Divertimento #151

Steve is not a normal aurora. Auroras occur globally in an oval shape, last hours and appear primarily in greens, blues and reds. Citizen science reports showed Steve is purple with a green picket fence structure that waves. It is a line with a beginning and end. People have observed Steve for 20 minutes to 1 hour before it disappears.

Here is an excellent name for a dating site for senior citizens.

Some major changes in the rules of golf.  "...they include fresh directives for how to take a drop, and an alternate solution for dealing with a lost ball or a ball knocked out of bounds. Clearer and more concise, the new rules are also kinder and gentler, with penalties softened in the name of pace of play and common sense."

Jupiter's Great Red Spot "is dying — the latest data from the Juno spacecraft suggests it might actually be gone within our lifetimes..."

When Czechoslovakia split up in 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia divided the national anthem, each getting one verse to modify.

Video of an avalanche of snow slowly burying cars in the parking lot.

"To his surprise, the DNA revealed that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed in their time together in Europe. Possibly even more than once. Today, surprisingly, the people carrying the most Neanderthal DNA are not in Europe but in East Asia—likely due to the patterns of ancient human migration in Eurasia in the thousands of years after Neanderthals died out."

An update on major advances in solar energy in Australia.

"...disenfranchised grief—grief that goes unacknowledged by society—can have huge mental health ramifications. This is especially the case for individuals dealing with the suicide of a sibling because while there's adequate support for the parents, little is known about this specific group."

Mamrorated stink bugs are invading the Upper Midwest. “They are notorious hitchhikers. They can ride on just about any vehicle — cars, trucks, RVs, delivery vans. They get into places where you can’t see them,” Ambourn noted. “They can cause some real damage to fruits and crops. … Perhaps the most noticeable impact of brown marmorated stink bugs is their tendency to congregate in homes by the hundreds. When a few get in, they emit a pheromone that attracts even more, and they tend to congregate in giant clusters.

John Bolton - the new national security advisor, is "an uber-hawk, itching for war."

Placards at the student anti-gun March For Our Lives protests frequently made reference to Harry Potter themes, such as ‘When I said I wanted the real world to be more like Harry Potter, I just meant the magic stuff, not the entire plot of book five where the government refuses to do anything about a death threat so the teenagers have to rise up and fight back’.

Don't call vanilla "plain."  "The world of vanilla isn’t particularly complicated. And yet shelves stocked with vanilla extract, vanilla paste, vanilla beans, vanilla flavoring and imitation vanilla can make it seem so. There’s a role for each. It depends on what you’re seeking..." (details at the link)

How tourism has ruined tropical islands in the Indonesian archipelago (photoessay).

The New York Times analyses the upcoming midterm elections.

"Amid a wide gap between modest teacher salaries and Miami’s high housing prices, the county has a new plan: build apartments on school property and let faculty live there."

See if you can figure out why this Icelandic landform is called Elephant Rock (click pic to embiggen).

Trailer and commentary for Westworld Season 2 (currently running - second episode this coming Sunday night).

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article206839799.html#storylink=cpy

Proof the earth isn't flat.

Pornhub played a cruel April Fool's prank on its visitors, flashing a message that the video they were watching was being "automatically shared" with the viewer's social media contacts.

"A Texas mother who says she didn’t even know she was ineligible to vote has been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally voting in the 2016 presidential election."

Minnesota has more shoreline on its lakes, rivers, and streams than California and Florida and Hawaii combined (including ocean).

There is a reason there are so many Thai restaurants.  "Using a tactic now known as gastrodiplomacy or culinary diplomacy, the government of Thailand has intentionally bolstered the presence of Thai cuisine outside of Thailand to increase its export and tourism revenues, as well as its prominence on the cultural and diplomatic stages."

"The sudden appearance of a network of new rivers in Argentina’s central province of San Luis has puzzled scientists, worried environmentalists and disheartened farmers."

A giant tarantula can climb up your leg very quickly.

Climate change is wreaking havoc with septic tanks in Minnesota. "The cause is a dramatic long-term decline in insulating snow early in November and December. Combined with still-freezing conditions, that drives the frost line deep underground — well below septic pipes and drain fields."

