Infodump about your Special Interests!

[Leo Zed]

1. OK let's think of earth's history.

2. Early life is pretty simple, and living with a reducing atmosphere. Substances like iron were freely soluble in the ocean. Some organisms used bacterial symbionts for energy. Some became mitochondria, others chloroplasts, and life was good for photosynthetic organisms. Vast areas of sea were covered with algal colonies, and they began taking CO2 in and producing Oxygen, toxic to most of the life evolved for a reducing atmosphere. The places I have seen these fossil Stromatolites were in Glacier National Park at the base of Grinnell glacier at 6,500 feet as well as in Morocco, in the Anti-Atlas. Then, the oceans rusted out. I have seen the banded iron deposits in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There were three pulses of -oxygen - rust-oxygen depletion- and finally after 99.9% of the ancient life died out there was sufficient oxygen to support more complex organisms. It was the Ediacaran and all sorts of segmented creatures with bilateral symmetry were living on the seafloor. The next burst of Oxygen and we are in the Cambrian, first there is the Small Shelly Fauna showing that organisms were making hard structures. And, after that, the Burgess Shale world takes competition up a notch. The top predator, the Anomalocaris, did not like Trilobite armor. In the Wheeler Shale in Utah, one may easily find many Trilobites, and I found one with a small Anomalocaris bite that it evently survived. The shell has taken the profile of the bite mark. I will leave you at the dawn of complex ecosystems while my reverie takes me through the next 450 million years of life coping with a geologically dynamic planet.

A lot of that went over my head, but with a little digging I came across an interesting site that gave a short history of atmospheric chemistry:

Evolution of the Atmosphere

BTW is the creature in your avatar an evil looking Trilobite or something else? I thought Trilobites were more oval-looking.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

A lot of that went over my head, but with a little digging I came across an interesting site that gave a short history of atmospheric chemistry:

Evolution of the Atmosphere

BTW is the creature in your avatar an evil looking Trilobite or something else? I thought Trilobites were more oval-looking.

It is a partially enrolled Drotops armatus. Large and spiny. In the Devonian there was an arms race between Trilobites and fishes. Trilobites avoided being eaten by either colonizing habitat where they can hide or where there were few fishes, or developed spiny features that made them distasteful. Below is an extreme example, genus Koneprusia.

 

[Alaric593]

It is a partially enrolled Drotops armatus. Large and spiny. In the Devonian there was an arms race between Trilobites and fishes. Trilobites avoided being eaten by either colonizing habitat where they can hide or where there were few fishes, or developed spiny features that made them distasteful. Below is an extreme example, genus Koneprusia.
View attachment 81304

Informative but kill it with fire

 

[Gerontius]

Here is one that combines two of my favorites: woodworking & antique machinery.

I am restoring the old 1880s 10-gauge "goose gun" today. Not everyone's a huge fan of guns (fair enough!) but 19th-century ANYTHING is kind of fun to restore.

This one got a coat of shellac at one point in its life, which prompted the refinishing. Shellac doesn't belong on a shotgun, because it is a water-sensitive finish--on a goose hunter's gun. Go figure. Shellac is nice for pianos and clocks and Victrolas; linseed oil (and many coats of it, hand-rubbed) is good for plow handles and axe handles, exterior doors, fortifying barn paint, and sportsmen's guns.

Yes, this piece of wood is 140 years old. The tree it grew from was likely a sapling the day they built the White House. When John Brown made the raid on Harper's Ferry it was probably still producing walnuts. It would have been standing and growing in the forest while Jane Austen was writing novels, while Dickens was still a popular serialist, and while Emily Dickinson was still stuffing poems into her desk and locking them away.

It is kind of an honor to get to work with a good old piece of wood. Linseed oil is a traditional finish for a lot of things; I only have 2 coats on this so far but if I keep putting on very thin coats I think it will do very well.

Now: I do have a use for shellac, and that would be antique furniture. This classic open horn phonograph is a Columbia Graphophone that I've had for a long time. I've replaced the veneer on the top & bottom of the motor board, as someone took a belt sander and peeled all the veneer off, revealing the "carcase" or substrate wood. Not only was the grain inferior, but large, thin pieces of solid oak are asking for cracks--especially when there is a 10-pound metal motor hanging from them which has a certain amount of flex or vibration introduced to the board when the thing is being cranked up!

