Okay so, it turns out that your cell phone battery is a basically a homunculus of an electric fish.
These are the same thing. Let me explain.
@fishteriously, a paleoichthyologist, told me that Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery after studying electric eels and rays. This sounded like a fun science factoid! I wanted to know more! I saw the claim repeated on any number of pop science articles from the last century or so, but none that quoted from primary sources.
The voltaic pile is one of the most important inventions, ever, of all time. Before Volta, electricity could be stored in Leyden jar capacitors, which would discharge in a single, brief burst. Volta’s pile was the first method of producing a continuous electric current, which launched the modern era of electricity as we know it. His explanation for how it worked was incorrect, but it was still a massive breakthrough.
Batteries use the same principle to this day, just with different materials (e.g. cobalt oxide, graphite, and lithium salts rather than silver, zinc, and brine).
But is it a fish?
This is Volta’s first schematic of a battery, or “voltaic pile” – at the time, “battery” referred to a bunch of Leyden jars linked in series, the term wouldn’t come to refer to piles until later. “Z” and “A” stand for zinc and silver (“argentum”), with brine-soaked paper disks between. It does look a bit like an eel?
But is it a fish?
Surely, if Volta modeled the pile after electric fishes, I’d be able to find a citation! Wikipedia is usually a good place to start when hunting primary sources, but no luck. No mention of fish at all. I trust fishteriously more than wikipedia, however, so I went digging. Looks like Volta first reported his discovery in a Letter to the Royal Society in 1800.
Found the letter!
Aw beans, it’s in French. I haven’t studied French since high school.
BUT WAIT. WHAT WAS THAT.
Okay so now I NEEDED to read the letter in English. I found an English-language summary published by the Royal Society, but it looks like the only English translation of the full letter was in the appendix an out-of-print book called “Alessandro Volta and the Electric Battery.”
So I bought a used copy. Let’s see what Volta has to say about this:
“To this apparatus … I have constructed it, in its form to the natural electric organ of the torpedo or electric eel, &c, than to the Leyden flask and electric batteries [battery = linked Leyden flasks], I would wish to give the name of artificial electric organ.”
Yes! The voltaic pile was explicitly modeled after electric fishes – torpedo rays and electric eels. Fishteriously was 100% correct. Volta never even calls it a “pile,” it is always “artificial electric organ.” A significant portion of the letter is devoted to electric eels and torpedo rays, in fact.
But also, the rest of the letter is bonkers.
He wrote pages on painful experiments with the artificial electric organ – touching it, poking it into his eyes and ears, making other people touch it, generally just shocking the ever loving hell out of himself over and over. He routinely shocks himself so hard that he has to take breaks. And of course, he licks it.
But that’s not the best part:
He says that the artificial electric organ can be turned sideways and submerged in liquid…
“…by which means these cylinders would have a pretty good resemblance to the electric eel … they might be joined together by pliable metallic wires or screw springs, and then covered with a skin terminated by a head and tail properly formed, &c.”
There you have it. One of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, and it includes a crafts project for building an authentic electric eel puppet.
In summary, next time you charge your phone, take a moment to thank the soul of the electric fish inside of it.
Okay, went to smash that last bit of Blueberry Hill, found some steady ground to the side but after a few swings realized it was steady cause it was thin dirt atop some still-intact planks, so I smashed them for a while.
Also weeding, clearing out this one grass from the front that’s much taller (and leggier and unplush) that used to be like 80% of the cover.
Taking an hour break then I’ll go back out, got some other stuff in mind.
My fingers were a little clumsy last week, and not only did stepping down to 4 scoops/day creatine not take, 5 felt pushing it, and I’m feeling a bit of iron hunger even with 2 pills twice daily… I DO suspect that was a 9th case boosting the echoes. If so it would be the weakest boost yet so far, I had said I didn’t expect to feel them past 11 but I might not even notice 10.
Every now and again LinkedIn will be like hey here’s some engineering jobs and I’ll scroll through it, how is it possible that even tiny towns in nowhere USA have companies that do military work. Like surely at some point you’ve got to have engineering companies that do not require their staff to have security clearance, this seems excessive. I swear I saw a family owned naval hull manufacturing company the last time I was on there.