A chiliagon is a polygon with 1,000 sides.  A myriagon has 10,000 sides.

Why tornados can cause clouds to be green ("...in the late afternoon and evening when most storm activity occurs, angled golden and reddish sunset light might mix with the blue precipitation core and the net effect is a greenish color.")  Video at the link.

"A pair of researchers with ELTE Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary has run computer simulations that suggest that tales of Vikings using a sunstone to navigate in cloudy weather might be true."

"The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves..."

The town of Whalen, Minnesota has an annual "stand-still parade."  The town is so small that a conventional parade seemed inadvisable, so they assemble the parade components along the two blocks of downtown, and people walk past.  Entertaining video at this link.

"In the Philippines, the Igorot people practice an ancient burial ritual where the elderly carve their own coffins and the dead are hung off the side of a cliff." (BBC photoessay)

A man left his dashcam on when he left his Mercedes for service at a Canadian dealership.  He wasn't pleased when he viewed the results.

"Armed with satellites and drones, archaeologists discover new Nasca lines and dozens of other enigmatic geoglyphs carved into the earth."

"...they describe a prison where the prisoners routinely break out of their cells to visit terrible violence on other prisoners, without any intervention from guards; where guards turned and ran when the shackled, helpless man they were dragging to his cell was set upon by an armed gang; where guards are paid less than $12/hour and received three weeks' training; where facilities devoted to people with mental illness have virtually no trained psychiatric staff; where prisoners whose bones have been broken during assaults are thrown in their cells for days before they receive any medical attention."  This is in Mississippi.

Nominative determinism.

"He offered to carry her roller skates. A year later, they were married! (1954)"

"...states are enacting laws to ban the sale of fake urine, which retails for about $17 to $40 in head shops, truck stops and on the Internet."

The embedded images for this linkfest are selections from a gallery at The Guardian featuring "the 24 finalists competing to illustrate a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, in a competition run by The Folio Society and House of Illustration."

Eye (human)

 
Prominent crypts of Fuchs (the black is mascara). 

Via the Pics subreddit.

The Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

This is an impressive book.

In the 1800s, robber barons raped the United States of its virgin forests.  The process which started in the Northeast had spread to the Midwest by the 1870s.  Forests were not only clearcut, but after separating the trunks from the crown and branches, the timber crews left the "slash" behind in massive tangles of deadwood that stretched for hundreds of miles.

In 1871 drought and high temperatures had turned the harvested forests of northern Wisconsin into tinder, and a massive fire obliterated the town of Peshtigo, killing 1200 people - a tragedy mostly overlooked by news reporters and history, because the Great Chicago Fire happened on the same day.

By 1894 there had been zero improvement in stewardship of the land, and the harvesting of the forests had moved west to Minnesota.  This time the victims were in Hinckley and Sandstone, communities just south of Duluth.

This book provides a detailed account of the conflagration.  It begins with a couple chapters of backstory on the communities and citizens, the timber industry, and pioneer life in the northwoods.  What impressed me was the detail the author provides regarding hour-by-hour movements of the victims and their actual conversations, which he gleaned from extensive research into first-person accounts collected by news reporters and preserved in diaries and correspondence of the survivors.

This was not just a "forest fire" - it was a "firestorm," in which the massive heat (1600-2000 degrees Fahrenheit) creates its own weather, with fire tornadoes and hurricane-force winds.  I was particulary awed by the report of one man who took his family to seeming safety in a boat on a lake; the convective forces of the fire column pulled in surrounding air so fiercely that their boat was blown back to the flaming shore, where they perished.

The details are brutal: 

(after the fire) "First, they came across the half-burned trunk of Peter Englund lying in his front yard.  Then, when they approached Englund's well, they were met by an overwhelming stench.  Peering down into the well, they could make out the top layer of what would turn out to be a stack of eighteen bodies - Englund's wife and his seven children and nine other people, most of them neighborhood children..."

After the fire, trainloads of sightseers came to gawk at the devastation, including ghoulish opportunists who scavenged the wasteland for safes and cashboxes, stripping jewelry from the bloated corpses.

