It was collected, he recalls, in the early 1960s. It is a classic example of the quartz-covered chrysocolla stalactites, but unusual in that it was preserved as a whole pocket...Photo (click to supersize) from The Arkenstone, via Twisted Sifter - with a hat tip to reader Erik.
The most important management tool in oak savanna restoration is the controlled burn. Savanna burns kill invading brush, small trees, and brambles, keeping the woods open and encouraging the growth of grasses and forbs. These are low-intensity burns that have no effect on the oaks themselves.For an extensive discussion of the rationale for, and the methodology of prescribed burning, see the website for the Savannah Oak Foundation.
One of the most recent acquisitions made by the Department of Coins and Medals is a highly unusual object – an ancient punch or ‘die’ used to manufacture coins in the second century BC. The die was found in Bredgar, Kent by a metal detector user in 2013 and is being used to shed new light on when the first coins were made in Britain...More at the link, including comments re the stylized horse on the die and the chalk one at Uffington.
Close examination of the coin die revealed that it was used in the production of the early Gallo-Belgic A coins. What this means is that, although it is the third Iron Age coin die to be found in the UK (the others are also in the British Museum), it is almost certainly the earliest. The most significant aspect of this discovery is the fact that it is a British find. This raises the intriguing possibility that the earliest known coins from Britain were actually made here and not just imports from the Continent.
When lightning hits the ground, current flows through the earth in a wide area around the point of impact. This is how a lightning strike can kill a field full of cows - the long wheelbase of the average cow means that a nearby strike induces a significant potential difference across the ground spanned by the cow's front and back legs; current flows through cow, cow dies.There is extensive discussion of mammal deaths by lightning at Tetrapod Zoology, including photos of large groups or entire herds of animals being killed at one time; in such cases ground conduction, not direct strikes, has to be responsible.
She was already addicted to fermented honey, which she had consumed with her school friends before she was married, and still consumed, not only by mouth but through all five senses in the sultry air of the sugar plantation. With Judas she learned to chew tobacco and coca leaves mixed with ashes of the yarumo tree, like the Indians in the Sierra Nevada. In the taverns she experimented with cannabis from India, turpentine from Cyprus, peyote from Real de Catorce, and at least once, opium from the Nao of China brought by Filipino traffickers. But she did not turn a deaf ear to Judas's proclamation in favor of cacao. After trying all the rest, she recognized its virtues and preferred it to everything else. Judas became a thief, a pimp, an occasional sodomite, all out of sheer depravity because he lacked for nothing. One ill-fated night, in front of Bernarda, with only his bare hands, he fought three galley slaves in a dispute over cards and was beaten to death with a chair…The fermented honey would be the mead of classic antiquity. Tobacco, coca, cannabis, peyote, opium are self-evident. But turpentine? I found little on a quick search, but didn't have time to be exhaustive. One supposes that as a complex hydrocarbon, it might be inhaled to produce euphoria, somewhat after the fashion of glue-sniffing (note the later reference to "lethal gases"), but that is just speculation on my part. There also could be subtleties lost in the translation - any clues in the Spanish, Paulo?
He pushed her door open without knocking and tried to see Bernarda in the darkened room, but she was not in the bed. He called her by name, and she did not answer. Then he opened the window, and the metallic light of four o'clock revealed her, naked and sprawled in a cross on the floor, enveloped in the glow of her lethal gases. Her skin had the pale gray color of full-blown dyspepsia. She raised her head, blinded by the sudden brilliance streaming in the open window, and could not recognize the doctor with the light behind him. One glance was all he needed to know her destiny.
"The piper is demanding to be paid, my dear," he said.
He explained that there was still time to save her, but only if she submitted to an emergency treatment to purify her blood. Then Bernarda recognized him, struggled into a sitting position, and let loose a string of obscenities. An impassive Abrenuncio endured them as he closed the window again. He left the room, stopped beside the Marquis's hammock, and made a more specific prognosis:
"The Señora Marquise will die on the fifteenth of September at the latest, if she does not hang herself from the rafters first."