Anyway, the visible surface of wood on the top deck of this machine is entirely a replacement. I made that out of 2-ply red oak veneer & did the same to the bottom. Now I have an attractive, usable Columbia BN ("Jewel") Graphophone. No I didn't coat it in linseed oil. I used shellac, thinned in alcohol, and the sawdust of the wood itself to fill the grain.

Not only is it structurally sound now, but it is also quite attractive, being back the way it was over 100 years ago--and putting things back the way they were is the goal of a successful restoration.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Maybe one of these days we will meet, lot of commonalities.

 

[Taylor Baker]

We'd be here all day, but...

My special interest is animation whether it be cartoons or comics. I love fiction. I value character, personality, color, and action.

My two greatest special interests at the moment are "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt." The latter is strongly recommended for mature audiences only.

Sonic has been there for me ever since toddlerhood. One of the first video game consoles that my family owned was a Sega Genesis. I also has the original NES and a Nintendo 64. I was born in 1992. Panty and Stocking came into my life in 2011, I believe.

Anyway, I love both Sonic and Panty and Stocking so passionately because of their paradigms of anything being possible. In Panty and Stocking's case, when you have a concept, or lack thereof for that matter, that's as random and off the walls as you can imagine, you can evolve into whatever you darn well please. There's a part of me that feels that this applies to Sonic as well. I take the paradigm of self-determination very seriously.

The main values of the characters from both series center on freedom and individuality. They do what they want when they want, and if anyone says otherwise, then that's tough. One my favorite characters of Sonic is Shadow while my favorite of the pair in Panty and Stocking is definitely Panty. Shadow is more than just a cool anti-hero. If you ask me, he presents the moral quandary concerning what I like to often call "the other side of the coin." What I love the most about him, however, is that I find him to be a truth-seeker. He doesn't waste time with opinions; he gets it straight from the horse's mouth. Panty also doesn't waste time with opinions. Anything that dares to restrict any of these characters' personal liberty must be obliterated.

In terms of both of their artistic aesthetics, I don't believe I can ever not fall in love with anything that have such dynamism. Flashing colors, smears, explosions, lightning bolts; these are all so appealing to my senses that I stim with them.

That's all I think I can say for the moment.

 

[Laughingowl1975]

I'm struggling to connect with my special interests due to a bad bout of depression but here goes with my info dump.
My interests are Owls, the Titanic, Dinosaurs (Theropods) and the Planets.
-- Owls eyes are tubular not round and thus cannot move in the socket, so owls have evolved very flexible necks allowing them to turn their heads 270 degrees.
-- Owls are among the few birds that are essentially colorblind but can see blue better than most species.
-- Owls flight feathers have a softened edge allowing them to fly silent and surprise prey, only the Fishing-Owls of Africa and South Asia lack this.
-- Most Owls are nocturnal but many in the far north (e.g. Norway) hunt in daylight, some tropical species do this as well.
-- During the sinking of Titanic Boiler Room No. 4 was dry until nearly 1 am (1 hour and 20 minutes after striking the iceberg) when water began to come up through the floorplates not via the ventilators and hatchways indicating the underside of the ship was more damaged than previously though.
-- Some survivors recalled seeing dim reddish lights in some of the windows of the stern after the main lights had failed, it is possible that even after the break up some emergency power was still functioning.
-- Seconds after the ship sank a loud muffed explosion was heard coming from the water and survivors who were swimming recalled pieces of woodwork from the ships interior shooting to the surface and probably inuring a few, this was caused by the stern section violently imploding (there were likely people trapped inside air pockets when the stern imploded).
--Tyrannosaurus did not bellow or roar but made a sub-sonic rumbling sound, you would have felt a T-Rex calling rather than heard it.
-- Velociraptor was nocturnal and was covered in feathers, the sickle-claw on the foot was more likely used for gripping than slashing prey.
-- Saturn's moon Titan smells like a petrol station and has lakes of Ethane, dry riverbeds and a complex 'water' cycle.
-- Jupiter's moon Io is caught in a powerful electrical flux around the planet and has the greatest surface rise and fall of any known rocky world.
-- Winds on Saturn and Neptune frequently break the sound barrier, while the winds on Venus are gentle but due to the great atmospheric pressure even a faint breeze at the surface would knock you over.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

I like your description of T-REX, should be like elephant, low frequencies more prevalent, always bothered me when watching movies sort of like watching a big burly male opera singer singing soprano.

