Can you find the missing seven states in this map?

Take your time pondering this clever map from xkcd.  When you give up, there is a link to the answer at the Kottke via.  (New England is o.k.)  I thought six of them were easy, but the seventh was hard.

Anne Boleyn's hands and fingers

Anne Boleyn’s Hever “Rose” portrait is one of history’s most iconic faces, with her “B” pendant, her French hood, her dark eyes and a red rose in her right hand... Scientific analysis of the painting at Hever Castle, her childhood home in Kent, has uncovered evidence that an Elizabethan artist sought to create a “visual rebuttal” to claims that Henry VIII’s ill-fated wife was a witch with a sixth finger on her right hand...

In her 2025 book, The Many Faces of Anne Boleyn, Helene Harrison suggested that Anne’s hands were prominently displayed in the Hever Rose portrait to counter claims by Nicholas Sanders, a 16th-century writer and activist, who campaigned for the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England. He sought to undermine Elizabeth I’s legitimacy, writing that Anne had “on her right hand six fingers”. On being told of the new evidence, Harrison said it was amazing to find that the analysis supported her theory.

Kate McCaffrey, who is also an assistant curator at Hever, said: “It’s really thrilling. This is very strong evidence of a visual rebuttal of a very specific myth of witchcraft and six fingers, which is really quite extraordinary. The scientific analysis extends this to a very specific political moment in time.

“It’s Elizabeth’s way of not only reclaiming her own legitimacy and lineage, but also restoring the legitimacy of her mother. It’s impossible to say that Elizabeth herself commissioned this portrait, but it certainly seems too much of a coincidence for it not to be in response to rumours that were circulating at this time.”

Additional discussion at The Guardian.

Undersea data cables as wartime leverage

The United States has been learning some unpleasant realities about "asymmetric warfare" in which the country with the most bombers and aircraft carriers is not necessarily a guaranteed winner.

The embed above comes from an article last week in Reuters, which begins by discussing accidental damage during wartime -

"In a situation of active military operations, the risk of unintentional damage increases, and the longer this conflict lasts, the higher the likelihood of unintentional damage," Kotkin said. A similar incident occurred in 2024, when a commercial vessel attacked by Iran-aligned Houthis drifted in the Red Sea and severed cables with its anchor.

- and then the difficulties of repairing during wartime, and the impossibility of switching to satellites:

"It's not as though you could just switch to satellite. That's not an alternative," Mauldin said, noting that ​satellites rely on connections to land-based networks and are better suited for things in motion, like airplanes and ships.  Low-Earth-orbit networks such as Starlink are "a boutique solution, which is not scalable to millions of users, at this time," Kotkin added.

But it's an article in The Eurasian Times that more directly speaks to the possibility of aggressive attacks on undersea cables -

Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz and controls long stretches of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. These waters host all the major cable routes that link Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This geography gives Tehran physical access to infrastructure on which the world economy depends.

In fact, disrupting undersea cables is a low-cost, high-impact option that can cause global disruption without a direct missile strike. A damaged cable in the Gulf can slow internet traffic from Mumbai to Frankfurt within minutes, delay international banking settlements, and degrade cloud services used by hospitals, airlines, and power grids.

Significantly, it could also cripple military communications for US CENTCOM, and regional partners would be forced to rely on backup satellites with limited bandwidth.

But the situation in the Middle East is such that people are not even talking about overt operations to damage the undersea cable networks on the seabed. They are apprehensive that Iran will resort to doing so openly, which it has the capacity to do, aided by its geography. This additional maritime disruption will only add to its strategic leverage against not only the Gulf countries but also America.

But for an in-your-face salty appraisal of the potential, read the post in the "I Fucking Love Australia" substack of April 26:

A few days ago, Tasnim, the IRGC’s tame mouthpiece, published what looked like a harmless technical explainer. Maps of undersea internet cables. Locations of cloud infrastructure. Landing stations in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. A polite little observation that the southern Gulf relies on these routes far more heavily than Iran does. No podium. No death to America chant. No uniformed general doing the finger wag. Just a map. Because when you have already put drones through 3 AWS data centres and an Oracle facility, you do not need to threaten anything out loud. You publish the coordinates. You let the insurance market translate for you. You let the CEOs in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh shit their expensive trousers in private. That is how grown-ups signal escalation, and it is a mode of communication that requires a functional prefrontal cortex to receive, which is why the sunburnt Big Mac wrapper in the Oval Office has completely missed it.