Unmoved, the Marquis said: "The only problem is that the fifteenth of September is so far away."
We experienced this quite a bit at Lake Myvatn in Iceland. During the summer, the swarms of midges are so thick that it looks as if the lake is on fire, with smoke rising out of the water.This weekend I found the video above, which was taken on the aforementioned Lake Myvatn. Imagine being in that boat and needing to cross the lake. And in case you are wondering about the name of the lake:
Although beautiful, my husband still refers to it as "hell on Earth." Though the midges don't bite, they will swarm humans, getting in your mouth, eyes, ears.
The name of the lake (Icelandic mý ("midge") and vatn ("lake"); the lake of midges) comes from the huge numbers of midges to be found there in the summer.The biology of the creatures is most interesting:
Diamesa mendotae, a cold-hardy but delicate insect also known as a midge, [have an] unusual ability to thrive in the winter, when they serve as trout food. When most other insects are idling, with eggs and larvae hidden away from the cold, midges, armed with a sort of internal antifreeze, produce several generations of offspring. Stream anglers, skiers and others who might poke into the deeper recesses of southeastern Minnesota during winter see them flying in clouds above the water or speckling the streamside snow...How does one cope with the mass emergences? Basically one has to follow the advice Lyndon Johnson offered about coping with the downsides of the presidency:
[They] can remain active down to about 6 degrees below zero... The midges are also high in calories and nutrients -- "like pecan pie" for trout, Ferrington said. But their cold-hardiness is balanced by an intolerance for warmth. An increase of as little as 1.8 degrees in the average water temperature in a stream could wipe out an entire winter reproductive cycle for them.
"Sometimes it's like being a jackass in a hailstorm. You just have to hunker down and take it."The lady in the boat quite sensibly copes by placing a bucket over her head:
Lincoln didn’t have a beard. He had whiskers—an enormously important distinction in mid-nineteenth century America. And second, Lincoln’s whiskers didn’t signify maturity, statesmanship, or gravitas, but rather urbanity: civilized, metropolitan grace...Much more, with illustrations, at The Appendix.
What Lincoln’s facial hair was meant to convey becomes clearer when we consider the language that the president-elect and his contemporaries used to describe it. While we moderns presume to call Lincoln’s facial hair a beard—“the most famous beard in the history of the world,” according to The New York Times’ Adam Goodheart—Civil War-era Americans would have recognized the president-elect’s facial hair for what it was: a fine set of whiskers. In fact, a thorough search of a leading digital newspaper database reveals that between November 1860 and March 1861, only two of dozens of commentators used the word ‘beard’ to describe Lincoln’s appearance.
This was not coincidental. The words ‘beard’ and ‘whiskers’ connoted distinctive styles in mid-nineteenth century America—and contemporaries used the words differently than we do. The word ‘whiskers’ typically referred not only to bushy cheek growths—to massive sideburns and muttonchops, as it does in the present—but to what we would call a ‘wreath beard’ as well: to facial hair configurations that met beneath the jaw. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, described one fellow writer as having “[t]hick whiskers meeting under the chin,” and another whose “hair and whiskers are dark, the latter meeting voluminously beneath the chin.” One might even use the word whisker to refer to what we would call a moustache. Writer Edward L. Carey, for instance, referred to a character with a “whisker on [his] upper lip” in a story entitled “The Young Artist.”
‘Beards,’ on the other hand, were more unruly affairs. In an article in the American Phrenological Journal entitled “Wearing the Beard,” for instance, the anonymous F.W.E. instructed beard-wearers that, contrary to the practice of bewhiskered men, “Thou shalt not cut it off at all, but let it grow. Let it grow, all of it, as long as it will.” What often distinguished beards from whiskers, then, was neither facial real-estate nor the length of one’s hair—one might wear a short, untamed beard-in-the-making or a long, carefully-sculpted set of whiskers—but rather one’s relationship to the work of men’s grooming. Hairy men who continued to visit the barber, trim their mustaches, or wax their locks wore whiskers; men who let their facial hair grow unrestrained sported beards.