This is not a "pleasant" read, but the book is well-written and the accounts, while grim, do not seem exploitative or sensationalized.   I found a copy at our local library, planning to browse it, but wound up reading cover-to-cover in a couple evenings.  It is perhaps better reading for a beach vacation than at a cabin in the woods.

More reading on The Great Hinckley Fire, The Hinckley Fire Museum, and firestorms in general.

You notice the blue because of the black

YouTube link. 

In this segment from the BBC's Planet Earth series, David Attenborough describes the courtship ritual of the superb bird-of-paradise.

Not explained in the video is the science behind that extraordinary color.  For that, we need to turn to a new Nature Communications publication:

Here we show that feathers from five species of birds of paradise... structurally absorb incident light to produce extremely low-reflectance, super black plumages... SEM, nano-CT, and ray-tracing simulations show that super black feathers have titled arrays of highly modified barbules, which cause more multiple scattering, resulting in more structural absorption, than normal black feathers.

 [normal black feather on the left, "super-black" on the right; details at the link]

By increasing the number of times light scatters, structurally absorbing materials can increase total light absorption to produce a profoundly black appearance. For example, a shiny metal with a smooth surface that reflects 30–70% of visible light can be converted to a matte black material that reflects less than 5% of light by adding microstructural surface complexity that increases structural absorption. Natural examples of structural absorption have been described in the wing scales of butterflies...

Our findings demonstrate that super black bird of paradise feathers structurally absorbs up to 99.95% of directly incident light... Interestingly, in both butterflies and birds of paradise, super black patches are always adjacent to bright, highly saturated, and structural colors... We hypothesize that structurally absorbing super black patches evolve because they exaggerate the perceived brilliance of adjacent color patches through a sensory/cognitive bias inherent in the vertebrate mechanism of color correction.

More at the link.  Fascinating.  Via Wired.

Hotel-Restaurant Belvédère

Located "am Furkapass im Wallis, Schweiz auf 2'300 m.ü.M."   Visible in the background of the James Bond movie Goldfinger.

Truthfully, no one really knows for sure how and why it was built [in 1882]. What’s well established is that it was built right after the mountain pass was completed, probably as a lounge for people who wished to escape and enjoy the silence, or attend one of the many lavish parties held inside. So this might answer the question as to why it was built. Or maybe it was meant to be a resting place for the mountain workers, but, in no time, the charming location and what it offers in terms of isolation and excellence inspired the elite to climb the scenic road.

And then there is the Rhône glacier right next to it. Only 200 steps away, it offers a spectacular close-up view of an icy scenery like no other place on Earth. The Belvédère Hotel is raised on a rock, practically over the glacier, so the view is available right from the hotel’s balconies while guests are slurping their morning coffees. Not only that but from the 1890s onward, an ice chamber inside the glacier has been carved out, re-drilled and maintained as a walkable tunnel.   (much more info at the link)

Drone video here.

Webpage with some interesting photos (click the "Galleries" top photo on the right, then the arrows).  Satellite view and reverse view explain parking.

Global warming has caused the glacier to retreat, and a tunnel has bypassed this series of S-curves, so the hotel is closed until further notice.

A concise history of hookworm in the American south

For more than three centuries, a plague of unshakable lethargy blanketed the American South.

It began with “ground itch,” a prickly tingling in the tender webs between the toes, which was soon followed by a dry cough. Weeks later, victims succumbed to an insatiable exhaustion and an impenetrable haziness of the mind that some called stupidity. Adults neglected their fields and children grew pale and listless. Victims developed grossly distended bellies and “angel wings”—emaciated shoulder blades accentuated by hunching. All gazed out dully from sunken sockets with a telltale “fish-eye” stare.

The culprit behind “the germ of laziness,” as the South’s affliction was sometimes called, was Necator americanus—the American murderer. Better known today as the hookworm, millions of those bloodsucking parasites lived, fed, multiplied, and died within the guts of up to 40% of populations stretching from southeastern Texas to West Virginia. Hookworms stymied development throughout the region and bred stereotypes about lazy, moronic Southerners...

“You had an entire class of Southern society—including whites, blacks, and Native Americans—that was looked upon as shiftless, lazy good-for-nothings who can’t do a day’s work,” my mom explained to me. “Hookworms tainted the nation’s picture of what a Southerner looked and acted like.”

