The science of "rogue waves"

"Researchers have since determined that rogue waves probably claimed 22 supercarriers and more than 500 lives in the second half of the 20th century alone...

... two schools of thought surfaced regarding how monstrous waves could develop. The first is the simplest. It starts with the observation that swells travel at different speeds. When one overtakes another, the two are combined...  Others, however, hold that the most extreme waves form from less straightforward behavior. In wave tanks, for instance, when one wave travels right next to another of similar length, energy leaks from one to the other. The individual swells affect one another in complicated nonlinear ways...

Standard arithmetic suffices for simple casino games, but this thinking captures the spirit of a branch of probability known as large deviation theory (LDT). It specializes in identifying instances of rare events that are much more common than the next most likely way they might play out. In the exceptional cases when LDT can be used, it allows calculations that are impossible with standard statistics, Vanden-Eijnden said, just as calculus can solve problems that are intractable in algebra.
The chaotic ocean, the group reasoned, should be the perfect arena to witness LDT in action..."

More information at Quanta Magazine.

Bad pie

Image cropped for emphasis from the one at the via.

Interesting coronavirus graphs, including ?triage effect

Comparison of countries embedded above.  State-by-state and other graphs at 91-DIVOC,

I'm also intrigued by this graph -

- and in particular by the steepness of the rise with advanced age.  Obviously elderly patients have an increased prevalence of COPD and coronary artery disease and renal insufficiency etc, which render them more susceptible to the stresses of an acute respiratory distress syndrome.  But I'd be surprised if the co-morbidities differences are that great.  I suspect (though I've not seen it discussed anywhere) that what this graph is depicting is a "triage effect."  You have two admissions to the hospital, one 84 years old, the other 54 years old.   There is one ventilator available; the other patient will receive supplemental oxygen and supportive care.  Your call.   An enormous number of heart-wrenching decisions are being made every day, all across the world.

Only one of these is a pine cone

The other is a Striped Cuckoo.

The final grievance in the Declaration of Independence

This is the 27th grievance against King George III:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The backstory for this grievance is discussed at length by a professor of history at the University of Oregon:

The 27th grievance raises two issues. The first, the king’s incitement of “domestic insurrections,” refers to slave revolts and reveals a hard truth recently brought to the public’s attention by The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project: Some of those who sought independence aimed to protect the institution of slavery. This was particularly true for Virginia slave owners, who were deeply disturbed by a proclamation issued in November 1775 by Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore, which promised enslaved people held by revolutionaries freedom in exchange for joining the British army. Virginians and other southerners feared that it would provoke widespread slave revolts...

Although the reference to the “merciless Indian savages” appealed to the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” Jefferson and others who signed the Declaration had their own reasons for detesting British policies relating to Native Americans and their lands... More than a decade earlier, in order to end a costly war to suppress an indigenous resistance movement led by the Ottawa war leader Pontiac, the king issued the Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous ownership of lands west of the Appalachian mountains’ crest and prevented colonists from settling there... Jefferson’s denigration of “merciless Indian savages” signaled that the war for independence from Great Britain would also be a brutal war to seize indigenous lands.

More at the interesting article in The Atlantic.

Divertimento #176

"How a storm revealed a Welsh kingdom" (nice photoessay)

If you're videoconferencing from home with Zoom, remember to cover up the camera if you carry your laptop into the bathroom.

What's the best way to poach an egg? (various techniques compared).

"Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches" - with a large map of Doggerland.

Commentary on Deborah Birx' sartorial style and professional behavior (more at the link):

Birx doesn’t dress like a lady politician in jewel-tone suits and statement jewelry. She doesn’t wear power dresses, those sleek sheaths that are a critical part of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s professional wardrobe. She doesn’t turn up in a white coat as if she’s there to take the nation’s collective temperature. Birx’s style can be called classically feminine when she wears her shirtwaist dresses and knots silk scarves around her shoulders. She exudes academic wonkiness with her earth tones and tunics and mufflers double-wrapped around her neck. She never looks bland or nondescript. She doesn’t look like an automaton or someone who has lost herself in the data and computer models. And in doing so, she offers a subtle but important reminder to people that while this crisis is serious and meeting it is hard, we are still human.

How the coronavirus is killing local news.

Rational logic indicates that the coronavirus did not escape from a bioweapons laboratory.

