- Huh
> they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela
Well, today I learned, Venezuela has glaciers.
Then I googled that, and…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/...
And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
- Interestingly, the US has ADDED a glacier in the last 30 years, that of Mount St Helens, which was able to form after the explosion in 1980. It is the youngest glacier on earth
- It had 13 glaciers pre-eruption, so perhaps "added" is doing a lot of heavy lifting :)
- We need to go nuclear with the newer type of plants. Built at scale, they are cost effective. Otherwise we are cooked, perhaps quite literally.
- Venus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole
- Always love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)
- Related: https://www.orangecrumbs.com (nice weekly summary of top wikipedia posts on HN)
- Agreed. I would follow a bluesky/mastodon/rss thing that shares every time a Wikipedia article hits the front page.
- When I used Kagi, my favourite feature was pinning Wikipedia to the top of all results.
- I did a bit of searching, and couldn't find a single timelapse of glacier mice movement. Time for a trip to the mountains with some cameras!
- I have found a video (under a minute long) of a backpacking group walking through a herd of glacier mice in Alaska: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4fHfDrfoJw. I'd love to see a timelapse of glacier mice moving.
- I’m actually surprised there isn’t Timelapse of it already. Seems like a simple enough setup to gather basically all of the information needed for finalizing how they move.
- If you put me on that surface I don't think I would have any idea it was a glacier.
- huh funny name that. When I hiked a glacier in Norway, dead mice (and other things) were everywhere under the ice. I assumed that's what the title was referring to.
- Here in Switzerland when children order shrimp at a restaurant I tell them that they come from the shrimp mines in the glaciers.
- If they don't know about tapioca pearls, please keep in mind they resemble fish eggs.
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- It's ok they're just bugs
- I use the same argument with dog meat.
- You managed to talk with the dog from fallout 1?
- Dogs are bugs?
- I would say they are features.
- I think you’ll find that words have definitions that can be changed.
#define bug dog
- Aren’t we all.
- I clicked the picture first without reading any of the article and was wondering "where are the mice? they must be well camouflaged!"
- same!
- Slightly related, ice worms
- jökla-mýs is a wonderful name, you gotta love icelandic. A swede might also associate it too "jäkla mys" - god damn cozy!
- TIL. Life never ceases to amaze.
- Wait until you hear about Ice Worms
- And sailing stones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones and toneballs https://luthierblogmartinahawe.wordpress.com/toneballs/
- I like how they installed a GPS module into one of the rocks to track its path.
- Thanks to your comment TIL that snow algae is a thing
- Another fun one is Mima Mounds, mounds found all over and especially in North America that don’t have established causes
- From your article:
> "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream".
To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2].
Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]:
> A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […]
> One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon
2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/
3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...
- Also a reminder that a lot of life is basic physics and a simple state machine.
e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
- But that's fine too. If the complexity of the natural world is just emergent behaviors, then emergence itself never ceases to amaze. Because one wouldn't normally expect that our "cold" physical laws could lead to the variety of life.
- I highly recommend the book "Deep Simplicity" by John Gribbin.^1
It explores precisely this topic: the emergence of unexpectedly rich, complex behaviors from very simple rules given feedback and sensitivity to initial conditions.
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
- Another recommendation, with a biological slant: One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind by Nikolay Kukushkin.
- reminds me vaguely of "Sailing Stones"
- > This suggests that this water buoyantly lifts the ice floes with embedded rocks until friction with the playa bed is reduced sufficiently for wind to move them and cause the observed tracks.
Wow, that's nuts!
- My first thought as well!
- Dunno about you, but I was really hoping to see mice not moss :/
- Remember seeing these in Iceland
- ...Poppa was a rolling stone...
- Am I the only one who immediately thought of tribbles?
- Yes
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