The Kabanaga Protectorate Centre in the town of Kabanaga in the north-west of the East African country, close to the Burundi border, caters to the nation's albinos, who are known as the 'tribe of ghosts', 'zeros' or 'the invisibles'. They have suffered appalling treatment at the hands of their own neighbours and are murdered for their body parts, which are believed to bring good fortune and cure all manner of ills...This photo shows one of the albinos in a shop in the village:
Sometimes the parents are afraid of their children, sometimes they are forced to give up their beloved offspring because they fear the prejudices of the people in their own community...
In February attackers collecting body parts of albinos for witchcraft hacked off the hand of a seven-year-old boy, officials said. The boy, called Mwigulu Magessa, was ambushed by the men as he walked home with his friends in Tanzania. He survived but many such victims of ignorance are not so lucky. Just days earlier an albino mother of four had her arm chopped off by machete-wielding men and a month before that an albino child died in Tanzania's Tabora region after attackers hacked off his arm.'..
'There's a market close to the centre and the women went together in a group as a safety measure because it's harder to kidnap someone in a group,' says Jacquelyn. 'Angel was in a shop and the woman behind the counter couldn't look her in the eyes. 'She just took her money. That was something that struck me.'Jacquelyn Martin's website is here, and the Tribe of Ghosts photoset is here.
To help individuals living at the Center please contact Asante Mariamu, a non-profit that takes an individual approach to education on the issues facing people with albinism.
Anyone within driving distance of Madison, Wisconsin is cordially invited to the annual spring meeting of the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association (SWBA) to be held in the Fitchburg Public Library (5530 Lacy Road, Fitchburg, WI) (directions) from 7:00-9:00 PM on the evening of Wednesday, April 2. Indoor, underground parking can be accessed from a driveway on the west side of the building.Alpine environments are extreme habitats with protracted winters, high climatic variability, and a history of rapid and repeated environmental transition. Despite many physiological challenges, a remarkable community of insects live exclusively in alpine environments. Dr. Schoville has been using genetic data to understand how alpine butterflies colonize, persist and diversify within alpine habitats of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.After the lecture there will be a photography "show and tell" featuring the spectacular images captured by members of the butterfly association.
Educationally bizarre: Current events, medicine, animals, forensics, oddities, teeth, eyes, deformities, funerals, cemeteries, blood, albinism and such ........Both sites include graphic images of human pathology (especially ocular pathology) which are not hidden beneath any folds and thus may be too intense for some readers. But the tumblr clearly has an abundance of images of "things-you-wouldn't-know" material, always with appropriate links to the source.
The grave defroster is approximately 8 feet long, and 4 feet wide. It is double walled steel construction, insulated between the two walls...
It is then filled with 100 to 120 pounds of charcoal, lit, sealed, and then left for a period of 24 hours or so. Once that time has passed, one man can easily dig the grave within an hour’s time. Propane can also be used to heat the unit, in which case a 100-pound cylinder would be used. However, with the cylinder, it burns at a higher temperature and requires supervision. The cost, at the present time, is also significantly more for propane than charcoal.Via The Soul is Bone.
Their aggressive behaviour was captured by Paul Quagliana, 43, a wildlife photographer, who found a colony of the ants on a log in Wareham Forest, Dorset. In order to trigger the insect’s reaction, he gave their nest a tap, which prompted the ants to squirt acid in the air from their tiny abdomens. ‘There are many different species of woodland ants in Britain and these are called Formica rufa,’ said Mr Quagliana, who lives in Gillingham, Dorset. ‘As a defence mechanism they squirt formic acid which smells a bit like salt and vinegar crisps or fish and chips,’ he explained.From the Mail Online, via The Soul is Bone.
Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught upwards of 15,000 women how to use a gun. Oakley believed strongly that it was crucial for women to learn how to use a gun, as not only a form of physical and mental exercise, but also to defend themselves. She said: "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies."Photo from the tumblr of the Smithsonian library, where it is noted that she biked 20 miles a day and incorporated a bicycle into her performance in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
Hello, I have been aware of this timber harvest shaped like the state of MN border for about 8 years. I was a forester in northern Minnesota for some time and I can tell you this. This is state forest land, managed by DNR Division of Forestry. The state employs foresters to design timber harvests to meet many objectives including ecological and economic ones. The forester who designed this timber sale is a veteran at his craft and created this boundary line without the use of gps, but with map and compass instead. The forest type is jack pine, which is an early successional species that colonizes sites after a major disturbance and needs full sun to thrive. This species occurs in fire dependent forests. Modern timber sales mimic the effect of fire in these landscapes. As such this large opening was created to encourage it's regeneration. Loggers are contractors of the landowners/ land managers, and as such do not have discretion as to the layout of the harvest or other design features. They perform the contract. This forester must have an artistic side.Via 22 Words, which offers a series of zoomed-out Google Maps to place this forest in perspective.
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)... was fascinated with insects and the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. Trained as a painter, she beautifully depicted her observations about the life-cycle of insects. Her illustrations show not just the insects’ transformation, but the important role specific plants have in sustaining the animal during the various stages of development.
Bre’r Rabbit taking a trifling 500,000 volts at 20 kilowatts, and liking it well, thank you! He held still for 20 seconds, only blinking once in awhile. He was not chained nor held down otherwise…He is still alive, so Sis needn’t worry that we killed him.”SciFi enthusiasts will know (or be pleased to learn) that the editor of The Electrical Experimenter was none other than Hugo Gernsback.
Dr. Schenck had been fed a steady diet of photographs, films, and propaganda posters of Hitler since the dictator had come to power in 1933. But the man he saw in the bunker looked nothing like those images. The 56-year-old Hitler “was a living corpse, a dead soul,” Schenck remembered in a 1985 interview. “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle… I was looking into the eyes of death.”Much more information at the links. Very interesting.
Even more shocking than the way Hitler looked was the way he moved about the bunker. He walked with the slow, halting shuffle of a man thirty years older, dragging his left leg behind him as he went. He couldn’t go more than a few steps without grabbing onto something for support.
Hitler’s head, arms, and entire left side trembled and jerked uncontrollably. No longer able to write his own name, he signed important documents with a rubber stamp...
According to one estimate, by the early 1940s, Hitler was taking 92 different kinds of drugs, including 63 different pills and skin lotions. Some medicines were taken only when specific complaints arose, but others were taken every day. By the summer of 1941, Hitler was popping between 120 and 150 pills a week on average. And on top of all the pills, Morell also administered injections -as many as 10 a day, sometimes more...
Most of the pills and shots that Hitler took were unidentified and mysterious, but Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills came in a little metal container... that identified them by name and even listed the active ingredients: gentian, belladonna, and an extract of something called nux vomica...
Hitler’s valets, secretaries, and other close aides occasionally witnessed the shots being administered, and after the war they all described how the sleepy and sometimes completely exhausted Führer responded to all the injections instantly, sometimes even while the needle was still in his arm...
We play Duck, Duck, Gray Duck, while the rest of the planet plays the inferior Duck, Duck, Goose...
The games begin the same way. Participants sit in a circle, while the person who is “it” circles the group, tapping each player. That’s where the differences start. In DDG, the tapper says only “duck” until using the word “goose,” at which point the tappee jumps up and gives chase.DDGD is more elaborate. To each “duck” designation, the tapper also adds a descriptive color, such as “red duck” or “yellow duck.” The chase starts when the tapper dubs someone “gray duck.”..The impetus behind his sudden national prominence was a column in the online news source BuzzFeed. Minnesota native Katie Heaney wrote about growing up playing Duck, Duck, Gray Duck, only to discover as an adult, much to her dismay, that the kids in the rest of the country are “playing some abomination version called Duck, Duck, Goose.”
Opal is a hydrated amorphous form of silica; its water content may range from 3% to 21% by weight, but is usually between 6% and 10%. Because of its amorphous character it is classed as a mineraloid, unlike the other crystalline forms of silica which are classed as minerals. It is deposited at a relatively low temperature and may occur in the fissures of almost any kind of rock...Photo credit Marty Magic, where this specimen is offered for sale.