I'll defer commentary. The post title, btw, comes from a traditional children's nursery rhyme "The Farmer in the Dell."Earlier this month, the [Republican] party’s Resolutions Committee voted in favor of a proposal that says the state party “supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin’s right, under extreme circumstances, to secede.”
A version of the so-called “state sovereignty” resolution was first OK’d last
month by one of the state GOP’s eight regional caucuses as an assertion of the state’s 10th Amendment rights. The measure also calls for ending all mandates that go “beyond the scope of the constitutionally delegated powers of the federal government.”
Top Republican officials hoped to kill the fringe proposal during a meeting of the resolutions panel at the Hyatt Hotel in Milwaukee on April 5. Instead, the committee made a few edits to the resolution and adopted it on a split vote.
Now, the matter will go for final approval to the delegates attending the state Republican Party’s convention in Milwaukee on May 2-4.
The rhyme is first recorded in Germany in 1826, as "Es fuhr ein Bau'r ins Holz," and was more clearly a courtship game with a farmer choosing a wife, then in turn the selecting of a child, maid, and serving man, who leaves the maid after kissing. This was probably taken to North America by German immigrants, where it next surfaced in New York in 1883 much in its modern form and using a melody similar to "A Hunting We Will Go."Embedded image via Mr. Verb (where you can read about the history of the word "cheesehead.")
After discovering last week that the childhood home of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was back on the Akron, Ohio, housing market, the folks over at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals floated the idea of converting it into a trendy eatery...There's more information at Vice. Background on Jeffrey Dahmer here.
Newkirk described how Dahmer would drug, bind, and slaughter his victims, refrigerating them to eat later, and noted that the horrifying violence he practiced did not end with his death (he was brutally murdered in prison) — billions of animals, she said, are similarly slaughtered for human consumption each year in the US.
“We are always looking for ways to draw attention to the violence inherent in the production of meat, eggs, and milk — which involve processes that would shock all but the most hard-hearted person,” the letter read. “Dahmer's old house gives us a way to evoke sympathy for these victims and to suggest that a life-affirming diet can change everything.”
The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded.
The report, entitled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, used extensive policy data collected from between the years of 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the US political system.
After sifting through nearly 1,800 US policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile) and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the United States is dominated by its economic elite.
The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organisations:There's more at The Telegraph. And see my previous post on this subject.
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
Pants on Fire explores the lies that govern America—why people go along with them and what it costs to do so. It reveals the plutocracy that benefits and examines what needs to be done to bring back a true democracy.
It's no secret: The wealthy demand—and get—what they want from the system at the expense of everyone else... These claims are driving the biggest economic crisis in modern history, and producing a society ready to explode with anger. Provocative and sometimes funny, Pants on Fire looks past the individual problems to the eventual, necessary solution.
--W C Fields
Mention 15-inch cups to a self-proclaimed golf purist, and their upper lip will quiver as their knickers bunch. “My forebears aimed at four-and-a-quarter-inch holes,” they’ll harrumph. “So it was, and so it shall ever be!”There is big money behind this trend. The "King" referred to above is Mark King, CEO of TaylorMade, a premium equipment manufacturer.
Which, of course, is pretty much King’s point. With all due respect to golf’s timeworn traditions, the game remains so wedded to its established views that its guardians are blinded to the need for change. As a consequence, golf has become like the prostates of many of those who play it: it has a growing problem.
Participation is dwindling, down nearly 20 percent in this country over the last 10 years alone. While others have noted this troubling trend, King has taken outsize steps to reverse it...
