Schrödinger's bat

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is one of the few airports with parallel runways that allow two planes to land at the same time. Since the two planes are moving at more or less the same speed, watching from one plane makes the other plane appear to be standing still.

Poster for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

According to the website bechdeltest.com, which has classified over 10,000 films, 57% pass all three requirements, 10% fail one, 22% fail two, and 11% fail all three.

The test has three criteria:
1. The work must have at least two women in it
2. The women must talk to each other
3. They must talk to each other about something other than men

Thus it fails the Bechdel Test (or Bechdel-Wallace Test), a measure of gender representation in film or other forms of fiction. The test is named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who originated the concept in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For."

In the entire LOTR film trilogy, no two female characters speak to each other. (Major characters - there are scenes in "The Two Towers" where a mother and daughter speak.)

A hovering hummingbird. The bird's belly and throat are mostly white while the upper parts of the body are a metallic green. The wings can only be seen as blurs due to their speed.

Other types of birds can hover – kestrels, kingfishers, etc. – but only for a short time. Some hummingbirds have been documented hovering for up to an hour.

Photo credit: focusingonwildlife.com

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.

They feed by hovering in front of flowers while probing for nectar, but then they need to "back up" to get away, so they have evolved a unique wing structure (specialized bones, joints, and feathers) that allows them to fly backwards.

The stone wall made of many different types of stone. The stones are of varying sizes and colors and some do, in fact, show signs of significant weathering.

Many of the stones were originally exhibited in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and then placed on display in the Smithsonian Institution. The wall was erected outdoors in 1948 in order to study the effects of weathering.

The wall contains 2,352 samples of 35 different stone types, including basalt, conglomerate, coral, dolomite, gabbro, gneiss, granite, labradorite, limestone, marble, pumice, quartz, sandstone, schist, soapstone, and travertine. The samples came from 47 US states and 16 foreign countries.

The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) stone test wall is an experiment designed to measure how different types of stone react to weathering over time.

Stem of a duck orchid plant with two blooms showing their resemblance to flying ducks.

An Australian postage stamp featuring the duck orchid.

The large duck orchid (Caleana major), a small orchid from Australia, bears a striking resemblance to a flying duck. It is pollinated by a species of sawfly that apparently has a duck fetish.

Photo credit: biofriendlyplanet.com

A white Chinese food takeout box with a wire handle sticking up above.

The 1894 patent to F. W. Wilcox for the Paper Pail.

At the same time, takeout food was becoming more popular and restaurants were looking for containers to package their food in. Chinese food, in particular, was well-suited for the paper pails and they soon became strongly associated with Chinese takeout.

In the mid 20th century, oyster sales began to drop, largely because of price increases due to overfishing (overmolluscing??).

The folding box (paper pail) commonly used in Chinese takeout restaurants was invented in the US and originally designed to carry oysters.

Closeup of David Bowie's face showing how the permanently dilated left eye does appear to be a different color than the right one.

In spite of the injury, the two remained friends, recording an album together (as The King Bees), and Underwood designed the cover artwork for several Bowie's albums.

David Bowie's (born David Jones) eyes weren't actually different colors – his left pupil was permanently dilated as a result of an injury he sustained as a teenager in a fight. Bowie and his friend George Underwood reportedly were fighting over a girl when Underwood punched Bowie in the eye.

A rough wood door in a stone wall. The door is supported by two long metal hinge straps and there are two small windows cut through the wood just below the top hinge. Just above the ground, a round hole has been cut and there is a black and white cat peeking out of the hole.

The astronomical clock the cats were protecting.

Exterior of Exeter Cathedral. In the foreground is a green, grassy lawn with several people sitting on it admiring the Cathedral. Behind the Cathedral is a beautiful blue sky with just a few wispy clouds.

The door opens into a room containing the mechanism of a large astronomical clock, and rodents were attracted to the animal fats used to lubricate the clock's gears.

Photo credits: archaeologyworlds.com (door); exeter-cathedral.com (clock and Cathedral)

This door at Exeter Cathedral in the UK is believed to be the oldest cat access door on record. Church records show that the hole was added in the 16th century, allowing cats access for rodent control.

Black and white portrait of Charles Darwin. He is wearing a heavy black jacket and tie which is partly obscured by his long, white beard. He is pictured in partial profile and is gazing steadily out of the frame to his right.

The resulting four-volume monograph is still considered to be the authoritative treatise on the taxon, but afterwards he reportedly commented, "I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow-sailing ship."

Long before penning his great work "On The Origin of Species," he spent some time working out the systematics of the barnacles, a poorly studied group at the time. He thought he would be able to complete the project in a year or so. It took him eight!

February 12 is Darwin Day, honoring Charles Darwin's legacy, and celebrating his contributions to science, evolution, and humanity. He was born this day in 1809.

A similar phenomenon, jamais vu (French for "never seen"), occurs when a location or experience that should be familiar seems novel and unfamiliar. (It is the opposite of déjà vu – "already seen.") Unlike semantic satiation, jamais vu does not require repetition as a trigger.

Semantic satiation (aka word alienation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition of a word or phrase causes it to temporarily lose meaning for the listener. A (correct) word that made sense earlier now seems to be spelled wrong or just seems like the wrong word.

The head, neck, and front legs of a titanosaur skeleton showing the long cervical ribs extending backwards below the neck bones.

The cervical ribs can be seen in the photo below of Máximo, a titanosaur and the largest dinosaur ever found, at the Field Museum in Chicago.

In some species, the ribs were up to six feet long – spanning three neck vertebrae – and oriented backwards along the length of the neck. They were apparently not solid bone, but were partly flexible, providing additional lifting power to assist the muscles, and reducing the chance of breaking.

Some long necked dinosaurs, e.g. sauropods, had cervical ribs arising from their neck vertebrae that are thought to have provided additional support for the muscles required to support and control their exceptionally long necks.

A meme about crab evolution. Man: "I'm studying convergent evolution." Woman: "Oh, yeah? Name six examples." Man: "Crab" Woman: "That's on me, I set the bar too low."

Why Do Animals Keep Evolving into Crabs? Crablike bodies are so evolutionarily favorable that they’ve evolved at least five different times

www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

Carcinization describes the phenomenon of non-crab crustaceans evolving into crab-like forms. Scientists say that it occurred at least five times.

This is an example of convergent evolution, where taxa that are not closely related evolve similar characteristics as adaptations to similar habitats.

Comparison of a human and a koala fingerprint showing that they have very similar patterns of ridges.

Koalas have fingerprints that are almost indistinguishable from a human's.