The eyes have it

The eyes have it, especially if you are a barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma) a species complete with a transparent head and tubular green eyes able to rotate 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal used
in its endless search for prey. 

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has extremely light-sensitive eyes that can rotate within a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head. The fish’s tubular eyes are capped by bright green lenses. The eyes point upward (as shown here) when the fish is looking for food overhead. They point forward when the fish is feeding. The two spots above the fish’s mouth are are olfactory organs called nares, which are analogous to human nostrils. Image: © 2004 MBARI 

Thousands of feet beneath the surface of Monterey Bay off California, scientists recently captured footage of a fish with a bulbous, translucent head and green orb-like eyes that peer out through its forehead.

This bizarre creature, known as a barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma), is very rarely seen. Researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have only spotted the species nine times, despite having sent their remotely operated vehicles (ROV) on more than 5,600 dives in the fish's habitat, MBARI tweeted on Dec. 9. 

But last week, a team of scientists deployed MBARI's ROV Ventana and caught sight of a barreleye fish suspended in the water. 

This face-on view of a barreleye shows it’s transparent shield lit up by the lights of MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle Tiburon. As in the other photos, the two spots above the fish’s mouth are are olfactory organs called nares, which are analogous to human nostrils. Image: © 2006 MBARIed MBARI's ROV Ventana and caught sight of a barreleye fish suspended in the water. 

As stated before, the eyes have it, indeed. :)

Presbyopia

If you look closely at this infrared image on the left side, you will see houses slightly out of focus, not because yours truly screwed up in taking the shot but rather how infrared wavelengths drift out of focus from time to time with lenses & cameras keyed to visible light. Now consider looking at a computer screen or smartphone for 8 hours to see how out of focus eyes can permanently become given just how intense screens on said devices tend to be in the year of our lord 2018.

To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. The first sign of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting at phones. Next comes the reflexive extending of the arm, the impulse to resize letters into the preschool range. And at last the buying of drugstore readers.

Modern medicine offers little apart from magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia (from the Greek presbus, meaning “old man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you on your feet just fine, which is to say, you can once again relish your phone without squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for farsightedness evidently succeeds to the degree that it restores a woman or man to the comfortable consumption of texts, email, ecommerce, and social media on a glazed rectangle of aluminum alloys held at a standard reading distance of 16 inches. With reading glasses we live again.

Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the primary object of our eyesight seems corrosive. We measure our vision against the phone, all the while suspecting the phone itself is compromising our ability to see it.

But there is a common sense remedy to this.

Computer vision syndrome is not nearly as romantic. The American Optometric Association uses it to describe the discomfort that people report feeling after looking at screens for a “prolonged” period of time. When screens pervade the field of vision all day, what counts as prolonged? (Moreover, reports of discomfort seem like not much to predicate a whole syndrome on.) But the AOA’s treatment of the syndrome is intriguing. This is the so-called 20-20-20 rule, which asks that screen people take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away every 20 minutes.

The remedy helps us reverse-engineer the syndrome. This suffering is thought to be a function not of blue light or intrusive ads or bullying and other scourges. It’s thought to be a function of unbroken concentration on a screen 8 inches to 2 feet from the eyes. The person suffering eyestrain is taught to look 20 feet away but she might presumably look at a painting or a wall. Twenty feet, though, suggests it’s depth she may be thirsty for.

Yours truly does the 20-20-20 rule to the max even though my eyes vis a vis close up vision crapped out years ago due to age but with that being said, said vision has not gotten any worse looking at screens of all sizes beginning in the late 70's of B&W 80 character displays, courtesy Perkin Elmer, creating fine art 3D graphics on the MAGI system using Fortran 77 as the weapon of choice to create said art in question. :)

Jumpers ... rule :)

Jumping spiders have an exceptional way of sensing the world. Behavioral scientists are fascinated by the differences — and similarities — in how we view things. Thomas Shahan

Yours truly loves these little guys. Enchanting, funny and vanishingly quick, these tiny entities never cease to amaze and now, scientists are learning how these incredible creatures view their world.

