"Spem in alium" in memory of Terry Pratchett

YouTube link.

"In June 2011 Terry Pratchett presented a one-off BBC television documentary entitled Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die on the subject of assisted death. It won the Best Documentary award at the Scottish BAFTAs in November 2011. He also stated several times that, when he dies, he wished to hear Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium played in the background."

Reddit memorial megathread.

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Hans Rosling clarifies world demographics

YouTube link.

I have featured Hans Rosling on a number of previous posts at TYWKIWDBI because I truly admire his style of presentation.  The best hours of my academic life were spent behind or beside the podium in front of an classroom full of students, so I'm supersensitive to the nuances of lecturing.  This guy has all the skills.  He is recognized as a wizard at portraying otherwise-dry statistics in comprehensible visual forms (see his superb TED talk on the developing world).  In addition his stage presence is captivating, and his use of English (as a second language) is excellent.

I'm not blogging today, but I wanted to put this up for you.  I know everyone's life these days is one continuous TL;DR, but take my word for it, if you are interested in the world beyond your doorstep, this video is worth 15 minutes of your time.  Or at least the first five, and then see if you can stop.

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Dance with your dog (Crufts, 2015)

YouTube link.

The video above is the encore performance of the winning team at the 2015 Crufts "freestyle heelwork to music" competition.

Readers who really love dogs will want to watch this extended video of the entire competition.

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"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation" - H. H. Munro (Saki)

If you bookmark links and don't blog them, they multiply like coathangers in a closet.  Time to clean out a month's worth...

If the legendary romance of hopping railroad trains appeals to you (or to your child), browse the photo gallery at the top of this Reddit thread.

An article in Detroit News emphasizes that computers in cars can be wirelessly hacked.  "Markey cited studies showing hackers can get into the controls of some popular vehicles, 'causing them to suddenly accelerate, turn, kill the brakes, activate the horn, control the headlights, and modify the speedometer and gas gauge readings...'"  Jalopnik provides an example of a 14-year-old doing so using equipment he bought for $15 at Radio Shack.

"...16-year-old Maxwell Marion Morton of Jeannette, Pa., fatally shot 16-year-old Ryan Mangan in the face before taking a photo with Mangan’s body and uploading it to Snapchat..."

An op-ed piece at Jezebel asserts that "Adults should not be drinking milk."  

Nissan has demonstrated a glow-in-the-dark body paint for cars.   Video at the link.

An elephant with an elastic ribbon illustrates Samuel Butler's adage that "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."

Technology is significantly changing the experience of consuming marijuana.  "While refining marijuana requires skill, caution, and an elaborate setup, concentrates will likely prevail. They’re simply a more economic THC-delivery system."

The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore really REALLY loves thundersnow.

Diane Rehm, host of a nationally-broadcast NPR program, adds her remarkable voice to the right-to-die debate after her husband, unable to get medical assistance to die, starved himself to death.  “I feel the way that John had to die was just totally inexcusable,” Rehm said in a long interview in her office. “It was not right.”


The image at right is a graphic portrayal of an analysis of 1.3 trillion hands of Texas hold-em poker.  Details at the link, where the process is interactive.

Divers are retrieving a historic typeface from the bottom of the Thames, where it was dumped a century ago.

A carnivorous plant has been identified in 40-million-year-old amber.  It had not developed digestive enzymes, relying instead on a symbiotic relationship with an insect.

A hoard of thousands of gold coins in in different denominations has been found in the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel.

Video of a man sliding down a mountain on his butt while being chased by his snowmobile.

From the Boston Globe, a gallery of 35 photos of the record snowfall in New England.

Oliver Sacks has written an article about his discovery that his ocular melanoma is metastatic and therefore terminal:

"I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.  This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future."

Rebuttal of the claim that climate-change data was falsified.

While in jail, a man punches himself in the face to get black eyes in attempt to claim that he was beaten by police; his self attack is captured on video.

A lucid explanation of the Roswell incident.

An article about a planned upgrade of the Panama Canal.  And a reminder that when you sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the canal, you are traveling east, not west (a good pub-quiz question).

A "lost Sherlock Holmes story" has been found.  It's not all that great, but enthusiasts will want to read it (fulltext at the link).

A man looking at watches in a Goodwill store in Arizona paid $6 for one that he was able to sell for $35,000.

Full sunlight provides about 10,000 lux of illumination.  Human eyes can see in light as dim as 1 lux.  Cats = 0.125 lux.  Tarsiers = .001 lux (and shame on people who photograph them with flash illumination).  A BBC article lists three creatures with even more sensitive eyes (able to see at illumination levels of .000063 lux).

Some people object to their neighbors putting up Little Free Libraries.  "Americans with Little Free Libraries are acting in that venerable tradition. Those exploiting overly broad laws to urge that they be torn down are a national disgrace."

Here's a good website:  Old and Interesting.  Go look for yourself.

I find John Oliver's sense of humor to be sometimes annoying, but one can't deny the power of some of his arguments, especially this discussion of how American judges are elected.

The graph at right depicts penis size based on 15,000 measurements of men around the world.  It's an awkward depiction; I think if the data were regraphed, it would be more understandable as a bell-shaped curve.  And when the article states that "In reality, only 2.28% of the male population have an abnormally small penis... and the same percentage an unusually large one," that's because "normality" is defined in that way - to include 95% of the population.  More discussion here.