...the enlarged hole isn’t meant for elite players. It’s aimed at juniors, newbies and assorted would-be golfers, those untold legions who steer clear of the game because they think that it’s too stuffy, too difficult, too boring, and the many more who have given up playing out of sheer frustration. Advocates of the 15-inch cup say that because it speeds up play and lowers scores (test-runs show that it shaves 10 strokes from the average golfer’s tally) it also has a place at easy-going tournaments and company outings. Behold the jumbo hole: a cure for the three-putt, an antidote to the five-hour round.
"The lump of gold, which weighs 217.78 grams (about 7.7 ounces), was brought to Los Alamos to confirm whether it was a single crystal of gold, or a more common multiple-crystal structure....
To determine the nugget's internal structure, Rakovan and his colleagues used two sophisticated machines: a neutron single-crystal diffraction (SCD) instrument, which determines the atomic arrangement of single crystals; and a high-pressure/preferred orientation (or HIPPO) instrument, which measures the crystal structure and the orientation of crystals in a polycrystalline material. These noninvasive techniques determined that the gold piece was, indeed, a very large and very rare single crystal of gold."
Twenty-six people have reported poisonings from marijuana edibles this year, when the center started tracking such exposures. Six were children who swallowed innocent-looking edibles, most of which were in plain sight...More at the link.
An autopsy report listed marijuana intoxication as a significant contributing factor in the death of 19-year-old Levy Thamba Pongi. Authorities said Pongi, who traveled from Wyoming to Denver with friends to try marijuana, ate six times more than the amount recommended by a seller... Toxicologists later found that the cookie Pongi ate contained as much THC — marijuana's intoxicating chemical — as six high-quality joints...
For now, the industry is trying to educate consumers about the strength of pot-infused foods and warning them to wait up to an hour to feel any effects before eating more. Still, complaints from visitors and first-time users have been rampant.
"One of the problems is people become very impatient," Bronstein said. "They eat a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie and they get no effect, so then they stack the doses, and all the sudden, they get an extreme effect that they weren't expecting."
"Ailuo garment factory planted more than 40 varieties of vegetables on its 4,800 sqm workshop roofs. The harvest is enough to produce meals for all 200 workers in the factory canteen."Text and image from Wired, via The Soul is Bone.
The helicopters dropped pellets of methoprene, which prevents mosquito larvae from becoming flying, biting, breeding adults while leaving them available as a food source to other aquatic creatures, McLean said.The targeted species — which carry the incriminating names Aedes excrucians, Aedes abserratus and Aedes stimulans — can grow into large, aggressive adults that can live one long generation, into late June or early July, McLean said. That’s when they’re usually succeeded by the daintier but more numerous and annoying Aedes vexans, a warmer-season floodwater-breeder.MMCD workers actually attack mosquitoes through the winter, placing anti-mosquito materials by hand on top of ice in cattail areas. That stymies a species that lays its eggs on the water and develops while attached to the roots of cattails through the winter.
The imprints are caused by the bird’s powder down, a special type of down which helps feathers to grow. In some species, the tips of the barbules on powder down feathers disintegrate, forming fine particles of keratin, which appear as a powder, or ‘feather dust’. When a bird strikes a glass pane, the power is shaken lose and adheres to the glass.We wondered whether the bird was mentally deranged, but finally found the answer after a brief internet search... (explanation below the fold to allow you to ponder the problem)
I’ve begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write...More at the link.
For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I’ve puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I’ve sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don’t know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language...
And so recently, I’ve started asking them: “What exactly did you do in high-school English class?” And whether I ask them as a group or individually, whether I ask my best students or my worst, the answers I get are less than reassuring...
Those who didn’t make it onto the honors or A.P. track hardly mention writing or reading at all. They talk about giving oral presentations and keeping reading journals evaluated with a big, meaningless check. They reveal putting on skits, reenacting some scene in a novel or play whose title they can’t recall. One student recounts a month of junior English class in which she and her classmates produced digital short film adaptations of the trial in “The Scarlet Letter.”