 

[SameStars]

Die Kaiserin (2022) kind of activated my dormant interest in Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and after my coworker jokingly remarked 'you're talking about Sisi again?!' I stopped mentioning it at work.

 

[AluxCinAmoon]

I'm struggling to connect with my special interests due to a bad bout of depression but here goes with my info dump.
My interests are Owls, the Titanic, Dinosaurs (Theropods) and the Planets.
-- Owls eyes are tubular not round and thus cannot move in the socket, so owls have evolved very flexible necks allowing them to turn their heads 270 degrees.
-- Owls are among the few birds that are essentially colorblind but can see blue better than most species.
-- Owls flight feathers have a softened edge allowing them to fly silent and surprise prey, only the Fishing-Owls of Africa and South Asia lack this.
-- Most Owls are nocturnal but many in the far north (e.g. Norway) hunt in daylight, some tropical species do this as well.
-- During the sinking of Titanic Boiler Room No. 4 was dry until nearly 1 am (1 hour and 20 minutes after striking the iceberg) when water began to come up through the floorplates not via the ventilators and hatchways indicating the underside of the ship was more damaged than previously though.
-- Some survivors recalled seeing dim reddish lights in some of the windows of the stern after the main lights had failed, it is possible that even after the break up some emergency power was still functioning.
-- Seconds after the ship sank a loud muffed explosion was heard coming from the water and survivors who were swimming recalled pieces of woodwork from the ships interior shooting to the surface and probably inuring a few, this was caused by the stern section violently imploding (there were likely people trapped inside air pockets when the stern imploded).
--Tyrannosaurus did not bellow or roar but made a sub-sonic rumbling sound, you would have felt a T-Rex calling rather than heard it.
-- Velociraptor was nocturnal and was covered in feathers, the sickle-claw on the foot was more likely used for gripping than slashing prey.
-- Saturn's moon Titan smells like a petrol station and has lakes of Ethane, dry riverbeds and a complex 'water' cycle.
-- Jupiter's moon Io is caught in a powerful electrical flux around the planet and has the greatest surface rise and fall of any known rocky world.
-- Winds on Saturn and Neptune frequently break the sound barrier, while the winds on Venus are gentle but due to the great atmospheric pressure even a faint breeze at the surface would knock you over.

Theropods are badass. My personal favorite dinosaur is the Troodon, as, last time I checked, it is believed to be the smartest known species and I respect that. What is your favorite dinosaur, if you have one?

 

[merithra]

I enjoy Computer Science; in fact, I will probably dedicate my whole life to studying it. I have always been fascinated with machines, I think what I find most captivating is we invented them, we invented these interpreters, these languages yet we are still in the unknown about many things regarding them. I like to read about the early implementations of different languages such as Python, C etc. because it reminds me how much they have changed and how much we have learned to make them better, one example is I had a project from a couple of years ago which was made for research purposes that I coded with Python2; after my return to technology it hadn't occurred to me that Python3 would be so much different compared to Python2 and my code would not run at all so I had to rewrite the whole project to be suitable for Python3. It really fascinates me that we made these machines, languages etc. but we don't know about them as much as we think we do, I want to dedicate my life to learning about them and finding out as much as possible about them. it simply fascinates me.

 

[Gerontius]

Let's have more infodumping about special interests. @autism-and-autotune I figure maybe you would find this interesting...one's a curiosity, two is a coincidence, three is a Collection.
My favorite musical instrument? Organs! They are delightfully mechanical, play music for all occasions (sacred, profane, burlesque, or indifferent), and have showed up in all forms from the sheng of the Chinese to the hydraulis of the Ancient Greeks to the harmonica of today.