The best way to reheat pizza (nine methods compared).

Blighted bar slated for demolition discovered to be an antique log cabin from 1700s.  Here is a 2018 Google Streetview.

Snowflake is a 2010s derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions. (example)

The movies with the most F-bombs.  "Funnily enough, not one but two Martin Scorsese's movies show up on the chart: "The Wolf of Wall Street" leads the pack with an astounding 569 uses of the word, while "Casino" is in fourth place with 422."

"Doctors warn parents not to sleep with their babies because of the risk of death by accidental suffocation. Still, mothers who've carried those infants inside them want to be nearby, which is only natural. Surely, modern technology can find a way to do that safely. One idea is the device... by BellyBelly. Years later, it is not widely used outside of the Netherlands."

How smart lightbulbs can be hacked ("... too many internet-of-things gadgets don’t come with automatic software updates").

"The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses."

Data regarding the Houston Astros' sign-stealing scandal.

Did you know horses can have mustaches?  Males and females.  Gallery of photos at the link, via Neatorama.

"Intuit [maker of TurboTax] and other tax software companies have spent millions lobbying to make sure that the IRS doesn’t offer its own tax preparation and filing service. In exchange, the companies have entered into an agreement with the IRS to offer a “Free File” product to most Americans — but good luck finding it."

In January, 37 mph winds blew over a portion of the border wall in California.

Three cake-baking tips from a state champion baker.

The do's and don'ts of eating and drinking on an airplane, from back in the days when people used to fly.

A simple three-card magic trick.

Some people make a reasonable income by owning vending machines.  "Yeah, it’s a lot more simple than people think. You can buy a vending machine used from Craigslist, and you get your business license. You go to door-to-door talking to business owners and offering the service."

A new type of plastic brick allows ice skating rinks to be built anywhere.

A Nashville art school is going to purge all non-Christian faculty.  “We do not hire people who are not Christian,” Thomas Burns, Belmont’s provost, clarified in a response to questions at a town hall on Wednesday. “So the ones who are not Christian will not be eligible to work at Belmont. That’s just part of who we are.”

Very simple illustration explains how a bill in Congress becomes law.

Trikafta is the latest breakthrough drug to treat cystic fibrosis.  “My life is officially starting at 29 years old. I don’t really have a lot to show for it. I spent my whole life preparing to die young…I have all this open future, all this unknown. I just don’t know how to process it.”

"Wild swimming" is what used to be called "swimming."

A mother's children tell her "there's water coming from the laundry room.  Looks like it starts at the washing machine."  She runs downstairs to find this.

Erosion on the shores of the Great Lakes is a serious problem for landowners.  Water levels are reaching historic high levels, probably because of climate change.

The Australian bushfires damaged aboriginal rock art.  "Moore said an intense bushfire burned right up to the edge of the boulder, shearing off enormous slabs of granite. The shearing – known as spalling – was probably caused by a rapid temperature change rather than prolonged heat exposure, he said."

Pearls in North Macedonia are made from ground shells and an emulsion made from fish scales.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 turned the brains of one Herculaneum victim to glass.  "Now Petrone and colleagues have revealed a number of substances within the glassy material, including proteins typically found in brain tissue. Crucially, these were not found in adjacent ash or elsewhere in the site.  “The detection of glassy material from the victim’s head, of proteins expressed in human brain, and of fatty acids found in human hair indicates the thermally induced preservation of vitrified human brain tissue,” the team write."

A razor-wielding rooster in a cockfight killed a bystanding spectator.

"Despite being a couple of years old, José Manuel Ballester’s artworks feel eerily familiar in the time of COVID-19. The Spanish artist recreates classic paintings like Goya’s “The Third of May 1808,” Vermeer’s “The Allegory of Painting,” and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” except he leaves out one central aspect: humans."  Via Colossal.

Ochre

From an article at Colossal:

"Washington-based artist and researcher Heidi Gustafson forages, processes, and catalogs natural mineral samples for the Early Futures Ocher Archive. Ranging in color based on its elemental structure, ochre is crushed into a powder and used in various applications from art to medicine. With over 550 samples, Gustafson’s ever-growing archive has become a collaborative project with contributions from archaeologists, scientists, and creatives from around the world."