Deep injection of wastewater causes earthquakes.

A useful webpage from the University of Minnesota discusses how to prevent and how to treat a frozen septic system.

In an embarrassing attempt to get better positioning for postseason play, two high-school girls basketball teams tried to lose a game, missing free throws on purpose, failed to cross the half-court line in time, even pointed out to the officials that they were violating the 3-second rule in the lane.  Both schools were banned from the playoffs.

Here is the full-text lyrics of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.  I didn't know there was a 100th verse: "No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.
Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall."  (p.s. there is some movie where a character (Chevy Chase?) gets revenge on a bus or van driver by teaching the children about this song.  Does anyone remember the name of that movie?)

Hakim Emmanuel, an amateur bowler in Brockton, Massachusetts, rolled a perfect 900 series.  Video of his final frame at the link.

How conservative was Ronald Reagan?  Compared to 10 of today's Republican presidential hopefuls - not very.  He would only be in 5th place.

Some parents try to treat their children's autism by "giving the children enemas, using a dangerous industrial solution used for bleaching wood pulp... Miracle Mineral Solution is the brainchild of Jim Humble, who quit the Church of Scientology to form the Genesis II Church of Health & Healing in order to promote his “miracle” cure..."

"Strawpedoing" (image left) is how students guzzle beer without creating a vacuum in the bottle.  It looks  like the straw is coming out his nose, but it's just bent at his lips,

A record drought is drying up the water reservoir for São Paulo.

"Kalaripayattu is considered to be the oldest fighting system, and the urumi — a flexible whip-like sword — is its most difficult weapon to master. An urumi wielder requires great agility and knowledge of the weapon simply to avoid self-injury." (video at the link)

A freshman basketball player for Florida State scored 30 points in the final 4:38 of a game.  "Rathan-Mayes scored 26 consecutive Florida State points without missing a shot."  His team still lost.

A police officer does not always have to show you his identification.   Exceptions include if it would jeopardize an investigation, hinder a police function, or if safety is involved.

In 2004 the New Jersey State Department of Environmental Protection initiated a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corporation for $8.9 billion in damages for the contamination and loss of use of more than 1,500 acres of wetlands, marshes, meadows and waters.  The suit has been quietly settled by the state for around $250 million. Also "If the settlement is completed, it is possible that some or even none of the money would go toward environmental costs in the Exxon case: An appropriations law in New Jersey allows money beyond the first $50 million collected in such cases in the current fiscal year to go toward balancing the state budget."

LARP is "live action role playing."

The United States may have an oversupply of people with PhDs.  "...only one in five PhDs in science, engineering and health end up with faculty teaching or research positions within five years of completing their degrees." One reason: postdocs are cheap labor for research labs.

A discussion thread asks truck drivers "what town or city do you refuse to stop in?"

If you are ordering airline tickets online for international travel, read this link about how to secure lower fares.

Video of 80-year-old Natalie Trayling giving a remarkable 30-minute impromptu performance on a library piano of a piece of music she made up on the spot.

A photo gallery of regrettable tattoos.

"St. Pauli pinkelt zurück."  Video explains how the application of superhydophobic materials to walls causes streams of urine to rebound onto the malefactor.

How women have used cannabis in years past to ease childbirth, to treat swollen breasts, for migraine, and for menstrual pain (Queen Victoria in the latter category).

The United States' policy of birthright citizenship encourages "maternity tourism" by Chinese women.

Use this site to "play with gravity."  Each click generates a center of gravity that affects the moving points.  Gravity sites close together will coalesce.  If all the moving points coalesce in the gravity site, it "explodes."

The top image is a modern reworking of a classic Normal Rockwell painting.

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A concrete block filled with human teeth

The Elkhart Truth provides the background:

The concrete block stands in a yard at the northwest corner of Riverside Drive and Lexington Avenue. It’s hard to make out the teeth from the sidewalk. But take a closer look into the cracks that run along its face, and you’ll find dozens of them — from the roots to the crowns — piercing through the stone...

After posting a picture of the concrete block on social media, Elkhart residents shared their childhood memories of it. Some remember playing on top of the block, picking teeth out of the concrete and scaring other children with them...

It was a memorial to Stamp’s childhood dog — a German Shepherd named Prince — according to his granddaughter, Susan Howard...

Neither Howard nor her three older brothers could say why Stamp filled the monument with teeth, but she said it probably saved him on concrete... He pulled thousands of teeth as a dentist and kept all of them, Howard said. Stamp collected the teeth in a barrel in his office’s basement...

More details and additional photos at the link.

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The Monty Hall Problem explained

Imagine that you’re on a television game show and the host presents you with three closed doors. Behind one of them, sits a sparkling, brand-new Lincoln Continental; behind the other two, are smelly old goats. The host implores you to pick a door, and you select door #1. Then, the host, who is well-aware of what’s going on behind the scenes, opens door #3, revealing one of the goats.

“Now,” he says, turning toward you, “do you want to keep door #1, or do you want to switch to door #2?”

Statistically, which choice gets you the car: keeping your original door, or switching? If you, like most people, posit that your odds are 50-50, you’re wrong...

This counterintuitive and often-debated problem is discussed in detail at Priceonomics.

