A SaaS platform providing full-stack solution for planning events, from inception to execution. We make event planning simplified, data-driven and less intuitive for brands and enterprises. Spalba uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR) technologies to build compelling use ...

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&quot;Spalba is a Gurugram-based SaaS platform that makes events and experiences simple, efficient and data-driven for enterprises. The platform aims to infuse the required technologies in the right area. Spalba uses artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies to build compelling uses ...

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Team Spalba not only exhibited the professionalism expected of a best-in-class company, but also demonstrated the dynamism and composure that a conference of this scale and scope demanded— Raisina Dialogue 2021 hosted four heads of governments/states, several cabinet ministers, local government ...

SPALBA - An Event-Tech Platform

Spalba | 4,187 followers on LinkedIn. Spalba is a SaaS enabled marketplace used by event planners and venues to bring successful events to life. | Spalba is a SaaS enabled Marketplace simplifying event planning for enterprises. Discover venues, design events and view your events come to life ...

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Search from thousands of event venues - ballrooms, banquet halls, conference halls, luxury resorts, five-star hotels, wedding destinations and many more.

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The SPAL team has an international presence with subsidiaries and offices worldwide · The location of subsidiaries are carefully co-ordinated to optimize the distribution and marketing of SPAL products with customer service and distribution centers based close to key customers

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Corporates, Enterprises, Government Organizations, Associations, Event Management Companies, Educational Institutes, Private Organizations, Event Organizers, Exhibition Organizations, Media Houses, ... Spalba has not provided pricing details yet.

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Last year around July 2019, while we were discussing our work, the problem came out again, we discussed and discussed and discussed, we started working on it. Months passed and the belief grew stronger, finally in Jan 2020 we registered our company and founded Spalba, a creative tech company. ...

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A SaaS platform providing full-stack solution for planning events, from inception to execution

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This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
Authors:
(1) Jakob Vogel, M.A. Digital Humanities, Institute for Digital Humanities, Faculty of Philosophy, Georg August University of G¨ottingen. Table of Links Abstract and Intro
Diverse cross-document coreference and media bias analysis
Annotation tool
Annotation guidelines
Conclusion and future work
Acknowledgements
Bibliographical References 7. Bibliographical References Ad Fontes Media, Inc. 2023. Media Bias Chart, Version 2.8.4. https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-mediabias-chart/, accessed 06 Jul 2023. AllSides Technologies Inc. 2023. AllSides Media Bias Chart, Version 9.0. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/mediabias-chart, accessed 06 Jul 2023. Herbert H. Clark and Adrian Bangerter. 2004. Changing ideas about reference. In Experimental pragmatics, pages 25–49. Springer. Herbert H. Clark and Susan E Haviland. 1977. Comprehension and the Given-New contract. In Discourse Production and Comprehension, pages 1–40. Erlbaum. Felix Hamborg, Anastasia Zhukova, and Bela Gipp. 2019. Automated identification of media bias by word choice and labeling in news articles. In 2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 196–205. IEEE. Lynette Hirschman and Nancy Chinchor. 1998. Appendix F: MUC-7 coreference task definition (version 3.0). In Seventh Message Understanding Conference (MUC-7): Proceedings of a Conference Held in Fairfax, Virginia, April 29-May 1, 1998. Jan-Christoph Klie, Michael Bugert, Beto Boullosa, Richard Eckart de Castilho, and Iryna Gurevych. 2018. The INCEpTION Platform: Machine-Assisted and Knowledge-Oriented Interactive Annotation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 5–9. Association for Computational Linguistics. Royce Kurmelovs. 2023. Fox News labels Joe Biden a ’wannabe dictator’ during Trump speech. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/14/foxnews-labels-joe-biden-a-wannabe-dictatorduring-trump-speech, accessed 13 Sep 2023. Linguistic Data Consortium. 2005. ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English Annotation Guidelines for Events, Version 5.4.3. https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn .edu/files/english-events-guidelines-v5.4.3.pdf, accessed 22 Sep 2023. Linguistic Data Consortium. 2008. ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English Annotation Guidelines for Entities, Version 6.6. https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn .edu/files/english-entities-guidelines-v6.6.pdf, accessed 18 Sep 2023. Ruicheng Liu, Rui Mao, Anh Tuan Luu, and Erik Cambria. 2023. A brief survey on recent advances in coreference resolution. Artificial Intelligence Review, pages 1–43. Michael Luciano. 2023. Trump Debuts New Nickname for Biden at New Hampshire Rally. Mediaite. https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trumpdebuts-new-nickname-for-biden-at-newhampshire-rally/, accessed 13 Sep 2023. Anna Nedoluzhko, Jiˇr´ı M´ırovsk`y, and Petr Pajas. 2009. The coding scheme for annotating extended nominal coreference and bridging anaphora in the Prague Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW III), pages 108–111. Tim O’Gorman, Kristin Wright-Bettner, and Martha Palmer. 2016. Richer event description: Integrating event coreference with temporal, causal and bridging annotation. In Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on computing news storylines (CNS 2016), pages 47–56. Marta Recasens, Eduard Hovy, and M. Ant`onia Mart´ı. 2010. A Typology of Near-Identity Relations for Coreference (NIDENT). In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Sasha Spala, Nicholas A Miller, Yiming Yang, Franck Dernoncourt, and Carl Dockhorn. 2019. DEFT: A corpus for definition extraction in free-and semi-structured text. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 124–131. Timo Spinde, Christina Kreuter, Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Felix Hamborg, Bela Gipp, and Helge Giese. 2021a. Do you think it’s biased? how to ask for the perception of media bias. In 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 61–69. IEEE. Timo Spinde, David Krieger, Manuel Plank, and Bela Gipp. 2021b. Towards a reliable groundtruth for biased language detection. In 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 324–325. IEEE. Anastasia Zhukova, Felix Hamborg, Karsten Donnay, and Bela Gipp. 2022. XCoref: Crossdocument coreference resolution in the wild. In International Conference on Information, pages 272–291. Springer. Anastasia Zhukova, Felix Hamborg, and Bela Gipp. 2021. Towards Evaluation of Crossdocument Coreference Resolution Models Using Datasets with Diverse Annotation Schemes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05250. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Jakob Vogel, M.A. Digital Humanities, Institute for Digital Humanities, Faculty of Philosophy, Georg August University of G¨ottingen. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: Authors: (1) Jakob Vogel, M.A. Digital Humanities, Institute for Digital Humanities, Faculty of Philosophy, Georg August University of G¨ottingen. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Diverse cross-document coreference and media bias analysis Annotation tool Annotation guidelines Conclusion and future work Acknowledgements Bibliographical References Abstract and Intro Abstract and Intro Diverse cross-document coreference and media bias analysis Diverse cross-document coreference and media bias analysis Annotation tool Annotation tool Annotation guidelines Annotation guidelines Conclusion and future work Conclusion and future work Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Bibliographical References Bibliographical References 7. Bibliographical References Ad Fontes Media, Inc. 2023. Media Bias Chart, Version 2.8.4. https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-mediabias-chart/, accessed 06 Jul 2023. AllSides Technologies Inc. 2023. AllSides Media Bias Chart, Version 9.0. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/mediabias-chart, accessed 06 Jul 2023. Herbert H. Clark and Adrian Bangerter. 2004. Changing ideas about reference. In Experimental pragmatics, pages 25–49. Springer. Herbert H. Clark and Susan E Haviland. 1977. Comprehension and the Given-New contract. In Discourse Production and Comprehension, pages 1–40. Erlbaum. Felix Hamborg, Anastasia Zhukova, and Bela Gipp. 2019. Automated identification of media bias by word choice and labeling in news articles. In 2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 196–205. IEEE. Lynette Hirschman and Nancy Chinchor. 1998. Appendix F: MUC-7 coreference task definition (version 3.0). In Seventh Message Understanding Conference (MUC-7): Proceedings of a Conference Held in Fairfax, Virginia, April 29-May 1, 1998. Jan-Christoph Klie, Michael Bugert, Beto Boullosa, Richard Eckart de Castilho, and Iryna Gurevych. 2018. The INCEpTION Platform: Machine-Assisted and Knowledge-Oriented Interactive Annotation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 5–9. Association for Computational Linguistics. Royce Kurmelovs. 2023. Fox News labels Joe Biden a ’wannabe dictator’ during Trump speech. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/14/foxnews-labels-joe-biden-a-wannabe-dictatorduring-trump-speech, accessed 13 Sep 2023. Linguistic Data Consortium. 2005. ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English Annotation Guidelines for Events, Version 5.4.3. https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn .edu/files/english-events-guidelines-v5.4.3.pdf, accessed 22 Sep 2023. Linguistic Data Consortium. 2008. ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English Annotation Guidelines for Entities, Version 6.6. https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn .edu/files/english-entities-guidelines-v6.6.pdf, accessed 18 Sep 2023. Ruicheng Liu, Rui Mao, Anh Tuan Luu, and Erik Cambria. 2023. A brief survey on recent advances in coreference resolution. Artificial Intelligence Review, pages 1–43. Michael Luciano. 2023. Trump Debuts New Nickname for Biden at New Hampshire Rally. Mediaite. https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trumpdebuts-new-nickname-for-biden-at-newhampshire-rally/, accessed 13 Sep 2023. Anna Nedoluzhko, Jiˇr´ı M´ırovsk`y, and Petr Pajas. 2009. The coding scheme for annotating extended nominal coreference and bridging anaphora in the Prague Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW III), pages 108–111. Tim O’Gorman, Kristin Wright-Bettner, and Martha Palmer. 2016. Richer event description: Integrating event coreference with temporal, causal and bridging annotation. In Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on computing news storylines (CNS 2016), pages 47–56. Marta Recasens, Eduard Hovy, and M. Ant`onia Mart´ı. 2010. A Typology of Near-Identity Relations for Coreference (NIDENT). In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Sasha Spala, Nicholas A Miller, Yiming Yang, Franck Dernoncourt, and Carl Dockhorn. 2019. DEFT: A corpus for definition extraction in free-and semi-structured text. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 124–131. Timo Spinde, Christina Kreuter, Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Felix Hamborg, Bela Gipp, and Helge Giese. 2021a. Do you think it’s biased? how to ask for the perception of media bias. In 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 61–69. IEEE. Timo Spinde, David Krieger, Manuel Plank, and Bela Gipp. 2021b. Towards a reliable groundtruth for biased language detection. In 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 324–325. IEEE. Anastasia Zhukova, Felix Hamborg, Karsten Donnay, and Bela Gipp. 2022. XCoref: Crossdocument coreference resolution in the wild. In International Conference on Information, pages 272–291. Springer. Anastasia Zhukova, Felix Hamborg, and Bela Gipp. 2021. Towards Evaluation of Crossdocument Coreference Resolution Models Using Datasets with Diverse Annotation Schemes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05250.

