or (b) plunged off the cliff in a ball of blue flame. One or the other.
Coming down, fast and floppy, from the exams. The week since the last (an account of which I still owe you) I’ve spent oscillating between nervous energy and nervous prostration.
There is so much I want to get done over this summer, but for now I’m mostly doing calm, therapeutic tasks. As I put it in a mail to a friend earlier, I’m reassembling myself. Plunging sinks. Designing CD covers. Configuring Linux. Oddly varied, when I think about it. Began summer work on my mother’s house. Planted some flowers – blue pansies. Cut the grass for the first time this year. Felt more like shearing a green sheep. And finally started to varnish the window frames, a job that’s been looking accusingly at me almost since last summer. It’s interesting, I’ve never varnished something before. Except the truth of course.
The Varnished Truth wouldn’t be a bad tag line for this blog, come to think of it.
College year being over I can think again about other aspects of reality. Such as the mess it’s in. I made it to a meeting about economics and change, and we were discussing why in Ireland we seem to be just letting this shit happen to us. The conclusion was that it is not just inexplicable passivity on the public’s part, all sorts of pressures are placed on people to make them keep their heads down. Some of them subtle, some brutal.
Somebody used the memorable phrase “The criminalisation of dissent”, and I had to draw this.
Stop, Press: For some protesty goodness, why not try these two short plays at the Town Hall Theatre? They’ll be followed by (optional) discussions with real historians and economists about the parlous state of the parlous State.
The connection between image and text is tangential at best.
Wow. Doing an exam is like shoving fistfuls of drugs into your face.
Well, doing an exam after…
Studying frantically in a sort of cold panic for over a week
Waking up at 3 a.m. and not getting back to sleep until an hour before the alarm
Rushing out of the house only to find that the car won’t start
… feels like messing your head up with all sorts o’ bad stuff. Stress, with the stress on stress.
I still don’t know what was up with the car. Yes I had checked it the night before and no, I didn’t leave the electrics on. It was the good new battery that saved me in fact, because as the last desperate throw of the dice I just turned the engine over and kept turning it over until finally, one cylinder at a time, life returned. Perhaps I’d flooded it on the first try.
So now trying to get to my exam through rush hour traffic on very little sleep but oh so much adrenalin. Made it as far as the campus with minutes to spare, knew it would take too long to find a student parking space so threw handfuls of change at a ticket machine. Ran up three flights, downed three cups of water, made it.
This was Java, at once somehow my most feared and enjoyed subject. The course had been challenging – literally half the class had transferred out – but I felt like I was beginning to grasp its rhythms and its symmetries. Some programmers dislike the language; I have little to compare it to but I see a beauty in it.
Java is perhaps the best known example of an “Object Orientated” language. If I dare try to explain that in simple terms, it means that instead of being long impenetrable lists of instructions, OO programs are made up of small units that attempt to model real things. A program with cars in it, say, would contain a subunit (called a “class” in Java) to represent cars. It would have its associated variables – colour perhaps, size, top speed – and “methods”, which represent what a car does: accelerate, brake, etc. They can be as elaborate or as simple as you need, but cars will exist in your program as discrete entities that can interact with other entities like passengers or junctions or other cars.
You can define subclasses that have things in common with some cars but not others, like 4x4s. Or superclasses – for example, one of vehicles – that comprise cars and other objects. In this way you clarify the relationships between things; you also avoid having to write the same code over and over, as subclasses inherit features from their superclasses. “Accelerate” for example need only ever be defined once to be used by every sort of vehicle. All these knit together in careful, logical ways to represent and simulate how things in the real world can interrelate. It’s elegant and subtle.
And elusive at times. So I worried that my understanding of the concepts was still quite tenuous and that an unexpected question might blow a hole right through it. But I think the exam went well. One good thing – I started at full speed, and stayed at full speed for three hours. All right, some of the answers may have been a little “Ooh, here’s another thing I remember!”, but I think I displayed a thorough understanding.
Unless of course I don’t understand, in which case I will have displayed a thorough misapprehension. To find out, we must now wait till autumn.
This is all over by 12:30, but the rest of the day is not without incident. Get some things I needed done done, fetch and carry, all in a strange trance of excess energy. I make it home eventually. The idea is to have an early night but I am as wired as I’m tired. It’s one in the morning before I finally – joyfully – go to my bedroom and reach to turn on the light.
And step in something wet.
That is never good. That is never never never good. It’s not much good in a bathroom or a kitchen. But in a bedroom, stepping in something wet is right out.