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Burning 15 tons of elephant tusks

"A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service walks past 15 tons of elephant tusks which were set on fire, during an anti-poaching ceremony at Nairobi National Park in Nairobi, Kenya Tuesday, March 3, 2015. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta set fire to the elephant ivory during World Wildlife Day to discourage poaching, saying that 25 years after the historic banning of the ivory trade, new demand from emerging markets is threatening Africa's elephants and rhinos."

Photo credit Khalil Senosi, Associated Press, via the StarTribune.

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Canine agility champion

YouTube link.

Filmed at the 2015 Westminster Kennel Club dog show.  Wikipedia has a wonderfully comprehensive article on dog agility competitions.

Dogs run off leash with no food or toys as incentives, and the handler can touch neither dog nor obstacles. Consequently the handler's controls are limited to voice, movement, and various body signals, requiring exceptional training of the animal and coordination of the handler....

Because each course is different, handlers are allowed a short walk-through before the competition starts. During this time, all handlers competing in a particular class can walk or run around the course without their dogs...

Each dog and handler team gets one opportunity together to attempt to complete the course successfully...

Dogs are measured in height at the peak of their withers (shoulders). They are then divided into height groups... Dogs are further divided into their experience levels...Dogs are not separated by breed in agility competitions... 

Lots more details re the individual obstacles and the training techniques.

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A woman sues herself...

... in order to get medical and funeral coverage for the accident which claimed the life of her husband.

As a widow, Ms Bagley is seeking damages to cover medical and funeral expenses along with compensation for the pain suffered by her husband, Bradley Vom Baur, who died 10 days after the December 2011 crash.

The decision by the Utah appeal court means that Ms Bagley the widow will have to give evidence against herself as a negligent driver...

Reid Tateoka, who is acting on behalf of Ms Bagley in her capacity as a widow, said she has been forced to sue herself to receive money from her insurers.

“The insurance company refused to pay out and said she was at fault. “It said it was prepared to pay for the car, but it would not take responsibility for her husband.  “She is facing funeral expenses, medical expenses and creditors.”

She can only expect compensation if the court upholds her claim that she was a negligent driver, with the financial responsibility resting with her insurers.

Lawyers acting on behalf of Ms Bagley the negligent driver have sought to have the case dismissed.

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Icebergs

Herewith three selections from a gallery of iceberg photos at The Telegraph.  Top photo credit to Steppes Travel. The beautifully-laminated one is by Hurtigruten/Dominic Barrington.  The bottom one, by Lizzie Williams, I include just for scale: those black dots are penguins.

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Emma Thompson - tax protester

She and her husband are protesting not about paying taxes per se, but to the selective enforcement of the rules and the coddling of corporate entities such as HSBC:

Greg Wise, the actor married to Oscar winner Emma Thompson, has said he and his wife will refuse to pay tax until those involved in the HSBC scandal go to prison.

Wise spoke of his disgust with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the bank after the Guardian and other news organisations published leaked details of 100,000 accounts held by HSBC’s Swiss arm which showed how the bank had helped clients to move cash out of the country.

“I want to stop paying tax, until everyone pays tax,” Wise told the Evening Standard. “I have actively loved paying tax, because I am a profound fucking socialist and I believe we are all in it together. But I am disgusted with HMRC. I am disgusted with HSBC. And I’m not paying a penny more until those evil bastards go to prison.”..

“Em’s on board. She agrees. We’re going to get a load of us together. A movement. They can’t send everyone to prison. But we’ll go to prison if necessary. I mean it.

Good for them.  More details at Business Insider, with a discussion at Reddit.

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"Southern Cross" (Crosby, Stills, Nash)

YouTube link.

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
You understand now why you came this way
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day

So I'm sailing for tomorrow my dreams are a dyin'
And my love is an anchor tied to you tied with a silver chain
I have my ship and all her flags are a' flyin'
She is all that I have left and music is her name...

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Texas sportscaster speaks out about race relations

YouTube link.

"Kids have to be taught to hate." 

The speaker is Dale Hansen -

In 1987, Hansen was honored with the George Foster Peabody Award for Distinguished Journalism. That same year, he won the duPont-Columbia Award for his contribution to the investigation of SMU's football program.

Sportscaster of the Year on two occasions by the Associated Press

Texas Sportscaster of the Year on three occasions by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association

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Weaselpecker

If you have never seen a weasel riding on the back of a woodpecker before, you can read the explanation at The Telegraph, where there is a video interview with the photographer.

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A shiny spot on the dwarf planet Ceres

Even more impressive on the gif of planetary rotation.

The latest images from Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft reveal a pair of bright spots on Ceres, a 590-mile-wide dwarf planet, with the brightest of the two reflecting at least 40% of the sunlight that falls on it.

Scientists are unsure what the bright patches are, but given that frozen water makes up at least a quarter of the bulk of Ceres, the odds are high that they are patches of primordial ice.

There are other possibilities though. The bright spots might be the work of volcanic eruptions on Ceres that blast ice out from the body’s interior. Yet another explanation could be the materials that make up the object. Some asteroids shine brightly because of their mineral constituents. Known as enstatite asteroids, they are rich in magnesium silicates, which can reflect nearly half of the light they receive.

The Reddit thread discusses this phenomenon and the concept and calculation of albedo.  Also interesting that a 590-mile wide planet "holds enough frozen water to fill all the lakes on Earth."

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St. Bernards prefer spaghetti to salad

YouTube link.