Code Book for Annotation of Diverse Cross-Document Coreference: Conclusion and Future Work

Code Book for Annotation of Diverse Cross-Document Coreference: Annotation Tool

Hi there 👋 For this week's analysis, we found . 5 TypeScript repos adored by the top 1% of developers Ready to check them out? How do we identify the "top 1%" of devs? 🔎 Have you ever heard of ? DevRank In simple terms, DevRank uses to measure Google’s PageRank algorithm how important a developer is in open source based on their contributions to open source repos. After finding the repos that the top 1% have starred, we calculate the likelihood that these top devs will star a repo compared to the likelihood that the bottom 50% won’t. 📊👇 🙏 Note: I recognize that this is not yet perfect, so we keep improving our model. We welcome any feedback on this. ranking method The below repos will be particularly useful when you want to build your own projects. If you want to build small apps, check out Creator Quests, an with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more. 🙃 💰 open-source challenge rewarding devs for creating cool apps The latest Creator Quest challenges you to build developer tools using GenAI. , and it will increase as more participants join. To participate, The current prize pool is $2048 you can check out on Quine.sh. Quests Now that we've explored the methodology let's dive into five fantastic TypeScript repositories that can take your work to the next level 🚀 🧩 amilajack/eslint-plugin-compat A tool to check your code's browser compatibility Eslint-plugin-compat ensures that your code is compatible with your target browsers. This tool examines your JavaScript code to flag features that may not work in the browser environment. It is useful for avoiding browser-specific issues and providing a consistent user experience across different websites. Why should you care? : Set up npm install eslint-plugin-compat Example Use Case: # 1. Update ESLint Config in .eslintrc.json:

{
 "plugins": ["compat"],
 "extends": ["plugin:compat/recommended"],
 "env": {
 "browser": true
 }
 // ...
}

# 2. Configure Target Browsers in your package.json:

{
 // ...
 "browserslist": ["defaults"]
} https://github.com/amilajack/eslint-plugin-compat 🔗 jeffijoe/typesync Installs your dependencies' missing TypeScript typings TypeSync automatically installs TypeScript type definitions for all dependencies in the project. The tool scans your package.json file and automatically adds the appropriate , saving you the trouble of adding them manually. It really saves time and ensures that your project's type-checking is correct and compatible with your dependencies. Why should you care? @types/package : Set up npm install -g typesync : Example use case typesync [path/to/package.json] [--dry]

# Path is relative to the current working directory. If omitted, defaults to package.json.
# If --dry is specified, will not actually write to the file, it only prints added/removed typings. https://github.com/jeffijoe/typesync 👯‍♀️ scinos/yarn-deduplicate Deduplicate your yarn.lock files It helps clean up project dependencies. It makes your project lighter and potentially faster by removing duplicate packages from your . This tool is handy if you're using Yarn v1, as it doesn't support native package deduplication like Yarn v2 does. Why should you care? yarn.lock file : OR Set up npm install -g yarn-deduplicate yarn global add yarn-deduplicate : Simply run Example use case yarn-deduplicate yarn.lock https://github.com/scinos/yarn-deduplicate ⭕️ discord/focus-rings Helping you display focus indicators anywhere on a webpage. Focus indicators are visual cues that highlight which element on a webpage is currently selected. React-focus-rings is a tool for creating a consistent and good-looking visual focus in web applications. This makes it easy to use focus rings to ensure your website is efficient and accessible to all users, including keyboard navigation users. Why should you care? : Set up npm i react-focus-rings : Example use case import * as React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";

import { FocusRing, FocusRingScope } from "react-focus-rings";
import "react-focus-rings/src/styles.css";

function App() {
 const containerRef = React.useRef<HTMLDivElement>(null);
 return (
 <div className="app-container" ref={containerRef}>
 <FocusRingScope containerRef={containerRef}>
 <div className="content">
 Here's a paragraph with some text.
 <FocusRing offset={-2}>
 <button onClick={console.log}>Click Me</button>
 </FocusRing>
 Here's another paragraph with more text.
 </div>
 </FocusRingScope>
 </div>
 );
}

