I Told You Guys Wrong

It's been a long time since I went to school, and they have changed a bunch of stuff since then. I said in my last blog that ticks were arthropods, not insects. Truth is, insects are also arthropods, but ticks are still not insects, they are arachnids. Insects are not a phylum, they are a class in the phylum arthropoda, as are arachnids. I just now discovered my mistake as I was looking up some stuff so I could tell Uncle Ken that neither moths nor ticks are bugs. Although people commonly refer to all creepy-crawlies as bugs, true bugs are actually an order (heteroptera) in the class insecta, which is in the phylum arthropoda. Therefore, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs, and ticks aren't even insects, they are arachnids. Moths and butterflies are indeed insects, but they belong to the order lepidoptera, not heteroptera, so they are not true bugs.

Don't feel bad, greater men than we have made similar mistakes. I read somewhere that the guy who invented the term "bug" in the context of computer problems was a computer expert, back in the days when only the government had computers. When called in to trouble shoot a problem, he took the machine apart and found a dead moth inside. He then wrote up a detailed report in which he concluded the problem was this bug in the machine, and he taped the dead moth to the report. So the common practice of calling computer problems "bugs" originated with a misidentification of taxonomy by a guy who should have known better.

By the way, I had to add all the Latin words I just used to the Blogger dictionary. My daughter told me how to do that the last time we visited. Apparently, Windows 10 replaced a lot of task bar controls with right click controls. If you can't figure out how to do anything in Windows 10, just right click on it. I don't know why that should affect the Blogger spell check program. Maybe they are all in it together.

I forgot to answer one of Uncle Ken's questions in my last post: The reason I was wearing my ROTC uniform to work was that it was Friday, the day we all wore our ROTC uniforms to school. I went directly to work from school, and there was no need to change clothes because I didn't get dirty on that job. My uniform would have gotten more rumpled being carried in a gym bag than it did getting worn by me for another few hours.