The pseudo-stop-action technique reminds me of some Naked Gun closing credits.  This one is well done and must have required remarkable restraint on the part of the four actors.

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The location of Jeopardy! daily doubles

The distribution should be intuitive to anyone who regularly watches the show.  This table offers a little more precision.

As a reminder to enthusiasts, here is the link to the JArchive and its 277,000 questions with answers.

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A Royal Flycatcher - before and after

Via Reddit.

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U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe tosses a snowball

YouTube link.

The travesty is detailed at ABC News:

Sen. Jim Inhofe, a devoted climate change denier, tossed a snowball at someone on the Senate floor today as he tried to debunk climate change. 

“In case we had forgotten because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair: You know what this is? It's a snowball and that just from outside here so it's very, very cold out. Very unseasonal,” he said. 

“So, Mr. President, catch this,” Inhofe, R-Okla., said on the Senate floor, tossing the snowball to someone off-screen as he tried to suppress a smile. 

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record but now the script has flipped and I think it's important since we hear it over and over and over,” Inhofe, 80, said. “As we can see with the snowball out there, this is today. This is reality.” 

That degree of ignorance in a person who helps make the laws for this country is virtually incomprehensible to me.  I can't even comment without resorting to offensive expletives.

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A global rainfall/snowfall map

YouTube link.

Created by NASA: "The map covers more of the globe than any previous precipitation data set and is updated every half hour, allowing scientists to see how rain and snow storms move around nearly the entire planet.... What this visualization shows so clearly is that all precipitation is interrelated all around the globe."

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Perhaps he was thinking of a fistula

BOISE -- An Idaho lawmaker received a brief lesson on female anatomy after asking if a woman can swallow a small camera for doctors to conduct a remote gynecological exam.

The question Monday from Republican Rep. Vito Barbieri came as the House State Affairs Committee heard nearly three hours of testimony on a bill that would ban doctors from prescribing abortion-inducing medication through telemedicine.

He later claimed he "wasn't being serious" when he posed the question.  It's worth noting that he "sits on the board of a crisis pregnancy center in northern Idaho."

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Why you "stave off" a cold

From the Language Corner of the Columbia Journalism Review:

Nowadays, “stave off” means to keep at bay, fight off, or defend against. But in its original, noun form, around 1400, the Oxford English Dictionary says, a “stave” was a thin strip of wood that was curved to make a cask or barrel...

“Staves” was originally the plural of “staff,” a long rod or walking stick. So by extension, many kinds of sticks or rods, including the staffs of a lance or other weapon, were known as “staves.”

By the 1600s, “stave” meant “to drive off or beat with a staff or stave; esp. in to stave off, to beat off,” the OED says. While the original use was meant literally, as in to “stave off” an attack on the castle, possibly using lances or other weapons with “staves,” the common uses today are figurative, as in “staving off” a cold.

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The reasons you have eyelashes

I had always assumed that eyelashes evolved simply to keep particulate matter out of the eyes. Now a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface reports that particulates are only half the story; eyelashes also divert airflow to prevent drying of the eyes.

Through anatomical measurements, we find that 22 species of mammals possess eyelashes of a length one-third the eye width. Wind tunnel experiments confirm that this optimal eyelash length reduces both deposition of airborne particles and evaporation of the tear film by a factor of two. Using scaling theory, we find this optimum arises because of the incoming flow's interactions with both the eye and eyelashes.

And this bit from the introduction was an interesting TYWK:

One study found that growth of eyelashes occurs in response to exposure to allergens. Children with allergies have 10% longer and denser lashes than those without allergies. This response arises from allergens triggering mast cells within the inside of the eyelid to release prostaglandins that promote hair growth, which presumably protects the eye.

More at the link, with additional discussion at the L.A. Times, via The Presurfer.

Previously on TYWKIWDBI:
Poliosis, and
Elizabeth Taylor's distichiasis (top photo).

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High school spends $662,000 on sports upgrades

This story comes from Wisconsin:

An anonymous donor's gift has come to fruition at Arrowhead.

In August 2014, the school board approved the renovation of the North Campus girls and boys basketball locker rooms after an initial $275,000 donation from a donor. The end result required more money from the donor, who ended up giving $361,224 to a project that cost a total of $662,602, according to Superintendent Craig Jefson.

The anonymous donor's money went toward the space-ready area, which included the girls and boys team room, a media room, football storage and 25 percent of the heating and ventilation upgrade.

Some additional details and a photo gallery at the link.   Stories like this crop up in state and local news, and tend to generate a mix of responses.  It's nice to see people donating their personal funds to their alma mater or hometown school, but certain inequities are created when more fortunate schools have training facilities that poorer or less lucky schools or districts cannot match.

Some of these views are discussed in a Reddit thread.

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17th century wearable technology

This is a relic of the Chinese Qing Dynasty, and is made of pure silver. Inlaid in a ring like a decoration, the size of the abacus is 1 cm × 0.5 cm. It has seven rods and on each rod there are seven beads. With a diameter of less than 1mm, the little beads are not made of filamentary silver, because they have no seams even when being examined under a microscope. More surprisingly, the beads can be moved easily and smoothly along the silver rods. For operating this tiny abacus, fingertips are too big. It seems that the beads can only be moved by small tools such as pins. However, this is no problem for this abacus’s primary user—the ancient Chinese lady, for she only needs to pick one from her many hairpins.

