I’ve always wondered what the night sky would look like if we could see the two Milky Way arches from the winter and summer side by side. This is practically impossible, since they are part of a whole and are visible at different times of the day.However, this 360-degree time-blended panorama shows us what they would look like. The two arches of the Milky Way represent one object in the starry sky, with part of it visible in winter and part of it in summer. Therefore, they are called the winter and summer arches. The winter arch includes objects that we can observe from October to March, primarily associated with the constellation Orion.On the other hand, the summer arch features the Milky Way core, visible from March to September, which is the most characteristic and luminous part of the night sky, representing the center of our galaxy.
TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")
"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
07 June 2023
Two Milky Ways
I'm on vacation for the next week
06 June 2023
Platform 9 3/4 optical illusion
An absolutely amazing crossword construction
There are various ways in which crossword puzzles can be interesting - sometimes from the content, sometimes from the construction. I remember one NYT crossword in which the constructor was able to incorporate the letter "Z" 40 times in the grid. The most wickedly fiendish clue I've seen was "Line just before a comma" (7) [answer in the Comments].
05 June 2023
A film made using artificial intelligence
A reedy voice-over—from an A.I.-generated vocal model, trained on Harry Dean Stanton’s monologue from the film “Paris, Texas”—reads a script written by Trillo, a voice mail on an answering machine, mourning the loss of possibilities and memories, perhaps of the ruins of a relationship...To make the clips, Trillo first generated still images that suggested the scenes he had in mind using the A.I. tool Stable Diffusion... in seconds, it was possible to render, for example, a tracking shot of a woman crying alone in a softly lit restaurant. His prompt included a hash of S.E.O.-esque terms meant to goad the machine into creating a particularly cinematic aesthetic: “Moody lighting, iconic, visually stunning, immersive, impactful.” ..It doesn’t matter that the scenes don’t look perfectly real; their oneiric [pertaining to dreams] quality makes them all the more haunting, doubling the plaintiveness of the voice-over. Photorealism wouldn’t match the material, though the film comes close enough to be briefly mistaken for real...The phrase “A.I.-generated film” is something of a misnomer. In Trillo’s case, the director wrote a script, assembled a visual aesthetic, determined which scenes to create, selected from Runway’s results, and then edited the clips into a threaded, thematically coherent finished product. Generative tools supplied the media—voice, faces, scenery, and animation—but the human creative element is still present in every step of the process.
American life expectancy is falling
Plotting life expectancy in the United States against that of other wealthy countries reveals three dark insights: Our life spans lag behind those of our peers; our life expectancy was already more or less flat, not growing; and most other countries bounced back from covid-19 in the second year of the pandemic, while we went into further decline...Unless the country changes course, and soon, the structural conditions responsible for the shorter lives and poorer health of Americans will continue to claim lives and weaken the country. It is not just the old who pay the price. Young and middle-aged Americans are now more likely to die in the prime of their lives, devastating families and communities and taking a hard toll on our economic productivity. Even more disturbing, in a change never recorded in the past century, the probability that children and adolescents will live to age 20 is now decreasing.
An interesting medical case
Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself...Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain. After months of targeted treatments — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.
April had undergone many courses of treatment — antipsychotics, mood stabilizers and electroconvulsive therapy — all to no avail... Even though April had all the clinical signs of schizophrenia, the team believed that the underlying cause was lupus, a complex autoimmune disorder in which the immune system turns on its own body, producing many antibodies that attack the skin, joints, kidneys or other organs. But April’s symptoms weren’t typical, and there were no obvious external signs of the disease; the lupus appeared to be affecting only her brain...
As part of a standard cognitive test known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), she was asked to draw a clock — a common way to assess cognitive impairment. Before the treatment, she tested at the level of a dementia patient, drawing indecipherable scribbles. But within the first two rounds of treatment, she was able to draw half a clock — as if one half of her brain was coming back online, Markx said. Following the third round of treatment a month later, the clock looked almost perfect...
While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues.