"As each sample enters the collection, it is labeled with a corresponding number. In a notebook, Gustafson records where the ochre is from, who sourced or collected it, any historic or contemporary uses, and other relevant information. Gustafson grinds the iron-rich ochre into pigments, which she sells to artists and also uses for her own work. Processed samples are added to glass vials and organized by region or dominate mineral type."

It's easy to see why such minerals were so valuable to early humans.  There are additional interesting photos at the artist's Instagram site.

Humor scrapbook, part VI

This is the sixth of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially the case with humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Movie theater in Minneapolis

Via.

Sweet

Recognize this crystal?  (answer in the comments). 

Image cropped for size from the original at the mildlyinteresting subreddit.

Her name is Campanula

In the movie Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the character voiced by Helena Bonham-Carter is Campanula, which raised the question of how many other names are derived from flowers.

Apparently there are hundreds of them.  It's a broadly cross-cultural phenomenon.  Mostly for girls (Heather, Iris, Olive, Violet, Rose, Lily, Daisy ...), apparently few for boys.  I found a list for dogs (presumably female dogs), some unusual ones (Anemone - really??), and even baby names inspired by food (Kobe, Barack, Katniss, Colby, Brie, Ginger and various herbs and spices).

Image via.

The city of Manila, before and after quarantine

The comment thread at the mildlyinteresting subreddit indicates similar observations coming from California, India, Jakarta...

Reminds me of when I drove from Wisconsin to Ohio after 9/11 and saw no contrails in the sky.

If you have anosmia, isolate yourself immediately

A mother who was infected with the coronavirus couldn’t smell her baby’s full diaper. Cooks who can usually name every spice in a restaurant dish can’t smell curry or garlic, and food tastes bland. Others say they can’t pick up the sweet scent of shampoo or the foul odor of kitty litter.

Anosmia, the loss of sense of smell, and ageusia, an accompanying diminished sense of taste, have emerged as peculiar telltale signs of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and possible markers of infection.

On Friday, British ear, nose and throat doctors, citing reports from colleagues around the world, called on adults who lose their senses of smell to isolate themselves for seven days, even if they have no other symptoms, to slow the disease’s spread. The published data is limited, but doctors are concerned enough to raise warnings.

“We really want to raise awareness that this is a sign of infection and that anyone who develops loss of sense of smell should self-isolate,” Prof. Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, wrote in an email. “It could contribute to slowing transmission and save lives.”

Full article at The New York Times.

"Tribalism" becoming more intense on islands and vacation areas

The word "tribe" can be defined to mean an extended kin group or clan with a common ancestor, or can also be described as a group with shared interests, lifestyles and habits. The proverb "birds of a feather flock together" describes homophily, the human tendency to form friendship networks with people of similar occupations, interests, and habits. Some tribes can be located in geographically proximate areas, like villages or bands, though telecommunications enables groups of people to form digital tribes using tools like social networking websites.

Two interesting articles today.  The first from the Washington Post: ‘Stay on the mainland’: Tensions grow as affluent city dwellers fearing coronavirus retreat to second homes":

In recent weeks, wealthy city dwellers hoping to escape the novel coronavirus have been fleeing to their second homes, exacerbating long-standing tensions between locals and summer residents. While those from out of town feel they have the right to use property they own and pay taxes on, year-round residents worry the new arrivals could be carrying the disease, and local hospitals aren’t equipped to handle an outbreak.

Last week, Facebook groups intended to connect Cape Cod residents devolved into embittered name-calling and demands to close the bridges to the mainland. Police in Block Island, R.I., reported receiving credible tips about residents threatening to destroy the island’s power transformers to discourage visitors. North Haven, a small island off the coast of Maine, voted to ban its own part-time residents...

Still, for city residents facing the prospect of an extended lockdown, escaping to Shelter Island in New York or Boothbay Harbor in Maine has obvious appeal. Some communities are turning to drastic measures to keep them away.

In North Carolina’s Outer Banks, both Dare and Currituck Counties have banned nonresidents from accessing their property. Exceptions will be made for “extreme circumstances” on a case-by-case basis, the Outer Banks Voice reported.

