environment, links, natural history, thoughts, topographical

Links of the Week

This week’s small selection of the curious and not-so-curious you may have missed …

According to a recent survey people spend too long in the shower and use too much water. And it isn’t as green as we were told. Now there’s a surprise!

But then no wonder we go for the therapeutic, because according to uSwitch the UK is the worst place in Europe to live. Well it is if you care about what they measure. For geeks like me you can follow their method, recalculate the scores, exclude things you don’t care about and add in other things you do care about. But you’ll still get much the same answer. 🙁

HornetNow here’s a seriously WOW! image. Yes it’s a European Hornet, Vespa crabro; a humongous but relatively docile wasp**. Sadly you don’t see them often. But just look at those compound eyes … and the detail which I’m sure shows the substructure underneath the eye. I’ve looked out other images of hornets and they all seem to show the same eye substructure. Absolutely amazing!

** Note. Hornets are brown and yellow, as in the image. If what you see is black and yellow it’s a wasp, not a hornet, regardless of its size. Please leave all these creatures alone. They generally won’t attack you unless you provoke them. Wasps and Hornets are superb predators of other insects, on which they feed their grubs. Without them we’d be knee-deep in caterpillars etc. They also chew up old wood for their nests. Besides Hornets are becoming endangered.

If you had a pet monkey, would you feed it crap food and never let it exercise or play and tell it how stupid and ugly it was? No, you’d love your pet monkey! So love your Monkey!

We all make mistakes. They’re nothing to hide. But we all do hide mistake, because they make us feel stupid. Don’t be afraid of Stupid. Stupid means self-awareness. Stupid means you’re learning. Love your Stupid.