Filtered for sexy animals (headphones required)

10.58, Friday 19 Jul 2019

1.

Orangina commercials. Watch at least until the forest one. File under “sexy animals.”

This message brought to you by today’s trailer for the movie Cats.

2.

The Popular Science Monthly, May 1877, “On the habits of ants” by Sir John Lubbock:

Landois is of [the] opinion that ants also make sounds in the same way [by rubbing their abdominal rings against another], though these sounds are inaudible to us. Our range is, however, after all, very limited, and the universe is probably full of music which we cannot perceive.

Emphasis mine. Source.

3.

The sound of dial-up internet, decoded: what each segment of beeps, ping-pong, and static is doing and what it means.

Also: A short video of opera singers dubbed with modem noises.

4.

My life has not been the same since I learnt that famously-silent giraffes are not in fact mute.

At midnight, in the pitch black, the neck becomes like a pipe organ, and they do this crazy deep ethereal HUMMING. Not kidding:

Listen to the video embedded here. (And read the paper.)

All I can think of is Palaeolithic humans on the African plains, it’s the dead of night, and they’re just bathing in this all-pervasive ASMR-inducing hum, the giraffes’ 14 Hz infrasound skewering the soul, the dark savannah as a nightly cathedral with no walls and for its roof the eternal stars.

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