Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

So, in our little town, a plane landed on the highway nearby because of a blizzard and all that.

A Cessna Caravan, operated by Southern Airways Express, took off for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but something went wrong and the pilot had to land wherever he could.

By the way, thanks to this incident, I now know that you can actually fly to a neighboring state for just 60 dollars from an airport that’s 10 minutes away from me. I always thought that the smaller the airplane, the more expensive the flight. Surely, the passengers of N1983X probably aren’t very happy.

What I like about our area is that we have seasons.

I don’t understand how people live in Florida, for example. It’s always summer there, almost no museums, music is okay, but it pales in comparison to the northern neighbors. Okay, there’s the ocean, but you get used to it.

Also, things can change very quickly around here — just look at the second image, a weather history for January 2020, these days. Back then, the temperature changed from minus two to plus 22 degrees in just two days.

However, a lot of snow never means “a lot of mud”. It’s probably due to the dry air, good drainage, and soil characteristics — if you don’t go into the forest, you hardly see any mud at all. I’m walking around in summer sneakers right now. If they’ve cleared the asphalt path, it’s dry the next day, and you could potentially walk on it in socks (although it would be cold).

All the photos are around our house at different times

I give Yuka a choice of three treats. He chooses the one on the right, then halfway through stops, goes to sniff the other two just in case, one by one, but ultimately sticks with his original choice and leaves with the treat in his mouth. At the staircase, he decides to return anyway, checks that the other two are still there, sniffs them again one by one, weighs the options, realizes that no, the one he chose is indeed tastier, and leaves.

After some time, having chewed on what he deemed the tastiest, he returns and is surprised to find that the other two are gone. And he’s still scratching at the pantry door. Such injustice! There were three! on the floor!

I wonder which Community Standard I am violating with this comment?

The CIA just dumped some warez here. Swarm it, there’s 150 episodes of Tom and Jerry on the Al-Qaeda leader’s laptop, no SMS and no registration, plus various other bits and pieces. Link in the comments.

Continuing to read Immense World by Ed Yong. I ordered his previous book, “I Contain Multitudes,” about the microbiota. But that’s for later. Currently, there’s an intriguing story unfolding from the pages as I read.

In previous posts, I mentioned that Catfish — those whiskered little fish — have taste receptors all over their bodies, from head to tail, numbering between 100,000 to 150,000. For comparison, humans have about 9,000, and chickens — 24. Thus, their life at the bottom in murky and muddy water is made easier as they can taste the water with their entire body.

I am now reading that in 2012, Daphne Soares, a biologist from the nearby University of Maryland, discovered something interesting about the Astroblepus Pholeter catfish from a cave in Ecuador. She found that these blind catfish evolved in the turbulent currents of the cave in such a way that their skin became covered with what she called “micro-joysticks,” but the interesting part is not just that, but that these “micro-joysticks” are essentially teeth. They don’t look like teeth, but they are indeed made from enamel and dentin, with nerves connecting to all of this. These tooth-like formations on the skin are called denticles.

There are other fish with denticles, but usually, they use them as a “tool” for “cutting,” as well as for protection, or for reducing resistance while swimming. However, cave catfish use these denticles as mechanosensors for navigation in dark and fast-flowing environments, needing more robust sensors, much like how other fish use the lateral line.

Incidentally, on Daphne Soares’ personal website, among the list of discoveries is also the previously unknown sensory organ in alligators — integumentary sensory organs (ISOs). They appear as black dots of about half a millimeter on the alligator’s face. With them, crocodilians feel water disturbances and changes in pressure (which are essentially the same thing). And they are very sensitive — able to detect water movements as small as 4 micrometers, which is less than the thickness of a human hair.

It also turns out that male alligators can produce very low sounds, which are detected by the female with these sensitive cells on the snout. It is unknown what the female then does with this information, but at least she’s now informed. Unknown what you will do with all this information, but at least you are now informed as well.

Eggplants

I stumbled upon a very interesting channel for engineers on YouTube called Lesics. It has a lot of fascinating content. Start, for instance, with a 15-minute video about the engineering details of constructing the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built in 1937 under the supervision of Joseph Strauss. You will quickly realize that the projects you are working on are trivial and insignificant compared to the challenges faced in the early 20th century. Constructing a bridge weighing nearly a million tons in a way that it could withstand load challenges unimaginable at that time is comparable to building spacecraft today. I’ve attached the link to the video in the comments.

I continue reading Ed Yong’s book Immense World about how animals interpret signals from the surrounding world. Very interesting stuff about seals.

What I learned. Seals are known for their ability to use their extremely sensitive whiskers to precisely follow the hydrodynamic trail left by their prey. To us, it looks like this: a fish swims through a complex curve, then a minute later a seal appears and follows the same curve (although a straight line might have been shorter to the fish). Research has shown that a seal can track a swimming herring from up to 180 meters away — which is comparable to dolphins’ echolocation system.

How do they manage this?

In one experiment, a complex curve was “drawn” in the water along a pool, and then seals were released, and they moved along this curve, although to our eyes, and indeed anyone’s, there was nothing left of it. This is despite the fact that the ocean water is constantly moving. The swimming fish leaves what is called a hydrodynamic trail – water vortices that last for some time (minutes), and the seals’ whiskers detect them.

It should be mentioned that seals have so-so vision, plus the water is significantly opaque (when we talk about a hundred meters) in their habitats, plus this experiment was also conducted with the vision of the seals being blocked (I don’t know how to translate blindfolded better). Vision is generally mediocre both underwater and above water for almost everyone. Birds, then humans, various felines, and a few others are exceptions.

But vortex flows are also created by the whiskers themselves — how do seals distinguish those created by the fish? It turns out that seal whiskers have a wavy structure, thickening and thinning in certain areas, which helps suppress the excitement caused by the vortex flows of the seal itself and the whiskers, and against this background, enhance the vortex flows from fish that swam in that place earlier. Ultimately, this feature increases the sensitivity of the whiskers to the hydrodynamic trails left by prey, allowing seals to hunt effectively even in conditions of poor visibility. And this is unique to seals. For instance, walruses and sea lions have simpler whiskers, and they are not as good at tracking hydrodynamic trails.

By the way, there is something similar in all fish — an organ called the lateral line. It looks like a thin line on both sides of the body, stretching from the gill slits to the base of the tail. When you are cutting up a fish, take notice, it’s quite noticeable in many of them. Lateral line organs help fish navigate, sense the direction and speed of currents, as well as detect prey or enemies, and of course, to swim synchronously in a school without bumping into each other. The sensitivity there is far from the aforementioned in seals, of course, but it is claimed that some fish can thus detect the disturbance from an insect on the surface.

Also interesting, catfish have a unique ability to perceive taste with their entire body – they essentially have taste buds located all over their surfaces from head to tail.

By the way, if a fish in an aquarium is looking at you, it appears as “fish sideways” and not “fish nose at me”. Most likely, a typical fish sees almost nothing directly in front of itself, and the area of maximum clarity is to the left or right side. So if you imagine that it is examining you, then stand by its side.

Well, I hope this was interesting. I don’t understand how some can read, I quote, “600 books a year”. When do they think? When do they stop and google? Sigh.

Should I craft a little house for him… Meanwhile, the cat is posing