The internal structure of precious opal makes it diffract light; depending on the conditions in which it formed, it can take on many colors. Precious opal ranges from clear through white, gray, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, rose, pink, slate, olive, brown, and black. Of these hues, the reds against black are the most rare, whereas white and greens are the most common. It varies in optical density from opaque to semi-transparent...
The word opal is adapted from the Roman term opalus, but the origin of this word is a matter of debate. However, most modern references suggest it is adapted from the Sanskrit word úpala... the argument for the Sanskrit origin is strong. The term first appears in Roman references around 250 BC, at a time when the opal was valued above all other gems...
It was also said to confer the power of invisibility if wrapped in a fresh bay leaf and held in the hand. Following the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Anne of Geierstein in 1829, however, opal acquired a less auspicious reputation. In Scott's novel, the Baroness of Arnheim wears an opal talisman with supernatural powers. When a drop of holy water falls on the talisman, the opal turns into a colorless stone and the Baroness dies soon thereafter. Due to the popularity of Scott's novel, people began to associate opals with bad luck and death. Within a year of the publishing of Scott's novel in April 1829, the sale of opals in Europe dropped by 50%, and remained low for the next twenty years or so.
"If the honeybee is a victim of natural menaces like viruses and unnatural ones like pesticides, it's worth remembering that the bee itself is not a natural resident of the continent. It was imported to North America in the 17th century, and it thrived until recently because it found a perfect niche in a food system that demands crops at ever cheaper prices and in ever greater quantities. That's a man-made mercantile ecosystem that not only has been good for the bees and beekeepers but also has meant steady business and big revenue for supermarkets and grocery stores."From an article in the August 19, 2013 issue of Time magazine. You learn something every day.
One by one, members of the Hopkins boys’ basketball team stepped forward to receive their second-place medals Saturday night at Target Center. Their mood reflected the manner in which they lost the big-school state championship game.The top-seeded Royals had the title within their grasp, only to see it disappear as Lakeville North, behind a remarkable performance by senior sharpshooter JP Macura, snatched it away in the final minute. That game represented high school sports at their best.But then came the awards ceremony and the reaction of the Hopkins players. Specifically, a few players removed their medals almost immediately after having them placed over their heads by a state high school league official.It wasn’t a good look, a high school athlete removing a state tournament medal in disgust. It created an unflattering impression that the perennial basketball power is too good for second place, which, predictably, made social media light up like Times Square because it involved Hopkins.But then the TV cameras found Hopkins student manager Grant Petersen, a senior born with Down syndrome who reacted as if his team had just won the state championship, the Super Bowl and the Powerball when he heard his name announced.
Grant jumped up and down, both arms raised. Upon receiving his medal, he raised his arms again and flashed two thumbs up to his parents, sister and relatives sitting in the stands.It was a beautiful moment, a kid overjoyed to get a medal in a sport he loves. Unwittingly, Grant showed all of us what grace and sportsmanship look like.
Across the country, kids fall—disastrously—from the upper heights of fraternity houses with some regularity. They tumble from the open windows they are trying to urinate out of, slip off roofs, lose their grasp on drainpipes, misjudge the width of fire-escape landings. On February 25, 2012, a student at the University of California at Berkeley attempted to climb down the drainpipe of the Phi Gamma Delta house, fell, and suffered devastating injuries; on April 14 of the same year, a 21-year-old student at Gannon University, in Pennsylvania, died after a fall from the second-floor balcony of the Alpha Phi Delta house the night before; on May 13, a Cornell student was airlifted to a trauma center after falling from the fire escape at Delta Chi; on October 13, a student at James Madison University fell from the roof of the three-story Delta Chi house and was airlifted to the University of Virginia hospital; on December 1, a 19-year-old woman fell eight feet from the Sigma Alpha Mu house at Penn State.What is far more interesting (and important) than the catalogue of problems is the complexities of legal responsibility (or lack of same). Generally, universities are NOT responsible for these incidents. NOR are the fraternities. Often it is the students themselves (or their families back home) who will be held financially responsible for another students death or injury.