More on the history of the abacus and examples of unusual ones at China Culture.

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"Consider the prison-phone industry"

From an article explaining how the prison system in the United States has been corporatized into profitable ventures:

The profits generated by the corrections economy have not been definitively calculated, and a comprehensive audit would be a staggering accounting task. The figure would have to include the cost of private-prison real estate, mandatory drug testing, electronic monitoring anklets, prison-factory labor, prison-farm labor, prison-phone contracts, and the service fees charged to prisoners’ families when they wire money for supplies from the prison commissary. Contracted commercial activity flows in and out of every city jail, rural prison, suburban probation office, and immigration detention center. For stakeholders in the largest peacetime carceral apparatus in the history of the world, the opportunities for profit add up. For analysts like Sommer, the system also offers a safe, government-secured investment...

Consider the prison-phone industry. For inmates, especially urban felons shipped to far-off rural sites, calls to the outside are a social lifeline and a proven method for reducing recidivism. But here, too, Wall Street has identified a high-demand, low-supply commodity. Other government contractors, be they food suppliers or dentists, collect fees paid out by the state. Prison-phone companies, and the prison-wire-transfer companies that are following their model, extract revenues directly from inmates and their families. (Fifteen dollars for a fifteen-minute phone call is not uncommon.)

As with partnership corrections, profits are largely determined by contracts, but phone and money-transfer companies sweeten the deals for their public partners with profit-sharing perks. These commissions kick back anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of revenue to the contracting government agency. According to a study by Prison Legal News, a publication of the Human Rights Defense Center, about 85 percent of non-federal jails sign up for commission-added contracts, and because commissions increase in proportion to the total contract value, cash-strapped public officials are motivated to choose the most expensive contract available. Prison Legal News found that when Louisiana put out a public request for proposals for phone services in 2001, the agency stated the wish explicitly: “The state desires that the bidder’s compensation percentages . . . be as high as possible.”

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The seacoast of Bolivia

You learn something every day.  Bolivia used to have a seacoast.  That territory was lost in the War of the Pacific (1879-83):

"... fought in western South America, between Chile and allied Bolivia and Peru in a variety of terrain, including the Pacific Ocean, Atacama Desert and Peru's deserts and mountainous regions in the Andes... Chile acquired the Peruvian territory of Tarapacá, the disputed Bolivian department of Litoral (cutting Bolivia off from the sea), as well as temporary control over the Peruvian provinces of Tacna and Arica."

Modern-day Bolivians still want to reclaim that land.

For more than a century, Bolivia has done a lot of magical thinking to support its claim that this condition is only temporary. The country has a star for El Litoral (The Shore) on its coat of arms, and it hosts a yearly pageant to choose a beauty queen for the former territory. Chile, for its part, hasn’t budged.

Map credit.

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YouTube anniversary video compilation

YouTube link.

I'm not officially "back" at the blogging desk, but I wanted to post this brief compilation of excerpts from approximately 200 videos to keep you busy until I do come back.

The best feature is this playlist, which not only lists the videos, but supplements them with thumbnails.  And... if you play one of the videos in the playlist, it will automatically segue to the next video in the compilation - probably about 500 minutes of watching if you start at the first one and cycle all the way through.

It's almost scary how many of these are instantly recognizable from just a 1-second clip.

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Hiatus

Lots of conflicting demands for my time.   Need to get this stuff done now, while we're still gripped by the polar vortex, because as soon as spring arrives, outdoor activities will beckon. 

If you need something to read this week, try browing the "categories" in the right sidebar.

Bye.

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Umbrella pines

A magnificent painting by Hendrik Voogd, from the Rijksmuseum, posted at Robs Webstek.

The trees are Pinus pinea, "also called Italian stone pine, umbrella pine and parasol pine."

Stone pines have been used and cultivated for their edible pine nuts since prehistoric times. They are widespread in horticultural cultivation as ornamental trees, planted in gardens and parks around the world.

In youth, it is a bushy globe, in mid-age an umbrella canopy on a thick trunk, and, in maturity, a broad and flat crown over 8 metres (26 ft) in width.

In Italy, the stone pine has been an aesthetic landscape element since the Italian Renaissance garden period.

It is also planted in western Europe up to southern Scotland, and on the East Coast of the United States up to New Jersey. Small specimens are used for Bonsai, and also grown in large pots and planters. The year-old seedlings are seasonally available as 20–30 centimetres (7.9–11.8 in) tall table-top Christmas trees.

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Is a global currency war coming?

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) shocked markets on Thursday by announcing that it would no longer hold the value of the Swiss franc down at 1.2 per euro, although it would lower interest rates from -0.25 to -0.75 percent. Mayhem ensued. The Swiss franc immediately shot up as much as 39 percent against the euro, before settling at "only" up 17 percent on the day. This is basically the biggest single-day move for a rich country's currency, as economist David Zervos points out, in the last 40 years. And it's sent Switzerland's stock market down 10 percent, as its suddenly more expensive currency will cripple its exporters by making their goods more expensive abroad...

Now let's back up a minute. Why was Switzerland pushing its currency down, and why has it stopped now? Well, in four words, it's the euro crisis. Back in 2011, you see, what looked like the imminent end of the euro made people want to move their money to the safety of Swiss banks...

