nevillepark – Page 4 – Neville Park

Minecraft Math: How To Calculate Stronghold Locations With Polar Coordinates

Note: If you just want to know what numbers to plug in where, skip to here.

So, Minecraft strongholds. These are rare underground structures that contain End portals, the only way to access the alien dimension called the End. Here, players like to build high-powered XP farms, one of the quickest ways to accumulate levels for mending gear or enchanting. It’s also the only place to get valuable items like shulkers and elytra. But getting to an End portal can be annoying, especially if, like me, you are an extremely lazy coward. Continue reading Minecraft Math: How To Calculate Stronghold Locations With Polar Coordinates

My spidering kit

You don’t need a DSLR, professional science equipment, or even a really expensive smartphone to get up close with spiders (or any other bugs). I’ve been using my cheap-ass smartphone and gear cobbled together from the dollar store for years. So, here’s what I’m using right now, as well as some recommendations for other stuff I’ve used in the past. Continue reading My spidering kit

Update: CBC Radio stream URLs

I’ve updated my post on CBC Radio stream URLs after someone found links to MP3 versions of the streams. I’ve put together a second playlist which will work for older applications like Winamp that don’t support HLS. Yes, there are multiple people out there still using Winamp. I guess it really does whip the llama’s ass.

Arachnews: June 8, 2021

In the latest (ir)regular roundup of arachnid-related art, news, and science:

nature photography, cool videos, and game footage
upcoming events and conferences for everyone
media coverage of research about amblypygids and paradise jumping spiders
new species
and more!

Read it on Medium.

Update: Pinecone Spiders

Summer spidering season is well underway, and I’m no longer turning over pinecones in search of spiders. But I just stumbled across this 2016 blog post by Rod Crawford (of Seattle, WA’s Burke Museum) about Laurel Ramseyer’s research! Since 2008 she’s been sampling fallen pinecones for spiders—apparently a niche unexplored till now. This turned up the first record of the jumping spider Pseudoeuophrys lanigera in North America and has also proved useful for tracking the range of the crab spider Ozyptila praticola.

In 2015, Ramseyer and Crawford wrote a paper summarizing their findings about the pinecone-dwelling spiders of Washington State. A lot of mesh-web weavers (family Dictynidae), ground spiders (Gnaphosidae), sheet-web weavers and dwarf spiders (Linyphiidae), and cobweb spiders (Theridiidae). A lot different from all the running crab spiders (Philodromus) in my lakeside pinecones. They also mention finding a lot of Euryopis, a spider I’ve failed to find at all in my area despite seeing their distinctive tufty egg sacs all the time. Maybe that’s where I should be looking.

Time to do some reading and up my pinecone game…

Arachnews: May 3, 2021

Well, I’m back. Much like a tarantula, I felt the need to seal myself into a burrow for several months on end for no particular reason. This isn’t even close to covering the backlog. But here is a sprinkling of arachnid-related art, news, and science from the last several months, including:

VR spiderweb sound art
slingshot spiders and harvesters on treadmills
new species with nerdy and musical names
upcoming arachnology conferences
and more…

Field journal: Sumo mites

I just love red velvet mites—their soft, plush coats, their Shar-Pei wrinkles, that eye-popping red. Until now, all I’d really seen of their behaviour was eating midges, aphids, and other small insects. But recently I saw something quite astonishing for the first time. Continue reading Field journal: Sumo mites

Field journal: More spiders in pinecones

A nice routine I have fallen into over the past several months is spider-hunting while catching up on the podcast The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. And so I found myself in the nearly-deserted Marilyn Bell Park, listening to an episode on Byzantine philosophy, turning over every single pinecone in the hopes of finding some interesting spiders, when I hear Peter Adamson intone:

“Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect. The word ‘trainspotter’, which refers to a railway enthusiast, is, in British English, synonymous with ‘loser’, and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless.”

Me:

Me: ಠ___ಠ

Aaaanyway, here’s a bunch of spiders and whatnot I’ve found on recent winter excursions. Continue reading Field journal: More spiders in pinecones

Field Journal: A Sunnyside pinecone

A few days ago, suffering from cabin fever, I went down to the Sunnyside boardwalk to flip rocks and see what I could find. Pickings were meagre at first, but I struck pay dirt with a pinecone! Pinecones will now be part of my winter spider-hunting repertoire. Continue reading Field Journal: A Sunnyside pinecone