If your house burns down with the family jewels inside, you can collect the pools of melted gold, but the diamonds will be gone in a puff of CO2. Cheaper, more attractive stones, such as cubic zirconia and synthetic ruby and sapphire, are made of refractory metal oxides that easily withstand the same heat. So it's actually mall trinkets, not diamonds, that are forever.
The United States not only incarcerates a lot of people, it also has a bewildering array of places to put them. There are, of course, jails and prisons: jails are usually run by local jurisdictions (cities or counties) and house either convicted criminals serving short sentences or people awaiting trial. Prisons, or penitentiaries, are run by states or the federal government, and house convicts serving longer sentences. But there are also juvenile-detention facilities, military prisons, immigration-detention and civil-commitment centres (used for court-ordered treatment of the mentally ill; they can be inpatient or outpatient) as well as jails and prisons in Indian and overseas territories, most of which are administered by different government entities...
Remember, though, that number is static: it does not capture the churn of people in and out of incarceration during a given year... Many of these have poor intent requirements, meaning people are being locked up not to keep the rest of society safe, but for technical violations of laws they may not have known existed.Image source. Via The Dish.
The so-called B7 version of Audi's practical supercar was sold between 2006 and 2008 and although the V8-powered machine is still highly desirable and worth upwards of £30,000, Audi doesn't make the seats any more.More at The Telegraph.
So they have to be imported in parts and according to mechanic Daniel Parsons at Five Oaks Audi, who had painstakingly done just that for Smith, it takes in excess of 20 hours at £132 an hour...
But who on earth are these seats being stolen for? Audi only sold about 2,000 of the cars in those two years and the race-inspired, leather-skinned bucket seats are hard-wearing enough not to need replacing.
The answer could lie in a new modification fashion, according to one expert. "There's a type of styling trend called OEM-plus where you use original equipment parts but from a superior car like a Bentley, Porsche or Audi," says Elliott Roberts, editor of Performance VW magazine. "You see Audi TT dashboards in Golfs and all sorts of stuff."
Photograph of a tick burrowing its feeding parts into the skin of the photographer's own leg.
In a report published in Conservation Biology, the scientists wrote that animals’ avoidance of power cables is likely linked with their ability to detect ultraviolet light. While the spectrum of light emitted from the lines is beyond what humans can see, it is visible to birds, rodents, and reindeer. These animals may see power cables as randomly flashing bands...
It has been known since the 1970s that birds can see UV light, and more recent studies have shown that many (mostly small) mammals can, too. Reindeer, more so than many other large mammals, have retinas that are adapted to living in the dark, which helps them forage for food during long Arctic winters. That, combined with the fact that UV light is more visible in snowy landscapes due to reflection, means that reindeer are particularly sensitive to the apparent flashing of power cables.
"We can make the entire design super-thin," said Zhaohui Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. "It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone." The material worked at room temperature, which is another accomplishment.More information at Popular Science. Graphene image from Nokia.
The results aren't just a measure of people's own religious beliefs, but also of the character of the place they're in and the exposure they have to people who aren't like them. If you've always been taught that the nature of right and wrong and the enforcement of those rules comes from the church, and virtually everyone you've ever known believes in God, those who don't would seem like something of an alien species...Commentary at The American Prospect asks why China and the United States "fall off the curve" and attributes the U.S. relatively high religiosity to the fact that "we've always had a dynamic, competitive religious marketplace."
At the other end, if you live in a place where most people don't believe in God, even if you do, you probably know many perfectly nice people who don't, so it would be harder to sustain the belief that they're all inherently amoral...
Back when Pope Francis was still going by the handle of Jorge Bergoglio, he earned a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires...More on science and Catholicism at International Business Times.
Modern-day science writer and Jesuit Guy Consolmagno studies asteroids and meteorites at the Vatican Observatory... “Doing science is like playing a game with God, playing a puzzle with God,” Consolmagno once told the Canadian Broadcasting Center. “God sets the puzzles, and after I can solve one, I can hear him cheering, 'Great, that was wonderful, now here’s the next one.' It’s the way I can interact with the Creator... Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism -- it's turning God into a nature god."