My favorite type of organ, though, is the pump organ. Let's face it, pump organs are weird. They have a reputation for sounding goshawful--they usually end up in the landfill when they are found today, as they aren't often collected. They were played in everywhere from saloons and brothels in 1880s Montana, to battlefields, to convent chapels accompanying Ursuline nuns at the morning Mass. You know how quartz watches democratized accurate timekeeping? The pump organ did that--and every culture that adopted them, developed their own take on how the ideal organ should work.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_organ
A very interesting happening at the thrift-store--I was in the middle of patching up my poor old Toyota Corolla again, so I went to the thrift store in town and look what was waiting in the back: a very special little pump organ, and one I recognized as something a local dealer had been trying to sell in his antique shop last year for $250. I guess he got tired of dusting it, or realized they do not sell well. People do not like pump organs very much.

I knew it was an earlier instrument by its incredibly plain walnut box and the crude stenciling for the maker's name. It was a funny name, too, an "S.D. & H.W. Smith's Conservatory Organ" from Boston. I know a Smith-American, but this was the company's early name from when they opened up shop in 1852. The name, "conservatory organ," refers to a conservatory of music--these were played by students looking for a good reliable practice keyboard. This would have been a terrific luxury at the time--a competently built little organ, light enough to be moved by one man, and fairly ruggedly constructed.

See, once upon a time organists had to practice at home upon a spinet or a harpsichord, during the 1700s, as even full-size pipe organs were almost impossible to really practice on without paying a chap called the "calcant," whose job it was to work a large bellows. There are still ancient organs with a stop knob reading Bellows Signal which was meant to ring a small bell and tell the calcant to get a bit more air-pressure coming. I've "borrowed" other peoples' harpsichord before and it was nothing like playing an organ at all.

So I looked it up and found by the serial number that:
--it was correctly a very old example of a Smith organ.This has 2 ranks by the sound of things but I haven't disassembled to check. Build date was 1858.
--the Tremolo stop activates a beater tremulant, instead of the far more common "Vox Humana" on later parlor organs, which is a rotary fan operating off reservoir vacuum. The beater adds a ton of vibrato and I am not sure what you're actually supposed to do with it
--these were more popular than pianos in their day, as they were lighter, less expensive, held their tuning for longer in heat and humidity, and could be transported by wagon or by packhorse when a piano couldn't. Also, you can build a folding organ--but not a folding pianoforte. It also helped that they are quite straightforward to play if you can read sheet-music, which was a more common skill in the 19th century.

I saw it was priced at $125 which is way high, so I began to haggle with the shopkeeper a few days after discovering the organ. Ended up knocking it down to $80 which was quite generous of me as it was worth perhaps twenty bucks on a good day.

https://www.reedsoc.org/index.php/rosdb/vieworgan?ID=9646
How strange is that? It was registered in 2004 with the Reed Organ Society, taking registration number 3206. This was something that was actually supposed to have been in preservation, but since it got out of its owner's possesion, and into an antique shop, and from there got dumped on the sidewalk in front of the thrift store where it was continuing to remain unsold and likely would have ended as landfill or been bought for breaking up--that was a rather close shave, especially when we are talking about trying to preserve an increasingly rare artifact.

Ordinarily I would not have bought it but as this was an extremely early instrument, already something registered as preserved, but in danger of being lost or destroyed soon, this helped.

Much like the full-size pipe organs that music students would have been training to use when this was new, you have "foundation stops" on this instrument--bass ranks shown here; you have to pull out the Principal on this end, and the Dulciana at the other, for it to play. On my later 1892-production organ, the diapason is 8' and so is the other--principal is named the "Melodia," after the earliest reed organs known as melodeons.

 

[autism-and-autotune]

Let's have more infodumping about special interests. @autism-and-autotune I figure maybe you would find this interesting...one's a curiosity, two is a coincidence, three is a Collection.
My favorite musical instrument? Organs! They are delightfully mechanical, play music for all occasions (sacred, profane, burlesque, or indifferent), and have showed up in all forms from the sheng of the Chinese to the hydraulis of the Ancient Greeks to the harmonica of today.