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.body); https://github.com/discord/focus-rings 🔦 g-plane/typed-query-selector and Better typed querySelector querySelectorAll Typed-query-selector improves the standard querySelector and querySelectorAll functions by providing better typing using TypeScript's template literal types. This means you'll get much more precision for DOM elements, making your TypeScript code safer and easier to use; especially when dealing with complex selectors or actions directly with DOM elements in type-safe mode. Why should you care? : Set up npm i -D typed-query-selector : Example use case import 'typed-query-selector'

document.querySelector('div#app') // ==> HTMLDivElement

document.querySelector('div#app > form#login') // ==> HTMLFormElement

document.querySelectorAll('span.badge') // ==> NodeListOf<HTMLSpanElement>

anElement.querySelector('button#submit') // ==> HTMLButtonElement https://github.com/g-plane/typed-query-selector I hope these discoveries are of value to you and will help you build a more robust Typescript toolkit! ⚒️ It's time to code, have fun, and bag some awesome rewards. 🤘 PS: I am not affiliated with them. I just think that great projects deserve great recognition. Please consider supporting these projects by starring them. ⭐️ See you next week, Your Hackernoon buddy 💚 Bap Also published . here

This Week's Repo Gems: 5 TypeScript Repos You Need to Check Out

Map of the Internet I recently expanded on my Internet map visualization that showed all of the undersea internet cables that run along the bottom of the oceans and seas. This time, I also added dots that represent the locations of all of the advertised internet exchanges in the world. The brighter/greener/bigger the dot, the more bandwidth the internet exchange supports. What’s an internet exchange? Internet Exchange: An Internet exchange, often referred to as an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), is a physical infrastructure or facility where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other network operators connect their networks together to exchange Internet traffic. The primary purpose of an internet exchange is to improve the efficiency of data exchange between different networks by allowing direct peering between them. Instead of sending data through multiple third-party networks, which can lead to increased latency and costs, ISPs can directly exchange traffic at an internet exchange, resulting in faster and more cost-effective data transmission. Internet exchanges play a crucial role in the functioning of the global internet. By facilitating direct peering, they help reduce the reliance on expensive long-distance links and enhance the overall performance and resilience of the internet. They also promote competition among ISPs and encourage the growth of internet infrastructure in specific regions. Traceroute Command: The command is a network diagnostic tool used to trace the route that data packets take from one computer to another across a network, typically the Internet. It helps identify the network path taken by the data, showing the sequence of intermediate devices (routers) that the packets pass through before reaching the destination. traceroute $ sudo mtr apple.com
                            My traceroute  [v0.95]
kevins-mbp-m1.local (192.168.88.31) -> apple.com (17.22023-08-02T13:19:54+0200
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                      Packets               Pings
 Host                               Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. router.lan                       0.0%     5    5.2   4.8   4.3   5.2   0.4
 2. 10.24.0.1                        0.0%     4    4.7   4.6   4.3   5.0   0.3
 3. soeborg2.net.gigabit.dk          0.0%     4    5.6   6.6   5.5   9.7   2.1
 4. apple-1.equinix-am1.nl-ix.net    0.0%     4   15.6  15.5  14.1  16.6   1.0
 5. apple.com.sg                     0.0%     4   15.2  15.0  14.5  15.6   0.5 In the provided example output: is the name of the source host or the computer from which the is initiated. That’s my laptop, so I know that it is located in Copenhagen, Denmark. kevins-mbp-m1.local traceroute is the destination host or the target server to which the is being performed. apple.com traceroute The columns in the output represent the following information: : The intermediate routers or nodes in the network path. Host : The percentage of packet loss experienced while reaching each router. Loss% : The number of packets sent to each router. Snt : The last round-trip time taken to reach the router. Last : The average round-trip time to reach the router. Avg : The best (minimum) round-trip time to reach the router. Best : The worst (maximum) round-trip time to reach the router. Wrst : The standard deviation of round-trip times to the router. StDev Identifying Exchange Location using Reverse IP Lookup: In the output, you can sometimes infer the location of an internet exchange based on the names of the intermediate routers. Many internet exchanges are named explicitly to indicate their location. For example, in the provided , the router with the name suggests that it is associated with Equinix Amsterdam (AM1), which is a prominent internet exchange in Amsterdam, Netherlands. traceroute traceroute apple-1.equinix-am1.nl-ix.net However, it’s important to note that not all routers or nodes in a traceroute will have such descriptive names. Some routers might be labeled with IP addresses or generic names that do not reveal their location. In such cases, it becomes more challenging to pinpoint the exact location of an internet exchange solely based on the traceroute output. Additionally, the reverse IP lookup method depends on the accuracy and up-to-date information in the IP address registries, and some routers might not be accurately represented. Because of all of this, we can see the path that is taken when connecting to a server, which I think is really cool. With my example, I can know that it takes around 15.5 milliseconds for my network traffic to reach the Netherlands, and I can tell that Apple is peering directly in this facility. You can verify this fact by looking at . Essentially, if you want to load faster for your users who are near(ish) to Amsterdam, you may want to run some fiber optic cable to this internet exchange. Put another way, the closer you are to the dots, the closer you are to the internet. PeeringDB apple.com How it’s made First, this is where I got the data from: - PeeringDB is a user-driven database that offers information about network interconnection facilities and peering arrangements, supporting network administrators in optimizing Internet connectivity. PeeringDB - I used this dataset to geolocate all internet exchanges in PeeringDB using the city and country fields. Simple Maps - TeleGeography maintains a database of all major submarine fiber optic cables and their status. Submarine Cable Map Next, these are the different tools/languages that I used: Javascript (nodejs) - D3.js is a powerful JavaScript library for data visualization that allows developers to create interactive and dynamic charts, graphs, and other visual representations on the web using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3 - library that helps with running d3 inside of a nodejs environment d3-node - library that handles translating coordinates for different map projections. I know it’s controversial now, but the earth isn’t flat. So to make a flat image you have to pick how you are going to translate the globe coordinates onto a map. Despite its flaws, I used the because it is by far the most popular map projection. d3-geo mercator projection - This is my current working language, so it’s what I used to integrate with the PeeringDB API and do some data processing/validation. The Go Programming Language - A library for talking to the PeeringDB API. PeeringDB The pipeline looks like this: Mapping of Cities to lat/long GPS coordinates I had so many data validation issues when doing this project. I should have expected this more since PeeringDB is user-managed, and there’s no validation of the City field. I had a lot of random issues mapping internet exchanges with their GPS coordinates. First, the geolocation database I was using was not complete. It only has around 43 thousand cities, but there are many, many more towns and cities. The way I handled that was to manually map to the closest city that I do have geo coordinates for. Additionally, the city field would be misspelled or formatted in a way differently than my database, or the name of the city may have changed. This happens a lot because there are usually multiple ways to convert many languages into Latin characters. And sometimes cities just change their names. All-in-all, I have 95 internet exchanges that I have had to manually map. I can’t guarantee that they are all correct… but it is definitely good enough. You can see all of the places that I manually mapped . on github Here are my favorites: There was an Internet Exchange named “BGP.Exchange - Los Angles.” Either they were talking about Los Angeles, or they just really like angles. - entry on PeeringDB (note: I believe they fixed the city entry but haven’t yet fixed the name of the IX) There is an exchange named “Example IX” which is obviously just used as an example: entry on PeeringDB The accepted Western name for the capital city of Ukraine changed from Kiev to Kyiv due to the efforts of a campaign called . There are several internet exchanges still using the old spelling in its address. KyivNotKiev Observations from the map Now here’s the pretty part. Here are close-ups of different parts of the map with some general observations. North America The internet exchanges in North America look how I’d imagine them. There are more and higher bandwidth internet exchanges on the eastern side of the US and a good amount along the west coast. However, there are some very important internet exchanges in Colorado. It likely serves as a good halfway point between East and West to transition traffic to different backbone providers. Europe After seeing the map from North America, it’s rather surprising to see how dense European internet exchanges are. There’s almost too much to comment on here, but I will say that it’s interesting how important Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London are. Asia-Pacific The area around Asia looks rather crazy, but it’s important to note that fiber links can visit islands along the way in order to give them internet access. Those islands will have networking gear that ‘drops’ and ‘adds’ certain channels of the signal. The network device is typically a ROADM (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer). I bet you can guess why they made that an acronym. Also, I think open peering in China is not really a thing, as I believe most traffic goes through so-called backbone providers instead of through internet exchanges. This is likely related to the . On the map, you only see a good number of internet exchanges in Hong Kong. great firewall of China Africa Africa has many optical cables that travel along coasts. I suspect the terrestrial optical networks aren’t as well developed in most parts of Africa. There are exceptions, though. There is a lot of bandwidth capacity in internet exchanges in Capetown and Pretoria. Also, it’s crazy to see how many optical cables lie at the bottom of the Suez canal. South America In South America, we have Fortaleza and Sao Paula have a lot of landings and internet exchanges. Svalbard Svalbard is a set of islands owned by Norway that is waaay far north. It’s one of those places that gets six months of day followed by six months of night. And it’s always super cold. It’s interesting to see two undersea cables to a place like this. Svalbard is where lives, with seeds from all over the world. If you want to use these two cables, you can check out . the global seed vault some webcams that are set up in Svalbard Maldives Maldives is another interesting place where fiber optic cables live. You might notice that the fiber optic cables cross each other. It appears that it was done in order to connect islands that the first cable didn’t service before. The cables were commissioned around five years apart. It must have been a hard five years if you lived on one of the islands that didn’t get high-speed internet in the first round. Thanks for reading So far, I’m pretty happy with the results of this little project. If I were to work more on this, I would want there to be an actual heatmap instead of just drawing dots. I have attempted to do this, but it was taking too long to figure out how to properly do it, specifically with the node-d3 library. Also, there’s probably a lot of data validation that I could do… but I do feel like it’s not my job to fix this database, so I’m probably not going to do that for the sake of a small side project. The part that is still missing is the terrestrial fiber links. There’s not good public data on those for a number of reasons, but you can be assured that there are significant backbone fiber optic cables buried nearby almost every major highway and rail line in the US. So imagine lines that nearly mimic the US road system, and you’ll have an idea of what that map would look like. That may actually be the next step for this map since it’s a bit hard to understand that we only have undersea cables. References: Github: https://github.com/sudorandom/submarine-cable-map PeeringDB: https://www.peeringdb.com/ Simple Maps (Geolocation Database): https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities Submarine Cable Map: https://submarinecablemap.com Also published . here