“Sounds fun,” I say to this student, a girl who would not know how to summarize a source or correct a sentence fragment if her life depended on it.
The symbol indicates that the elevator is big enough to hold a stretcher...
More information at Slate. If such elevators are not available, the patient may need to be transported downstairs on a stair chair (basically a fancy furniture dolly. See image embedded at right).The blue symbol itself is modestly known as the Star of Life. Originally designed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and trademarked in 1977, it’s since become the general symbol for emergency medical services...When it appears on an elevator, it typically means that that elevator is large enough to accommodate a 24” by 84” stretcher.
What is cut flower food?Directions for DIY at the Telegraph source column. I hope the "growth inhibitor" is a natural and not a pharmaceutical antibiotic.
Q: What is actually in those packets of cut flower “food”? Is it just a preservative to make them last longer in the water? Is it possible to make it oneself?
--- Mrs Jeni Butler, via email
A: The contents of those little sachets is a mixture of sucrose (sugar), acidifier and something that inhibits the growth of bacteria.
Sucrose serves as a source of energy to make up for the loss of the functioning leaves and ensures continued development and longevity of the flower. Most water supplies are alkaline and can reduce the life of cut flowers, so the acidifier makes the pH of the water closer to the more acid pH of the plant’s sap. It also acts to stabilise the pigment and the colour of the flowers.
A microorganism growth inhibitor is perhaps the most important part of the “food”. Bacteria quickly starts to proliferate in the vase water (especially if damaged leaves are left clinging to flower stems prior to dunking).
Many gardeners/florists swear by various ways to keep flowers fresher for longer. But aspirin, wine or copper coins added to the water are apparently ineffective. Home-made concoctions are not as good as the packet stuff, either (according to the people who are in the business of selling flower food, anyway).
However, variations of the following recipe seem to be favoured by many. To make one litre of the solution...
It’s called “zentai.” And in Japan, it can mean a lot of things. To 20-year-old Hokkyoku Nigo, it means liberation from the judgment and opinions of others. To a 22-year-old named Hanaka, it represents her lifelong fascination with superheroes. To a 36-year-old teacher named Nezumiko, it elicits something sexual. “I like to touch and stroke others and to be touched and stroked like this,” she told the AFP’s Harumi Ozawa. But to most outsiders, zentai means exactly what it looks like: spandex body suits.More at the Washington Post.
Following up on an ancient Russian way of keeping milk from going sour — by putting a frog in the bucket of milk — scientists have identified a wealth of new antibiotic substances in the skin of the Russian Brown frog. The study appears in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research.
A. T. Lebedev and colleagues explain that amphibians secrete antimicrobial substances called peptides through their skin...Discussed at Reddit.
“These peptides could be potentially useful for the prevention of both pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacterial strains while their action may also explain the traditional experience of rural populations,” the scientists concluded.
"Twenty is Plenty" is a cleverly-titled campaign in urban New York and the U.K. seeking to lower speed limits on roads to 20 mph. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."Photos of what are said to be the most beautiful libraries in the world.
The four-year-old sapling -- grown from a cherry stone that spent time aboard the International Space Station (ISS) -- burst into blossom on April 1, possibly a full six years ahead of Mother Nature's normal schedule.Its early blooming baffled Buddhist brothers at the ancient temple in central Japan where the tree is growing... "A stone from the original tree had never sprouted before. We are very happy because it will succeed the old tree, which is said to be 1,250 years old."..By April this year, the "space cherry tree" had grown to around four metres (13 feet) tall, and suddenly produced nine flowers -- each with just five petals, compared with about 30 on flowers of the parent tree.It normally takes about 10 years for a cherry tree of the similar variety to bear its first buds.The Ganjoji temple sapling is not the only early-flowering space cherry tree.Of the 14 locations in which the pits were replanted, blossoms have been spotted at four places.