Switzerland is still stuck in deflation, with prices falling 0.3 percent, and a stronger currency is only going to make that worse. Now, they tried to offset this by charging people even more to hold their money in Switzerland—aka negative interest rates—but that wasn't nearly enough to stop the Swiss franc from going vertical... 

More at the link and more at this Bloomberg Business Week article.  This is a big deal for those outside of Switzerland who purchase Swiss products and for those who have their mortgages demoninated in Swiss francs.

It's also the first time I remember encountering negative interest rates.  How does that work?  You deposit your money and they take a little away each week?

Addendum:   I posted the above in January of 2015.  This past week I saw an article in the telegraph entitled Sweden cuts rates below zero as global currency wars spread:

Sweden has cut interest rates below zero and launched quantitative easing to fight deflation, becoming the latest Scandinavian state to join Europe’s escalating currency wars...

The move comes as neighbouring Denmark takes ever more drastic steps to stop a flood of money overwhelming its exchange rate peg to the euro and tightening the deflationary noose. The Danes have cut rates four times to minus 0.75pc in a month to combat fall-out from the European Central Bank’s forthcoming QE...

Exchange rate mayhem in Europe is matched by a parallel saga in Asia, where Japan’s vast monetary stimulus and barely disguised efforts to drive down the yen are causing heartburn in China...

The Riksbank insists that the only motive is to stave off deflation but there are widespread suspicions that Sweden is in fact protecting its industrial and export base. It is no stranger to controversy. The oldest central bank in the world, it took radical action early in the 1930s to liberate Sweden from the constraints of the Gold Standard. Its prescience shielded the country from the worst of the Great Depression.

Stephen Lewis from Monument Securities says the emergency actions are getting out of hand: “The chief threat from a global currency war is that it will lead central banks to take up monetary stances so extreme that they damage the smooth functioning of financial markets. It is remarkable that they should be closing their minds to the possibility that they are undermining the basic motive to save and invest as they blindly wage their currency wars.”

This isn't front-page news in mass media.  One hopes it doesn't become such...

Please feel free to offer advice in the Comments as to what an ordinary person should do in such circumstances.

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There's a huge difference between "masticophilia" and "mastigophilia"

I learned from reading Collector's Weekly that there are people who collect chewing gum.

In the U.S., there are about half a dozen serious collectors of gum, and more than one serious enough to pay $350 for a stick of Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum, dating from 1900 to 1910...

“A fellow collector and I got a lead on a National Colgan’s Taffy Tolu gum vendor from a Chicago dealer who had found it in an old barn. We decided rather than try to outbid each
other, we would make a fair bid and purchase the machine together. Pleased with our $2,000 purchase, I took it home and opened it up and cleaned it. I was pleasantly surprised to find seventeen sticks of Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum inside... In the end, my partner and I sold thirteen sticks of the gum for $300 to $350 each, making a $4,000 profit without even selling the machine!”

I tried without success to find a word for "lover of gum."  The appropriate match for the Greek "-phile" would seem to be "mastic", which is also the word for a Mediterranean evergreen shrub which produces a resin ("mastic tears" at right) used to make varnish and chewing gum.  So it should be "masticophile."

But I wouldn't use the word to describe someone in public, because it would sound too much like "mastigophile" -

Mastigophilia: Paraphilic sexuoeroticism that hinges on punishment and humiliation.

A new word for me, but one that I suppose is going to pop up more frequently in the popular press and cyberspace now.

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A new video series from The American Museum of Natural History

YouTube link.

The American Museum of Natural History offers incomparable resources for anyone seriously interested in the natural world.  They are now producing a series of videos designed to highlight their mission and their astonishing array of source material.

I've embedded above the fourth video in the series - "Skull of the Olinguito" - which explains how new species can be discovered in archived specimens:

Considering the number of specimens collected during the trip, it’s little wonder that the olinguito—Mammal #66573, a raccoon relative originally identified as a kinkajou—spent nearly 90 years on the Museum’s shelves before being described as the new species Bassaricyon neblina in 2013.

The third video in the series was Six Ways to Prepare a Coelacanth.  The previous two, and subsequent ones to be released on a monthly basis, are available here.  These are concise, interesting, high-production-quality videos tailored for anyone with an interest in the natural world.

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Limpet teeth - nature's strongest natural material

"Spider silk is famous for its amazing toughness, and until recently a tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals (GPa) was enough to earn it the title of strongest natural material. However, researchers report online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface that the record books need to be updated to properly recognize the incredible strength of the limpet teeth. Marine snails known as limpets (Patella vulgata) spend most of their lives scraping a set of small teeth along rocks in shallow ocean waters, looking for food. The constant grinding would be enough to quickly reduce most natural materials to nubs, but the limpets’ teeth boast a tensile strength of between 3 and 6.5 GPa..."

Microphotograph via the Washington Post, which offers these observations:

The teeth also bested several man-made materials, including Kevlar, a synthetic fiber used to make bulletproof vests and puncture-proof tires. The amount of weight it can withstand, Barber told the BBC, can be compared to a strand of spaghetti used to hold up more than 3,300 pounds, the weight of an adult female hippopotamus.

Their secret is in the size of their fibers, which are 1/100th the diameter of a human hair. The ultra-thin filaments avoid the holes and defects that plague larger strands — including man-made carbon fibers — meaning any structure they compose is also flawless, regardless of how big it gets.

The original publication is here.