So let me lay out who actually holds the cards in this pissing contest, because if you have been listening to the cable news lizards you could be forgiven for thinking it is the side with the aircraft carriers.

It is not.

Iran’s internet runs overland. Turkey to the north, the Caucasus to the northwest. If every single submarine cable in the Persian Gulf gets severed tomorrow morning, Tehran checks its email over lunch without noticing. The southern Gulf, by contrast, is a data peninsula. UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. Every banking transaction, every AI cloud workload, every ride-share app, every oil trade settlement, every fucking everything gets to the rest of the world through a handful of fibre bundles running through one of the most contested bodies of water on the planet. 99 percent of international internet traffic travels over submarine cables. The Red Sea corridor is already effectively closed because the Houthis have made it a no-go zone for repair vessels. The Gulf corridor is now being mapped by the people who just put drones into Amazon’s racks. That leaves the entire southern Gulf with precisely 0 safe options for getting their data to Europe, to India, to Africa, to anywhere.

And here is the kicker. The cables do not need to be bombed. They do not need missiles. They do not need a full IRGC naval sortie. They need a fishing trawler dragging an anchor in the wrong place..."

Do not rely on my excerpts from sources.  Do your own research, make your own conclusions.

Time to start thinking about global oil reserves - updated

I'm embedding a graphic I found in a May 2 Facebook post by Christian Decle (who apparently is a "digital creator.")  It's a slightly blurry probable screencap of a report from J.P. Morgan written by Natasha Kaneva last week.  I tried to track the original and found her on various J.P. Morgan web pages, but haven't seen the original report, which may have been distributed privately to clients.  

I've added two annotations of my own.  The first is a red arrow noting the point in the graph where the global oil inventory changes from current to projected future, extrapolated on the downward slope for the last couple months, and assuming the global drawdown stays unchanged at 5.5 million barrels per day (second annotation, circled).  I inserted the arrow because the color change from purple to green is subtle, and I wanted to note that the curent level is not critical - it is about the same as ten-year averages - but the steepness of the recent fall reflects an unprecedented severity of disruption and will quickly become critical if it continues.

This topic has been discussed repeatedly on the Bloomberg business televaion channel by hosts interviewing various specialists in business and economics.  Everyone wants to know what is going to happen, and there are a lot of assumptions that need to be made.

The author of the Facebook post concludes by saying "The UK has a fuel reserve buffer — measured in days."  I have no idea whether that is true.

But it is true that after Trump made the yet-unproven claim that the U.S. was escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran did launch some drone or missile attacks on the U.A.E., which damaged a refinery and threatens the U.A.E.'s route of bypassing the Strait via a pipeline to the Indian Ocean.  Brent crude is now back at highs, and no resolution is in sight.  

Addendum:  This update posted yesterday in the Financial Times:

Global oil reserves plunged at a record pace in April, as the conflict in the Middle East strains supplies and raises the risk of a further sharp jump in prices ahead of the summer travel season.

Stockpiles of crude fell by nearly 200mn barrels, or 6.6mn barrels a day, estimated S&P Global Energy, even as higher prices triggered a collapse in demand of about 5mn b/d, the sharpest ever fall outside of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“This is massive, it is far above the usual range,” said Jim Burkhard, head of crude research at S&P, adding that in a normal month, global stocks fluctuate by between a few hundred thousand and a million barrels. “An inevitable market reckoning is coming,” he said...

Despite average pump prices nearing $4.50 a gallon, US drivers have yet to significantly curb consumption, according to Morgan Stanley. The bank estimates that one in every 11 barrels of oil is used by American motorists and forecasts that US inventories could fall below 200mn barrels by the end of August, the equivalent of roughly one week of demand...

He said a sharp drop in US stockpiles could be the trigger for wider alarm. “The worst of the crisis is ahead of us,” he said.

