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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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 mushroom cap

From the archives of National Geographic:

This hat, shaped from the fibrous interior of Fomes fomentarius, was mailed to National Geographic headquarters by William J. O'Reardon in 1920... According to an eyewitness report in the newsletter of the North American Mycological Association, Fomes caps of Hungarian origin were spotted for sale at the 12th International Fungi and Fibre Symposium in 2005...

Photo credit: Charles Martin (National Geographic Stock)

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The Bluetooth logo is formed by Nordic runes

The logo combines "haglaz" (H) and "berkanan" (B), the initials of Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, King of Denmark and Norway.

Harald's nickname "Bluetooth" first documented appearance is in the Chronicon Roskildense from 1140.  The usual explanation is that Harald must have had a conspicuous bad tooth that has been "blue" (i.e. black, as "blue" meant dark).

Another explanation, is that he was called Thegn in England (corrupted to "tan" when the name came back into Old Norse) — in England, Thane meant chief. Since blue meant "dark", his nickname was really "dark chieftain".

A third theory, according to curator at the Royal Jelling Hans Ole Mathiesen, was that Harald went about clothed in blue. The blue color was in fact the most expensive, so by walking in blue Harald underlined his royal dignity.

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Young blood reverses some age-related impairments

As reported in the prestigious Nature Medicine:

At the cognitive level, systemic administration of young blood plasma into aged mice improved age-related cognitive impairments in both contextual fear conditioning and spatial learning and memory... Our data indicate that exposure of aged mice to young blood late in life is capable of rejuvenating synaptic plasticity and improving cognitive function.

Discussed at a webpage of UC San Francisco:

Anatomically, it was clear that these mice formed more structural and functional connections between neurons, or nerve cells, while they also turned on more genes associated with the formation of new nerve connections.

Furthermore, the researchers found that a protein called Creb became more activated in the brain region known as the hippocampus, and that this increased activity was associated with the anatomical and cognitive improvements the team observed...

Identifying and getting rid of aging factors in old blood, or supplying youthful factors from young blood, might both be worthwhile strategies to combat aging...

There is an AMA with the lead author at the Reddit Journal of Science.

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A 12th-century rebus

It reads “Well fare, mi lady Cateryne”.  Details explained* in a post at Erik Kwakkel's always-interesting blog.

* the explication there says that "cater" was the term used for a die - but I think "cater" refers just to the 4-spot on a die ("the terms ace, deuce, trey, cater, cinque and sice have been made obsolete by one to six...")  Anyone know for sure?  Never mind - I found it:

The full set of numbers for the six sides of a die are ace, deuce, trey, cater, cinque, sice. They are from Old French (cf un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six of modern French). Ace is originally from the Latin for 'unit'.

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Je suis... gobsmacked

My wife noticed the above eBay listing yesterday.  An eBay seller offering the recent issue of Charlie Hebdo for 2,000 Euros.  Further searching revealed this one:

This morning I checked eBay to find actual sales - not just offers - and found...

That one actually sold for over $400.  So I pulled a complete listing of "sold" items ranked from highest price.  At the top was...

$20,000, with 117 bids from a variety of bidders. 

Some of this may be fakery, with false bids from fake accounts.  When I rank the "sold" items by lowest price+shipping, I see quite a few being sold for $1 or so. 

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The world's oldest ice hockey stick

It's known as the Moffatt stick:

Moffatt, nicknamed "Dilly" and born in 1829, is believed to have been the original owner of what the Canadian Museum of History says is the world's oldest known hockey stick.

The son of Loyalist shipbuilders who settled on the shores of Pottle Lake, Dilly would have been less than 10 years old when the stick was fashioned from a single tree branch. He took ownership of the short-handled stick by carving his initials into its long blade.

Now the stick sits in a protective case, awaiting its unveiling when the Canadian Museum of Civilization is officially reopened as the Museum of History on Canada Day in 2017.

Presley was fascinated by the stick when he found it in a barber shop in 2008 in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. His fascination was such that he paid $1,000 for it... **

Through its donor-supported National Collection Fund, the museum recently purchased the Moffat stick from Presley for $300,000...

"It is the earliest known hockey stick, or hurley stick, that we have yet to identify," she said.

The Moffatt stick has its own website (whence the photo), where you can see the documentation, including study of the paint/varnish and the dendrochronology.

See also:  Hockey player high-sticks himself (gif).

** the guy who sold it for $1,000 isn't happy about the recent resale of it.

Ferneough is feeling ripped off.  "I think I should get a little cut," he said Thursday.

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Re...cycling ?

Photo via First Time User.

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How cold is it?

Temperatures at MarsCuriosity's Gale Crater location compared to the U.S. and Canada. And Mars doesn't have wind chill.

Via the Mars Weather Report Twitter feed.

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Asymmetric heartwood

This image was originally posted as just a "tree within a tree" curiosity, but it set me off on a search to understand why the heartwood of a tree would take on such an asymmetric pattern.

I found some images at treedictionary.com that are useful, in that they show trees sectional sagitally rather than transversely.

Apparently the transverse asymmetry arises when the heartwood branches out into one of the limbs of the tree.  Some readers here may be able to clarify or fill in more details from their own experience or work.

