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To paraphrase the great Leonard McCoy ... Dammit RobertB, I'm an etymologist, not an entomologist.
But seriously, I don't think anyone in this forum could answer your question, since the video only shows the insect as a blur. I tried pausing that clip in several spots, but the insect is moving too fast to be anything but a blur. If I could get a distinct image anywhere, I'd do a screen cap, crop it down to just the insect, and use Google's new image search feature. This search function allows you to drag an image into the search box, and then Google searches for similar images online. No idea how their search algorithm works, but I've used it on a few occasions and it allowed me to find other copies of the same image I had, some with the needed info attached. Can't do this with the clip you linked to, so you'll have to take the videographer's word that it is indeed Phengodidae.
Since I've discovered that many people are unaware of Google's new "image search" feature, I'll take this opportunity to explain how I used it to solve a puzzle. This search feature is available at the top right on Google's starting page. Just click on the "Images" link.
I had this cool image of a huge Moon over a smaller Sun several people had forwarded to me. They wanted to know if it was real or fake. It went viral a couple years ago, and a lot of people were forwarding it. But if you know anything about astronomy, you know this can't be real. In every copy I saw there was no attribution, and the claim was that it showed a rare "close approach" of the Moon as seen from Antarctica. I wanted to use it in my blog to debunk the hoax, but not without proper attribution.
When I did a text search for "big moon" (and other similar text searches) I got too many hits to check manually. Google image search allowed me to find the exact image on the artist's website. It had been "hijacked" by someone, processed to remove the artist's signature, and spread around the internet as a "real" photo. It was a drawing, not a photo, and never intended by the artist to be used as a hoax. So I added back the attribution and explained how her image was being used. The artist expressed her gratitude for setting the record straight.
There was another image that went viral almost 10 years ago and is still circulating today. It claims to show how planet Mars will appear as large as the Moon on some specific date. Also a hoax. Also addressed in that same post on my blog. If you have email friends that like to forward things, you may have seen both these images at some point over the years. I continue to get both every now and then.
When I attended "Nikon School" about 45 years ago, they taught us how to get those photographs with the huge moon in them. The secret, they said, was to walk up really close. Nikon School was a traveling show, where a couple of guys would show you how to get the most out of your 35mm SLR cameras, and wouldn't you know it, just anout every trick required a different lens or an attachment, all of which were available for Nikons but not necessarily for your brand of SLR.
An alternative way to shoot big moons is to back off from your subject, so everything else shrinks but the moon, and shhot with a telephoto lens to make them normal-sized. That way, the moon alone appears larger.
That was when I had my aha! moment. A telephoto lens doesn't really get you closer, but rather it just crops the picture. Photolabs would happily use the mask for a smaller image to crop your enlargement, giving you "telephoto" for free. Since you were using less negative, it got grainier, but not all that much. A cheap Yashicamat had a 66x66 negative shot with an 85 mm lens, which was a (all too sharp) portrait lens if you used a mask for 828 film, and if you used a mask for half-frame 35mm cameras, it was like a 145mm telephoto lens on a 35mm SLR. Using the Minox ("spy cam" that used 16mm film) mask was more like a 300mm extreme telephoto. A custom enlargement cost $5 to $8 for a 6x7, but using a mask, it was just the 55c of a regular 5x7.
Ask the next five people you see - indoors, so they don't cheat - to stretch out their arm and use their thumb and index finger to show how big the sun and the moon appear. Many people think the moon is perhaps 3/4" and the sun a quarter of that. In fact, they're the same size, as you can see from the "ring of fire" during an eclipse, and at arm's length, about the size of a dime. Someone showed me that about 30 years ago, and I'm still surprised and delighted every time I think of it.
Next time there is a discussion of SETI, ask people how many planets would have a moon and sun that are visually the same in size, and ask if that has anything to do with the development of intelligent life, or if it's just a coincidence that menstrual cycles are one lunar month long, and blood is so similar in composition to tidal pool waters. I'm sure there is an argument to be made from that about the existence of god, but I'm not sure whether it works for or against the atheists.
Thanks. I have doubt that these flying ghostly things are Phengodidae that I found mostly described as crawling insects. These on camera seem to be of 2 kinds, smooth body and knotty body. And the body lengths are greatly varied. And they being too fast and too few, I can never detect them with my own eyes. Mystery to me.
Heimhenge, in this case Google image is no luck- gives back a bunch of architectural scenes.
RobertB said: Heimhenge, in this case Google image is no luck - gives back a bunch of architectural scenes.
Yeah, it's sometimes funny how Google Image Search works. If you have a classic image, say DaVinci's Last Supper, you get lots of exact matches. But if it's a less-well-recognizable image, you get a lot of "noise" in the search results. I'm really curious what Google's search algorithm looks for. It's obviously able to scale and resize images for the search, but beyond that, are they looking for matching segments, light-to-dark ratios, outline traces, color pallets, or what? I couldn't find any info about that online, so I guess it's some proprietary algorithm they're still tweaking for accuracy.
RobertB said
These on camera seem to be of 2 kinds, smooth body and knotty body. And the body lengths are greatly varied. And they being too fast and too few, I can never detect them with my own eyes.
The varied body lengths are probably related to flying rods and cmos camera artifacts.
Thanks, EmmettRedd. I can buy that explanation.
But the light-emitting insect is real (since then I've seen legs and wings, though what kind of insect I don't know) - only the knobby worm-like body is the effect of interlaced video- and how convincing! I'll try perhaps waving a burning spaghetti strand, but I suspect it won't work without this crucial ingredient: fast flapping wings.
Meanwhile I mourn how mystery can be so rudely intruded upon by facts!
I concur that light emitting insects are real; I have personally see 3 different kinds. Lightening bugs have long been known. The second kind I have only seen once; it was in the rotten part of a hay bale I was feeding one night. The bug/worm was about 8-10 mm long and 0.5 mm in diameter like a mechanical pencil lead and had one dot on the end. I tried to collect it but was unsuccessful. The other seems very common in the lawn or pasture. It can approach 20 mm long, 3-4 mm wide and 1-2 mm thick. It has 2 dots on one end. When I went to show it to a Biology Professor, he pulled out a book with hundreds of drawings of various species.
In one of the posts lost in the site restoration someone described the one in the video being common in Texas. I have not observed that one.
EmmettRedd said
I also mourn how simple facts can be ignored in explaining away conspiracy theory mysteries, to wit, chem trails and flying rods (although the flying rod hype appears to have abated).
The fact that conspiracy theories are often so preposterous is immaterial. When someone brought back a duckbill platypus, the learned scientists were still convinced that it was a fraud, because "there ain't no sech animal" and I agree; it's a preposterous creature that doesn't seems to be crossbred from wildly dissimilar lines of evolution. Best single argument in favor of creationism (which is in *need* of an argument.)
And there are elements of the 9/11 conspiracy theory that are intriguing, but the larger the number of people involved. the harder it is to pull it off by surprise. It's hard to pull off a surprise birthday party for 25. The number of people required to orchestrate the air strikes. the demolition of the buildings faster than gravity, etc., would be phenomenal. With so many deaths, surely one of the conspirators would have broken down by guilt feelings and confessed, or been lured nu the fame and fortune, the TV appearances, the book sales, the lecture tour, etc. Look at the SEAL who went after Bin Laden!
It's a felony to reveal the name of a CIA agent; I can't even name myself! But Dick Cheney did. There's always someone of low character, and even with those of sterling character, two can keep a secret if two of them are dead. If a secret conspiracy remains secret, the conspiracy theory is, to use the technical term, a bunch of hooey.
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