The rest of the story, with a video, is at PBS.

This week in the United States

 I'll defer any commentary and close them for this post.  You can read about the incident at TIME.

Pyramus and Thisbe, and the wall between them

This couple was referenced recently in a book I was reading, and I realized I knew nothing about their story, so here it is:

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pyramus and Thisbe are two lovers in the city of Babylon who occupy connected houses/walls, forbidden by their parents to be wed, because of their parents' rivalry. Through a crack in one of the walls, they whisper their love for each other. They arrange to meet near Ninus' tomb under a mulberry tree and state their feelings for each other. Thisbe arrives first, but upon seeing a lioness with a mouth bloody from a recent kill, she flees, leaving behind her veil. When Pyramus arrives he is horrified at the sight of Thisbe's veil, assuming that a wild beast has killed her. Pyramus kills himself, falling on his sword in proper Babylonian fashion, and in turn splashing blood on the white mulberry leaves. Pyramus' blood stains the white mulberry fruits, turning them dark. Thisbe returns, eager to tell Pyramus what had happened to her, but she finds Pyramus' dead body under the shade of the mulberry tree. Thisbe, after a brief period of mourning, stabs herself with the same sword. In the end, the gods listen to Thisbe's lament, and forever change the colour of the mulberry fruits into the stained colour to honour the forbidden love.

There are older versions of the myth, noted at Wikipedia (whence the image by John William Waterhouse, 1909).  Romeo and Juliet is an obvious adaptation. 

Our mulberry fruits are purple rather than red, but perhaps it depends on whether the lovers spilled arterial or venous blood.

"Below Suspicion" and "Patrick Butler for the Defense"

I started my review of all of John Dickson Carr's detective novels with the classic "It Walks By Night," featuring detective Henri Bencolin, and then covered Bencolin's other four mysteries in two posts (here and here).  In December I reviewed detectives Rossiter and Gaunt in "Poison in Jest and The Bowstring Murders."

This post looks at the two detective novels featuring Patrick Butler.

Below Suspicion (1949)
John Dickson Carr introduces Patrick Butler, an arrogant and borderline unlikeable London attorney and self-styled sleuth, who in this novel is assisted by Gideon Fell.  Fell was well-known to the reading public by 1949, and well-known to the characters of this story ("you're the one - aren't you - who knows all about locked rooms"), but plays only a minor supporting role here.  The plot does involve serial poisonings in apparently-locked residences, but the elements of detection are diluted with quite a bit of derring-do and thriller aspects.  I rated the novel 2+ on my 1-4+ scale.  Herewith the interesting gleanings:

"In the room were a "plain deal table and two chairs."  The usage is not of "plain deal" but of a plain "deal table."  Deal = soft wood with implications of "cheap" or "humble."

"If it makes you feel better, my dear, I'll take my fee out of the next rich blacketeer who really is guilty."  The story is set in post-WWII London, so a "blacketeer" is a portmanteau word referring to a black-market racketeer.

"Mrs. Taylor was sitting up in bed, with her hand still on the bell-push.  It's the sort of bell-push they have in hospitals, with a long white cord fastened on the wall..."  Self-explanatory, but I've never heard the term before, despite spending 30+ years in hospitals.

"Acushla!" he chided her... I've already prepared your defense." Anglicization of the Irish word chuisle = "pulse" (of my heart).

"It was blowing a gale, but there was a dancy kind of moon."  I couldn't find this anywhere.

"Counsel for the defence, producing a key which he said belonged to the back door of his own house, demonstrated that it would fit the back door of "The Priory."  Calling witnesses, he showed that the lock was a "Grierson," which had been fitted to nine-tenths of the houses built in London during the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century."  I was startled to discover that locks of older houses were not necessarily individually keyed in the post-WWII era.  Note also the use of the apostrophe on the dates to indicate the elided "eighteen," just as Carr uses 'phone on many occasions.