"Gaggles" historically refer to informal briefings the press secretary conducts with the press pool rather than the entire press corps....they were more or less off the record, and their purpose was mostly to exchange information... The nickname could stem from the idea that these more freewheeling press sessions, where the talk is much more rapid and free-form, are like a "gaggle of geese" honking.The etymology is apparently onomatopoeic.
Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.More details at Pro Publica.
It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate...
Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing.
A Dutch chintz jacket from 1810-1820.
Chintz (from the plural of chint) was originally glazed calico textiles, initially specifically those imported from India, printed with designs featuring flowers and other patterns in different colours, typically on a light plain background. Since the 19th century the term has also been used for the style of floral decoration developed in those calico textiles, but then used more widely, for example on pottery and wallpaper. Chintz designs are mostly European patterns loosely derived from the style of Indian designs themselves reflecting, via Mughal art, decorative traditions in Islamic art such as the arabesque...From the Rijksmuseum, via A London Salmagundi.
These early fabrics were extremely expensive and rare. By 1680 more than a million pieces of chintz were being imported into England per year, and a similar quantity was going to France and the Dutch Republic....
In contemporary language the word "chintz" and "chintzy" can be used to refer to clothing or furnishings which are vulgar or florid in appearance....
On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI)), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.More at the link. I'll grant that some of the respondents may have been trolling the interviewers by pointing to Kansas or Canada, but I'm not surprised by the general pattern. I believe it was George Carlin who asked us to think of how stupid the average American is and then to remember that half of them are more stupid than that.
An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity...Experian rebutted the allegations, and Krebs has recently replied to their rebuttal.
These services specialized in selling “fullz” or “fulls,” a slang term that cybercrooks use to describe a package of personally identifiable information that typically includes the following information: an individual’s name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of work, duration of work, state driver’s license number, mother’s maiden name, bank account number(s), bank routing number(s), email account(s) and other account passwords. Fulls are most commonly used to take over the identity of a person in order to engage in other fraud, such as taking out loans in the victim’s name or filing fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS...
In summary, Experian wants you to remember that the consumer data sold to Ngo’s identity theft service didn’t come directly from its database, but merely from the database of a company it owns. But happily, there is no proof that any of Ngo’s customers — who collectively paid Experian $1.9 million to access the data — actually harmed any consumers.
Readers who find all of this a bit hard to swallow can be forgiven: After all, this version of the facts comes from a company that has been granted a legal right to sell your personal data without your consent (opting out generally requires you to cut through a bunch of red tape and to pay them a fee on top of it). This from a company that is quibbling over which of its business units profited from the sale of consumer records to an identity theft service.
Magie designed the game to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.More at Wikipedia and the links there.
A rare wine cup fired in the imperial kilns of China's Ming dynasty more than 500 years ago has been sold in Hong Kong for HK$281.2m (£21.7m), making it one of the most expensive Chinese cultural relics ever auctioned.More details at The Guardian.
The tiny porcelain cup from the Chenghua period, dating from 1465 to 1487, is painted with cocks, hens and chicks, and is known simply as a "chicken cup". It is considered one of the most sought-after items in Chinese art, held in a reverence equivalent to that of the jewelled Fabergé eggs of tsarist Russia.
An alarming lapse in Internet security has exposed millions of passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive bits of information to potential theft by computer hackers who may have been secretly exploiting the problem before its discovery.More at the link and undoubtedly at many other sites on the web today. Knowledgeable readers are encouraged to offer comments (or other relevant links).
The breakdown revealed this week affects the encryption technology that is supposed to protect online accounts for emails, instant messaging and a wide range of electronic commerce.
Security researchers who uncovered the threat, known as "Heartbleed," are particularly worried about the breach because it went undetected for more than two years...