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17 nude people

Body-painting artist Emma Hack piled 17 naked models up on the floor before arranging their arms, heads and legs into the shape of a small hatchback. She covered them in shades of blue, white, black and silver paint to highlight every detail, including the alloy wheels and number plate...and she even made it look like the car had been involved in a small shunt [?] by exposing the "engine" and leaving the front "bumper" hanging off. 

One of the photos at The Week in Pictures at The Telegraph.

Photo credit: MAC/Emma Hack/Jacqui Way/Solent

Addendum: Reposted from 2012 to add this "making of" video:

YouTube link.

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Fennec fox

This evocative photo by Bruno D'Amicis was one of the winning entries in the 2014 World Press Photo of the Year competition.  These are his notes:

An adult fennec fox crouches in a village sheep pen [in Tunisia]. The fox had been captured as a cub, and kept as a pet for over a year.

The fennec is the smallest of the Canidae (dog family) and is found in desert and semi-desert areas of North Africa. It is particularly well-adapted to desert conditions—its large ears help dissipate heat, furry under-paws provide insulation against hot sands, and it can live without water for long periods, deriving all it needs from its prey. Fennecs are not an endangered species, but—prized for their appearance—they are systematically being captured to be sold as pets, or used to make money from tourists wishing to pose for souvenir photographs.

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The history of dunking in basketball

YouTube link.

There have been a lot of repostings recently of the video above of Zach LaVine's between-the-legs dunk at the most recent NBA dunk contest.  More interesting to me, however, is the story at Vice Sports entitled "The Plot to Kill the Slam Dunk" -

The first thing you need to know is that the inventor of basketball never intended for the rim to be set at 10 feet...

From as early as 1930 until the late 1980s, not a year went by without talk of raising the rim—and with it, killing the dunk—in order to cure the game's ills...

When an all-time basketball greats list was assembled in 1940, the average height of the players was 5'10". Only gradually did people realize what an advantage size could be. ..

Sports Illustrated published a 1967 cover story, "The Case for the 12-Foot Basket." The magazine even staged an experimental game like Newell wanted, one of many during this era...

"No one was making a basket as the result of a hyperactive pituitary gland," Morrison said. "You had to develop skills.".. .A 1981 syndicated column complained, "Slam-dunking is how gorillas would play basketball if let out of the zoo." A 1981 LA Times column demonstrated that basketball players' heights have gotten out of hand by referring to old "suits of armor and the length of bunks in old slave ships." The racial politics of the dunk, and the sport, still had a ways to go...

The next most popular highlight is the three, which has the dunk to thank for its existence, and maybe vice versa. "The legalization of the dunk," Schultz suggested, "led to conversations about the three-point line."

Way more at the link.   Excellent fodder for March Madness party conversations.

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My grandfather's encounter with M. bovis

While searching the 'net for something else, I ran across this blurb about my maternal grandfather.  I knew from oral family history that he had been a very active member of the local Holstein-Friesian Association (later the Holstein Association).  He would have been 31 years old at the time of this story - the archetypal "Norwegian bachelor farmer" joked about so often by Garrison Keillor.

Losing 30 of 40 cattle to tuberculosis would have been a major financial blow, and may be one reason why it was another 6 years before at age 37 he would be able to marry my grandmother. 

These early-generation immigrant Norwegians were a resilient lot, and I was not surprised to see a report further down in the same dairy newspaper that at a subsequent meeting of the Goodhue County Farmers' Progressive Association, grandpa Finseth had presented a paper entitled "My Experience with Tuberculosis."

Perhaps it's from him that I inherited my gene for teaching.

Wikipedia has a good entry on bovine tuberculosis.

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There's a surprise inside

An interesting item posted in Rob's Webstek:

The mummified body of the Buddhist master Liuquan, a monk who lived around the year 1100 and who belonged to the Chinese Meditation School, is hidden in this precious reliquary dating from the eleventh or twelfth century.

In Amersfoort's main hospital, Meander Medical Centre, the nearly thousand year old mummy has been recently examined with a CT scan and an endoscope... A gastrointestinal and liver doctor took samples of yet unidentified material and examined the thoracic and abdominal cavities.

Results of the endoscopy at the link.  Photo credit M. Elsevier Stokmans.

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"It depends on the size of the gun and the size of the guns"

As reported in The Telegraph:

Christina Bond, a 55-year-old mother of two, fatally shot herself in the eye while attempting to secure her handgun. 

"She was having trouble adjusting her bra holster, couldn't get it to fit the way she wanted it to," said St. Joseph Public Safety Director Mark Clapp. "She was looking down at it and accidentally discharged the weapon." ..

She was a local Republican official, and an obituary printed in the Herald-Palladium newspaper said she served two tours as a member of the United States Navy.  The obituary also describes Bond as having been "on fire for the lord", and an active member of the Christian Motorcycle Association...

Carrie Lightfoot, owner of the Well Armed Woman store, told the USA Today last year that bra holsters were growing in popularity.

"It's kind of a natural location depending on the size of the gun and the size of the 'guns,'" said Ms Lightfoot. "Women just need options because one day a woman is wearing a dress, the next day a suit and the next day exercise clothing." 

Photo via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.  Comments are closed for this post.

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Your religious is ridiculous. Mine makes sense.

