Category: Stuff

Hat tip to JenT for pointing me to an article about bees from the New Yorker.

The following paragraph in the article stands out because it is an observable fact that points towards asking for an explanation:

What really worried him were the bees. Something was up. “Very up,” Patterson said. Since the early nineties, he had noticed that his queens could not lead their colonies for as long as they used to. In the past, Patterson’s queens had lived for five or six years. Now they were being superseded—deposed by the colony—within a year or two. Patterson hadn’t changed his beekeeping techniques much since 1963. “It is a massive problem,” he said. Some of the queens seemed fine. Others had misshapen wings. Patterson’s theory was that something was interfering with the bees’ pheromones in the hive, their Nestduftwärmebindung. But he didn’t know what.

The Patterson referred to is

Roger Patterson, who maintains dave-cushman.net—a Web site built by a fellow-beekeeper who died in 2011—which is regarded as one of the world’s best sources of apiculture information. Patterson started keeping bees sixty summers ago. He served for eight years as a trustee of the B.B.K.A., but he is better known as the president of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association, a more radical outfit that has long opposed the importing of foreign bees.

And for the meaning of Nestduftwärmebindung

In the forties, a German beekeeper named Johann Thür used the term Nestduftwärmebindung—literally, nest-scent-heat-binding—to convey the heady fug of warmth, humidity, pheromones, and other mysterious signals that is essential to a healthy bees’ nest

Here is the link to the article in the New Yorker that is under the title Is Beekeeping Wrong? and covers the control or non-control of bees, the taking or not taking of honey, the design of hives and their placement – and the causes of bee losses.

It’s a good article that raises important questions. And if you follow the links in the article there is yet more information on the variety of approaches towards ‘what’s good for the bees?’

What gets little attention is pesticides. They are mentioned in the sub-heading and get a very brief one-word mention three times in the article with a list of problems facing bees. Yet we know that pesticides even in trace quantities disrupt the ability of bees to orient themselves.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that the cocktail of twenty-five or more chemicals present in trace amounts found in the system of bees disorients them.

So what does it take for bees to be exposed to pesticides even from fields away from their colonies – to be absorbed and to damage them?

I am reminded of the autopsies on polar bears in Svalbard. Their general health and specifically their reproductive capabilities are diminished and this has been traced to PCBs burnt off televisions and computers by reclamation workers in India trying to get at the rare earth elements inside.

The PCBs travel in the air, in the atmosphere, around the globe, and in this case to the far north of Norway to be absorbed by polar bears.

Runaway consumerism and pollution, and the human causes of climate change are problems that we humans seem inadequate to face and deal with. We have this huge engine that we have made out of multiple pieces, and we don’t know how to apply the brakes.

Here’s a thought though – What if we stop seeing these as problems and instead see them as roads pointing to a solution even if the road is unclear?

The day I read that gross domestic product doesn’t mean how much we have produced, but how much we have spent on what we have produced I realised that the only meaningful engine in the economy is the consumer.

If we want to change society in the face of the climate crisis, we really have to stop consuming. We have to cut it by a huge amount, because if we don’t – well we know where that road leads.

But if we suddenly stop consuming overnight, the centripetal force would fling gobs and swathes of people off into space. It would be catastrophic.

Catastrophic of course for the companies that produce things, but also for everybody who would get caught up in it.

It would hit the people who would no longer have jobs. It would hit people who would no longer have access to all kinds of things – I mean you name it and it would cause problems if they didn’t exist. Take something simple like water. How would people access it if nobody was making taps anymore or pipes anymore.

So we can’t just stop consuming and say that that’s the solution.

But in the long term and even in the shorter term it has to be the solution and that is why we should all thank the climate crisis because it’s pointing exactly towards that.

And it’s pointing as exactly towards that at the same time is that we human beings with our desires and needs are getting slightly sick of this ever expanding drive and push to consume more. We are growing out of consumerism and you can tell that is the case because people are pushing faster and faster for more and more distractions, and none of them are hitting the spot for very long.

So we are on a path that is narrowing from one direction and another, and we should be grateful because it’s pointing the way.

I just saw an artist inviting people to join his free class on the six principles that set artists apart from those who don’t know what they are doing. Or as he puts it ‘How can you tell the difference between real artists and imposters in abstract painting? The formers systematically use these 6 principles..”

So I googled for the six principles and the first entry says “Abstract art has a unique voice that provokes interest, permitting both artists and viewers a distinct sense of freedom and expression. Despite its often chaotic and spontaneous appearance, it possesses a structure that is composed of six key elements: colour, shape, form, texture, line, and value.”

And I am thinking, when art is abstract – how would you possibly know whether it uses the six (or sixty) key elements in a meaningful way?

Bees are waking up earlier and earlier from their winter slumbers owing to temperatures becoming warmer, a study has found. Scientists at the University of Reading analysed data on more than 350,000 bee sightings in the UK to work out on which date 88 wild species ended their hibernations in the years from 1980 to 2019. They then compared these dates with temperature data and a clear pattern emerged: for every 1°C rise in temperature, the bees woke up six-and-a-half days earlier. On average, they were waking up four days earlier per decade. As a result of this, wild bees are becoming out of sync with the plants they rely on for food, say the researchers, risking their ability to procreate and survive. Shortages of available food could also sap their energy levels, making them less effective as pollinators – and threatening the various crops that depend on pollination.

Chaotic and stochastic systems have been extensively studied and the fundamental difference between them is well known: in a chaotic system an initial condition always leads to the same final state, following a fixed rule, while in a stochastic system, an initial condition leads to a variety of possible final states,

Magenta is a town in Italy about 25km west of Milan.

The Battle of Magenta was fought on 4 June 1859 during the Second Italian War of Independence, resulting in a French-Sardinian victory under Napoleon III against the Austrians under Marshal Ferencz Gyulai.

The second War of Italian Independence, also called the Franco-Austrian War, the Sardinian War, the Austro-Sardinian War or Italian War of 1859, was fought in Lombardy. It was fought between Austrian and Franco-Piedmontese armies and resulted in the annexation of most of Lombardy by Sardinia-Piedmont, leading eventually to the unification of Italy.

France’s assistance was not out of the magnanimity of its heart. A year before the war, in the Plombières Agreement, France agreed to support Sardinia’s efforts to expel Austria from Italy in return for the Duchy of Savoy (in the north-west of Italy bordering France) and the County of Nice.

In the RGB colour wheel, magenta is opposite Green, and made therefore from blue and red. Natural compounds of blue and red do not mix to form the colour we know as magenta, which is made chemically. It was first made in 1856 as Fuchsine, or rosaniline hydrochloride, a magenta dye with chemical formula C₂₀H₁₉N₃·HCl.

After the Battle of Magenta in 1859, the name of the compound became known as magenta to reflect the carnage at the battle.

I just made a patch of magenta in RGB and CMYK. The proportions are easy. In RGB magenta is the mix of 100% Red and 100% blue, both of which are produced as 255 on the intensity scale. The resulting patch gives a file size of just 7KB. In the CMYK colour space the file size is fifty times that size. I’ve no idea why. Plus there is the fact that displaying CMYK on an RGB computer screen is its own kind of madness. Still, here are three patches, first the hexadecimal RGB #ff00ff for magenta, then the formula I just mentioned, and then the CMYK.

Question: Can you see a difference between the first two patches?