"By the Lord, I think you'd give anything on earth to see me come a cropper!"  A familiar phrase with obvious meaning, but I had to look up the derivation.  It obviously means to suffer a misfortune, but originally meant to take a bad fall off the back of a horse (crupper being the horse's hindquarters).  The Aussie equivalent is said to be "come a gutsa/gutser."

"He was a spiv and a drone and an eel and a butterfly!"  Wiktionary says flashy con artist, low common thief, slacker.  Some connotation of well-dressed, perhaps related to "spiffy?"

"Since it was past nine o'clock, all electric light and heat and gas had to be turned off..."  The novel is set in 1947.  Last year I did browse the book Austerity Britain, but had forgotten that utility shortages extended this long past the end of the war.

"A man was bashed about by two wide-boys in Renshaw's pay."  Thugs in context.  Definitions indicate a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing, or a petty criminal.

"The moley was an extraordinary potato, its surface jagged with the edges of safety-razor blades.  They ground it into your face, twisted it, and--"  I couldn't find this.  ?prison slang

"The so-called club was hot and frowsty, not large and not much cleaner than the billiard-saloon below."  Musty, stuffy, stale, warm.  Variant of frowsy and maybe related to fusty (etymology: 14th c. from fust wine cask, from Old French: cask, tree trunk, from Latin fūstis cudgel, club.)

"Anybody got an electric torch?"  Flashlight, obviously.  Quaint.

"She swept up the knitting-bag and hared out."  Probably to run like a hare; I don't have time to look up everything.

"Modern secret societies, you know," Dr. Fell mused, "are mere tyros in their quickness to slash out and kill."  Beginner, novice, from Medieval Latin tyro, tīro (“young soldier, recruit”)

"We were skylarking, that's all.  No harm done."  Originally a nautical term "to jump about joyfully, frolic; to play around, play tricks."  ?presumably related to some behavior of the bird?

Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956)
Carr resurrected Patrick Butler seven years later for what in my estimation is a rather mediocre novel.  The "locked room" is weak, the protagonist unlikeable and the plot muddied with derring-do and comic overtones.  But I did find some interesting tidbits...

I mentioned in reviewing a previous book my surprise at seeing 'phone written with an apostrophe, and earlier in this post 'fifties and 'sixties.  In this story there is mention several times of the 'flu.

"His grey tie was pulled down skew-whiff from the hard collar..."  From askew (obviously) + weft to mean fabric out of alignment.  ?does this lead to "squiffy" meaning "drunk" ?

"The door was closed; or, as the barristers liked to say, sported."  Didn't find any help in the usual places.  Finally located this in the Bartleby definition of sport a door or oak: "To keep an outer door shut. In the Universities the College rooms have two doors, an outer and an inner one. The outer door is called the sporting door, and is opened with a key. When shut it is to give notice to visitors that the person who occupies the rooms is not at home, or is not to be disturbed. The word sport means to exhibit to the public, as, “to sport a new equipage,” “to sport a new tile [hat],” etc."

"Oh, bedad," he whispered..."  Irish "By God." (Patrick Butler is Irish).

"Can you think of a place more poetic to plot damnation to the spalpeens than in the sink of their own iniquity?"  More from the Irish: poor migratory farm worker, often viewed as a rascal or good-for-nothing.

"Will you kindly permit me to question my client, so that all of us may not land prematurely in chokey?"  British slang for prison, but why?

"Both of them were speaking ventriloquially, without moving their lips."  The meaning is obvious, but I have never seen the word used as an adverb!

 "It wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't been so incarnadined polite." "Blood-red" by definition - presumably a play on the British use of "bloody."

"No noise!  Want the scotches on us?" The context indicates that it refers to the police.  Probably some British history related to this usage (?).

"They had thought Pam a beetle-wit, a dandelion-clock." Wiktionary: "The term is applied when the flower is used in a children's pastime by which the number of puffs needed to blow the filamentous achenes from a dandelion is supposed to tell the time."  Used here as a derogatory term for stupid or naive.

"Nobody knows.  I think I know.  But that's because more grasses come to me, with secret information..."  Slang term for police informer.

"Butler quietened Hugh as the call-boy, from mere force of habit, banged a fusillade of knocks on the dressing-room door."  A boy or man who summons actors when their presence is required for a performance.  I wonder if this is related to the "Call for Philip Morris" character in old cigarette ads?

