David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Social links
I’ve added some code to the Sciencebase backend so that readers can easily get to my social media pages. All you have to do is use https://sciencebase.com/social as the link. For example swap the term social for mastodon: https://sciencebase.com/mastodon and that will take you straight to my Mastodon page. It should work with Instagram, 500px, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn, BandCamp, and SoundCloud. (Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science)
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 15, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Social Media Source Type: blogs

Apple of Sodom
As regulars to the Sciencebase site will know, I’ve been doing some ad hoc wilding of our garden for a few years now. Always hoping that blooming wildflowers would attract interesting invertebrates. There are therefore patches and pots that I’ve not managed with all sorts of odd things sprouting from them at different times of year. At the moment, there is a big tub, which used to be crocuses and daffodils that has a very tall and leafy plant growing in it at the moment, with pale-purple flowers in bloom (it’s November!). Apple of Peru, usually only has one or two blossoms at a time I used the ObsIdentify...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 11, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Biology Botany Source Type: blogs

World population likely to reach eight billion by the end of the year
The human population is roughly 7,986,585,500 as of today. That’s about 13 million shy of 8 billion people. On average this year population has been growing at about 222,000 people every day. The world’s population has doubled since 1974, the year ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo. It was half the 1974 number in 1927, the year of the first transatlantic phone service. We numbered a mere billion in 1804 the year Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France. It had taken from 1600 to that point for the estimated world population to have doubled to a billion, that was the year En...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 8, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science Source Type: blogs

World population likely reaches 8 billion by the end of the year
Human population is roughly 7,986,585,500 as of today. That’s about 13 million shy of 8 billion people. On average this year population has been growing at about 222,000 people every day. The world’s population has doubled since 1974, the year ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo. It was half the 1974 number in 1927, the year of the first transatlantic phone service. We numbered a mere billion in 1804 the year Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France. It had taken from 1600 to that point for the estimated world population to have doubled to a billion, that was the year Englan...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 8, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Science Source Type: blogs

Departing Twitter
The holiday cruise is drawing to a close. Many of the cruisers have a clutch of new best-friends-forever friendships. These were easily won and formed in the halcyon days in the far-flung resorts visited on the liner. They may have been melded over one too many shared jugs of sangria by the pool. Maybe they were sweated out under a burning sun in the queue waiting for the boats to take them ashore to see the old town. It’s possible that they were the tortured rapture of a shared grievance about cold showers or a badly stocked minibar at the rep’s desk. It’s the last night blues which inevitably sees all t...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 7, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Fiction Source Type: blogs

Twitter refugees – Twugees
The holiday cruise is drawing to a close. Many of the cruisers have a clutch of new best-friends-forever friendships. These were easily won and formed in the halcyon days in the far-flung resorts visited on the liner. They may have been melded over one too many shared jugs of sangria by the pool. Maybe they were sweated out under a burning sun in the queue waiting for the boats to take them ashore to see the old town. It’s possible that they were the tortured rapture of a shared grievance about cold showers or a badly stocked minibar at the rep’s desk. It’s the last night blues which inevitably sees all t...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 7, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Fiction Source Type: blogs

Spirograph and string things
As a child, I was always really pleased to get a Spirograph as a Christmas present. With its cogs and pens it allowed you to create what you might call mathematical art. You set up the frame and the cogwheels, poked a pen into one of the holes and whirled the pen round and round until it had drawn out a complex-looking spiral on the paper. You used different sized cogs and shapes and different holes to generate different patterns, which you could overlay. 1970s Spirograph set, photo c/o VintageToys.com I even had one that used paints and tinfoil instead of pen and paper. I remember rattling off dozens of these things, I su...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 7, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Photography Source Type: blogs

First BLANK of the winter
Fellow mothers, those who light up in the hope of seeing interesting nocturnal Lepidoptera will know only too well the feeling of disappointment when they check their trap the morning after the night before only to find not a single scaly-winged friend within. A BLANK. Last night was wet and chilly, early evening it had been dry, cloudless, and chilly, with a bright moon. The local primary school also did their annual fireworks extravaganza. None of this had any bearing on the moths, they just weren’t flying into the trap. So, my first BLANK since last winter. Null results are, of course, scientifically just as impo...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - November 5, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

