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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