Geologist here - Looks like you have a fantastic piece of Packstone / Biomicrite. Without being able to run the tests on it, the matrix (blue) is probably a calcareous mudstone, with the blue colour being formed from trace minerals in its composition. Like others have said, the white parts are cross sections of shells, and in this case they look like bivalves.
TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")
"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
06 December 2024
Interesting rock, found in a river near Verona, Italy
Preventive? or preventative?
The shorter word, preventive, has meanings such as "something that prevents," when used as a noun, and "devoted to or concerned with prevention," when used as an adjective. Preventative means the same thing.Of the two, preventive is slightly older, appearing in English at the beginning of the 17th century."So Philip of Macedon, and Atis the sonne of Croesus, found a chariot in a swords hilt, and an Iron poynted weapon at the hunting of a Bore, to delude their preuentiue wearinesse."— Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, 1602However, preventative is no Johnny-come-lately, showing definite use for over 350 years now."Here follows the preventative: take a poor man, and settle him in a comfortable situation, making him pay (or secure) a reasonable valuation...."— Christopher Love, The Strange and Wonderful Predictions of Mr. Christopher Love, 1651It is not uncommon to find both of them used interchangeably by a single author within the same work... But the English language is not only rich with variation; it is rich as well with strife, and people who like to tell you that the thing you're doing is a bad thing to do... This was followed by another hundred years of language guides claiming that one of these words was proper and one was not.
"Bad Sisters" season 1 trailer
05 December 2024
King Williams College Christmas quiz, 2024-5
Posted today in The Guardian - several weeks ahead of schedule and catching me completely off guard. So I will be taking some time off from blogging to work on the quiz with friends. I'm back. I was only able to figure out three in the whole quiz without Googling (too tough (and too British)).
Here are questions from Section 13 (of 18 total)
1. What dish is a reticulum?
2. What Irish name describes an absence?
3. Which Australian sports a silver-grey coat?
4. What did the Dutch Lakenvelder create in south-west Scotland?
5. What has a lineback and markedly overdeveloped keratin-based protuberances?
6. Identify four stiff standers, four dilly danders, two hookers, two lookers and a wig-wag.
7. What hybrid was developed from red and dun in adjacent counties?
8. What came from Heck and Hagenbeck, one from each?
9. Who righted the females from Valencia?
10. What was sourced from Teeswater?
03 December 2024
"Goodbye to All That" (Robert Graves, 1929)
"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills and that he bred the pedigree dogs of his prose to feed the cats of his poetry. Yet it’s for his prose that he’s most famous today, including 'I Claudius', his brilliant account of the debauchery of Imperial Rome, and 'Goodbye to All That', the unforgettable memoir of his early life including the time during the First World War when he was so badly wounded at the Somme that The Times listed him as dead."
I unfortunately didn't copy the citation or page reference, but Graves several times uses the phrase "half left" to indicate a direction of travel. I found it discussed in Wikipedia as a drill command, meaning to turn 45 degrees to one's left. I think it's an excellent term, now apparently archaic, useful when compass headings are unavailable or unknown."You'd be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in the trenches. Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies, because kindling is scarce. Our machine-gun crew boil their hot water by firing off belt after of ammunition at no particular target, just generally spraying the German line. After several pounds' worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns - which are water-cooled - begins to boil..." (109-110)"Another story: 'Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy, bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. "See, lads,” he says, "I’m off to bonny Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to the dressing- station, he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper’s working. He gets it through the head, too. Finee. We laugh, fit to die ! ’" (110)"We officers spend a lot of time revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet-area: a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers. We put it up on a post at fifty yards’ range. He said: "1’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn objects. My aunt has one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ I smothered a tender impulse to rescue it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Everyone missed. Then we went up to within twenty yards and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and knocked the case off into the grass. Jenkins said: "Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: "No, it’s in pain. We must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the coup de grace from close quarters." (116)"The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house. My servant, who had stood in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man — about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’" (122)"We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the First and Second Battalions the other day. The First had all their decent ponies pinched last October when they were massacred at Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to prevent a break-through. So the Second won easily." (125)"Still, patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the 'cosh’, a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to one-self, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull." (131)"The Germans opposite wanted to be sociable. They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of these was evidently addressed to the Irish batt- alion we had relieved: "We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and invite you to a good German dinner tonight with beer (ale) and cakes. Your little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you please." Another grenade contained a copy of the Neueste Nachrichten, a German Army newspaper..." (137)"An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades ! ” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches ! ” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’ (184)"Executions were frequent in France. I had my first direct experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915, and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s Forces." (240) [Graves indicates that families were never told of executions - only that the man had "died a soldier's death."]
An industrial trigger for snow
An isolated but mighty band of snow whipped up Thanksgiving mischief for travelers in Wisconsin on Thursday. Over a several-hour period, a localized zone of occasionally heavy snow dropped a couple inches on places not far from Eau Claire — and the primary culprit was exhaust from a nearby glass factory.While the band didn’t hit a large area, it had a relatively high impact because of its location, parallel to Interstate 94 across western Wisconsin. At one point, very low visibility as well as rapidly changing road conditions fueled accidents that closed the thoroughfare.Meteorologists in the region got to talking about it as it unfolded. It turns out that a Menomonie glass factory was mostly to blame... Snowfall totals of about 2 to 3 inches have been logged from the event, according to the Weather Service.