Mapping the Internet: A Visualization of the Web

Architectural Designs

Our Humble Helpers: Familiar Talks on the Domestic Animals by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE TURKEY CHAPTER IX. THE TURKEY Turkey “Of our barnyard fowls, the turkey is the most remarkable except the peacock, which is raised only for the incomparable richness of its plumage. The turkey-gobbler has his head and neck covered with bare bluish skin, embellished behind with white nipples and in front with red ones, which swell and hang down in large pendants, resembling sealing wax in color. Over his beak falls a piece of flesh, short and wrinkled when the bird is in repose, hanging far down and of brilliant coloring when he wishes to display his charms. In the middle of his breast is fastened an unkempt sort of mane. To show off, he bridles up, inflates his red pendants, elongates the piece of flesh over his beak, throws his head back, spreads out his tail feathers in the shape of a wheel, and lets the tips of his half-opened wings trail on the ground. In this grotesquely proud posture he turns slowly to let himself be admired from all sides. From time to time a low sound, puff-puff, accompanied by a sort of convulsive stretching of the wings, is the sign of his supreme satisfaction. If some noise, especially whistling, disturbs him, he hauls down his colors and, stretching his neck, hastily gives a gloo-gloo-gloo that seems to burst from the very depths of his stomach.” “By whistling to the turkeys feeding in the fields,” said Emile, “I can make them repeat their cry as often as I want to. The turkey hens do not say gloo-gloo; they peep plaintively.” “This fowl is a recent acquisition of our poultry-yards,” resumed Uncle Paul. “It came to us from North America in the sixteenth century. As America was called West Indies in contrast with the Asian or East Indies, the bird originating in the forests of the New World was called the Indian cock (coq d’Inde) and the Indian hen (poule d’Inde); from which have come the French terms dindon and dinde. For a long time the bird spread but little; it was raised merely as a curious rarity. The first that appeared on the table was, they say, at the wedding feast of Charles IX. “The turkey lived, and still lives to-day, in a wild state, in the forests of the United States of North America. Its habits are described by a celebrated naturalist, Audubon, who, with his gun on his shoulder, [ ]his notebook, pencil, and brushes in his game-bag, traversed the most secluded solitudes in order to observe, paint, and describe birds. 1 71 “ ‘The nest,’ he tells us, ‘which consists of a few withered leaves, is placed on the ground, in a hollow scooped out by the side of a log, or in the fallen top of a dry leafy tree, under a thicket of sumach or briars, or a few feet within the edge of a cane-brake, but always in a dry place.… When depositing her eggs, the female always approaches the nest with extreme caution, scarcely ever taking the same course twice, and when about to leave them covers them carefully with leaves, so that it is very difficult for a person who may have seen the bird to discover the nest.… “ ‘The mother will not leave her eggs when near hatching, under any circumstances, while life remains. She will even allow an enclosure to be made around her, and thus suffer imprisonment, rather than abandon them. I once witnessed the hatching of a brood of turkeys, which I watched for the purpose of securing them together with the parent. I concealed myself on the ground within a very few feet, and saw her raise herself half the length of her legs, look anxiously upon the eggs, cluck with a sound peculiar to the mother on such occasions, carefully remove each half-empty shell, and with her bill caress and dry the young birds, that already stood tottering and attempting to make their way out of the nest. [ ]Yes, I have seen this, and have left mother and young to better care than mine could have proved—to the care of their Creator and mine. I have seen them all emerge from the shell, and, in a few moments after, tumble, roll, and push each other forward, with astonishing and inscrutable instinct.’ ” 72 Turkey “That’s the kind of hunter I like,” declared Jules; “one who knows how to restrain himself at the touching sight of a nest of young birds. What did you say his name was?” “Audubon.” “I shan’t forget that name again.” “And that will be right, for few observers have discoursed on birds with so much sympathetic understanding as he. “I continue to draw from his account. ‘About the beginning of October,’ says he, ‘when scarcely any of the seeds and fruits have yet fallen from the trees, these birds assemble in flocks, and gradually move towards the rich bottom lands of the Ohio and Mississippi.… When they come upon a river, they betake themselves to the highest eminences, and there often remain a whole day, or sometimes two, as if for the purpose of consultation. During this time, [ ]the males are heard gobbling, calling, and making much ado, and are seen strutting about, as if to raise their courage to a pitch befitting the emergency. Even the females and young assume something of the same pompous demeanor, spread out their tails, and run round each other, purring loudly, and performing extravagant leaps. At length, when the weather appears settled, and all around is quiet, the whole party mounts to the tops of the highest trees, whence, at a signal, consisting of a single cluck, given by a leader, the flock takes flight for the opposite shore. The old and fat birds easily get over, even should the river be a mile in breadth; but the younger and less robust frequently fall into the water—not to be drowned, however, as might be imagined. They bring their wings close to their body, spread out their tail as a support, stretch forward their neck, and striking out their legs with great vigor, proceed rapidly toward the shore; on approaching which, should they find it too steep for landing, they cease their exertions for a few moments, float down the stream until they come to an accessible part, and by a violent effort extricate themselves from the water. It is remarkable that, immediately after thus crossing a large stream, they ramble about for some time, as if bewildered. In this state, they fall an easy prey to the hunter. 73 “ ‘Of the numerous enemies of the wild turkey, the most formidable, excepting man, are the lynx, the snowy owl, and the Virginia owl.… As turkeys usually roost in flocks, on naked branches of trees, they [ ]are easily discovered by their enemies, the owls, which, on silent wing, approach and hover around them for the purpose of reconnoitering. This, however, is rarely done without being discovered, and a single cluck from one of the turkeys announces to the whole party the approach of the murderer. They instantly start upon their legs, and watch the motions of the owl, which, selecting one as its victim, comes down upon it like an arrow, and would inevitably secure the turkey, did not the latter at that moment lower its head, stoop, and spread its tail in an inverted manner over its back, by which action the aggressor is met by a smooth inclined plane, along which it glances without hurting the turkey; immediately after which the latter drops to the ground, and thus escapes, merely with the loss of a few feathers.’ ” 74 “To make a breastplate of the tail spread out like a wheel is a very ingenious means of defense,” remarked Emile. “The turkey is not so foolish as people think.” “It is so far from being foolish that we have not in the poultry-yard a more impassioned lover of liberty. In their native country turkeys wander through the great woods from morning to night in untiring search of insects and fat larvæ, fruit and seeds of all kinds, acorns and nuts especially, of which they are very fond. Thus the stay-at-home habits of the poultry-yard do not suit them at all. They must have the open air of the fields and the exercise of long walks. Moors, woods, hills abounding in grasshoppers, [ ]are their favorite haunts. Their timid nature makes them very docile. A child armed with a long switch is enough to lead the flock to the fields, however numerous it may be. Then, step by step, to-day in one direction, to-morrow in another, the flock explores the stubble and gleans the grain fallen from the ear, traverses the grassy meadows where the crickets leap, and penetrates the woods where is found abundant pasturage of chestnuts, beechnuts, and acorns. 