Additional details here. Reports like this are not at all unusual in Wisconsin."A Stevens Point man has been arrested for his 10th drunken-driving offense... The man was on supervision for his ninth operating-while-intoxicated conviction when he was arrested..."
Drones also are making news in the outdoor world, particularly in hunting, as states such as Colorado pass laws to prohibit their use in pursuit of elk and other game...
Meanwhile, scouting wildlife in Minnesota with drones might be legal, Salo said, though flying them over private property without permission is problematic, as is, perhaps, their use over various federal properties, such as waterfowl production areas and national forests.Meanwhile, in Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation last year making it illegal for anti-hunters to use drones to interfere with hunters and anglers...
“Drones are pretty loud,” he said. “I could see where they might frighten deer or other wildlife into running, rather than staying put.” Another downside to drone use for, say, scouting, is that their cameras provide relatively wide-angle views. So the size of a deer or sex of a turkey, for example, might be difficult to determine remotely unless the drone was flown relatively low.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,”Via The Dish.
– James Madison, “Political Observations” from Letters and Other Writings.
For the engineers, the removal of windows will facilitate passenger relaxation and reduce in-flight exertion by ensuring “no more glaring sun and no more shades to pull down or push up”. More pertinently, the absence of windows will reduce the weight of the aircraft – the insertion of windows requires additional structural supports and parts – and will lessen drag, thus diminishing travel times and fuel costs. In place of windows, the jet’s interior walls will be covered in thin display screens. Cameras on the exterior of the aircraft will be able to transmit footage of the surrounding panoramas...The concept is illustrated at the link with images of wide, plush airline seats that you and I will never sit in. For some reason, I don't like the concept...
The firm is so assured of the benefits of windowless cabins that it anticipates them to become the norm on all new aircraft within the next 20 years...
Passengers willing to fly in a windowless fuselage may need to consider other potential problems. Should the technology falter during the flight, for example, passengers would be plunged into darkness and would have no other means to look out of the aircraft...
Windows are not just there to allow passengers to get accustomed to the ambient light outside in case of an emergency, but also to allow emergency workers to see in, in case they need to cut into the aircraft.
Curious about the explosive potential of WWII mines? This video shows the controlled detonation of one recently found on the Dutch shoreline."I know what I was supposed to say when I went to your table. I was supposed to politely tell you to please not have your daughter yell. I was supposed to offer to move you to another area. I was supposed to offend you by not offending you...How to prevent outside faucets from freezing. Too late for this winter for many of you, but worth bookmarking if you live at a northern latitude (but note newspaper links do not last forever).
I did not do any of that.
Instead I just told you I hoped your meal was awesome. I high-fived your daughter and then I told you that your meal was on us tonight. It was only $16. It meant more to me than that. I do not think the other guests I spoke to were happy about it. At that moment it did not matter to me."
If mice are an accurate model for humans, one of the ways that THC increases appetite is by making us more sensitive to the smells of food. Because scent and taste are so closely related, it likely allows us to better taste flavors as well.A video camera falls from an airplane into a pigpen; the pigs investigate.
There is an annual spelling bee for seniors. Here is the word list for the 2012 competition.Coots said then he needed the snakes for religious reasons, citing a Bible passage in the book of Mark that reads, in part: "And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."The Roving Typist is a 10-minute video about "C.D. Hermelin [who] was broke when he decided to bring his typewriter to a park and type unique, one-of-a-kind stories for any passersby with a few dollars to spare. And people responded."
"...whose job it is to make sure that not a single Dolby Theatre seat is left open when actors and actresses excuse themselves from the three-hour awards show for the bar or loo... seat-fillers are expected to be “very stoic, like a model,” as to not rouse any at-home viewers’ suspicions that they do not know the person they are sitting beside."(The title of this post is the last two sentences of Sister Carrie)
"Berthold Woltze was a German painter who was born in 1829. Several works by the artist have been sold at auction, including 'The Irritating Gentleman' sold at Dorotheum '19th Century Paintings' in 2011 for $43,737. The artist died in 1896."