"Before another day, I promise you, that damned old fraud will very much regret giving the cut-direct to his own nephew."  I found nothing on this.

"He was in a large and luxurious, if somewhat heavily and loweringly furnished, bedroom..."  With cloudiness or threatening gloom.  From ME louring.

 "Across the bedroom a door stood open to a sybaritic bathroom."  From Sybarita, an ancient Greek city in southeastern Italy noted for the luxurious, pleasure-seeking habits of many of its inhabitants.

"On the desk, at one side, lay a heavy stone paperweight.  This would do to smash the ring to flinders; to pound and crush its diamonds, if that were possible..."  Fragments, splinters, probably of Scandinavian origin: compare Norwegian flindra (“splinter”).

In Hugh's office, and between Butler and Lord Saxemund as might have been expected, there was progressing a truly memorable schemozzle."  A state of chaos and confusion, from Yiddish.

If you were blind, you'd know why this doorknob is knurled

From the International Building Code:

26.11.4 Special hardware: Doors opening into hazardous areas shall have door-opening hardware which is knurled or has a roughened surface to give tactile warning to persons with visual impairments. Hazardous areas shall include but not be limited to loading platforms, boiler rooms, and electrical equipment rooms.

Of course then I had to look up "knurl" -

knurl:

1. A contorted knot in wood.
2. A crossgrained protuberance; a nodule; a boss or projection.
3. A lined or crossgrained pattern of ridges or indentations rolled or pressed into a part for grip.

etymology:

knur +‎ -le (“diminutive”), from Middle English knar (“knot in wood”), earlier sense “a stone”, of Unknown origin.
gnarl is a later variant, from gnarled, via knurled.

Knurl related to "gnarly."  Cool.  You learn something every day.

Image cropped for size from the original at the Mildly Interesting subreddit.

"Industrial-scale" farming of cucumbers in central Wisconsin

YouTube link.

100 years of polio in the U.S.

Quite a remarkable graph; the Salk vaccine was developed in 1952, tested in 1953-54, then used widely.

I was a "participant" in that epidemic of 1952.  My mother used to tell of me crying through one night with muscle cramps; I have no memory of that, but I do remember waking up the next morning, trying to stand by the bed, and falling to the floor because both legs were paralyzed.  After that followed a series of adventures in a Sister Kenny facility in Minneapolis and in later years the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, all of which undoubtedly molded me into the person I am today.

Graph from a superb webpage on polio statistics at Our World in Data - where you can find other pages on other health-related issues (smoking, suicide, cancer, HIV, malaria, etc).

Note - the embed is a screencap; the graph is interactive at the website.

Sheep farming in the hill country of New Zealand

YouTube link.

I suppose some farmers have tried using drones not just for photography, but for the herding as well.  I hope drones never replace the dogs.

Vodka aisle in Polish supermarket

Via the Mildly Interesting subreddit.

Bluebells

A woman sits on a tree trunk in the Hallerbos as bluebells bloom, in Halle, Belgium, on Thursday April 19, 2018. Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) are particularly associated with ancient woodland where it may dominate the understorey to produce carpets of violet–blue flowers. The forest is a crowd favorite thanks to the beautiful purple flowers. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert) (via)

4/20 has a different meaning for me than for many of my generation.  That is the approximate date on which the Blue-Eyed Marys (Collinsia verna) would be in peak bloom in the Raven Run nature sanctuary outside Lexington, Kentucky.  I have some memorable photos, but they are all on Kodachrome slides, and I need to find a way to digitize my old photo memories for the blog. [Iain, I haven't yet looked into the slide scanner you recommended]

Afghan mother determined to get an education

YouTube link.

The video tells the story.

Cat owners will understand the humor

Via, where original credit is not listed.

Big hair

From a gallery of "hair-tossing horses."  Credit Wiebke Haas.

Enjoy a piano duet - updated

"Fran & Marlo Cowan (married 62 years) playing impromptu recital together in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic. He'll be 90 in February."

Found at Within the Crainium.

Addendum: The piece is “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet.” More about the couple at MinnPost.