And this related article in The Lily:  "Nantucket has 3 ventilators. Residents say ‘stay away,’ but East Coast elites keep coming":

[Nantucket is] a “medical desert,” according to Nantucket Cottage Hospital CEO Gary Shaw. The first confirmed case of coronavirus on the island was announced Sunday, and more will likely follow. With 17,000 year-round residents, Shaw estimates the island could eventually have as many as 1,700 infected patients, 350 of whom would require hospitalization.

“Well I have 14 beds and three ventilators,” said Shaw. The hospital also has a shortage of doctors, and no intensive care units. “It’s straight math.”

Nantucket is a storied holiday destination for the East Coast elite, its population swelling to approximately 50,000 at the peak of the summer season. In the past two weeks, summer residents have streamed onto the island, retreating to second homes to wait out the virus, straining a medical system already incapable of treating coronavirus for the people who live there year-round...

It didn’t take long for the year-rounders to notice the new arrivals. The first sign of summer residents is always the license plates, said Chapa. Last weekend, she said, she started seeing BMWs from New York, Mercedes-Benzes from Connecticut. Then she drove by the airport and saw the line of private jets...

Now the big question is whether to restrict access to the ferries, preventing the summer residents from boarding the boats...

Year-rounders should remember the island’s history, Glidden says: Centuries ago, when white settlers first arrived on the island, they brought a virus that wiped out Native Americans.

“We’re sitting here talking here about invaders bringing viruses,” said Glidden. “We were those invaders.”

A history of disinfected mail

As soon as humans became aware that infectious diseases could be transmitted by fomites (inanimate objects), attention was directed to developing methods of disinfection. Postal and public health authorities had to deal with a wide variety of extremely dangerous infections (cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, leprosy, anthrax), and applied a surprising variety of techniques to letters and packages sent through the mails, beginning as early as the 15th century in Venice.

A very informative philatelic exhibit presents examples of how the U.S. has dealth with potentially dangerous items.  Shown at the top, for example, are two letters from locations where yellow fever was present; they have been punctured to allow fumigating agents to reach the inside of the envelope.  The bottom envelope in this image -

- had its corners clipped off so that formaldehyde gas could be introduced to kill smallpox.  Other letters and postcards were autoclaved or steam sterilized, which could be deleterious to the letters inside.

These precautions were not limited to the preantibiotic era.  In 2001 threats of anthrax attacks were made in the United States, and a variety of special precautions, including x-irradiation, had to be undertaken, beginning at this page of the exhibit and continuing for a dozen pages thereafter.  And these letters from Hawaii in 1900 show how holes were punched in the envelopes -

- so that sulfur fumes could be insufflated before they were sent from areas quarantined for bubonic plague.  Other examples are shown of disinfection of mail from the Hawaiian leper colony.

Philatelic exhibitions are conventionally mounted on a series of glass-fronted frames, with up to 16 letter-size pages in one frame, and in this case spread onto six frames.   This award-winning exhibit was created by William A. Sandrik of Arlington, Virginia.  The entire exhibit may be viewed at Exponet (frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, frame 4, frame 5, frame 6).

And those interested in philately (stamp and postal history collecting) should browse the Exponet site beginning at this index page.  Over 600 exhibits are accessible, on a huge variety of topics, in a wide variety of languages.

Reposted from 2011 because of its timely subject matter.   Today a New York Times article addresses the question of transmission of coronavirus by mail:

A representative for the U.S. Postal Service was unwilling to discuss current sanitization protocols. But the agency’s website reports that the only mail items receiving treatment are letters and parcels sent to ZIP codes beginning in 202, 203, 204 and 205, which serve federal government agencies in Washington, D.C. In a process that began shortly after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Postal Service sends mail destined for those ZIP codes to New Jersey, where they are put on a conveyor belt and passed under a high-energy beam of ionizing radiation that kills bacteria and viruses. The letters and packages are then “aired out” for a while, before being forwarded to their destinations. The paper is left slightly faded and somewhat crispy, but sterile.

Should mail irradiation be extended beyond these exclusive ZIP codes, to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus? On CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned that SARS-CoV-2 could potentially be transmitted by contaminated objects. “This is a sticky virus,” he said. The structure of the coronavirus’s protective envelope helps it bond tightly to certain surfaces: skin in particular, as well as fabric and wood, but also plastic and steel...

David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, noted that the surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, along with the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, has “indicated that there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through the mail.”..

Then again, contact transmission is notoriously difficult to study and document...