"...during their time at the lake, the researchers saw as many as 20 successful fish strikes on barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) every day. These ranged from pursuits by fish at the surface, followed by leaps, to direct attacks from deeper water."
Nine minutes' worth of highlights of Minnesota Viking running back Adrian Peterson. Since everyone is talking about Mega Stuf oreos and how great they are, as an exercise in applied consumer mathematics, high-school teacher Dan Anderson of Queensbury, New York, had students do some measuring, calculating, and reflecting. What they found will shock and disturb you. The Double Stuf Oreos had 1.86 times the stuf of regular Oreos...Some college athletes are demanding a union because the NCAA is "like a dictatorship."
Former presidents and first ladies have Secret Service protection for life after leaving office, which means they have very limited opportunities to drive... George W. Bush often drove his pickup truck, but only within the confines of his ranch in Crawford, Texas.Pope Francis has referred to the internet as a "gift from God." "While praising the internet for the “immense possibilities” it offers to encounter people from different backgrounds, he also warned that the obsessive desire to stay connected can actually isolate people from their friends and family."
The bonanza emerged last year as the man and woman were walking their dog on their property in the Gold Country [the area in California where gold was discovered] and noticed the top of a decaying canister poking out of the ground.
They dug it out with a stick, took it to their house and opened it up. Inside was what looked like a batch of discs covered in dirt from holes rotted through the can.
They weren't just discs.
A little brushing revealed nearly perfectly preserved $20 gold coins with liberty head designs on the front, dated from the 1890s. They ran back to the same spot, and when they were done digging, they'd found a total of eight cans containing 1,427 coins - with a face value of $27,980.
The oddest of the bunch are an 1866 $20 coin minted in San Francisco without the words "In God We Trust" on the back - the words were added to those coins, called "Double Eagles," later that year - and an 1849 $5 coin struck in the short-lived Dahlonega, Ga., mint.I found more information at the website of the American Numismatic Association's National Money Show, where some of the coins are on display this week.
Professional Coin Grading Service of Irvine, one of the world's foremost coin-assessment firms, evaluated the hoard and certified that 13 of the coins are either the finest-preserved known examples of their kind, or tied for that rating...
The find comprises almost 1,400 $20 gold pieces, 50 $10 gold pieces and four $5 gold pieces, all of which were struck between 1847 and 1894. Highlights of the cache include at least 13 finest known specimens, among them an 1866-S No Motto Double Eagle valued at close to $1 million.
Other highlights include finest example or tied for finest example certified by PCGS: 1875-S graded MS64 (tied); 1877-S PCGS MS65 (tied for "top pop"); four 1888-S PCGS MS64 (tied for "top pop"); two 1889-S graded PCGS MS65 (tied for new "top pop"); and 1894-S PCGS MS65 (tied for "top pop").
The coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in chronological order in six cans, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s pieces going into one can until it was filed, then new coins going into the next one and the next one after that. The dates and the method indicated that whoever put them there was using the ground as their personal bank and that they weren't swooped up all at once in a robbery.Fascinating and tantalizing. And meanwhile the nice metal detector in my closet still hasn't found enough treasure to pay for itself. Perhaps I should dust it off this summer...
'The coins may have been stolen during a heist at the San Francisco Mint in 1899. Roughly the same amount of gold was stolen,' Good Morning America reports. A coin collector dug up an old newspaper article about the heist. According to the article, the amount stolen was $30,000 in gold coins... if the coins are found to be those stolen from the government, the couple probably won't be able to keep the coins, but they might be entitled to a finder's fee.An article at The Guardian offers a rebuttal:
Even if the mint had coins on hand covering a span of 47 years, which is unlikely, those in the hoard include some so badly worn that they wouldn’t have been there, said David McCarthy, a San Francisco numismatist.I wonder if the couple who found the coins and reported them are wishing that they had quietly negotiated private sales slowly over a few decades.
Another coin, dated 1876, was in such pristine condition that it wouldn’t have been there either. “It doesn’t have a single marking on it,” McCarthy said. “That coin couldn’t have sat in a bag in the San Francisco Mint and looked like that. It would have had what we call ‘bag marks’ all over it.”
