Entomologists

173 quotes found

"A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This tubular motor is not the most efficient of linear induction machines. ...This amazing force of induction ...appears as almost artificial gravity under our control. Now, as an engineer I must try and put this force to good use, and when I do I must be sure that I'm getting the very best out of my machine. Now one of the advantageous of arrangements appears to be to use two flat machines face to face, forming the outside of a sandwich, with the aluminum sheet as the filling. Now this motor is really a most potent device, but still pretty useless... So if we want continuous motion, we must turn this machine over. Let [it] now be the moving part, and let it sit on a fixed rail and run along that... I'm going to raise the voltage slowly and the motor will climb this very steep incline. ...[I]t doesn't need wheels to grip the rail. There are virtually no moving parts, and the motor is capable of developing a very large force. Taking off. I can control the motor for very low speeds, or stop it when it's moving very fast. When used on the horizontal and made in a much larger size, such a machine is capable of developing a very high acceleration. At the Motor Industry Research Association laboratories at , the linear motor is being used to crash test all kinds of vehicles. ...The linear motor to do this job is very small, It's only about three times as big as our model which climbed the rail. ...Red lights flash, and once the final button is pressed, the forces of induction take over."

- Eric Laithwaite

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomElectrical engineersPeople from ManchesterEntomologists
"I was telephoned by a man called Alexander Charles Jones, who asked me if he might bring me a box of apparatus which he said when put on frictionless casters and set in motion inside, would displace itself outside its own dimension. Immediately I knew this man was different. ...Any ordinary crank would have said, "How would you like to see Newton's Laws disobeyed." ...So I said... "Does you box contain anything that might loosely be described as a gyroscope?" ...He said, "In the box, there is a gyroscope." I said, "I think you'd better come and show it to me... because I know enough about gyros to know that they're like electromagnetism, and I've studied electromagnetism for thirty years and I know darn well I don't understand it, and I don't understand gyros either, but I can invent new things in electromagnetism once a year. And if you've got something new about gyroscopes I want to see it." And he brought it, and it did. And that was the start of a new line of research for me. And then, about a year later, I met a second enthusiast called Edwin Rickman who added his own brand of instinct that... improved the ideas we'd already got. Let me say of Alex Jones that since I first met him that I've been convinced both of the validity of his argument, and been impressed with his feel for what I'd call the elements of nature. A thing that the more learned acknowledgement of science and mathematics have seldom had, a natural feel for what goes on..."

- Eric Laithwaite

0 likesAcademics from the United KingdomElectrical engineersPeople from ManchesterEntomologists
"So, one can argue that insects are important, practically and economically, and one can argue that they bring us joy, inspiration and wonder, but both arguments are ultimately selfish, for both focus on what insects do for us. There is a final line of reasoning for looking after insects and the rest of the life on our planet, big and small, and it is one that is not focused on human well-being. One can argue that all of the organisms on Earth have as much right to be here as we do. If you are of a religious bent do you really think that God created all of this amazing life just so we could recklessly destroy it? Do you think He or She intended for coral reefs to be bleached and dead, littered with plastic trash? Does it seem plausible that He or She went to the trouble of creating five million species of insect so that we could drive many of them extinct without ever even registering their existence? If on the other hand you are not a believer, and accept the scientific evidence that species evolved over billions of years rather than being created by a supernatural being with a beetle obsession, then you must realize that we are just a particularly intelligent and destructive species of monkey, nothing more than one of the perhaps ten million species of animal and plant on Earth. In that view, nobody granted us dominion over the beasts; we have no God-given moral right to pillage, destroy and exterminate. Religious or not, most humans agree that the rich and powerful should not be allowed to oppress or dispossess the poor and powerless (though of course we do allow it to happen all the time). Similarly, in dozens of sci-fi movies from The War of the Worlds onwards, aliens more intelligent than ourselves arrive, decide that the human race is redundant, and set about wiping us out so they can plunder the Earth for their own ends, or build an interstellar bypass. Of course, in these films we see the aliens as the bad guys, and we root for the inferior humans who usually somehow triumph in the end despite the odds being stacked against them. When will we realise the hypocrisy of our position? On our own planet we are the bad guys, thoughtlessly annihilating life of all kinds for our own convenience. We intuitively grasp that the aliens of the movie Independence Day have no right to take our planet; I wonder what goes through the mind of an orang-utan as it sees its forest home bulldozed to the ground? There should not have to be a ‘point of slugs’ for us to allow them their existence. Do we not have a moral duty to look after our fellow travellers on planet Earth, beautiful or ugly, providing vital ecosystem services or utterly inconsequential, be they penguins, pandas, or silverfish?"

