TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")
"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
17 July 2025
The future of clean energy
Visually-appealing puréed meals
The ongoing genocide in Gaza
NK: You know, when we talk about these hundreds and hundreds of people being killed around aid distribution sites, what are Palestinians in Gaza telling you? What are your staff members there telling you about the kinds of choices people are having to make right now?AS: It's very difficult. I mean, to be honest with you, we are lost for words to describe how things are in Gaza. Two-point-two million people are suffering, and not necessarily all dying, but in different ways. In that background -- against that background -- we see, and I have to say, you know, before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stepped in to distribute food, there were 400 places -- 400 centres -- where the UN and its partners were distributing food. That is for 2.2 million people. That's been reduced to about four centres. And now, three centres in the last few days. We're talking about 700,000 people squeezed into each centre trying to get food. It is chaotic, and people are being shot. And this has happened over the last six weeks. We see 700-plus people who have been shot and killed while trying to get food. They are not a threat to the Israeli Defense Force. So, why are they being shot? This is a crowd control issue. So, you can imagine, after six weeks, when people have been shot and killed every day trying to get food, they still go. And that is because their choices are just to either starve and die, or go to these places, struggle, step on each other, fight for this meagre resource, and get shot. And that's a very, very difficult choice to make. And they say we know the risk, but we will take that risk. We'd rather die one way or the other. So, it's that desperate.
A column at The Guardian collected some of the more outrageous statements by Israeli politicans in the past couple years:
“All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza,” said May Golan, minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel on 7 October 2023.
“Flatten everything [in Gaza] just like it is today in Auschwitz,” David Azoulay, council leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station, December 2023.
“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, wrote on X 7 October 2023. Vaturi also wrote: “The war will never end if we don’t expel everyone.” (2 November 2023) and “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery.” (9 October 2023)
“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview. This did not get much international coverage but was cited in the letter sent to the attorney general at the end of 2023 accusing the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring incitement to genocide.
“The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” said Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid in response to a Palestinian lawmaker bemoaning the loss of civilian life on 16 October 2023.
“There should be 2 goals for this victory: 1. There is no more Muslim land in the Land of Israel ... After we make it the land of IL, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom …” said Likud member of the Knesset Amit Halevi on 16 October 2023.
“They [the children] are our enemies,” said Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the National Religious party, part of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Rothman was responding to a question from a Channel 4 (UK) interviewer asking “the children are your enemies?”
"The Motorcycle Diaries"
13 July 2025
Four xrays of hands on the fourth of July
WWII prisoners-of-war in Minnesota - updated
"Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States.Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors.Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives."
12 July 2025
A "heat burst" is a rare weather phenomenon
"A rare weather phenomena known as a heat burst occurred in a remote area of northwest Minnesota before sunrise Thursday.At an automated weather station near the town of Fertile, Minn., the temperature rapidly rose from about 72 degrees at 3 a.m. to 93 degrees at 3:40 a.m. At the same time, the dewpoint went from the upper 60s to the low 40s — a staggering drop before normalizing back into the 60s."
Just 10 miles south, at the weather station in Waukon, Minn., the heat burst didn't occur. While it was 93 in Fertile, the temp stayed in the low 70s in Waukon.
In meteorology, a heat burst is a rare atmospheric phenomenon characterized by a sudden, localized increase in air temperature near the Earth's surface. Heat bursts typically occur during night-time and are associated with decaying thunderstorms. They are also characterized by extremely dry air and are sometimes associated with very strong, even damaging, winds.Although the phenomenon is not fully understood, the event is thought to occur when rain evaporates (virga) into a parcel of cold, dry air high in the atmosphere, making the air denser than its surroundings. The parcel descends rapidly, warming due to compression, overshoots its equilibrium level, and reaches the surface, similar to a downburst.
10 July 2025
The Milky Way - horizontal and vertical orientations
Not The Onion
The cartoon equivalent of a "dad joke"
"The muumuu /ˈmuːmuː/ or muʻumuʻu (Hawaiian pronunciation: [ˈmuʔuˈmuʔu]) is a loose dress of Hawaiian origin. It is related to the Mother Hubbard dress, introduced by Christian missionaries in Polynesia to "civilize" those whom they considered half-naked savages. Within the category of fashion known as aloha wear, the muumuu, like the aloha shirt, are often brilliantly colored with floral patterns of Polynesian motifs. In Hawaiʻi, muumuus are no longer as widely worn as an aloha shirt, but continue to be a popular dress for social gatherings, church, and festivals such as the Merrie Monarch hula competition.The word muʻumuʻu means "cut off" in Hawaiian. The dress, which was originally used as an undergarment or chemise for the holokū, lacked a yoke and may have featured short sleeves or no sleeves at all. The muumuu was made of lightweight solid white cotton fabric and, in addition to being an undergarment, served Hawaiian women as a housedress, nightgown, and swimsuit. Holokū was the original name for the Mother Hubbard dress introduced by Protestant missionaries to Hawaii in the 1820s. In contrast to the muumuu, the holokū featured long sleeves and a floor-length unfitted dress falling from a high-necked yoke which was worn by the aliʻi as well as the common people. By the 1870s, the holokū of the aliʻi took on a more fitted waist and often a train seven or eight yards in length for the evening, and included ruffles, flounces and trimmings, while the modest loose-fitting train-less holokū continued to be widely worn by women of all classes as their daily dress. In time, upon the introduction of printed fabrics to Hawai'i, the muumuu, essentially a shortened and more comfortable version of the holokū, gained popularity for everyday wear."
An articulated T. rex foot
A fascinating video about Roman aqueducts
The engineering of roman aqueducts explained.
byu/cosmic_voyager01 inDamnthatsinteresting
Nonuplets thriving
"On 4 May 2021, nine children were born to Halima Cisse (Mali) in the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco. This is the first known incidence of nonpulets surviving birth. The record previously belonged to eight babies born in 2009 to Nadya Suleman (USA) aka "Octomom".Nonuplets are extremely rare, and until the arrival of the Cisse children, no cases had been recorded of nine babies from a single birth surviving for more than a few hours."