Troubled waters

Diania cactiformis

Around 520 million years ago, a walking cactus roamed the Earth. Its body had nine segments, each bearing a pair of armour-plated legs, covered in thorns. It was an animal, but one that looked more like the concoction of a bad fantasy artist. Jianni Liu from Northwest University in Xi’an discovered this bundle of spines and named it Diania cactiformis – the “walking cactus from Yunnan”. And she thinks that it sits at the roots of the most successful group of animals on the planet. If Liu is right, Diania is one of the earliest relatives of the arthropods – the group that includes insects, spiders, crabs, and more. These species all share a segmented body, a hard external skeleton and jointed legs. They are life’s winners, the most diverse of all animal groups.

Neanderthal feather accessories

A Neanderthal burial site in Italy reveals hundreds of bird bones mixed in with those of our hominid cousins. The bones had the feathers scraped off, as though the Neanderthals had removed them on purpose - and the only plausible reason they would do that is to wear the feathers. It's more evidence that Neanderthals were just as cultured as own ancient ancestors.

The woman shown in the above artist's impression is wearing what looks like a fascinator. 

Miranda sings

The unearthly sounds in this video are derived from electromagnetic signals picked up by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew past Miranda, moon of Uranus. 

The Infant's Grammar or a Pic-nic Party of the Parts of Speech

Two pages from The Infant's Grammar, published 1824. Source.

Scans of the whole book can be seen here.

Ammonites

Programming as music and drama

Velato is a programming language in which the source code consists of MIDI music files, so that each program doubles as an electronic tune. This is how a "Hello World" program sounds, and this is an accordion rendition of a program that copies input to output.

Another strange programming language is Shakespeare, in which programs look like plays; variables have the names of characters and their values are determined by equations encoded as invective. The results are rather absurdist:

Scene II: Juliet and Ophelia's conversation.
[Enter Ophelia]
Juliet:
Thou art as good as the quotient between Romeo and the sum
of a small furry animal and a leech. Speak your mind!
Ophelia:
Thou art as disgusting as the quotient between Romeo
and twice the difference between a mistletoe and an 
oozing infected blister! Speak your mind!
[Exeunt] 

Seashells under glass

Crystallized dinosaur

Cross section of a dinosaur bone at 15× magnification. The bone (blue), from an unknown species, is about the size of a roll of duct tape and was found in the Morrison Formation on the Colorado Plateau, where fossils are common. The iron oxide (red) in the quartz-filled (white) sample could be part of the marrow or spongy bone, but Barker says “it could also be a tree root that grew and decomposed over the millions and millions of years it takes before the actual specimen becomes fossilized.”

Jenday Conure

Photographed at a pet shop devoted to exotic birds.

Watson, the Jeopardy-playing AI

Watson wasn't always this adept:

It botched the solutions to the game-show clues with howlers that filled IBM's research lab with laughter — and raised deep concern. Once, when queried about a famous French bacteriologist, Watson skipped right past Louis Pasteur and responded instead: "What is, 'How tasty was my little Frenchman?'" (the title of a 1971Brazilian movie about cannibals). Even worse, Watson churned away for nearly two hours to come up with such nonsense.

However, Watson's "intelligence" is artificial in more ways than one. Like a chatterbot, a clueless politician or the inmate of Searle's Chinese Room, it creates output appropriate to its input by associating between symbols without any understanding of their referents, and cannot deal with questions that require more subtle interpretation:

When it comes up with an answer, such as "What is 'Othello?,'" the name of Shakespeare's play is simply the combination of ones and zeros that correlates with millions of calculations it has carried out. Statistics tell it that there is a high probability that the word "Othello" matches with a "tragedy," a "captain" and a "Moor." But Watson doesn't understand the meaning of those words any more than Google does, or, for that matter, a parrot raised in a household of Elizabethan scholars...
This clue, for example, ties Watson into knots: "Look in this direction and you'll see the wainscoting." The answer is rooted in human experience, not data. Only a "Jeopardy!" contestant with a body is likely to understand it and come up with the right response: "What is down?"

Purple (and red and yellow and orange...) prose

Chromatographic writing system used by the Edo people of Nigeria

Crinoids

These creatures, also known as sea lilies, are related to starfish. Most living species are small and dwell on the sea floor, but in prehistoric times they grew to truly impressive proportions and drifted in the ocean currents:

Also, fragments of their fossil exoskeletons have been used as rosary beads.

Sticholonche

A marine microbe, one of the Radiolaria, which moves by "rowing" with its spines

Sights on the pathway to sleep

Sketch of a form constant, a form of hallucination often seen when drifting off to sleep

Other dreamers may see falling tetrominoes, chess boards, or microscope slides behind their eyelids. I often see text-- apparently of a rambling, nonsensical character akin to the output of random generators, but with formatting resembling that of the books or websites I've been browsing. On a few occasions, I have even seen hypnagogic syntax trees.

Latinglish poetry

O, si vile, si ergo,
Fortibus es inero!
O nobile, demis trux.
Vadis indem? Causem dux.

Caesar adsum jam forte — Antonius sed passus sum.
Caesar aderat forte
Pompey adsum jam
Caesar sic in omnibus
Pompey sic intram

See here for explanation and more verses. See also "Oh Four Tuna".

Tea with milk

The same patterns appear on all scales.

Temari

These traditional Japanese craft items (many more images here) sometimes display symmetries resembling the Platonic polyhedra; compare this figure for instance.

Rain and clouds

Candles on a glass table

Poppies

Possible worlds

How would the night sky look if our moon was replaced by one of the planets?

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

Maps of emotional space

Chart of the basic emotions as determined by psychologist Paul Ekman.

Two-axis map per James A. Russell

Concept map based on the writings of the philosopher Spinoza