My favorite type of organ, though, is the pump organ. Let's face it, pump organs are weird. They have a reputation for sounding goshawful--they usually end up in the landfill when they are found today, as they aren't often collected. They were played in everywhere from saloons and brothels in 1880s Montana, to battlefields, to convent chapels accompanying Ursuline nuns at the morning Mass. You know how quartz watches democratized accurate timekeeping? The pump organ did that--and every culture that adopted them, developed their own take on how the ideal organ should work.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_organ
A very interesting happening at the thrift-store--I was in the middle of patching up my poor old Toyota Corolla again, so I went to the thrift store in town and look what was waiting in the back: a very special little pump organ, and one I recognized as something a local dealer had been trying to sell in his antique shop last year for $250. I guess he got tired of dusting it, or realized they do not sell well. People do not like pump organs very much.

I knew it was an earlier instrument by its incredibly plain walnut box and the crude stenciling for the maker's name. It was a funny name, too, an "S.D. & H.W. Smith's Conservatory Organ" from Boston. I know a Smith-American, but this was the company's early name from when they opened up shop in 1852. The name, "conservatory organ," refers to a conservatory of music--these were played by students looking for a good reliable practice keyboard. This would have been a terrific luxury at the time--a competently built little organ, light enough to be moved by one man, and fairly ruggedly constructed.

See, once upon a time organists had to practice at home upon a spinet or a harpsichord, during the 1700s, as even full-size pipe organs were almost impossible to really practice on without paying a chap called the "calcant," whose job it was to work a large bellows. There are still ancient organs with a stop knob reading Bellows Signal which was meant to ring a small bell and tell the calcant to get a bit more air-pressure coming. I've "borrowed" other peoples' harpsichord before and it was nothing like playing an organ at all.

So I looked it up and found by the serial number that:
--it was correctly a very old example of a Smith organ.This has 2 ranks by the sound of things but I haven't disassembled to check. Build date was 1858.
--the Tremolo stop activates a beater tremulant, instead of the far more common "Vox Humana" on later parlor organs, which is a rotary fan operating off reservoir vacuum. The beater adds a ton of vibrato and I am not sure what you're actually supposed to do with it
--these were more popular than pianos in their day, as they were lighter, less expensive, held their tuning for longer in heat and humidity, and could be transported by wagon or by packhorse when a piano couldn't. Also, you can build a folding organ--but not a folding pianoforte. It also helped that they are quite straightforward to play if you can read sheet-music, which was a more common skill in the 19th century.

I saw it was priced at $125 which is way high, so I began to haggle with the shopkeeper a few days after discovering the organ. Ended up knocking it down to $80 which was quite generous of me as it was worth perhaps twenty bucks on a good day.

https://www.reedsoc.org/index.php/rosdb/vieworgan?ID=9646
How strange is that? It was registered in 2004 with the Reed Organ Society, taking registration number 3206. This was something that was actually supposed to have been in preservation, but since it got out of its owner's possesion, and into an antique shop, and from there got dumped on the sidewalk in front of the thrift store where it was continuing to remain unsold and likely would have ended as landfill or been bought for breaking up--that was a rather close shave, especially when we are talking about trying to preserve an increasingly rare artifact.

Ordinarily I would not have bought it but as this was an extremely early instrument, already something registered as preserved, but in danger of being lost or destroyed soon, this helped.

Much like the full-size pipe organs that music students would have been training to use when this was new, you have "foundation stops" on this instrument--bass ranks shown here; you have to pull out the Principal on this end, and the Dulciana at the other, for it to play. On my later 1892-production organ, the diapason is 8' and so is the other--principal is named the "Melodia," after the earliest reed organs known as melodeons.

Wow, what a great write-up! It's neat that your favourite is the pump-organ. I like their reediness and low sound.

 

[autism-and-autotune]

Oh, to go on further about my special interest...well, it's Baroque music. It all began with J.S. Bach--even further than that, it began with films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Both films include antagonists playing the pipe organ on their vessels--which hooked me, but mostly Zimmer's music.

Long story short, I had the fortune to have a wonderful organ instructor, and throughout college I immersed myself in Bach's music (an escapsim/fixation, as I'd constantly write out lists of his music, preferred performers, etc) and I'd also take harpsichord lessons and learn as much as I could about Baroque writing.