75 “In spite of these rambles afield, which remind it a little of the wandering life it leads in the immense forests of its native country, the turkey never acquires in domesticity the plumpness of body and richness of plumage that belong to it in its free state. It is a curious fact that, contrary to all our experience with other animals, which have improved under human care and have increased in size, the turkey alone has degenerated in our hands, as if preyed upon by an ineradicable regret for its native forests, where bellows the buffalo, chased by the red-skinned Indian. The domestic turkey is not much more than half as large as the wild one. And then what a difference in the plumage! Our poultry-yard fowl is of a uniform black or of a dull red, sometimes white. The bird of the wooded solitudes of the New World is splendid in costume. Bronzed brown predominates, but the neck, throat, and back have, in the light, metallic reflections; and as the plumage is clearly imbricated, the whole gives the appearance of scale armor in gold and steel. Furthermore, the [ ]large wing-feathers have a pure white spot on the tip.” 76 “From that description,” said Jules, “I see well enough that the bird has not gained by living with us.” “Nor has its flesh gained in nutritive quality, that of the wild turkey being considered incomparably superior.” “It is just the opposite with the common hen,” observed Louis. “Originally as small as the partridge and with as little flesh, it has developed into the fat poulard.” “Such as it is,” said Uncle Paul, “the domestic turkey is none the less, next to the common fowl, the most valuable acquisition of the poultry-yard. Let us now turn our attention to it. “The laying of its eggs takes place in April, when about twenty to a nest are laid, of a dull white with reddish spots. These eggs are scarcely ever used as food; not that they are bad—far from it—but they are too precious and too few to be converted into omelets. As fast as the turkey-hen lays them they are gathered and kept in a basket lined with hay or old rags until the time for setting. The gathering of these eggs is not always easy. Faithful to her wild habits, the turkey-hen does not willingly accept the poultry-house nest. She steals away to lay her eggs in neighboring straw-ricks, underbrush, and hedges. One must watch her proceedings therefore, foil her ruses, and from time to time visit her favorite haunts.[ ] 77 “Incubation presents no difficulties, the female turkey being so good a brooder. Like the common hen, she devotes herself to her eggs with passionate love; like the hen, too, while setting she forgets her food, so that she must be taken off the nest every day and made to eat and drink, as otherwise she might let herself die of hunger. The little ones hatch at the end of thirty days. There is nothing more delicate than these new-born chicks; the least cold chills them, a shower of rain is fatal to them, even the dew imperils their lives, and a hot sun kills them in a trice. If there is delay in feeding, and the mother, of ponderous bulk, awkwardly plants her feet in the midst of her numerous offspring, then the greedy little things are liable to be trampled on and crushed to death. Another danger awaits them at the age of two or three months. Young turkeys hatch with the heads covered with down, with no sign of the red nipples that will ornament them later. Within two or three months these nipples, real collars, and pendants of coral begin to show; they say then that the red is starting. At this time there takes place in the bird a painful change which to many is mortal, especially in a damp season. To succor the sick ones, they are made to swallow a few mouthfuls of warm wine. All things considered, there are numberless chances of death for the turkey-hen’s brood. Add to that the small number of eggs laid, and we can understand why, in spite of its great utility, the turkey is less common than the ordinary fowl. “Audubon has told us that when, from his concealment [ ]in the bushes, he witnessed the mother turkey’s anxious procedure, the young ones left the nest almost as soon as the shell was broken. For a moment the mother warms and dries them under her breast; then, trotting and tumbling, they abandon the bed of leaves, never to return. In domesticity it is much the same; no sooner are they hatched than the little turkeys leave the nest and thenceforth have no other shelter than the cover of their mother, who protects them under her wings exactly as the hen protects her brood. She also takes the same care of her family, exercises the same vigilance in foreseeing danger, shows the same audacity in coping with the bird of prey. For the first few days the refuge afforded by the wide and deep coop, so useful to the little chickens, is not less useful to the young turkeys. The hen-turkey is put there with choice provisions, and the little ones are free to come and go as they please. These provisions consist of a pap similar to that given to young chickens and composed of bread-crumbs, curds, chopped salad leaves and nettles, a little bran, and hard-boiled eggs. Later comes grain, oats in particular. When the weather is fine the coop is put out of doors in a sunny spot, on very dry ground, and the brood is allowed to play about for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. Great care must be taken to avoid rain, dew, and dampness; a wet turkey chick is in grave danger. 78 “The more delicate the bird at the beginning, the more robust it is when it has successfully passed the [ ]period called the red. It no longer needs the shelter of the poultry-house at night. However cold it may be, it sleeps in the open air, roosting on the branches of some dead tree or on a perch fixed to the wall. Vainly does the north wind whistle and the frost nip; the turkey rests peacefully in the manner of its fellows in the woods of America, and without fear lest a snow-owl come to disturb its slumbers and compel it to spread its tail quickly and make a breastplate against the marauder’s talons. 79 “I will finish this story with a few words on a curious method of fattening used in certain countries, especially in Provence, Morvan, and Flanders. Over and above the usual food that fattening birds eat voluntarily, they force both the gobbler and the hen to swallow whole nuts.” “Whole, but without the shell?” queried Emile. “No, my friend; with the shell too; in fact, nuts just as the tree bears them.” “A nut with the shell, no matter how small, must make a hard mouthful to swallow, and still harder to digest.” “I don’t deny it; but finally, with the finger pushing the nut a little into the throat, and the hand gently pressing from the base of the beak to the crop, the voluminous mouthful ends by going down, not without some grimaces on the part of the bird.” “And reason enough for them!” exclaimed Emile. “One nut would be nothing; but that is not all. The next day they force it to swallow two, the next [ ]three, and so on, augmenting the dose each day. In Provence they stop at forty nuts a day; elsewhere they go on to a hundred.” 80 “And the turkey does not die, stuffed thus with nuts as large and hard as stones?” asked Jules. “You would be pleased to see how the bird prospers and fattens on food that would choke any other creature.” “With a hundred nuts in its crop, or even only forty,” was Louis’s comment, “the turkey can’t be very comfortable.” “They are not swallowed all at one time, but in portions during the day.” “No matter,” persisted Jules; “if you hadn’t already told us, according to that learned Italian—Wait a minute; what was his name?” “The abbot Spallanzani.” “Yes, the abbot Spallanzani. If you hadn’t told us about his experiments and the wonderful power of the gizzard, I should never be able to understand how a turkey could manage to digest nuts, shell and all, up to forty and even a hundred a day.” “Everything is reduced to a sort of soup in the gizzard—shells and kernels; all becomes as soft as butter; and the bird, fat as a pig, finally serves as the chief dish at the Christmas feast.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). Our Humble Helpers: Familiar Talks on the Domestic Animals. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67073/pg67073-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE TURKEY