Note the drawdown of reserves is not decreasing, even despite some demand destruction.  This morning American equity market futures are trending up, based on anticipated rising earnings from the controversial AI sector and on the assertion from Trump that there are hopes for "a deal", when what he wants is total surrender by Iran of their nuclear material and their sovereignty, and what they want is retention of the enriched uranium plus control of the Strait plus reparations for damages incurred to date.  A "compromise" between those two viewpoints is an utter fantasy.  I have to add the mandatory "IMHO", so do your own research.

A brilliant turn of phrase

"A beleaguered grunt from the other room interrupts him.  Moments later, a teenage boy lopes out... Without a glance at Cameron, the boy holds up a cereal box and moans, 'Mom!  We're outta Cheerios."...

A look of surprise crosses Avery's face, then she inhales stiffly... "Marco, hon, what do we do when we're out of Cheerios?"

Marco rolls his eyes.  "The list."

"Right.  We add it to the shopping list," she says, her tone pointed  "I'm sure you'll find something else to eat in the meantime."

Marco mutters, "We're out of chips, too."

"Oh, the humanity," Avery says dryly.  "Look I'll try to get to the grocery store later..."

-  excerpted from Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt.

Very seldom do I actually laugh out loud when reading a book, but the mother's phrase of exasperation with her teen's complaint was truly chuckleworthy.  In the past, when confronted with such a situation, my response probably would have been to say (or at least think) "First World Problem."  But this response is better.

Relevant reference (0:40)

"Remarkably Bright Creatures"

Enjoyed the book and am looking forward to the movier.  Here is the New York Times review of the book back in 2023.   The movie drops on Netflix on May 8.

A glimpse of the future of AI-produced movies

Absolutely amazing.  Imagine being a human actor viewing this and wondering what your future holds re 

employment.  Imagine what fake celebrity porn must look like now.  Imagine how unsophisticated viewers can now be duped into believing false realities re their political leaders.  Imagine being able to create one of your own using generative AI...

Addendum:  I'm now seeing a "Video Unavailable" message in place of the video.  I'll see if I can find a workaround for the embed.  In the meantime, you can view it at this Reddit thread.  And if that disappears, try Googling "The AI movie Pi Hard shows Neil deGrasse Tyson teaming up with Sam Bankman-Fried to stop an evil Stephen Hawking from destroying the multiverse by dividing by zero. Bill Gates is a robot and Elon Musk is panicking."

Just found this on YouTube.  Don't know if it will stay up...  I gotta go do yard and garden chores.

The role of rare earths in future wars

Interesting development re AI in Chinese court system

Screencap from moments ago (Sunday May 3) on Bloomberg's The China Show.  The case was brought by a tech worker in Eastern China (Hangzhou) whose job was to evaluate the efficiency of large language models.  The company used AI to replace him.  He sued, and on April 28 the court ruled in his favor, saying that workers can be laid off because of external influences [presumably bad sales etc], but not if the company develops or purchases software to replace the employee.  

I wonder how American courts will rule when this (inevitably) arises.

Public service announcement

Viewers at Neatorama are advised by Miss Cellania that this brief video is a public service announcement, so I was alert to the possibility, but didn't figure out the message until the 3:40 mark.  I'm reposting it not so much for the message as for the artwork, which I find very appealing - especially the styling of the willow tree by the pond.

Huge losses by the U.S. in its war on Iran

I found a CNN video report on this matter, posted yesterday.  I've seen similar reports at Al Jazeera English and other miscellaneous sites; this seems to be the first one released on mainstream US media.

"Blind Faith" - a new Banksy

Cleverly conceived, and well-executed.  Not apparent from this view is that the subject's front foot is going to lead to him fallling off the plinth.

Addendum:  Side view of the statue stepping off its plinth -

- cropped for emphasis from the original posted at the BBC.  Hat tip to a reader for sending me the link.

One more.  The best view, via Kottke:

7 + 2 = x + 6. Can you solve for "x" ?

Certainly you can.  Probably in less than 5 seconds, or you wouldn't be reading this blog.

But... one-fourth of incoming University of California San Diego freshmen taking a placement exam last year failed to solve for the x.