On June 9, 1603, Samuel de Champlain attended an Algonquin victory ceremony along the banks of the Ottawa River. He sat with the Grand Sagamore, Besouat, in front of a row of spikes topped with the heads of the defeated enemy, and watched as the Grand Sagamore’s wives and daughters danced before them entirely naked, wearing only necklaces of dyed porcupine quills.

After the dancing, the conversation turned to theology. The Grand Sagamore told Champlain that there was one sole God. After God had created all things, he stuck some arrows in the ground, and these turned into the men and women who populated the earth.

Champlain told the Grand Sagamore that this was pagan superstition, and false. There was indeed one sole God, but after he had created all things, he took a lump of clay and made a man, and then took one of the man’s ribs and made a woman. The Grand Sagamore looked doubtful, but, following the rules of hospitality, remained silent.

Originally encountered in the hard copy of Harper's (my favorite magazine).

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This skull was extensively trepanned. For scruples.

Explained at io9:

Researchers at the University of Pisa, Italy, have solved a longstanding mystery around the honeycombed skull of one of the Italian martyrs beheaded by 15th century Ottoman Turk invaders when they refused to give up their Christian faith...

The skull was later drilled, most likely to obtain bone powder to treat diseases such as paralysis, stroke, and epilepsy, which were believed to arise from magical or demonic influences...

"The perfectly cupped shape of the incomplete perforations leads(us) to hypothesize the use of a particular type of trepan, with semi-lunar shaped blade or rounded bit; a tool of this type could not produce bone discs, but only bone powder," Fornaciari said...

This would make the Otranto skull a unique piece of evidence supporting historical accounts on the use of skull bone powder as an ingredient in pharmacological preparations...

Indeed, in his Pharmacopée universelle, a comprehensive work on pharmaceutical composition, French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645 –1715) detailed how powdered human skull drunk in water was effective to treat "paralysis, stroke, epilepsy and other illness of the brain."

"The dose is from half scruple up to two scruples," Lémery wrote.

"The skull of a person who died of violent and sudden death is better than that of a man who died of a long illness or who had been taken from a cemetery: the former has held almost all of his spirits, which in the latter they have been consumed, either by illness or by the earth," he added.

Yes, I had to look it up too:

Scruple: a unit of apothecary weight, with symbol ℈. It is a twenty-fourth part of an ounce, or 20 grains, or approximately 1.3 grams. More generally, any small quantity might be called a scruple.  

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Eisenhower's 91% income tax rate

It wasn't that long ago:

[T]he most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:

[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

That was a marginal tax rate, of course, but still worth noting.

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TBS compresses Seinfeld - updated

YouTube link.

"Upper-right is a live feed from my tuner card from tonight's Seinfeld rerun. Lower-right is a digital recording from Fox Chicago about 10 years ago on the same hardware. TBS's broadcast gained 15 seconds in 3:22. This amounts to almost 2 full minutes for the entire episode."

Discussed at Reddit where there are comments that the image is cropped to make it "wide screen" and that the content is sometimes edited as well, and a notation that this is sometimes done with broadcast music.  The purpose apparently is to create more time for commercials.

Although the result is described as a "speeding up" of the program, I would think that even a 7.5% increase in speed would alter voice pitch, so I wonder if the process is instead some sort of computerized microediting - removing seconds of stares, views of a door about to open, shortening nonrolling credits, and such.  The process would be similar to time-compressed speech.

Confession:  I've never seen even a single episode of Seinfeld.  Apparently I'm the only living person with that distinction.

Addendum:  This video and the Reddit discussion generated a more-extended discussion of the technology at Digital Trends:

One provider is called Prime Image, which advertises a product called the Time Tailor. According to the site, the service “optimizes video runtime to seamlessly insert new ad spots, shrink content runtime without cutting scenes” and allow for several other solutions which alter programming to fit the network’s specifications. The service is automated, essentially allowing networks to program the time warping necessary, sit back, and collect that extra cash...

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Otzi's copper axe

Readers of this blog should already be familiar with Ötzi the Iceman (his face) (his tattoos).  This is what his axe looked like.

Ötzi's copper axe was of particular interest. The axe's haft is 60 centimetres (24 in) long and made from carefully worked yew with a right-angled crook at the shoulder, leading to the blade. The 9.5 centimetres (3.7 in) long axe head is made of almost pure copper, produced by a combination of casting, cold forging, polishing, and sharpening. It was let into the forked end of the crook and fixed there using birch-tar and tight leather lashing. The blade part of the head extends out of the lashing and shows clear signs of having been used to chop and cut. At the time, such an axe would have been a valuable possession, important both as a tool and as a status symbol for the bearer.

Image cropped for emphasis from the original.  This is a replica; the original can be seen in this photo -

- from the Otzi website, where there are many more details about this tool.

The haft, i.e. the handle of the axe, was carved from the split wood of a yew tree. A nearly right-angled branch growing out of the trunk was used. The axe blade is held in a slit in the haft with birch tar. It was then bound in place with narrow strips of leather.  Using a replica of the axe, it took just over half an hour to fell a yew tree...

In Central Europe in the period around 3000 BC, a copper axe would have belonged to a man of high social status. This is confirmed by grave finds from this period. In the grave field at Remedello di Sotto southwest of Lake Garda, for example, only 17% of the axes placed in the men’s graves had a copper blade. The copper axe blades recovered from those graves are identical in shape and size to the Iceman’s.

If you would like to make one, someone else has posted a photo gallery of the steps required to craft the tool.

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