"Dead salmon hats" worn by orcas
In what may seem like a call-back to 1980s whale culture, a resident orca off the coast of Washington state was recently spotted sporting a dead salmon on its head. The phenomenon was first documented in 1987 when whales from three separate pods were seen wearing salmon on their heads, like a human wears a hat.But scientists never understood why, and experts are still scratching their heads as they contemplate the most recent incident, documented in October. The director of the University of British Columbia's Marine Mammal Research Unit, Andrew Trites, said there's no obvious reason for the behaviour.
01 December 2024
Phytophotodermatitis - updated
It's exactly what the word says - skin (derma) inflammation (itis) caused by exposure to plants (phyto) and sunlight (photo). My wife has experienced it after brushing against rue in our garden (which we raise for the Black Swallowtails). Other plants capable of photosensitizing human skin are listed in the Wikipedia entry, and include wild parsnip (which we encounter frequently while hiking in our part of the Midwest), parsley, celery, lemon, and lime.
The photos above are from a report on a group of children burned after playing with lime juice.
What at first seemed to be overexposure to the sun blossomed into softball-sized blisters and second-degree burns. Her girls, Jewels, 12, and Jazmyn, 9, wound up spending several days in an intensive care unit, hooked up to morphine to manage the pain...The tricky part is that even after initial clinical resolution, the victim has to minimize exposure to sunlight because the light can cause recrudescence of the lesions even without reexposure to the sensitizer.
A neighbor had a large lime tree that grew over the fence into the backyard where the girls went swimming. They had picked some of the fruits and squeezed them out into imaginary tea cups in their play lemonade stand... She remembered the girls crushing the fruits, juice sliding down their arms, splashing their legs, hitting their faces.
Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.
In this case the man had manually juice a dozen limes, then attended an outdoor soccer game without wearing sunscreen. The erythema and blistering persisted for several days during rx with triamcinolone, eventually progressing to hyperpigmentation and scaling, then normality (not shown).
30 November 2024
Women with monkeys as prostitutes - updated
We'll begin with the photograph above (credit here, via BoingBoing 2006):
"...the community of Beloit, Wisconsin came together on the banks of the Rock River to recreate George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte."They are performing a tableaux vivant to reproduce the famous pointillist painting shown here:
One difference between the photograph and the painting is that in the photograph, the woman in the foreground does not have a monkey at her feet. This apparently reflected unavailability of one in Beloit, Wisconsin - or it may have been intentional, since the monkey symbolically represents that the woman may be a prostitute:
Furthermore, the inclusion of symbols, most obviously a monkey on a leash and a woman fishing, is indicative of the painting’s satirical nature. In nineteenth century slang, ‘singesse’ (female monkey in French) meant prostitute. The wordplay of ‘pêche’ (fishing) and ‘péché’ (sin) was a pun often made in French cartoons with reference to prostitution. Such symbols speak to the ability of “the proletarian woman [to] become superficially bourgeois through prostitution.” Through this subtle imagery, Seurat adds another dimension to the comparison of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, noting the superficiality and immorality within high class society.That was all new to me, so I searched the web for pictures of women with monkeys, and after discarding those with Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Fay Wray, and Jessica Lange, I found this one by Aubrey Beardsley (source):
and this one by Picasso:
- both of which presumably incorporate the monkey with woman = prostitute symbolism, as may this this depiction mocking an early American suffragette:
- both found at Infinite Thought,
I got started on this topic because of a Reddit thread last month, where the best comment comparing the Beloit photograph and the Seurat painting came from UserNumber42:
"Oddly enough, both were created with very small dots, one just has better resolution than the other."And finally, since I won't have another chance to blog tableaux vivant again, I'll close with this old but quite remarkable music video by Hold Your Horses:
Addendum: Reposted from 2010 to add this example from the 1920s:
Found at La balsa de la Nostromo. Perhaps some Francophile can translate for us the title and captions. (Hat tip to an anonymous reader: "Title: "With monkeys being in fashion this winter, we'll leave the antics to them." Caption: "C'mon, hurry up, lady, you're putting me in an awkward position." The text at the bottom is number/pricing info for the magazine issue.)
Pondering infinite monkeys
Monarchs at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Michoacan, Mexico
Wolves as pollinators (therophily)
Up to 87% of flowering plant species depend on a wide range of animal species for their pollination. Among mammals, nectivorous pollinator species are principally represented by flying species such as bats and, to a smaller extent, by some marsupials, rodents, primates, and small carnivores. It has been pointed out that therophily, pollination by non-flying mammals, may however be more widespread and hold more significance than currently recognized. For example, in Australia, direct experimentation has shown that the brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii) and the sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) are important pollinators of native Proteaceae (Banksia spp.). The mammals involved in pollination are typically small- to medium-sized and often arboreal species, whereas nectar-feeding carnivoran mammals are much rarer, with only four species of Carnivora among the 343 mammals identified as potential and known pollinators in a 2015 review. However, examples of carnivore species foraging for nectar, and putatively involved in pollination, continue to be discovered, such as the masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), the Cape genet (Genetta tigrina), and the Cape gray mongoose (Herpestes pulverulenta). Here, we report the visitation to inflorescences of the Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) by a large carnivore, the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), in the Bale Mountains of southern Ethiopia. Wolves were observed foraging for nectar on K. foliosa flowers, which deposited relatively large amount of pollen on their muzzles, suggesting they could contribute to pollination.