Updated from 2009 to add some new links.  After that spontaneous duet captured on the first video, the couple were invited back to the Mayo Clinic for other performances.

This video in 2010 compiles several of their routines.

This 2011 video covers their "final performance."

It's "old-time fun." 

Battle of the seasons

Winter and spring duking it out here in the Midwest.  A month ago I was weeding the garden and raking the yard.  Then winter returned.  Two days ago we got 7" of snow, bringing the April total to 13.5 - more than December, January, or February.

The crocuses in our front yard have been frost-bitten a couple times already.  (p.s. - my Green Bay Packer-fan neighbors haven't yet noticed that the crocuses in our front yard come up purple and gold in tribute to a different NFL team...)

Robins and other migratory birds are really suffering; many of them are ground-feeders, and unlike mammals their need for flight means they don't have large fat reserves to burn.  We and others in the area are putting out extra seed, and the birds swarm to those locations.  50-degree temps returning today, so hopefully these anomalous conditions are over.  For now.

TYWKIWDBI is down - again (updated) [returning Friday, see Addendum]

Yesterday when my iMac started up, the usual "susumi" sound was absent and the screen opened up dark instead of grey.  The Apple logo appeared, along with the expected progress bar.

The progress bar evolved way too slowly, then stopped.  After an hour it was still frozen at about 95% complete.  I restarted while zapping the parameter RAM; that accomplished nothing.  And rebooting in the Safe mode (shift key down) didn't help.

So I went to my old Mac to look for help online.  When I rebooted in Recovery mode (command-R), I at least got a response:

I had already been to multiple other help sites, several of which suggested that the frozen progress bar at the end of the startup process probably indicated a problem with "permissions," which should be fixable using Disk Utility.  So I opened it...

... and clicked on the First Aid logo...

... and ran First Aid, hoping to repair permissions.  First Aid ran successfully...

... but after clicking "Done" the iMac still wouldn't complete the rebooting process.

On my old Mac (the one I'm using right now to access the blog) (running OSX Yosemite 10.10.5), the First Aid program presents the  option of repairing permissions:

But this new, crashed, iMac running OSX 10.13.something doesn't seem to offer that option.  ???

Of course, his may not be a permissions problem at all.  Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Of possible note, I did try to option of seeking help online at Apple, and the frozen computer did connect me, so much of its guts, including web access, appears to be functional, but I just can't access stored material.

My next option is to restore using a Time Machine backup.  Here's where I have to offer a "mea culpa" and admit that I don't keep the Time Machine constantly attached to the Mac because my desk is so full of gadgets (printers/scanners, digital microscope, USB extender, lamp, SAD light etc.  So my last complete backup was in mid-February.  I can restore from there, losing a couple months of bookmarks for the blog (many hundreds of them) and various Word documents and uploaded photos.

More importantly, restoring to February status will lose my entire Turbotax tax return, which I had joyfully completed yesterday.  Today was to be the day to file online and submit payment.  I don't know if I can retrieve the entered data from Turbotax online on this old computer or whether it's only stored on the crashed hard disk.

So I am frantically looking for some way to revive the Mac with the frozen progress bar.  I'll be seeking help from Apple online and perhaps over the phone.  In the meantime I'm seeking help from readers who might have any suggestions for me.

This isn't the end of Life As We Know It, but absent a satisfactory recovery, especially of my tax data, I'm just not going to have time to blog for at least several weeks.

Nighttime Addendum:

You learn something every day.  Reader Charlie has introduced me to rebooting in Verbose mode (command-V).  I just did so, and the screen lit up with line after line of TMI-for-an-English-major:

Eventually it settled in to a mantra of "too many corpses" -

That continued past the 300th iteration before I finally had mercy on it and powered it down for the night.

Charlie, there may be a clarification of what's going on earlier in the readout, but I couldn't find a way to scroll up to get closeup photos.  Tomorrow after the Mac and I both get some rest, I'll try another Verbose boot with camera in hand.

If I ever start a band, "Too Many Corpses" might be an interesting name.  I've appended it to the title of this post for now...

Addendum #2

Excellent information at Robin Monks for any reader experiencing the same problem.

Addendum #3

Oh joy !!!

