This wasn't intended to be a Venn diagram

Via the Crappy Design subreddit.

This is called the "Toenail Hoard"

The story dates back to 2015, but I just heard about it in a podcast of No Such Thing As A Fish, and thought it worth posting.

Hundreds of 16th Century coin clippings have been discovered in a Gloucestershire field. The 500 silver clippings, dubbed the Toenail Hoard, were unearthed by Gavin Warren using a metal detector in the Forest of Dean. Shaved from the edges of coins dating back to 1560, the precious metal would have been melted down and sold... Mr Adams, from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, said the hoard, currently being catalogued at the British Museum, was not only "one of the biggest" but a "fantastic bit of social history"... The earliest clippings date from the reign of Elizabeth I, so 1560s to 1570s, and the latest from 1645," he said.

This is of course why coins made of precious metal are milled on the edges. (These appear to have embossed edges, which apparently didn't deter a determined thief).

"Microblading" for cosmetic eyebrow enhancement

In microblading, a practitioner uses tiny needles to make shallow cuts in and around the eyebrow, which are filled in with ink. It's similar to a tattoo, but it's only semi-permanent. That means it will fade over time, sometimes lasting up to three years, although the results can vary.

The dye placement is meant to mimic individual hairs, so it can make overplucked eyebrows look full and defined. It only takes a quick Google search to find a salon or spa offering the service. But microblading is largely unregulated and carries risks, as Jennifer found out.

The rest of the story is here.

Skiers? Or musical notes?

Cross-country skiers (image cropped for size from the original).  But here they are "transcribed" as musical notes...

And you can listen to the score HERE (credit to Redditor K8hoxie).

"That's another pair of sleeves" explained

I encountered the phrase in a John Dickson Carr mystery, and decided the explanation was worthy of a separate post.  Herewith an excerpt from Friends of Cama's Blog.

"That's another pair of sleeves" is a colorful expression that we use in Italian to describe something that is about a completely different thing with no connection to a previous one. 

The expression comes from the Medieval and Renaissance use of interchangeable sleeves in men's and women's dress...

The interchangeable sleeve tradition in the Renaissance was also part of the lover's cup tradition of giving an engagement token of love to one's beloved for their wedding. Interchangeable sleeves could be so valuable that they were kept in safes.

So the next time I'm tempted to say "another ballgame" or "another kettle of fish" I'll substitute this phrase.

This sign at the party for Jana...

Via the Funny subreddit.

The red line is a straight line

And not just any straight line.  It is the longest straight line on the surface of the earth that traverses water without touching land (approximately 20,000 miles).

Here's a video demonstration:

YouTube link.

Officer channels his inner drum major

YouTube link.

I think we can call this manhole cover "metal"

Located in Wiesbaden, Germany.  Via the Manhole Porn subreddit (I kid you not - and despite the name totally SFW).

Reposted from last year to add this manhole cover -

- found by John Farrier and posted at Neatorama.  The artist has a gallery of similar "street art," so I'm not sure if the manhole cover was painted in situ or digitally altered.  I suspect the latter - but still clever.

A teacher's lifelong battle with dyslexia

Excerpts from a thought-provoking story:

And then in the second grade we were supposed to learn to read. But for me it was like opening a Chinese newspaper and looking at it - I didn't understand what those lines were, and as a child of six, seven, eight years old I didn't know how to articulate the problem...

By the time I got to the fifth grade I'd basically given up on myself in terms of reading. I got up every day, got dressed, went to school and I was going to war. I hated the classroom. It was a hostile environment and I had to find a way to survive. By the seventh grade I was sitting in the principal's office most of the day. I was in fights, I was defiant, I was a clown, I was a disruptor, I got expelled from school...

I could write my name and there were some words that I could remember, but I couldn't write a sentence - I was in high school and reading at the second or third grade level. And I never told anybody that I couldn't read...

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine... I taught a lot of different things. I was an athletics coach. I taught social studies. I taught typing - I could copy-type at 65 words a minute but I didn't know what I was typing. I never wrote on a blackboard and there was no printed word in my classroom. We watched a lot of films and had a lot of discussions...

I was reading to our three-year-old daughter. We read to her routinely, but I wasn't really reading, I was making the stories up - stories that I knew, like Goldilocks and The Three Bears, I just added drama to them.

But this was a new book, Rumpelstiltskin, and my daughter said, "You're not reading it like mama." My wife heard me trying to read from a child's book and that was the first time that it dawned on her. I had been asking her to do all this writing for me, helping me write things for school, and then she finally realised, how deep and severe this was...

So one Friday afternoon in my pinstriped suit I walked into the library and asked to see the director of the literacy programme and I sat down with her and I told her I couldn't read. That was the second person in my adult life that I had ever told.

The rest of the story is at the BBC.

And "Hi" to you, sir.

Image cropped for size from the original at the Mildly Interesting subreddit.

"Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?"

That's the question asked by financial analysts at Goldman Sachs.

In an April 10 financial report titled “The Genome Revolution,” company analysts allegedly posed the question “is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The report broke down the pros and cons of new gene therapy treatments being worked on by biotech companies. Turning the search for medical remedies into a numbers game, analyst Salveen Richter called potential “one shot cures” a bad business decision that will hurt a company’s bottom line...

Goldman researchers pointed to pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which developed a treatment for hepatitis C, as an example of the financial impact treating diseases can have on profits. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients,” the memo argued.

Offered without comment.

An unexpected equation

Credit to Cliff Pickover, via Neatorama.

The only "bullfight" video worth watching

YouTube link.

Good advice

"Peace, brother: be not over-exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils;
For, grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid ?"

Nothing special; just posting this for myself for future reference.

The passage above, remembered from some collegiate reading 50 years ago, popped into my mind yesterday and persisted as an earworm demanding that I uncover its source and context.  I searched for perhaps half an hour, using various combinations of the keywords, without success because I had also included "Shakespeare" in the search terms.  I finally discovered it was written by Milton, not Shakespeare, as the only passages I remember from his Comus.

And here's the context: two brothers searching for a lost sister -

While alone, she encounters the debauched Comus, a character inspired by the god of revelry (Ancient Greek: Κῶμος), who is disguised as a villager and claims he will lead her to her brothers. Deceived by his amiable countenance, the Lady follows him, only to be captured, brought to his pleasure palace and victimised by his necromancy. Seated on an enchanted chair, with "gums of glutinous heat", she is immobilised, and Comus accosts her while with one hand he holds a necromancer's wand and with the other he offers a vessel with a drink that would overpower her. Comus urges the Lady to "be not coy" and drink from his magical cup (representing sexual pleasure and intemperance), but she repeatedly refuses, arguing for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. Within view at his palace is an array of cuisine intended to arouse the Lady's appetites and desires. Despite being restrained against her will, she continues to exercise right reason (recta ratio) in her disputation with Comus, thereby manifesting her freedom of mind. Whereas the would-be seducer argues appetites and desires issuing from one's nature are "natural" and therefore licit, the Lady contends that only rational self-control is enlightened and virtuous...

The rest of the story is at Wikipedia.   I'm curious about those "gums of glutinous heat," but don't plan ever again to wade through the convoluted prose of this masque.  But those five lines are still worth remembering, so I'll just leave them here.