Our Humble Helpers: Familiar Talks on the Domestic Animals by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE GIZZARD CHAPTER II. THE GIZZARD “Nearly all the higher or mammiferous animals,” Uncle Paul continued, “such as the dog, cat, wolf, horse, have only one digestive pouch—a stomach—where the alimentary substances are dissolved and made fluid, so as to enter the veins and be turned into blood, by which all parts of the body are nourished. But the ox, goat, and sheep—the cud-chewers, in short—have four digestive cavities, which I will tell you about later. I will tell you how, in the pasture, these animals hastily swallow almost unchewed grass and put it by in a large reservoir called a paunch, from which it comes up again afterward in a season of repose, to be rechewed at leisure in small mouthfuls. “Well, birds are fashioned in a similar way, as far as eating is concerned. Not being able to chew, as they have no teeth, they swallow their food without any preparation, nearly as the beak has seized it, and amass a quantity of it in a spacious stomach, just as the ox does in his paunch. From this reservoir the food passes, little by little, into two other digestive cavities, one of which immerses it in a liquid calculated to dissolve it, and the other grinds and triturates it better than the best pair of jaws could [ ]do. There takes place a kind of chewing, it is true, only the food, instead of returning to the beak, where teeth are lacking for its thorough mastication, continues its journey, and on the way comes to the triturating machine. Birds, then, are generally provided with three digestive cavities. 18 “The first is the crop, situated just at the base of the neck. It is a bag with thin and flexible walls, its size proportioned to the resistant nature of the food eaten. It is very large in birds that feed on grain, especially the hen, and is medium-sized, or even wholly wanting, in those that live on prey, which is much easier to digest than dry and hard seeds. In the crop, the food swallowed in haste remains hours and even days, as in a reservoir; there it softens somewhat, and is then submitted to the action of the other digestive pouches. The crop corresponds in a certain sense to the bag in which the pelican stores up his fishing; it represents also the first stomach of the ox and the other cud-chewers or ruminants. “Next to the crop is a second enlargement, called the succenturiate ventricle, of small capacity but remarkable for a liquid of a bitter taste that oozes in fine drops through its walls and moistens the food as it passes. This liquid is a digestive juice; it has the property of dissolving the alimentary substances as soon as trituration has done the greater part of the work. The food does not remain in this second stomach; it merely passes through to become impregnated with the digestive juice. “The third and last stomach is known as the gizzard. It is rounded and is slightly flattened on both sides, like a watch-case, and is composed—especially in birds that live on grain—of a very thick, fleshy wall, lined on the inside with a kind of hard and tenacious leather which protects the organ from attrition. Finally, it is to be noted that at the same time the bird is swallowing grain it takes care also to swallow a little gravel, some very small stones which, away down in the gizzard, will perform the office of teeth.” “I know what the gizzard is,” volunteered Emile. “When they are cleaning a chicken to cook, they take out of the body something round that they split in two with a knife; then they throw away a thick skin all wrinkled and stuffed with grains of sand, and the rest is put back into the chicken.” “Yes, that is the gizzard,” said Uncle Paul. “Let us complete these ideas got from cooking. The bird, not having in its beak the molars necessary for grinding, as in a mill, the seeds that are hard to crush, supplies its gizzard with artificial teeth, which are renewed at each repast; that is to say, it swallows little pebbles. The grain, softened in the crop and moistened with the digestive juice during its passage through the succenturiate ventricle, reaches the gizzard mixed with the little stones that are to aid the triturating action. The work then performed is easy to understand. If you pressed in your palm a handful of wheat mixed with gravel, and if your fingers, by continual movement, made the two kinds of particles rub vigorously against each other, is it [ ]not true that the wheat would soon be reduced to powder? Such is the action of the gizzard. Its strong, fleshy walls contract powerfully and knead their contents of sand and seeds without suffering damage themselves from the friction, because of the tough skin that lines their inside and protects them from the roughness of the gravel. In such a mill the hardest kernels are soon reduced to a sort of soup. 20 “To make you understand the prodigious power of the gizzard, I cannot do better than relate to you certain experiments performed by a learned Italian, the abbot Spallanzani. A century ago the celebrated abbot, while pursuing his researches on the natural history of animals, caused a number of hens to swallow some little glass balls. ‘These balls,’ he said, ‘were sufficiently tough not to break when thrown forcibly on to the ground. After remaining three hours in the hen’s gizzard they were for the most part reduced to very tiny pieces with nothing sharp about them, all their edges having been blunted as if they had passed through a mill. I noticed also that the longer these little glass balls remained in the stomach, the finer the powder to which they were reduced. After a few hours they were broken into a multitude of vitreous particles no larger than grains of sand.’ ” “A stomach that can grind glass balls to powder,” commented Jules, “is certainly a first-rate mill.” “You shall hear something still more remarkable,” returned his uncle. “Wait. ‘As these balls,’ continued the abbot, ‘were polished and smooth, they [ ]could not create any kind of disturbance in the gizzard.’ So he was curious to see what would happen if sharp and cutting bodies were introduced. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘how easily little pieces of glass, broken up by pounding, tear the flesh. Well, having shattered a pane of glass, I selected some pieces about the size of a pea and wrapped them in a playing card so that they would not lacerate the gullet in their passage. Thus prepared, I made a cock swallow them, well knowing that the covering of card would break on its entrance into the stomach and leave the glass free to act with all its points and sharp edges.’ ” 21 “With all those little pieces of glass in its stomach,” said Jules, “the bird must surely have died.” “Not a bit of it. The bird would have come out all right if the experimenter had not sacrificed it to see the result. The cock was killed at the end of twenty hours. ‘All the pieces of glass were in the gizzard,’ the abbot tells us, ‘but all their sharp edges and points had disappeared so completely that, having put these fragments on my palm, I could rub them hard with the other hand without inflicting the slightest wound. “ ‘The reader,’ he goes on, ‘must be curious to learn the effect produced on the gizzard by these sharp-pointed bodies that rolled around there unceasingly until they lost their keen edges and sharp points. Opening the cock’s gizzard, I examined minutely the inside skin after having well washed and cleaned it. I even separated it from the gizzard, [ ]which is done without difficulty, and thus it was easy to scrutinize it as closely as I wished. Well, after all my pains I found it perfectly intact, without a tear or cut, without even the slightest scratch. The skin appeared to me absolutely the same as that of the cocks that had not swallowed glass.’ ” 22 “So the bird that is made to swallow pieces of broken glass,” said Jules, “grinds them up without injury and without even a scratch, while we could not so much as handle this dangerous stuff with the tips of our fingers without wounding ourselves. This power of the gizzard is really inconceivable.” “What follows is still more surprising,” resumed Uncle Paul. “Spallanzani continues: ‘The experiments with glass not having done the birds any harm, I performed two others that were much more dangerous. In a leaden ball I placed twelve large steel needles so that they stuck out of the ball more than half a centimeter, and I made a turkey swallow this ball, bristling with points and wrapped in a card; and it kept the ball in its stomach a day and a half. During this time the bird showed not the slightest discomfort, and in fact there could have been none, for on killing the bird I found that its stomach had not received the slightest wound from this barbarous device. All the needles were broken off and separated from the leaden ball, two of them being still in the gizzard, their points greatly blunted, while the other ten had disappeared, ejected with the excrement. “ ‘Finally, I fixed in a leaden ball twelve little steel lancets, very sharp and cutting, and I made [ ]another turkey swallow the terrible pill. It remained sixteen hours in the gizzard, after which I opened the bird and found only the ball minus the lancets; these had all been broken, three of them, their points and edges entirely blunted, being found in the intestines, the nine others having been ejected. As for the gizzard, it showed no trace of a wound.’ 23 “You see, my little friends, a bird’s gizzard is the most wonderful organ of trituration in the world. What are the best-equipped jaws in comparison with this strong pouch which, without suffering so much as a scratch, reduces glass to powder and breaks and blunts steel needles and lancets? You can understand now with what ease the hardest seeds can be ground when the gizzard of the granivorous bird presses and rolls them pell-mell with small stones.” “Where glass and steel are broken up,” said Emile, “grain ought to turn to flour as well as in a mill.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). Our Humble Helpers: Familiar Talks on the Domestic Animals. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67073/pg67073-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE GIZZARD