Imagine that the world is shades of gray and a little blurry, almost as if your lousy peripheral vision has taken over. This fuzzy field of view extends so far that you can make out dim shapes and motion behind you as well; no need to turn your head. The one bright spot is an X-shaped splash of color that moves with your gaze. At the center of this splash, everything is crisp and clear — a small window of sharp, colorful detail in a gauzy grayscape. 

360 anyone?

A jumping spider’s eight eyes, magnified above with a scanning electron microscope, combine for a nearly 360-degree view of the world. The large, forward-facing principal eyes see in color and have the highest resolution known for such a small animal. Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source

Unlike bees and flies, which have compound eyes that merge information from hundreds or thousands of lenses into a single, pixelated mosaic image, the jumping spider has camera-type eyes, similar to those of humans and most other vertebrates. Each of the spider’s eyes has a single lens that focuses light onto a retina. 

The principal eyes — the big forward-facing ones that just beg us to anthropomorphize — have incredibly high resolution for creatures that are usually between 2 and 20 millimeters long. Their eyesight is sharper than any other spider’s and is the secret behind their ability to stalk and pounce on prey with impressive precision. Their sight is comparable to that of much larger animals like pigeons, cats and elephants. In fact, human visual acuity is only about five to 10 times better than a jumping spider’s.

Jumpers ... rule. :)

Addendum:: They're smart as hell as well. :)

“Jumping spiders are remarkably clever animals,” says visual ecologist Nathan Morehouse, who studies the spiders at the University of Cincinnati. “I always find it delightful when something like a humble jumping spider punctures our sense of biological superiority.”

One possible reason jumping spiders are so behaviorally advanced is that they have the sharpest vision known for animals their size, which is typically just 1 millimeter to 2.3 centimeters in length. They use this visual prowess to find, stalk, and pounce on their prey, rather than the better-known spider strategy of building a web and waiting for a meal to arrive.

I like them even more. :)

The eyes have it/Rev II

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The eyes have it - Rev 1, is pretty extensive as the notion of sight is rather interesting because the instrument enabling it to happen first appeared in the Ediacaran over 555 million years ago. 

Why all this palaver? Well, it seems front loading applies when the entity in question sees something interesting to investigate, in this case, a person calculating 2 + 2 = 4 by starting the calc when seeing the first number before the calculation is finished because priming the pump of thinking is necessary before doing anything of consequence, something nearly all life forms do when dealing with the vagaries of reality. 

To whit.

People often solve simple arithmetic problems, such as basic addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, in their minds. The precise mental processes they rely on to solve these problems, however, are not entirely clear. Researchers at Université de Bordeaux and UCLouvain recently tried to better understand how humans tackle simple math mentally by tracking the size of their pupils.

Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that the human brain starts solving these problems before it receives all the information and relies on Bayesian inference. This is a reasoning approach used to make decisions under varying levels of uncertainty, which entails combining prior beliefs with new information.

"Our core hypothesis was that when people solve an addition problem, they don't wait passively for all the numbers before starting to compute," explained Zénon. "Instead, as soon as they hear the first number, the brain begins updating a kind of internal probability map of likely answers, eliminating implausible results. The more informative the first number, the greater this 'information gain,' and the more cognitive work the brain does at that early stage."

The researchers' observations were consistent across all three experiments. Specifically, they found that people's pupils dilated more when the first number they were presented with carried more information; or in other words, whether it offered more clues about what the likely solution to the problem was.

"This happened even before participants heard the second number, showing that the brain was already updating its expectations at that early stage," said Zénon. "Interestingly, participants who showed larger pupil responses to the first number were subsequently faster at producing the correct answer. This shows that this early cognitive work that used only the first number was very helpful in simplifying the problem and getting faster to the answer once the second number was available."

Now think a lioness going after a zebra. The processing is not arithmetic, it's dinner. Her pupils will dilate while doing the calc of how to get the zebra. This amazing research relates to how all life tackles problems as the eyes have it without question. :)

Major stages in the evolution of the eye in vertebrates

Factoid

The first possible fossils of eyes found to date are from the Ediacaran period (about 555 million years ago),[5] while the oldest certain fossilized eye is from a Schmidtiellus reetae fossil from 530 mya, collected in Saviranna in northern Estonia. The structure is similar to the compound eyes of modern-day dragonflies and bees, but with (~100) ommatidia spaced further apart, and without a lens.[6][7] The lower Cambrian had a burst of apparently rapid evolution, called the "Cambrian explosion". One of the many hypotheses for "causes" of the Cambrian explosion is the "Light Switch" theory of Andrew Parker: it holds that the evolution of advanced eyes started an arms race that accelerated evolution.[8] Before the Cambrian explosion, animals may have sensed light, but did not use it for fast locomotion or navigation by vision.

Foundation's Edge

When looking at this outrageous tech whereby ordinary objects like door knobs, sofas and water could become smart, Isaac Ashmov's Foundation's Edge comes to mind whereby starships were controlled by hands, something somewhat akin to but, in actuality, far beyond the realm of Minority Report even though this work was written over 30 years ago.

Disney Research’s “Touché” is Touch Control on Another Level. 


Or in this case, multiple frequencies. Touché, from Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a project that explores what they’re calling “a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique” that would allow objects to sense multiple different touch gestures. By objects, they mean humans, liquids, sofas and just about anything else you can touch. Hello, Minority Report.

Foundation's Edge - The Avatar of touch.

Hesitantly Trevize placed a finger on the circle of light and at once the light spread out to cover 
the desk top. On it were the outline of two hands: a right and a left. With a sudden, smooth movement, the desk top tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees. 
 Trevize took the seat before the desk. No words were necessary. It was clear what he was expected 
to do. 
 He placed his hands on the outlines on the desk, which were positioned for him to do so without 
strain. The desk top seemed soft, nearly velvety, where he touched it--and his hands sank in. 
 He stared at his hands with astonishment, for they had not sunk in at all. They were on the surface, 
his eyes told him. Yet to his sense of touch it was as though the desk surface had given way, and as though something were holding his hands softly and warmly. 
 Was that all? 
 Now what? 
 He looked about and then closed his eyes in response to a suggestion. 
 He had heard nothing. He had heard nothing! 
 But inside his brain, as though it were a vagrant thought of his own, there was the sentence, 
“Please close your eyes. Relax. We will make connection.” 
 Through the hands? 
 Somehow Trevize had always assumed that if one were going to communicate by thought with a 
computer, it would be through a hood placed over the head and with electrodes against the eyes and skull. 
 The hands? 
 But why not the hands? Trevize found himself floating away, almost drowsy, but with no loss of 
mental acuity. Why not the hands? 
 The eyes were no more than sense organs. The brain was no more than a central switchboard, 
encased in bone and removed from the working surface of the body. It was the hands that were the working surface, the hands that felt and manipulated the Universe.

Any Questions?

In the blink of an eye

The coolest eyes on the planet belong to the ferocious Mantis Shrimp, a carnivore supreme possessing stun gun weapons in the form of two heavily modified claws able to modify prey via pulverization or knockout depending on the base configuration of said prey. Seen below is a side shot of this most fearsome predator.

While the researchers aren’t sure exactly what the shrimp are doing instead, it’s possible that their visual system functions somewhat like a satellite sensor. The eyes of a mantis shrimp move independently—like chameleons’ eyes—and are perched atop stalks on their heads. To see, the shrimp move their eyes across whatever they are looking at, scanning it sequentially with their visual cells.

Seen below is Ze Frank's over the top description of interesting facts about this amazing animal.

ISpy - The 5 Eyes

Nations spy on each other 24/7 but listening to the disinformation bandied about in the three debates, it seems the US is portrayed as Lilly white and perfect while the Russians are cast as nefarious players all too ready to game the election for Trump by means of hacking, something rather questionable given the fact we do the same to Russia but Russia, being a mafia state, never divulges anything when the US does the deed when it negatively impacts Russia, particularly on the political side of things. As often stated in BRT, this piece is not about Hillary and the Donald but rather about the 5 Eyes, Australia, the US, England, New Zealand and Canada an alliance founded after WWII, that spies on the world 24/7.

In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress. As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn't answer to the known laws of its own countries".[6] Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.[7][8][9][10]

Click ISpy to go to the interactive website showing how 5 Eyes does the deed 24/7.

15 seconds ...

Quantum mechanics proves beyond a shadow of a doubt there is no certitude. When researchers delve into the notion of superposition, reality itself becomes questionable at best, something in concert with how our eyes and brain keep us from going truly live in an existence we will never fully understand.

Everything You See Is From 15 Seconds in the Past, New Research Claims

And that's probably the reason why our vision doesn't constantly make us throw up.

"Instead of analysing every single visual snapshot, we perceive in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds," the authors note in a piece published in The Conversation, a website where scientists routinely detail their latest work. "So, by pulling together objects to appear more similar to each other, our brain tricks us into perceiving a stable environment. Living 'in the past' can explain why we do not notice subtle changes that occur over time."

As the researchers put it in their paper:

Retinal images continuously fluctuate because of many sources of internal and external noise ranging from retinal image motion, occlusions and discontinuities, lighting changes, and perspective changes, among many other sources of noise. However, the objects do not appear to jitter, fluctuate, or change identity from moment to moment.

As an experiment, track your finger with your eyes, notice how smooth the motion is. Now, try to move your eyes without tracking something. Not smooth is it? This is something yours truly has noticed for years but never knew why this is so until now. :)

The image below shows why certitude is but an illusion.

Figure 1: Classically, a particle is bound in the central region C if its energy E is less than V0, but in quantum theory the particle may tunnel through the potential barrier and escape.

Not just for the 3rd world

Knowing just how overpriced medical hardware tends to be in America's profit-driven healthcare system gives one pause but there's hope, especially when talented scientists work with innovative techs to create inexpensive and elegantly designed hardware that makes a difference, as seen by this very cool CerviScope,  developed by David Walmer and Duke's biomedical engineering group.

The first step was to reorient the lenses. Surgical loupes are custom-designed for each physician. “A rep comes to measure the distance between my eyes because different people’s eyes are different distances apart,” Walmer says. “But if we are going to do this globally, we can’t manufacture each one personally. So we asked them to build a slot so you could move the lenses back and forth, right and left, until they’d line up with whoever’s eyes were looking through the devices,” Walmer says.

Then one of the firm’s engineers cannibalized the lenses from a $2 pair of reading glasses and incorporated them with a pair of binoculars. “There was nothing on the market that gave us the magnification but also focused up close,” said Dan Fucella, the firm’s head. The combination worked: Reading glasses are designed for close viewing, binoculars to magnify objects at a distance, allowing a user to quickly switch perspectives, the better to see cervical changes. Walmer was thrilled as the device approached completion. He regularly tested the latest iteration of his scope on patients. “I love taking a problem, problem solving and bringing together people who can go back and forth over time to solve that problem,” Walmer says. “Working in Haiti is a slow, steady process, so this matched up with it.”

How cool is this? :)

Zenith & Nadir - Opposites to the Extreme

As seen in the diagram, Zenith is the direct opposite of Nadir, the definitions of which most certainly apply for two postings, one being inspired research, the other, political follies of the highest order.

The zenith part of this piece centers on eyes, wavelength of light and heath courtesy of the NY Times, Aging of Eyes Is Blamed for Range of Health Woes

To whit:

 The aging eye filters out blue light, affecting circadian rhythm and health in older adults.

For decades, scientists have looked for explanations as to why certain conditions occur with age, among them memory loss, slower reaction time, insomnia and even depression. They have scrupulously investigated such suspects as high cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and an inactive lifestyle.

Now a fascinating body of research supports a largely unrecognized culprit: the aging of the eye.

The gradual yellowing of the lens and the narrowing of the pupil that occur with age disturb the body’s circadian rhythm, contributing to a range of health problems, these studies suggest. As the eyes age, less and less sunlight gets through the lens to reach key cells in the retina that regulate the body’s circadian rhythm, its internal clock.

Now the Nadir:

 On Tuesday (Feb 14) , the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill introduced by Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) by a 66-32 vote. The bill, like other "personhood" measures, would amend the definition of the word "person" under state law to include zygotes, thereby granting them legal rights. The summary reads:

Provides that unborn children at every stage of development enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of the Commonwealth, subject only to the laws and constitutions of Virginia and the United States, precedents of the United States Supreme Court, and provisions to the contrary in the statutes of the Commonwealth.

One can only imagine the end result of such folly.

A better name for this bill, then, may be the "Lawyer Full Employment Act" since, if this becomes a law, it will take years, maybe decades of litigation, amendments, rulings, etc. to sort all of its nuances and implications... 

Let's use our imagination to think about some of the ways this law could be used or abused, because there is no surer bet than that it will be.  Maybe people and their lawyers will:

- Set up a Cayman Islands' bank account in their zygote's name to avoid taxes. (The Romney Special!)

- Sue against any sort of restriction on activity attributed to fertilized eggs based on age discrimination.  (Could regulation of late term abortions be judged discrimination against less developed eggs?)

- Prosecute a pregnant woman for watching pornography in the presence of an (unborn) minor.

- Put an embryo in one's will rather than one's wife, to make sure she does not have an abortion, etc.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. 

- Albert Einstein

A different kind of meander :)

Quanta Magazine is a gem. Science for the rest of us, particularly physics, warms the cockles of yours truly's heart, especially when it comes to the mysterious connect between order and disorder, a subject that never ceases to amaze given just how profound the connect truly is. With this in mind, the eyes of birds have an interesting tale to tell with it's indirect link to random walks, chaos and close packing, commonplace phenomena that show the inner workings of reality in subtle and interesting ways.

Random Walk

Chaos - Lorenz attractor aka The butterfly effect

Close packing of cannon balls

Seven years ago, Joe Corbo stared into the eye of a chicken and saw something astonishing. The color-sensitive cone cells that carpeted the retina (detached from the fowl, and mounted under a microscope) appeared as polka dots of five different colors and sizes. But Corbo observed that, unlike the randomly dispersed cones in human eyes, or the neat rows of cones in the eyes of many fish, the chicken’s cones had a haphazard and yet remarkably uniform distribution. The dots’ locations followed no discernible rule, and yet dots never appeared too close together or too far apart. Each of the five interspersed sets of cones, and all of them together, exhibited this same arresting mix of randomness and regularity. Corbo, who runs a biology lab at Washington University in St. Louis, was hooked.

When this notion of unordered yet uniform distribution is connected to the universality of phase transitions and the permutations of randomness, a more comprehensive view of reality emerges.

Beyond the one-dimensional random walk, there are many other kinds of random shapes. There are varieties of random paths, random two-dimensional surfaces, random growth models that approximate, for example, the way a lichen spreads on a rock. All of these shapes emerge naturally in the physical world, yet until recently they’ve existed beyond the boundaries of rigorous mathematical thought. Given a large collection of random paths or random two-dimensional shapes, mathematicians would have been at a loss to say much about what these random objects shared in common.

“You take the most natural objects — trees, paths, surfaces — and you show they’re all related to each other,” Sheffield said. “And once you have these relationships, you can prove all sorts of new theorems you couldn’t prove before.”

Mandelbrot would get this research without question.

The stuff of nightmares ...

 Dr. Eugenijus Kavaliauskas http://www.dantis.net/x3/

 The stuff of nightmares.  Happy Halloween 2022. :)

To clarify, the ant's red eyes aren't actually its eyes, but the bases of its antennae. Its real eyes are further back, shrouded by the image's vignetting — but don't let that spoil the fun.

Besides looking absolutely terrifying, it's some remarkable photomicrography, which is the art of taking extreme digital close ups like this one by using a microscope. To capture the ant's baleful demeanor, Kavaliauskas used a 5x objective lens.

Taken by wildlife photographer Eugenijus Kavaliauskas, the unnerving closeup is a convincing reminder that it's probably a good thing we don't see nature at the microscopic level.

Just look at the ant's menacing leer, glowering like some demonic harbinger of doom, emerging from a hellish portal.

Seeing for the first time ... with XRAY eyes

Credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team (MPE); Eugene Churazov, Marat Gilfanov (on behalf of IKI)

Seeing for the first time ... with XRAY eyes depicts the universe in an all-new light without question.

A million X-ray sources revealing the nature of the hot universe – this is the impressive harvest of the first scan of the entire sky with the eROSITA telescope onboard SRG. “This all-sky image completely changes the way we look at the energetic universe,” says Peter Predehl, the Principal Investigator of eROSITA at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). “We see such a wealth of detail - the beauty of the images is really stunning.”