- Dave Goulson

0 likesBiologists from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandScience authorsEntomologistsEcologists
"With few exceptions, luminous insects throughout the world belong, broadly speaking, to one family of Beetles, the , or to give them their popular name, the Fireflies and Glow-worms. The most important exception to this statement is afforded by the Fireflies of the West Indies and Central America, locally known as " Cucujos," which, though still Beetles, belong to quite a different family, the or Skipjacks. ... Though usually present to a greater or lesser degree in both sexes, the luminous property is generally developed much more highly in one sex than in the other. When it is the male beetle that possesses it in the greater degree, the light is shown when the insect is on the wing, and is generally of an intermittent or flashing character, and gives to the insects their popular name of Fireflies. On the other hand, when the power of luminosity is the more highly developed in the female beetle, the character is usually associated with a more or less complete absence of wings, and the insect becomes merely a crawling, unpleasant-looking, worm-like creature, generally known in fact as a Glow-worm, which nobody who is not an entomologist would ever dream of calling a Beetle. The males of these insects are winged, in form closely resembling the Fireflies, and are totally unlike their spouses. The consequence of this utter dissimilarity between the two sexes of one species is, that it is not easy to co-relate them properly in our collections."

- Kenneth Blair

0 likesCuratorsEntomologistsZoologists from EnglandPeople from Nottingham
"As the value of the in checking the depredations of s (whiteants) does not seem to be generally known, I should like to call your readers’ attention to it through your columns. My first knowledge of it came from. sleeping on the ground when camping in a compound which proved to be riddled with termite runs. Several of us used water-proof ground-sheets that we had prepared from unbleached by sprinkling grated paraffin wax over it and then running this into the fibre by passing a very hot iron very slowly over it. In the morning the undersides of these ground-sheets were found to be covered wih termite mud, but to be unharmed and to have served as a complete protection to everything upon them, whereas all campers without them had had their blankets and some even their pyjamas badly eaten, some of the blankets having been reduced to rags. At that time termites were a constant menace to the books in the , where almost all the shelves were built into the walls. In view of the above experience, therefore, I tried coating the insides of all the book-cases with paraffin wax. A great improvement resulted immediately, though termites quickly found their way through any small gaps that had inadvertently been left. This incidentally made these easy to locate and to fill in, since when all trouble from termites has ceased, the danger having been completely and apparently finally averted, for it is now a number of years since the treatment was effected. And the same method has subsequently been used with equal success in s and boxes elsewhere."

- F. H. Gravely

0 likesBiologists from EnglandEntomologistsNon-fiction authors from EnglandScience authorsZoologists from England
"The wife may be divorced for ing, , , , to her husband's parents, and thieving; but all these causes are null when her parents are not alive to receive her back again. A man cannot have more than one wife, but he may take s, whose children are legally subject to the authority of the wife, as 's were to . Public opinion does not however justify the taking of a concubine except when the wife has borne no sons. In regions where the people are very poor, it is uncommon for a man to have more than one wife. A husband may beat his wife to death, and go unpunished ; but a wife who strikes her husband a single blow may be divorced, and beaten a hundred blows with the heavy bamboo. As long as a woman is childless, she serves; as soon as she becomes a mother, she begins to rule, and her dominion increases perpetually with the number of her descendants and the diminution of her elders. Married at fifteen, she is often a great-grandmother at sixty, and is the head of a household of some dozens of persons. So greatly does the welfare of the wife depend on her having sons, that it is not strange that they are her greatest desire, and her chief pride. For them she will sacrifice all else. Her daughters leave her and become legally and truly an integral part of another family forever. For domestic service, care in sickness, help in old age, and offerings for the sustenance of her spirit after death, she must rely on her son's wife, while her own daughter performs these services for someone else. The prosperity of a Chinese household is in proportion to the number of its sons."

- Adele M. Fielde

0 likesMissionaries from the United StatesBaptists from the United StatesEntomologistsFeminists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United States