December will be magic, again
I’ve waited patiently for one particular species of moth to turn up in the garden and the night before Halloween 2022, it made its inaugural appearance, drawn to a 20-watt fluorescent, ultraviolet lamp – the December Moth. Poecilocampa populi (Linnaeus, 1758). If the name seems anachronistic don’t blame me. The Lepidoptera textbooks tell you it can make an appearance any time between October and January, peak is mid-November. Male December Moth When I first started mothing back in late July 2018, I hinted to one of the very experienced enthusiasts I know, a guy called Leonard Cooper, that I’d probab...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 30, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Cleaning up bad photos
Don’t despair if you get an underexposed and noisy photo of something interesting…there are ways and means to recover…provided you were shooting RAW with your digital camera! This heron landed on the garden fence and was peering into the neighbour’s pond. I grabbed a snap through the back window. It was early morning, dull, and I didn’t get the right settings before it flew off. A bit of software to reduce noise reduction (DxO PureRaw2) worked to get rid of much of the noise/grain in the photo, it’s equivalent to turning the ISO/sensor sensitivity down by 4 stops, which would naturally ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 29, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Photography Source Type: blogs

Hoist with one ’ s own petard
” Hoist with one’s own petard” – to fall victim to one’s scheming. As with so many phrases its origins lie with Shakespeare, and specifically the play Hamlet, wherein Hamlet tells his mother, Gertrude, how he hopes to outwit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who have been ordered to take him England and have him killed. For ’tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard So, the word engineer, etymologically related to ingenious was in Shakespearean times not a maker or controller of machines, but a bomb-maker, a petard being a small bomb. To be hoist would i...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 28, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Sciencebase Source Type: blogs

Little and Large
My friend Andy, who, like myself, is a keen amateur wildlife photographer, often asks me questions about the birds and butterflies he photographs. I can usually come up with an answer. But, today, we were talking about Little Owls and he casually referred to the species as the Small Owl. As far as I know, there is no species known as the Small Owl. I pointed this out and he came back with an intriguing question. Why are the birds “Little” but the butterflies “Small”? The Little Owl species does not have a counterpart Large Owl For example, among the birds, we have Little Owl, Little Gull, Little Sti...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 27, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Education Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Male moths and butterflies often fire blanks but nobody knows why
A few days ago I tweeted about a famous picture of a moth, the Death’s Head Hawk-moth used in the artwork surrounding the 1991 psychological thriller “The Silence of the Lambs”. At first glance, the moth looks genuine, but closer inspection reveals that what is thought of as markings resembling a skull on the moth’s thorax is, in the movie illustration, actually an imprint of a well-known 1951 creation of Salvador Dali and photographer Philippe Halsman. In that image, In Voluptas Mors, a group of naked women were posed in such a way as to create the illusion of a skull. Of course, this morbid allus...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 18, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Hacking the moth trap
I’ve had to hack my moth trap, or more specifically, I’ve had to hack my two moth traps. The white, plastic vanes are broken on my original moth trap (the collapsible wooden one bought from an ex-mother and cabinet maker friend mentioned here years ago). The UV U-tube also failed in the night a week or so ago, So, having previously also acquired a spare moth trap from yet another friend in the village who is also an ex-mother, I have now hybridised the original box and funnel with the vanes and UV tube from the second trap. The U-tubes were 40 Watts, the linear bulb is just 20 Watts, so will be half the electri...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 17, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Mothing stats
One might ostensibly refer to mid-October as the point in the year at which the mothing season is beginning to draw to a close. There are still plenty of autumnal moths to be seen, (various Sallows, Merveil du Jour, Red-line and Yellow-line Quakers, Bricks etc, and then winter moths (Winter Moth, November Moth, December Moth etc) around and a chance of rare migrants but from now on, a cold lighting-up night might give you a blank from here on until mid to late February…it can be a gloomy time for moth-ers, although perhaps not quite as gloomy as it is for the moth-ers we know as butterfliers. One of several Convolvul...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - October 14, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs