Katydid
Before settling on www.insectpod.com for a domain name, I considered www.this-thing-stung-my-cousin-in-the-neck-and-now-hes-in-a-coma.com. This katydid would have been the poster insect.
Most of you will be glad to know that’s actually an ovipositor and not a stinger, but a small few of you will be thinking www.this-thing-stung-my-cousin-in-the-neck-AND-LAID-EGGS-IN-THERE- and-now-hes-in-a-coma.com.
Well, don’t be silly. Domain names can’t be that long.
Slowly getting the site back onto an even keel. It's nice to get back into the old posting rhythm.
David Brady said,
December 2, 2007 @ 2:06 pm
P.S. Her middle right foot isn’t missing: she was preening when I took these photos, and her leg is folded up underneath her to clean that foot. I have several pictures of her, but they are all “missing” one foot as she preened her way around her legs.
tceisele said,
December 3, 2007 @ 6:44 am
There’s a nice sequence showing the sort of things that katydids do with their ovipositors at the bottom of this page, which is also showing a nice example of the “hot pink” variation of katydids. She is actually ovipositing between the top and bottom surfaces of the leaf!. Of course, this one has a different style of ovipositor, it looks to me like it would be good for injecting eggs into plant stems or maybe underground.
I tried using the ID Keys for North American Katydids at the University of Florida, but unfortunately the first details they ask for are things like “where do the antenna attach to the face?” and “are the tympanum on the forelegs visible?”, neither of which show very well in the picture. I keep running into this sort of thing with my own pictures: I try to photograph from as many angles as possible, but then I look up the keys and find out that the one angle I missed, was the one needed to find the crucial differentiating detail. I guess that’s why entomologists prefer to make IDs from specimens rather than photographs.
M said,
December 3, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
They most certainly can be that long! Just try visiting http://www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/wearejustdoingthistobestupidnowsincethiscangoonforeverandeverandeverbutitstilllookskindaneatinthebrowsereventhoughitsabigwasteoftimeandenergyandhasnorealpointbutwehadtodoitanyways.html and see for yourself.
My favorite site back in middle school had a URL that was the entire first stanza of “Jabberwocky”…
After a minute’s searching, actually, I found it!
http://twas.brillig.and.the.slithy.toves.did.gyre.and.gimble.in.the.wabe.all.mimsy.were.the.borogoves.and.the.mome.raths.outgrabe.jabberwocky.com/
The site apparently hasn’t updated since I first found it about ten years back, though.
(Apologies in advance if the extremely long URLs in this post mess up anything with the blog. I hope that they don’t.)
David Brady said,
December 3, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
Hi M!
Actually, domain names are limited to 63 characters by RFC 1035, which defines the format of URLs and domains. You can tack extra stuff on there like hostnames (which guide your browser to a specific machine in a domain, like http://www., or mail., or twas.brillig.etc.outgrabe.) or trailing path (which guides you to specific folders on a machine, like /users or /2007/12/02/katydid/#comments), and those are indeed governed by a longer restriction.
All of the labels in your fully-qualified hostname (e.g. “www”, “insectpod”, and “com” in “www.insectpod.com”) must adhere to the 63 character limit, but you can’t add as many as you want: even combined they are not permitted to go over 255 bytes total. There is a third restriction on the total length of the entire URL, but I can’t remember it offhand. I *think* it’s 1023 bytes but it could be as high as 8191.
You are correct that I could have used dots to separate the words, and it would have all fit within the 252-byte¹ limit. But then only the last word before .com would have been the actual domain name… and “Colorado Mediators & Arbitrators” already has coma.com sewn up.
I think the blog will be okay with the long urls, it may chop them off and render weird but I think the links themselves will get chopped by the layout code rather than the links trashing the blog layout.
Thanks for the comment, and keep posting!
¹ The 255 total includes the final “.com”, leaving 252 for our needs.
David Brady said,
December 3, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
Oh, to clarify, in that really crazy long URL that you posted, the domain name is “thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast”, which is exactly 63 bytes long.
tceisele said,
December 4, 2007 @ 6:58 am
Oh, incidentally: you mentioned “That’s actually an ovipositor and not a stinger”. It turns out that most stingers (bees, wasps, ants) actually *are* modified ovipositors (which is why male bees, ants, and wasps don’t have stingers). So, when a wasp stings you, just be glad it’s a shot of venom and not a bunch of eggs. . .
An amusing trick if you have access to a beehive is to collect a bunch of the drones (which are big, noisy, and scary-looking, but have no stingers) in a jar, then let them loose on somebody who doesn’t know what they are. Minutes of hilarity. Until they kill you and bury you in a shallow grave, that is.