The Hunting Wasps by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . AN UNKNOWN SENSE Chapter XIX. AN UNKNOWN SENSE I have described the Ammophila’s hunting tactics in detail. The facts which I ascertained seem to me so rich in results that, even if the harmas laboratory supplied me with nothing more, I should think myself indemnified by this one observation. The surgical methods adopted by the Wasp with the object of paralysing the Grey Worm are the highest manifestation in the realm of instinct that I have hitherto met. This inborn science is eminently calculated to give us food for thought. What a subtle logician, what an unerring operator is that unconscious physiologist, the Ammophila! He who would witness these marvels for himself can hardly count on what a country walk may happen to show him; besides, if the lucky opportunity did present itself, he would not have time to profit by it. An observation, which I kept up for five hours on end, without even then managing to complete the experiment and obtain the proofs which I anticipated, is one that, to be properly conducted, should be made at leisure in one’s own garden. I owe my success, therefore, to my rustic laboratory. I make a present of the secret to whosoever would continue those magnificent studies: the harvest is inexhaustible; there will be sheaves for all. When we follow the Ammophila’s hunting in the due sequence of her actions, the first question that suggests itself is this: how does the Wasp go to work to recognize the spot beneath which the Grey Worm lies? There is nothing outside, nothing, at least, perceptible to the eye, to indicate the caterpillar’s hiding-place. The soil that conceals the quarry may be grassy or bare, flinty or earthy, smooth or seamed with little cracks. These varieties of appearance are matters of indifference to the huntress, who prospects every spot without showing preference for one more than another. At no place where the Wasp stops and digs with some persistency do I see anything particular, in spite of all my attention; and yet there must be a Grey Worm there, as I have but now convinced myself, five times in succession, by lending a helping hand to the insect, which was at first discouraged by a task out of proportion to its strength. Sight, therefore, is certainly out of the question here. What sense, then? That of touch? Let us inquire. Everything tells us that the organs of search are the antennæ. With their tips, bent like a bow and quivering with a continual vibration, the insect tests the ground, giving a number of little taps. When some crack shows, the restless threads enter and sound it; when some grass-tuft spreads its tangled root-stock along the ground, the quivering of the antennæ redoubles as they grope among its knots and angles. Their tips are applied for an instant to the spot explored, moulding themselves, so to speak, upon it. They suggest two tactile filaments, two long fingers of incomparable mobility, which gather information by feeling. But the sense of touch can play no part in revealing what is underground: the thing to be felt is the Grey Worm; and the worm is lying snug in its burrow, at a depth of some inches below the surface. We thereupon turn our thoughts to the faculty of scent. Insects, there is no denying, possess the sense of smell, often very highly developed. The Necrophori, the Silphæ, the Histers, the Dermestes hasten from every side to the spot where lies a little corpse of which the ground is to be purged. Guided by scent, these grave-diggers hurry towards the dead Mole. 1 2 3 4 But, while the presence of the olfactory sense in insects is indisputable, we still ask ourselves where it is seated. Many declare that the seat is in the antennæ. Let us admit this, though it is difficult to understand how a rod consisting of horny segments, jointed end to end, can fulfil the office of a nostril which is so very differently constructed. The organization of one apparatus having naught in common with the other, can the impressions received by both be of the same nature? When tools are dissimilar, do their functions remain alike? Besides, there are grave objections in the case of our Wasp. Smell is a passive rather than an active sense; it does not, like touch, anticipate the impression: it receives it; it does not inquire after the scented effluvium: it accepts it when it comes. Now the Ammophila’s antennæ are always moving: they investigate, they anticipate the impression. The impression of what? If it were really an impression of smell, repose would serve them better than a perpetual quivering. But there is more to be said: the olfactory sense goes for nothing when there is no smell. Now I have tested the Grey Worm for myself; I have given it to young nostrils to sniff, nostrils much more sensitive than mine: not one of us has perceived the faintest trace of smell in the caterpillar. When the Dog, famed for his scent, becomes aware of the truffle underground, he is guided by the tuber’s savour, which is highly appreciable by ourselves, even through the thickness of the soil. I admit that the Dog has a more subtle sense of smell than we have: it is exercised at greater distances, it receives more vivid and lasting impressions; nevertheless, it is impressed by odorous effluvia which becomes perceptible to our own nostrils under the proper conditions of proximity. I will allow the Ammophila, if you like, a scent as delicate as that of the Dog, more delicate even; but still a smell is needed; and I ask myself how that which is inodorous at the very entrance to our nostrils can be odoriferous to an insect through the intervening obstacle of the ground. The senses, if they have the same functions, have the same excitants, from man to the Infusoria. No animal, so far as I know, can see clearly in what to us is absolute darkness. True, it may be said that, in the zoological progression, perception, always fundamentally the same, has varying degrees of power: this species is capable of more and that species of less; what is perceptible to one is imperceptible to another. This is perfectly right; and yet the insect, generally considered, does not appear to possess exceptional keenness of scent: the effluvia that attract it are perceived without a sense of smell of unusual delicacy. When Dermestes, Silphæ and Histers pour into the chalice of a carrion-scented arum lily, never to come out again; when swarms of Flies buzz around a dead Dog’s blue and swollen belly, the whole neighbourhood reeks with the stench. It hardly requires a scent of exquisite accuracy on the insect’s part to discover putrid meat and rotten cheese. Wherever we see its hordes gather, with scent for their undoubted guide, we ourselves are cognizant of a smell. There remains hearing. This is another sense about which entomologists are not adequately informed. Where is its seat? In the antennæ, we are told. Those fine, quivering stalks would seem fairly well suited to be put in motion under the impulse of sound. In that case the Ammophila, exploring the region with her antennæ, would be warned of the presence of the Grey Worm by a slight noise coming up from the ground, the noise of the mandibles nibbling a root, the noise of the caterpillar wriggling its hind-quarters. What a faint sound and how difficult to transmit through the spongy cushion of the earth! It is less than faint, it is non-existent. The Grey Worm is nocturnal in its habits. By day it skulks in its lair and does not stir. It does not nibble either; at least, the Grey Worms which I unearthed upon the Wasp’s indications were nibbling nothing, for the very simple reason that they had nothing to nibble. They were completely motionless and therefore silent in a layer of earth devoid of roots. The sense of hearing must be rejected with that of smell. The question recurs, more abstruse than ever. How does the Ammophila go to work to recognize the spot beneath which the Grey Worm lies? The antennæ are, beyond a doubt, the organs that guide her. They do not, in this case, act as olfactory instruments, unless we admit that their dry and tough