And... 3/5 of them failed to round 374,518 to the nearest hundred.

I found those numbers in the May 2026 Harper's Index, attributed to Akos Rona-Tas, University of California, San Diego.  A Google search led me to confirmatory editorial commentary in the San Diego Union Tribune.

"... it is so jarring to read a lengthy new report from UCSD’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions that says many students can’t answer simple math questions. “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly 30-fold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort,” it stated.

Some 25% of students in need of remedial math training couldn’t figure out the answer to this equation — 7 + 2 = blank + 6 — the sort of problem that California first-graders are expected to master. And 61% were unable to round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred — a basic task third-graders are drilled on..."

From what I've read elsewhere, it appears that UCSD students take the placement exam in order to assess what level courses they should enroll in in the STEM programs.  So the low numbers would seem to reflect science-interested students, not necessarily the liberal arts-focused students.

A number of potential causes are cited, including grade inflation during high school:

But the last cause on that list — high school grade inflation — is something that UCSD can’t fix. It is part of a far-reaching educational crisis that demands a much broader response.

The report said even the students admitted in 2024 who were most in need of remedial support had high school math grade point averages of better than 3.6 — and the difference in such GPAs between the least and most prepared entering students was very small.

If you're interested, here is one Math Placement Exam from UCSD, which you can take at home privately and for free.  It seems to start easy and get harder as you go along.  I didn't see these particular questions on this particular placement exam. 

Related:  Over the years I have hired a number of bright young neighborhood high schoolers to help me with yard and garden chores, and I sometimes challenge them with math and geometry puzzles from the mathematics category of this blog to ponder while they walk in diminishing circles behind a mower, or to take home to work out.  Last year I messaged a new puzzle to a high-school junior.  The correct answer came back in a few hours.  I told him I was impressed.  He said he and his friends couldn't figure it out, so they plugged it into ChatGPT...

New word for the day: neuston (or pleuston)

Fascinating video, and IMHO worth the time expenditure to watch.  As a child I was fascinated by the water striders and whirligigs in northern Minnesota lakes.  These "ripple bugs" are similar inhabitants of fast-flowing streams.  The role of hydrophobic legs has been documented long ago, but the details here re the fans and their deployment is awesome.

Now for the words and their etymology:

Neuston, also called pleuston, are organisms that live at the surface of a body of water, such as an ocean, estuary, lake, river, wetland or pond. Neuston can live on top of the water surface or submersed just below the water surface. In addition, microorganisms can exist in the surface microlayer that forms between the top- and the under-side of the water surface.

Neustons can be informally separated into two groups: the phytoneuston, which are autotrophs floating at the water surface including cyanobacteria, filamentous algae and free-floating aquatic plant (e.g. mosquito fern, duckweed and water lettuce); and the zooneuston, which are floating heterotrophs such as protists (e.g. ciliates) and metazoans (aquatic animals).

The word "neuston" comes from Greek neustos, meaning "swimming", and the noun suffix -on (as in "plankton"). This term first appears in the biological literature in 1917. The alternative term pleuston comes from the Greek plein, meaning "to sail or float". The first known use of this word was in 1909, before the first known use of neuston. In the past various authors have attempted distinctions between neuston and pleuston, but these distinctions have not been widely adopted. As of 2021, the two terms are usually used somewhat interchangeably, and neuston is used more often than pleuston.

Also interesting to note that "neuston" is both countable and uncountable, depending on usage.

Seeking address labels that support a charity

Many years ago I used return address labels from the National Wildlife Federation and other nature- and medicine-based charities.  Then I started printing my own labels using the Avery system of buying blank sticky labels and printing them at home with my name and address.  The last time I tried that, the process was hellishly frustrating, ending with the paper jamming in my printer and the sticky labels tangled in the gears.  I vowed in the future to buy directly from charities again.

But where?  A quick search this morning wasn't productive.  And my understanding of most label-printing services (like the Walmart pictured above) is that my $$ goes to Walmart or the check-printing company and not to the charity.  My "support" for the charity thus becomes having their name or logo microprinted on the label.  

I wonder if any readers are purchasing return address labels from charities.