Cropped for size from the original at Reddit.

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Interesting ice

When I saw this photo my first thought was how much that pattern resembles the selenite (gypsum) crystals I once enjoyed digging up in the salt plains of Oklahoma.

Via Reddit, where no explanation is provided.

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Tête à tête

"Two members of the Bertram Mills Circus walk head-to-head at Hammersmith Broadway in London, 1953"

Via the HistoryPorn subreddit,  Sloth Unleashed, and Alabaster.

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An "artificial leaf"

A graduate student working with the Tufts University silk lab has created an "artificial leaf" by extracting chloroplasts from plants and suspending them in a matrix of silk protein.  When provided with water and exposed to light, the leaves will produce oxygen.

Via Fresh Photons.

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This is a "red-fleshed apple"

Pink Pearl apples are generally medium sized, with a conical shape. They are named for the color of their flesh, which is a bright rosy pink sometimes streaked or mottled with white. They have a translucent, yellow-green skin, and a crisp, juicy flesh with tart to sweet-tart taste. Pink Pearl apples ripen in late August to mid-September. It is susceptible to scab, and the fruit tend not to keep well on the tree once ripe.

Via Winelandia and The Soul is Bone.

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The Cyr wheel

YouTube link.

The Cyr wheel (also known as the roue Cyr, mono wheel, or simple wheel) is an acrobatic device popularized in the early 21st century.

There are records of people using a similar apparatus as sports equipment during the 19th[citation needed] and 20th centuries. The cyr wheel was further popularized as a circus skill by numerous acrobats and circus artists during the 1990s and later by Daniel Cyr in 2003, who presented the first cyr wheel circus act at the 2003 Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris...

 Cyr wheels are typically made of aluminum tubing. Usually a 1.5” diameter tubing with 1/8” sidewall 6061 aluminum is used. Generally they are made in 3 or 5 individual pieces, and connect with inserts. The inserts can be made out of solid aluminum or steel (either tubing or solid). They are then painted, and covered with a plastic PVC covering to add friction, and protect the metal. Smaller wheels spin faster, work better for smaller spaces, and make "no hand" tricks easier than larger wheels. Larger wheels are more graceful and there is more room for suspensions.

In the video a young man documents his first 30 days using the wheel.  Via Neatorama.

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Is there an upside-down flag on this $10 bill ?

This image is a closeup of the reverse side of a $10 bill from the series of 1950C (printed between 1961 and 1963).  It looks like the flag is being flown upside-down.  This has been vehemently denied by government officials and numismatists:

Let us put this rumor to rest. It doesn’t matter whether or not the flag on the back of a series of 1950 bill appears upside down. This is not considered an error and in no way does it command a premium.

It takes a team of eight engravers hundreds of man hours to engrave a plate used for printing currency. There is no rogue engraver out there inverting American flags. Whether the flag on the back of 1950 does or doesn’t appear upside down is all in the eye of the beholder. The fact of the matter is that the flag looks the way it is supposed to look.

 So spread the message and please do not call asking about an upside flag on 1950 or any other bills. It is not a recognized error and it never will be.

Via Reddit.

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So you like to take quizzes?

I'm waiting (impatiently) for the annual King Williams College General Knowledge Quiz, which presumably will be released just after Christmas.  In the meantime I peeked at the Royal Statistical Society Christmas Quiz, which is equally near-impossible.

Here is the first of the ten questions:

1. Setting the scene (12 points)

In whole or in part, which works are set on, in or at:

• (a) A ship at sea; The Palace of Theseus; An open place; The guard-platform of the castle
• (b) Antwerp, c. 925; Thuringia, c. 1200; Rome, c. 1350; Gothic Spain, at an unspecified time
• (c) A Leicestershire castle, c. 1194; A Warwickshire castle, c. 1575; ‘A large and antiquated edifice’ in Northumberland, c. 1715; Prestonpans, 1745

More at the link.  Alternatively, here is their 2011 quiz --- with the answers.

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17th century witchmarks

As reported in the International Business Times:

Witch markings dating to the 17^th Century have been uncovered by archaeologists at a stately home in Kent and are believed to have been created to protect King James following the gunpowder plot of 1605.

Experts working at Knole house discovered the witchmarks in a room built to accommodate royalty. They had been hidden for centuries in beams and joists below the floorboards and on a fireplace in the Upper King's Room...

The witchmarks, or apotropaic marks, are carved intersecting lines and symbols believed to form a "demon trap" to ward off evil and prevent demonic possession. The marks include chequerboard and mesh designs, as well as interlocking V-shapes on the beams and joists – a symbol that stands for Virgo Virginum that invokes the protection of Mary the Mother of God.

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The "Pillar portrait" of the Bronte sisters

"Anne is on the left with Emily in the centre and Charlotte on the right. Originally, their brother, Branwell, had begun painting himself in the picture but ultimately decided to paint himself out by replacing his image with a 'pillar'. This must have been done before the painting was completed as recent x-rays, which clearly show his image, indicate that it is incomplete. Badly mixed oil paints can have a tendency to become translucent with age, and as a result of Branwell's inexperience in this area, his own ghostly image can now be seen 'in the pillar'. 

The original is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, London

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