surface, which has none of the delicate structure required for the ordinary sense of smell, is nevertheless capable of perceiving scents that are non-existent to us. This would be equivalent to admitting that coarse tools tend to perfection of work. Nor do they act as instruments of hearing, for there is no sound to be discerned. What then is their function? I do not know and I despair of ever knowing. Inclined as we are—and it could not well be otherwise—to judge all things by our standard, the only one in any way known to us, we attribute to animals our own means of perception and do not dream that they might easily possess others of which it is impossible for us to have an exact idea because there is nothing like them in ourselves. Are we quite certain that they are not equipped, in very varying degrees, for the purpose of sensations as foreign to ourselves as the sensation of colours would be if we were blind? Has matter no secrets left for us? Are we so very sure that it is revealed to the living being only by light, sound, taste, smell and touch? Physics and chemistry, young though they be, already declare to us that the dark unknown contains an enormous harvest, in comparison with which our scientific sheaf is the merest penury. A new sense, perhaps that which dwells in the grotesquely exaggerated nose of the Rhinolophus, perhaps that which dwells in the antennæ of the Ammophila, would open to our search a world which our physical structure no doubt condemns us to leave for ever unexplored. Cannot certain properties of matter, which have no perceptible action upon us, find a receptive echo in animals, which are differently equipped? 5 When Spallanzani, after blinding some Bats, released them in a room converted into a maze by means of cords stretched in every direction and of heaped-up brambles, how were those animals able to find their way about, to fly quickly, to move to and fro, from end to end of the room, without hitting the interposed articles? What sense analogous to any of ours guided them? Would some one tell me and, above all, make me understand? I should also like to understand how the Ammophila infallibly finds her caterpillar’s burrow with the aid of her antennæ. It is not a case of the sense of smell: we should have to presume it to possess an unparalleled delicacy, while recognizing that it is exercised by an organ in which no provision seems made for the perception of smells. 6 What a number of other incomprehensible things do we not ascribe to the insect’s sense of smell! We are satisfied with a word: the explanation is ready-found, without laborious search. But, if we care to consider the matter thoroughly, if we compare the requisite array of facts, then the cliff of the unknown rises abruptly, not to be climbed by the path which we insist on following. Let us then change our path and admit that animals may have other means of information than our own. Our senses do not represent the sum total of the methods whereby an animal communicates with that which is not itself: there are others not capable of comparison, however remote, with those which we possess. If the act of the Ammophila were an isolated fact, I should not have lingered over it as I have done; but I propose to speak of others stranger still, which will carry conviction to the most exacting mind. After relating them, therefore, I shall return to the subject of special senses, irreducible senses, unknown to us. For the moment, let us go back to the Grey Worm, which it would be as well for us to know in a less casual fashion. I have four of them, dug up with the knife at the spots indicated by the Ammophila. My intention was to substitute them, by turns, for the doomed victim, so as to see the Wasp’s operation repeated. When my plan failed, I placed the worms in a glass jar, with a layer of earth and a lettuce-stalk above them. By day, my captives remained buried in the earth; at night, they came up to the surface, where I caught them gnawing at the salad from below. In August, they dug deep down, not to come up again, and fashioned themselves a cocoon apiece of earth, very rough on the outer surface, oval in shape and the size of a small pigeon’s egg. The moth appeared at the end of the same month. I recognized the Dart or Turnip Moth (Noctua segetum, Hübn.). The Hairy Ammophila, therefore, feeds her grubs on the caterpillars of Noctuæ; and her choice falls exclusively on the species that live underground. These caterpillars, commonly known as Grey Worms, because of their drab garb, are a most formidable scourge to agricultural crops, as well as to garden produce. Curled in their burrows by day, they climb to the surface at night and gnaw the base or collar of the herbaceous plants. Everything suits them: ornamental plants and edible plants alike. Flower-beds, market-gardens, fields are laid waste without distinction. When a seedling withers without apparent cause, draw it to you gently; and the dying plant will come up, but maimed, severed from its root. The Grey Worm has passed that way in the night; its greedy mandibles have performed the deadly amputation. Its havoc rivals that wrought by the White Worm, the grub of the Cockchafer. When it swarms in a beet-country, the damage amounts to millions. This is the terrible enemy against which the Ammophila comes to our aid. I point out and urgently recommend to agriculturalists this valuable auxiliary, so zealous in her search of the Grey Worm in spring, so skilful in discovering its hiding-place. An Ammophila in a garden may mean the saving of a lettuce-bed, the snatching of a balsam-border from danger. But there is need here for recommendations. None would dream of destroying the pretty Wasp that goes fluttering nimbly from one path to the other, that visits this corner of the garden, then that, then the next, then the one over there; none dreams either—and none, unfortunately, can dream—of assisting her to multiply. In the immense majority of cases the insect evades our influence: to exterminate it, if it be harmful, to propagate it, if it be useful, are impracticable undertakings for us. By a singular contrast of strength and weakness, man cuts through the neck of continents to join two seas, he pierces the Alps, he weighs the sun; and yet he cannot prevent a wretched maggot from enjoying his cherries before he himself does, nor an odious Louse from destroying his vines! The Titan is vanquished by the pigmy. Now we have here, in this insect-world, an auxiliary of high merit, the supreme foe of our grievous foe the Grey Worm. Can we do anything to stock our fields and gardens with it at will? We cannot; for the first condition of multiplying the Ammophila would be to multiply the Grey Worm, the only food of her family of grubs. I do not speak of the insurmountable difficulties which this breeding would present. We have not to do with the Bee, who is faithful to her hive, because of her social habits; still less with the stupid Silkworm, perched on its mulberry-leaf, or its clumsy Moth, who for a moment flutters her wings, pairs, lays her eggs and dies: we have to do with an insect that is capricious in its wanderings, swift of flight and independent in its ways. Besides, the first condition shatters all our hopes. Would we have the helpful Ammophila? Then we must resign ourselves to accepting the Grey Worm. We move in a vicious circle: to produce good we must invoke the aid of evil. The hostile band brings the friendly troop to our fields; but the second cannot live without the first; and the two show an even balance in numbers. If the Grey Worm abound, the Ammophila finds copious provender for her grubs and her race prospers; if the Grey Worm be rare, the Ammophila’s offspring decrease and disappear. This balance between prosperity and decadence is the immutable law that governs the proportions between devourers and devoured. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). The Hunting Wasps. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67110/pg67110-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

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