Grape jelly can kill hummingbirds
During the past few years providing grape jelly to orioles has become a popular alternative to the traditional orange slices/halves. Grape Jelly was a convenient energy food as it is a “semi solid” substance even in colder temperatures and easy to keep contained in a bowl. It provides a quick source of energy during migration. But then…for whatever reason, the use of jelly, the stuff we’ve always understood to be sticky, even as it covers the faces and clothing of our own children, bypassed logical use, and morphed into a multi-species, year-round jelly feeding frenzied fad. A problem in hot weather is jelly “melts i.e. liquifies” somewhat and therefore more available to adhere to the birds body, feet and feathers. Some people added water to the jelly and began serving it in larger bowls. This fad occurred even within the birding community. Businesses became involved, developing new types of jelly feeders and bird specific jelly. A photo that became my own personal nightmare was on a birding site recently. It was of an adult Baltimore Oriole perched on “jelly feeders” and feeding the jelly to their own babies. That behavior is outside the natural history of this species and causes more questions about changes that may be happening due to a high sugar diet. Orange halves are a healthier and more safe way to provide a high energy food.
02 June 2023
Math puzzle for you
A group of "space Marines" are returning from defending our planet against carnivorous alien invaders. 79 per cent of the Marines have lost an arm, 84 per cent have lost a leg, 76 per cent have lost an ear, and 71 per cent have lost an eye. It clearly was one heck of a battle.
What percentage of these combatants, at the very least, must have lost all four body parts?
I have changed the circumstances and the numbers, because this math puzzle was first formulated in the 1800s by Carolus Lodovicus, a famous Oxfordian mathematician, and I didn't want you guys to Google the keywords. If your answer is anything other than zero, you must explain why. This is the final exam; the result counts for 100% of your grade for the semester. Summer vacation begins tomorrow.
Credit for finding this goes to Anne Fadiman.
"King Philip, come out, for God's sake"
The title is a delightful mnemonic for remembering the order of "kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species." I found it in Anne Fadiman's most recent book "At Large and At Small," which I am currently thoroughly enjoying.
Introducing "No Mow May" - and a year 2 update
Appleton, some 200 miles north of Chicago, is a small college city nestled on the shores of the meandering Fox River. Two assistant professors at a local liberal arts college, Dr. Israel Del Toro and Dr. Relena Ribbons of Lawrence University, knew that No Mow May was popular in Britain. They wondered if the initiative might take root here, too.They began working with the Appleton Common Council, and, in 2020, Appleton became the first city in the United States to adopt No Mow May, with 435 homes registering to take part...Dr. Del Toro and Dr. Ribbons studied the impacts of No Mow May on Appleton’s bees. They found that No Mow May lawns had five times the number of bees and three times the bee species than did mown parks. Armed with this information, they asked other communities to participate.By 2021, a dozen communities across Wisconsin had adopted No Mow May. It also spread to communities in Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and Montana.I learned about No Mow May in the fall of 2020 when I was looking to make my own yard more friendly to bees. The following spring, I helped organize No Mow May in Shorewood Hills, Wis., where I live. When I realized how quickly the movement was spreading, I started photographing it across Wisconsin...Not everyone appreciated the unmown lawns. Allison Roberts, a resident of Prairie du Chien, Wis., participated in No Mow May even though her city hadn’t adopted it. After a few weeks, she awoke from a nap to find police officers pounding on her door.“Apparently, they were here to ensure I was not dead,” she said.Nor were her neighbors happy with her shaggy lawn. One of them, unable to stand the sight of it, eventually mowed it without her permission.
"Such rules don’t mandate that you let your weeds and grass go shaggy in May, but municipalities simply won’t punish residents who choose to let their lawns go. By June 1, enforcement of lawn length generally resumes, and residents will be required to keep those lawns nice and tidy once again."
People who chose not to mow were rewarded with rare plants. More than 250 wild plant species were recorded by gardeners last year, including wild strawberry, wild garlic and very rare plants including adder’s-tongue fern, meadow saxifrage, snakeshead fritillary and eyebright. Many orchids were also seen, including the declining man orchid, green-winged orchid, southern and northern marsh orchid and bee orchid.
In addition to Edina, Monticello, Vadnais Heights and New Brighton are among the Minnesota cities participating in No Mow May for the first time. Those municipalities will not enforce city codes that restrict lawns from exceeding a maximum turf length (10 inches in Edina and Vadnais Heights, 8 inches in Monticello and New Brighton) during the month of May... ""The best part about it is it doesn't cost anything to do it and it makes such a big difference."
Dandelion (Taxaracum officinale) is native to Eurasia and naturalized throughout most of North America. The flowers are visited by many pollinators and are an important nectar source early in the season when few other flowers are blooming. Their deep taproots help to loosen and aerate soil as well as pull nutrients like calcium from deep in the soil, which makes the nutrients available to other plants once dandelion leaves decompose. Several bird species also eat dandelion flowers, buds, and seeds.