gltysk:

In 2008, a huge collection of more than 1,800 books, ledgers, and other banking documents dating from 1825 onward were discovered in storage in a downtown office building in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The documents were property of the New Bedford Merchants Bank (later the Merchants National Bank), which closed in 1916 and had once been frequented by many of the most influential whaling merchants of the 19th century. When the United Way moved their headquarters to a building on Williams Street, they found some very old pallets of books in the attic and designated them for salvage. Luckily, the New Bedford Whaling Museum was able to save the documents before they went on their way to antique shops around the country.

I had the honor of being able to help sort and catalogue some of these books 4 years ago when the museum was still trying to make sense of the sheer size of the new collection. Thumbing (very carefully!) through all of these almost 200 year old documents, admiring the Quaker scribes’s careful script (and penchant for recording days of the week as “First Day,” “Second Day,” instead of “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc) and reading all the signatures of people I’d read about in whaling history - William Rotch, Charles W. Morgan - was one of the defining moments of my life. I joke a lot about being a whaling and history nerd, but for some reason no one has ever inspired me as much as the Yankee whalers of the very first American oil industry.

The first photo above is a snapshot I took as the books were being taken off the pallets and piled up to be examined and sorted. If you click on the South Coast Today link, you can read the original article from the New Bedford Mercury, who came out to document some of our work that first day while Whaling Museum librarians Mike Dyer and Laura Pereira were there, and took the second and third photos. I’m the one in green :P (for some reason the reporter chose to take photos of us with a super wide-angle lens. I’m not sure why, as there was plenty of room in that warehouse space to use at least a 28mm.)

theoddmentemporium:

Meat-shaped Stone

In the collection of the National Palace Museum, two of the most famous works on display are “Jadeite Cabbage” and “Meat-shaped Stone”, which is why these two are often exhibited together for the appreciation of visitors. At first glance, this meat-shaped piece of stone looks like a luscious, mouth-watering piece of “Tung-p’o meat”. Made from banded jasper, it is a naturally occurring stone that accumulates in layers over many years. With time, different impurities will result in the production of various colors and hues to the layers. The craftsman who made this meat-shaped stone took the rich natural resources of this stone and carved it with great precision, and then the skin was stained. This process resulted in the appearance of skin and lean and fatty layers of meat, the veining and hair follicles making the piece appear even more realistic. (1644-1911)

biomedicalephemera:

Glaucus atlanticus - The Blue Glaucus

Top: Comparison for size - the Blue Glaucus does not exceed 5-7 cm long, but that’s huge compared to its nearest relative, Glaucilla marginata, which generally doesn’t exceed 18 mm.
Bottom left: Method of locomotion - Blue Glaucus float on the top of the ocean thanks to a gas sac in their abdomen, with their “head” facing upwards, and their cerata (those feathery appendages) dangling down.
Bottom right: Blue Glaucus from above. Note the numerous finger-like collections of cerata - in a full-grown adult, each of these can contain a concentrated dose of nematocyst venom.

Have you met my favorite nudibranch yet? I’m sure you have, and it’s totally cliche to love it, but whatever! I am a nudibranch hipster; I loved the blue sea swallow before the internet even caught wind of its awesomeness. JUST SAYIN’.

These seafaring drifters will float along with the current for days or weeks without feeding, using very little energy, until they sense a suitable prey within range - as these guys don’t move terribly well in the open ocean, “within range” is never much more than a few feet away. Favorite meals of the blue glaucus include the sailor by-the-wind (Velella velella) and the Portuguese man-o-war (Physalia physalis), the latter of which is particularly venomous. However, the blue glaucus is not only immune to the nematocyst venom, but possesses the ability to actually determine which stingers are the most venomous, and concentrate the venom of many meals into each “fingertip”, along with the stinging mechanism.

While they are unlikely to put anyone’s life in danger because of its tiny size, the blue glaucus can be found with venom two-to-twelve times stronger than that of each nematocyst on a Portuguese man-o-war, and is extremely painful when agitated. Though stings to humans are relatively rare, they apparently feel much like a bad hornet sting, with radiating burning pain, and both localized and generalized symptoms.

Images:
Taxonomy of Glaucus atlanticus. Natural History Museum of Britain.
Voyage dans l’Amerique meridionale. Alcide d’Orbigny, 1837.

jaynajaynajayna:

When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.

Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.

These pictures are drawn from the Flickr group “The Smiling Victorian” and show a perhaps surprising side to the people who’s “now” was a hundred years before our own.