Periodical cicada Brood X will emerge in 15 states in 2021
cicadamania.com
cicadamania.com
> The emergence period of large prime numbers (13 and 17 years) was hypothesized to be a predator avoidance strategy adopted to eliminate the possibility of potential predators receiving periodic population boosts by synchronizing their own generations to divisors of the cicada emergence period. Another viewpoint holds that the prime-numbered developmental times represent an adaptation to prevent hybridization between broods with different cycles during a period of heavy selection pressure brought on by isolated and lowered populations during Pleistocene glacial stadia, and that predator satiation is a short-term maintenance strategy.
Wow.
So obvious primes such as 2, 3 and 5 won't do.
If not, processes that take more than one unit will overlap eventually[0]
[0] Advent of code 2020, day 13. https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/13
Like have a deterministic way of starting stuff that is not urgent, but has to be done in a certain window.
for example, I have cron jobs that run every night, and I run them at times like 2:13 am and 2:27 am.
it would be nice to say: run this at 2:<prime> at night, different every night
It would be nicer to say: run these groups of things at night, in order, but at randomized non-overlapping times or similar
There's also systemd timers which can replace cron jobs with RandomizedDelay.
Before that, people used to include a random sleep in the actual job.
Personally, I tend to not use these things and instead pick a random start time when provisioning the job. That way the time delta between run is constant, which is often desired.
> The next regular appearances will be in 2021 and 2038.
My friends, behold the parents of the 2038 bug.
I'd never seen anything like that ever before, I had to stop for gas, saw a few insects land, went in to pay and by the time I wanted to go back to the car it was literally covered in insects, there was no way to get into it without bringing a few hundred of them along. I ended up waiting out the worst of it.
Horror movies really don't capture the feeling well.
... we've all heard the factoid that the average person supposedly eats 4 spiders per second. This statistic is misleading; it's based on a study examining on the peak rate of spider consumption in areas where the spider-streams are densest. The global average rate is probably closer to 1 spider per second (obviously higher while asleep than while awake) ...
Fortunately I don't mind spiders much, but it did look like a scene out of a horror movie.
Places to Avoid, list written + maintained by Arthur Collé:
[] Deep space [added: after seeing Gravity]
[] Mariana Trench [added: after seeing Underwater]
[] Amazon rainforest [NEW, added: 2021-01-20]
Harvestmen are not even spiders. They're nonvenomous arachnids. Completely harmless.
Gravity takes place in near space, and it gets most of the gravity quite wrong.
Haha! That took me a minute. If that experience was anything to go by, spiders will be around long after humans have left.
They are pretty gentle as far as things go.
Around sunrise, they head to forested land northeast of the city. At sundown, they head back to their roosting grounds in Victoria Park. The sky is filled with hundreds of crows for approximately 10 to 15 minutes during this rush hour. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch.
Every so often, you get to be “lucky” winner of them roosting in a tree in your back yard overnight. They cackle throughout the night. Anything under the tree will be caked in droppings by morning.
I wouldn't stand for that....uh...shit.
The biggest plague used to be the Rocky Mountain locust, which would cover every surface for days, utterly destroying farms. Those went extinct in about 1905. The High Plains Locusts went extinct in about 1930. [1]
There are various theories about why they went extinct -- something to do with what the settlers and farmers were doing to the land. But it wasn't an obvious culprit like pesticide, which wasn't really in widespread use until about the 40s.
There is a locust swarm in Things Fall Apart (a work of fiction) which is viewed as cause for celebration. The locusts cover everything and eat the crops -- but they can be harvested and eaten themselves.
A devastating tale. We had to read it in school.
It stlll impresses me that they are better at keeping track of years than I am.
That sounds like something from Starcraft or Warhammer 40k.
Everything about this story made be smile. Except, you know, for the swarms of cicadas flooding our country. That part was a little less cool.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/05/04/the-broodax-im...
Playing 'tennis' as they fly across the yard. Dad was not pleased with cicada wings and goo dried on his favorite racket.
The cat eating so many he vomits.
The combined sound of thousands within earshot is not to be believed.
I actually checked air fares, thinking about 'cicada tourism'...
And I'm very fun at parties ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ
I hadn't thought about it in a long time. Fun memories.
Great info, and we do have a lot of Cicadas here in Brazil at this time of the year, wonder if perhaps there are similar broods.
K, no more internet today.
According to wiki, it seems like the periodic broods are solely within the US/Canada.
As a kid it was novel, if gross, With people cooped up inside these days, I feel like it'll be less of an issue.
The whole thumb. And that's just the length.
They're bigger than large cockroaches.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9b/06/00/9b0600f601c8bfada378...
> With people cooped up inside these days, I feel like it'll be less of an issue.
It'll sound nice. They produce an incredibly calming, "summer" sound.
Evolutionary niches are awesome.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19990488
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom
I noticed this because Alabama is not listed as one of the 15 states, despite being nearly surrounded by cicada observations. And I know from experience that the northern part of the state gets swarmed with cicadas when they emerge.
Cicada groups split off while they occupied glaciated territory. The Appalachia mountain range is famously, formed by glaciers. The Valley and Ridge part of Appalachia, was a major highway of immigration and colonization. It is more likely that territory borders respect the geography and that the brood respects geography, rather than to each other.
A rough inspection of the brood distribution and the continental divides shows approximate respect to the St. Lawrence and Eastern Continental Divide.
There also seems to be some respect to the division between Mississipi Flyway and Atlantic flyway, which are bird migration routes.
It is my understanding that an organism highly dependent on deciduous forests will respect those regions and this includes most of the South.
Turns out, humans like deciduous forests too. They're useful for timber, charcoal and potash (fertilizer). The borders of this territory lines up pretty squarely with the border to Canada. That makes civilization a predator of the cicada through deforestation. The Onondaga brood is named for the Onondaga people.
As I understand, the Brood distribution effort is done by crowdsourcing.
Given the longevity of the brood cycle and the inconsistency in historical record, it could very well just be the case that the recency of this effort has not synced with an emergence.
That's my guess why cicadas and humans line up.
More practically, cicada cycles provided a necessary evolutionary flush of nutrients, bacteria and fungi across the distributions. They breed in such overwhelming numbers that the entire ecosystem of predators is likely to prosper from their emergence. So perhaps humans settle where there is game and timber, and where there is game and timber it is likely that the area prospered from a cicada cycle.
/s
There's a scene in Silicon Valley based on a story about Peter Thiel.
The scene involves the idea of 'prime collision' and cicada cycles.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-peter-thiel-sesame-seed-scen...