June 24, 2016 at 02:39AM

Today I Learned: 1) The vampire is a curious creature, in that it is neither vampire nor squid. It's an ancient relative of both squid and octopuses that swims around languidly in a band of heavily oxygen-depleted ocean waters where there aren't a lot of predators. There also isn't a lot to *eat* there, so the vampire squid feeds off of marine snow (i.e., bits of dead things that float down from more shallow waters). Since its food doesn't really move, unlike that of octopodes and squid, the vampire squid doesn't chase down its food. Instead, it has a long, thin, sticky tendrel that it lets float around. When the tendrel is nice and saturated with snow, it scrapes off food into a pouch formed by the skin between its tentacles. It also looks like an evil demon fish, which is just not fair for such a chill creature. These facts on the vampire squid brought to you by Mengsha Gong, via a post on Science Friday. 2) Lead is way softer than I thought. I mean yes, I know lead is supposed to be soft, but I didn't expect it to be *that* soft. In this case, I was handling a chip off of a lead pipe, which was pretty flaky. The texture (and impurities) may have largely contributed to its pliability, as it was much tougher after being melted over flame and re-cooled. 3) The word "butterfly" has a couple of possible etymologies. It may come from an amalgam of Old English for "beater" and "fly", as in, an insect that beats around to fly. It may have once referred only to yellow, buttery-colored butterflies, or possibly been related to a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter. Or, as is speculated in the good old OED, "Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement." Also, the word "butterfly" is *old* -- the OED has (Anglo-Saxon) references as far back as ~1000 AD. It looks like "butterfly" used to be used more liberally and more poetically than we use it now, with the OED listing definitions including "a vain, gaudily attired person", "applied to persons whose periods of work or occupation of a place are transitory or seasonal", and, perhaps my favorite, the phrase "to break a butterfly on a wheel", meaning "to use unnecessary force in destroying something fragile".