There is a puddle forming on the floor. The computer I’m building is sitting there powered up to standby, so it’s just as well I “went to bed” when I did. There is a drip from the ceiling. Deftly turning off all electrics and water with a single move, I fetch a ladder and squirm into the attic.
It’s coming from the complex pipework linking the three tanks of water in the attic space (I do not know why there are three tanks of water in the attic space). It is dropping directly onto a box of my personal memorabilia, and from there through the floor. After cutting away some of the nice new insulation I find a weeping joint. I fetch tools and tighten the fitting, squirm out and turn water back on.
Leak much much worse bugger.
Opening offending joint, I find that yet again a pipe has eroded. Don’t know what’s doing this, but it’s maybe the fourth instance of spontaneous dissolving pipe in the last couple of years. What the hell are we drinking? Spend the next hours crawling around in the dusty, glass-fibery, spidery dark doing work almost utterly unlike the pure cerebration of the morning, so tired now that – mercifully – I can’t even feel how tired I am.
In its science section today, the Guardian / Observer ran a story about a mysterious sheen found on the rocks of many deserts:
These layers of manganese, arsenic and silica are known as desert varnish and they are found in the Atacama desert in Chile, the Mojave desert in California, and in many other arid places. They can make the desert glitter with surprising colour and, by scraping off pieces of varnish, native people have created intriguing symbols and images on rock walls and surfaces. […]
Professor Carol Cleland, of Colorado University, has a very different suggestion. She believes desert varnish could be the manifestation of an alternative, invisible biological world.
The suggestion is that alongside life on Earth as we know it there may be other forms that arose entirely separately and remain virtually invisible to us. It’s a very interesting story and I urge you to read it all. I really only have one problem with it.
It’s not science.
There’s a seriousdebate going on right now about what is good science journalism, what forwards public understanding. This doesn’t. It’s presented in a science column, it concerns science-oriented things like biology and geology, it even seems to be putting forward a hypothesis. But it isn’t science. Actually it’s philosophy.
And as philosophy, I like it. I don’t mean that as any sort of faint praise. Philosophy is important, and too much these days it seems – bizarrely – to be afraid of the big issues. This is as bravely speculative as good science fiction, which I also mean as a high-order compliment. It’s an interesting idea, and I have no reason to doubt that a wholly alternative form of life could exist on Earth.
The problem is, that is the only argument being offered here – that it could exist. The desert varnish thing is placed in the article as if it were some sort of pointer to, even evidence of, its existence. But it’s not. The process here is actually running in the opposite direction, not from the phenomenon but from a question: “Logically the chemistry of life could work in different ways, so why doesn’t it?”
It’s a good question. “What if it does, and we’ve just missed it?” is an excellent answer to that question.
The problem I have is with the next step. “Maybe the evidence for it is this other thing we can’t explain.”
That is only speculation. If there is no falsifiable hypothesis being made about how shadow bioforms could be causing the desert varnish then it’s really nothing to do with science. A best it’s just a suggested area of enquiry. It sounds more like a guess.
And this question matters – both scientifically and philosophically. It’s challenging in fact to imagine a bigger one we might ever be able to answer by means of science. Just how likely is it that life came into being, that chemicals somehow arranged themselves in a self-replicating way? If we had evidence of a “shadow biosphere” so different from the one we know that it couldn’t possibly be related to us, it would strongly suggest that life arose more than once even on a single planet. And therefore, that we probably live in a crowded and lively universe.
It would also suggest that the tendency to self-organisation is somehow innate to the laws of nature. Perhaps our minds, our culture and civilisations, are manifestations of that tendency too.
When we don’t find evidence for alternative life, that lends weight to the view that its appearance here in Earth was extraordinary, a trillions-to-one chance event. In that case, this planet may hold the only life in the universe. Which is interesting, scary, inspiring – and quite a responsibility.
It is a vast question of almost unimaginable consequence, so it is exasperating to find something held up as the answer when in fact there is no evidence at all. No one could write an article like this who thought it really mattered.
Crazy day in college, so all I’m gonna do is put up this picture I took a couple of days ago of a lovely bizarre light in the sky. It’s an ash tree, in no hurry to get to spring. The black bits are crows. Click the thing for the high resolution version.
White backgrounds on the other hand make Hasdrubal – I call her Hasdrubal, for reasons which remain unclear to me – look virtually black. The woodgrain one to the right (taken without benefit of the jug) probably gives the best impression of how she appears to the naked eye. If anything, a little darker than a honeybee – but with similar golden hair.