The annotated version.

Had to show another. :)

The Shapley supercluster of galaxies is one of the most massive concentrations of galaxies in the local universe at a distance of about 650 million light-years (z~0.05). Each of the dozen extended structures is itself a cluster of galaxies, consisting of 100s to 1000s of individual galaxies, each denoting an intersection of filaments making up the large-scale structure in the Universe. 

XRAY eyes indeed.

The eyes have it

The eyes have it. The larger the pupil, the smarter the person as per Scientific American.

It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well.

Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. In fact, across three studies, we found that the difference in baseline pupil size between people who scored the highest on the cognitive tests and those who scored the lowest was large enough to be detected by the unaided eye.

Factoid ...

To be clear, pupil size refers to the diameter of the black circular aperture in the center of the eye. It can range from around two to eight millimeters. The pupil is surrounded by the colorful area known as the iris, which is responsible for controlling the size of the pupil. Pupils constrict in response to bright light, among other things, so we kept the laboratory dim for all participants.

As per Col. Nathan Jessup, Are we clear? :)

"Will you walk into my parlour?"

Gary Neill for WSJ

The whirlwind, the impact of AI on business, is just that. Everything's in play and business is having difficulties integrating this tech into complex operations. At the same time, a poem of delicious irony applies.

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I have many curious things to shew when you are there."

To whit ...

In the past few days, employees of Authentic Brands Group have been seeking out the company’s chief digital officer, Adam Kronengold, to ask him a newly urgent question: Should they start using a new AI tool released by Anthropic to review legal documents? 

The company, which has about 600 employees and owns brands including Reebok and Champion, uses specialized software for that task now. But company leaders have encouraged experimentation and embrace of AI in the ranks. 

“Everyone feels very empowered to raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, how can we fold this in?’” Kronengold said. 

He has told employees he’ll make sure they get access to the new plug-in—but they can keep using the existing software for now. 

The subscription service model apples as per the service, when software is "purchased",
you don't own the code, you own THE RIGHT TO USE IT.

The same applies to AI but ...

The employees using AI are conveniently being replaced, bit by bit as AI learns via pattern recognition and stores the acquired data in question so the inherent knowledge of said corporation goes away when the employees are let go with the end result ... the corporation is saddled with a subscription service they don't own and a knowledge space they no longer have.

Mary Howitt

The Spider and the Fly (1829)

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I have many curious things to shew when you are there."

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."

"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high;

Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the Spider to the Fly.

"There are pretty curtains drawn around; the sheets are fine and thin,

And if you like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in!"

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "for I've often heard it said,

They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed!"

Said the cunning Spider to the Fly, "Dear friend what can I do,

To prove the warm affection I've always felt for you?

I have within my pantry, good store of all that's nice;

I'm sure you're very welcome–will you please to take a slice?"

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "kind sir, that cannot be,

I've heard what's in your pantry, and I do not wish to see!"

"Sweet creature!" said the Spider, "you're witty and you're wise,

How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!

I've a little looking-glass upon my parlour shelf,

If you'll step in one moment, dear, you shall behold yourself."

"I thank you, gentle sir," she said, "for what you're pleased to say,

And bidding you good morning now, I'll call another day."

The Spider turned him round about, and went into his den,

For well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again:

So he wove a subtle web, in a little corner sly,

And set his table ready, to dine upon the Fly.

Then he came out to his door again, and merrily did sing,

"Come hither, hither, pretty Fly, with the pearl and silver wing;

Your robes are green and purple–there's a crest upon your head;

Your eyes are like the diamond bright, but mine are dull as lead!"

Alas, alas! how very soon this silly little Fly,

Hearing his wily, flattering words, came slowly flitting by;

With buzzing wings she hung aloft, then near and nearer drew,

Thinking only of her brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue–

Thinking only of her crested head–poor foolish thing! At last,

Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held her fast.

He dragged her up his winding stair, into his dismal den,

Within his little parlour–but she ne'er came out again!

And now dear little children, who may this story read,

To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:

Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,

And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.