Military contracting gets widely scattered so that each program might shore up its budgetary support by creating jobs in as many Congressional districts in search of an industrial base as possible.
There’s a utility pole on the corner due to be replaced this week and for days there’s been a steady stream of people bringing a logo truck out, poking around, spraypainting exactly one thing on the ground, and leaving, it’s seeming like those spray tags you see for things more represent someone signing off on it than actual guidance to the work crew
Huh , of the four molar cusps of flesh of the once-belly I thought the lower right was unusually prominent but as everything comes into focus I see it’s really that the upper right one was unusually flattened, giving me a clearer view of the lower one looking down.
Ever? Like talked at all even just for a second? If you've talked to at least a thousand people or thousands than in theory you've statistically talked to at least one person who's been murdered, since about 1 in 10,000 people get murdered a year and you've lived for decades
Yes, that’s what raised the possibility, the follow-up question is “who?”
The first transcontinental railroad ran to San Francisco, and when a southern route was built the obvious western terminus was San Diego, but San Francisco elites feared the growth of another California power center so they pulled strings to get it redirected to Los Angeles, which was originally the agricultural lands feeding a Spanish mission and had no natural port. (They first built long piers around Malibu and then an artificial breakwater-protected harbor down by Long Beach.)
Then in 1892, the city was found to sit atop a major oil field and a drilling boom ensued, then in WWI the existence of a large labor force without strong left-labor organization like elsewhere on the west coast and in coastal shipping range of the wood-producing Pacific Northwest made it ideal to spin up a military aircraft industry.
Then after WWI, the booming Mediterranean-climate city drew a lot of immigrants from post-Ottoman lands as their national restructurings wrang out, then the motion picture industry relocated there from upstate New York for the weather and to get distance from Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons, then in WWII that defense aerospace industry got even bigger, carrying the region through the Cold War.
But so why there specifically is that downtown (which was not particularly central to the city since its auto-oriented postwar expansion) is on the banks of the seasonal Los Angeles River, which irrigated the land to grow crops for the mission at the northern mouth of the San Fernando Valley.
"Hmm, Protagonist-kun is always tripping, has constant nosebleeds, low libido, and his face turns red at the slightest stimulus. Well, these sure aren't signs of any serious underlying condition! Now time to hit him in the head!"
Anime romcoms must be so uncomfortable for neurologists, lol.
The long wavelengths of the light spectrum—red, yellow, and orange—can penetrate to approximately 15, 30, and 50 meters (49, 98, and 164 feet), respectively, while the short wavelengths of the light spectrum—violet, blue and green—can penetrate further, to the lower limits of the euphotic zone. Blue penetrates the deepest, which is why deep, clear ocean water and some tropical water appear to be blue most of the time. Moreover, clearer waters have fewer particles to affect the transmission of light, and scattering by the water itself controls color. Water in shallow coastal areas tends to contain a greater amount of particles that scatter or absorb light wavelengths differently, which is why sea water close to shore may appear more green or brown in color.
Checkout @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.
Video credit: Kendall Roberg
Fun fact! This is why there are some sea creatures in the twilight zone in the ocean who use red pigment to camoflauge. Red light doesn’t reach down that far, so there isn’t any light to reflect and the animals appear black.
This makes me realize that many of the brightly colored pictures of coral and brightly colored fish species have to be taken close to the surface.
Alright, started on the little bit of Blueberry Hill left to smash but it really was left til last because it had the least stable ground to stand on and after a few swings realized I wasn’t gonna have my big finish today.
So instead I edged it (ba-dum-tiss).
I also finished off all the weeding circuit except the yards – front and top rear – within the retaining wall, took the time to try to totally clear some subpar grasses out while the soil’s still moist and good to dig out clumps.
Dumped 3 buckets of pull onto my ramp down into the Blueberry Hill dugout shell, that’s just loads dumped on wood fill full of air pockets so when it rains dirt drains down there and I gotta keep packing more on.
Tree in the top backyard starting to bear leaves, there’s a part where I cut two trunks to mount a bench and table, and shoots are growing off the sides right to thicken to be trimmed into a candelabra of supporting pillars in time.
