Question About The Consequences Of The Events In Deep Wizardry. Will The Master Shark Be Replaced By

"With!!"

“With!”

here are some plasma waves recorded by the voyager from certain planets and turned into sounds audible to humans. they’re quite lovely, especially to meditate, astral project, or just fall asleep to.

Neptune

Jupiter

Uranus

Earth

Saturn

you have to pretend to be a wizard sometimes, for your health. the obvious method is d&d, but you can also open the dishwasher on cold mornings and raise your arms dramatically as you’re enveloped in the steam, or you can find a really good stick to walk around in the woods with, or you can run a bizarrely dedicated rp blog on tumblr. but it’s an important component of human well being to occasionally pretend to be a wizard.

A remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the 21st century. The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday [17 March 2021], is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t. Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. […] Before humans, orca were their only predators […]. It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched […].

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Headline and text published by: Philip Hoare. “Sperm whales in the 19th century shared ship attack information.” The Guardian. 17 March 2021.

Catching a sperm whale during the 19th century was much harder than even Moby Dick showed it to be. That’s because sperm whales weren’t just capable of learning the best ways to evade the whalers’ ships, they could quickly share this information with other whales, too, according to a study of whale-hunting records. […]

“At first, the whales reacted to the new threat of human hunters in exactly the same way as they would to the killer whale, which was their only predator at this time,” study lead author Hal Whitehead, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told Live Science. “[The sperm whales] all gathered together on the surface, put the baby in the middle, and tried to defend by biting or slapping their tails down. But when it comes to fending off Captain Ahab that’s the very worst thing they could do, they made themselves a very large target.”

The whales seem to have learned from their mistakes, and the ones that survived quickly adapted — instead of resorting to old tactics, the whalers wrote in their logbooks, the sperm whales instead chose new ones, swimming fast upwind away from the whalers’ wind-powered vessels. […]

The whales communicated with and learned from each other rapidly, and the lessons were soon integrated into their wider culture across the region, according to the researchers’ interpretation of the data.

“Each whale group that you meet at sea typically comprises two or three family units, and the units quite often split off and form other groups,” Whitehead said. “So, what we think happened is that one or two of the units that make up the group could have had encounters with humans before, and the ones who didn’t copied closely from their pals who had.“ 

Sperm whales are excellent intel sharers: Their highly observant, communicative nature, and the fact that each family unit only stays in larger groups for a few days at a time, means they can transmit information fast.

As studies show, that information could be news on new threats, new ways to hunt or new songs to sing.

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One example of whales’ extraordinary information sharing abilities involves lobtail feeding, in which a humpback whale slaps its tail hard against the water’s surface, submerges to blow disorienting bubbles around its prey, and then scoops the prey up in its mouth. Researchers first observed this tactic being used by a single whale in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1980, before it spread throughout the regional population in just 10 years.

Whale culture also extends far deeper than innovative ways to feed. “Sperm whales are divided into acoustic cultural climates,” Whitehead said. “They split themselves into large clans, each with distinctive patterns of sonar clicks, like a dialect, and they only form groups with members of the same clan.”

Different whale clans each have different ways of singing, moving, hunting and looking after their calves. These differences are profound enough to even give some clans a survival advantage during El Nino events, according to Whitehead. […]

In the 20th century, whales, especially the 13 species belonging to the category of ‘great whales’ — such as blue whales, sperm whales and humpback whales — found themselves pursued by steamships and grenade harpoons that they could not escape. These whales’ numbers plummeted and they soon faced extinction. […] [T]hey still face the growing destabilization of their habitats brought about by industrial fishing, noise pollution and climate change.

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Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Ben Turner. “Sperm whales outwitted 19th-century whalers by sharing evasive tactics.” Live Science. 19 March 2021.

I think this one might be my favorite book in the series...

Chapter Titles: Deep Wizardry

Kepler Mission Analysis Shows Reduced Number of Earth-Sized Planets in Field of View

A large number of worlds found by NASA’s Kepler alien planet-hunting space telescope are probably significantly larger than scientists previously estimated, a new study suggests. Using a galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, the image above shows the scale of the distances for the sample of stars with planet candidates described in a new study by scientists using the Kitt Peak National Observatory Mayall 4-meter telescope . The circled dot represents the position of the sun in the Milky Way, and the stippled cone shows how far away the new candidate stars are (2800-7000 light years), compared to the size of our galaxy. 

The Kepler Space Telescope has spotted more than 2,700 potential exoplanets since its launch in 2009, and scientists using the Kitt Peak National Observatory categorized the home stars of many of those planet candidates for the past three years. In particular, the researchers made detailed follow-up observations of 300 of the stars Kepler found likely to be harboring exoplanets.

The Kepler satellite, in orbit around the sun, stares at a region of the northern hemisphere sky sandwiched between the bright stars Vega and Deneb. Attached to the telescope is the largest imaging camera ever flown into space—16 million pixels—the only instrument on the telescope and the one used to monitor all the stars in its search for planets. Planets are detected if they pass in front of their parent sun, causing a very slight dip in the star’s brightness. When this dip repeats periodically, it reveals the presence of a possible planet, the length of the planet’s “year”, and other information.

One of the main findings of this initial work is that our observations indicate that most of the stars we observed are slightly larger than previously thought and one quarter of them are at least 35 percent larger,” astronomer and leader of the study Mark Everett said in a statement. “Therefore, any planets orbiting these stars must be larger and hotter as well. By implication, these new results reduce the number of candidate Earth-size planet analogues detected by Kepler.”

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Russian shorthand. 19th c.

book character fancast for repfest: #5

Xolo Maridueña as Kit Rodriguez, Young Wizards by Diane Duane

Chapter Titles: So You Want To Be A Wizard