"This still means that the little lock icon (HTTPS) we all trusted to keep our passwords, personal emails, and credit cards safe, was actually making all that private information accessible to anyone who knew about the exploit," Tumblr said. "This might be a good day to call in sick and take some time to change your passwords everywhere — especially your high-security services like email, file storage, and banking, which may have been compromised by this bug."
Its name comes from the Arabic rahj al-ġār (رهج الغار, "powder of the mine"), via Catalan and Medieval Latin, and its earliest record in English is in the 1390s...Another specimen here.
Realgar, orpiment, and arsenopyrite provide nearly all the world's supply of arsenic as a byproduct of smelting concentrates derived from these ores...
Realgar is poisonous. The ancient Greeks, who called it "sandaracha", knew that it was poisonous. It was used to poison rats in medieval Spain and in 16th century England.
"Muggles" is the title of a recording by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, recorded in Chicago on December 7, 1928.J. K. Rowling has indicated that she was unaware of this prior use of the term:
The title refers to the use of the word "muggles" as a slang term for marijuana amongst jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. Armstrong was an enthusiastic user of marijuana, which was legal in most American states at the time.
I was looking for a word that suggested both foolishness and loveability. The word 'mug' came to mind, for somebody gullible, and then I softened it. I think 'muggle' sounds quite cuddly. I didn't know that the word 'muggle' had been used as drug slang at that point... ah well.
No rent collection while in jail, double the dough for landing on Go and clean out Free Parking if your luck takes you there are among five made-up Monopoly rules Facebook fans voted in for future editions of the board game.Photo credit Steven Senne, Associated Press.
Several thousand people weighed in on "house rules" over 10 days of recent debate and a year after Hasbro Inc. added a cat token and retired the iron in a similar online stunt aimed at keeping the 79-year-old game fresh...
The winning house rule for landing on Go means players get 400 Monopoly dollars instead of the official 200. As for Free Parking, official rules call for absolutely nothing to happen when a player lands there. Under the house rule, any taxes and fees collected are thrown into the middle for a lucky someone who lands on that corner square.
Rounding out the five winners are players must travel around the board one full time before they can begin buying properties, and collecting 500 bucks for rolling double ones.
Jury, grand prize/ Very Short Int'l Film Fest. 2013, ParisYou'll see why.
Audience award/ Prix de Court Pathé 2013, Lausanne
Best film for Children/ Animateka Fest.2013, Slovenia
Audience favorite animation short/ Palm Springs Int'l Shortfest
Special mention, Spirafilm Prize, Off-Courts Trouville 2013
Honor. mention/ BeFilm Festival 2013, New York
In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.There's more at the link, and undoubtedly some other viewpoints elsewhere on the 'net this week. Can some reader here offer a morally-defensible justification for this activity based on strategic necessities? Personally, I'm so very, very, very tired of the U.S.' endless attempts to subvert the Cuban government. These shenanigans go back for probably 50 years - and for what reason? Is it just because Cuba has continued to maintain a form of governance of which we don't approve? Do they provide any smidgen of a threat to the U.S. in any real way? Or is this just an example of the U.S. f***ing with any country it wants to because it can? I get so mad when I blog about stuff like this that I have to walk away from the computer to the back yard for a few minutes to calm down so I don't use language I shouldn't.
McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government.
McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid...
Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAid document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."..
The program's legality is unclear: US law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization. Officials at USAid would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment.
USAid spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with US law.
Although Helstrup is still not completely convinced that it was indeed a meteorite that flew past him, the experts are in no doubt.Addendum: A tip of the hat to reader Adrian Morgan for finding extended commentary on the incident at Bad Astronomy.
“It can’t be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites – a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded,” said geologist Hans Amundsen. He explained that the meteorite had been part of a larger stone that had exploded perhaps 20 kilometres above Helstrup.
Amundsen thinks he can make out coloured patches in the stone, and believes that in that case it may be a breccia – a common type of meteorite rock.