It looks like we are back in business, boys and girls.  TLDR: I reinstalled the operating system.  I don't THINK I lost anything, but I'm not touching anything right now until Time Machine is finished making a complete backup of whatever's there.

I'll leave some notes in the comment thread for those interested in the technical aspect of the problem and its solution.

Best case scenario I'll still be busy tonight and tomorrow with taxes and eBay and stuff.  TYWKIWDBI should reanimate Wednesday or Thursday.

Addendum #4: problem recurs

Gloom returns the next morning -

When I pushed the start button and heard no susumi chime and the screen started to open black instead of grey I had a sinking feeling.  The progress bar has been frozen at 99% for half an hour.

Thankfully I did get my taxes finished and e-filed just before midnight last night.

Now to resume troubleshooting.  Apparently reinstalling the OS was a workaround rather than a fix.  Whatever gremlin is doing this is still in there.  I'll be rebooting in various modes and probably ordering a USB-to-Thunderbolt or Firewire-to-Thunderbolt connector from Amazon, or else I'll just haul the iMac over to the Apple store.

So, no blogging for a while.  *sigh*

Addendum #5: problem gone (for the moment)

The sequence of events is getting a bit fragmented between the text of this post itself and the ever-enlarging Comment thread below.  I don't have time to "optimize" the narrative, but I'll summarize with another addendum -

When the frozen progress bar first appeared, rebooting in Safe mode (space bar) didn't help.  After I used the Recovery mode reboot (R) to reinstall the operating system (which incidentally also updated from OSX 10.13.3 to 10.13.4) I was able to access the desktop.

Then the problem recurred.  But this time (with new operating system in place) I was able to access the desktop via a Safe mode reboot.  I read (or one of the readers told me) that if the problem can be bypassed by a Safe mode reboot, then the problem probably lies in the login or startup files because the Safe mode deactivates login items.

So I restarted Safe mode, got to the desktop and went to System Preferences > Users and Groups to see what my "Login items" are. There were 6 of them: System Events, iAntiVirus, Microsoft AU Daemon, Adobe Resource Synchronizer, Dropbox, and SMART reporter.

I started looking some of them up to see what I could maybe do without.  Never did find exactly was "System Events" was.  The Microsoft "AU Daemon" is an AutoUpdater for Microsoft Office.  Dropbox and SMART reporter I remember as being add-ons that I never have used directly.

I couldn't find a way to "turn them off and back on" so it was late in the evening and I said (literally) WTF I'm just going to delete them.  Did so, pulled down the Restart command - and the iMac opened to the desktop !!  I was so happy I went directly to Civilization V and finished my Genghis Khan campaign.

This morning was the acid test.  Would I need a Safe Mode reboot?  Nope.  Started up fine.f

I don't know if the problem is fixed or dormant.  I could have an occult malignancy somewhere in the computer, but I'm guessing (it's only that) that one of the startup items caused a conflict with some other item that had been updated, or it became corrupted/went insane.  It would be ironic if the glitch that I was calling a "gremlin" turns out to be Microsoft's "Daemon."

If this problem stays fixed with this relatively simple intervention that can be performed by any elderly English major, I should probably revise the title of this post with some keywords that would be useful to others searching the same problem.

So, things are working and I have a current TimeMachine backup.  I also have dozens of new links for the blog that I bookmarked on my old iMac.  Eventually I should probably run some diagnostics.  But first, real life calls.  We're getting yet another snowstorm and I have some paperwork to attend to.

Barring surprises, I should be able to resume blogging on Friday.

An example of "Troxler fading"

Fix your gaze on the center of this image (the black pixel) and stare at it for about 20 seconds.  The colors will disappear.

Troxler's fading has been attributed to the adaptation of neurons vital for perceiving stimuli in the visual system. It is part of the general principle in sensory systems that unvarying stimuli soon disappear from our awareness. For example, if a small piece of paper is dropped on the inside of one's forearm, it is felt for a short period of time. Soon, however, the sensation fades away.

An even more dramatic example is in the video at Digg.

This is a "bulbous bow"

An interesting article at Hakai Magazine entitled "The Secret Language of Ships" explains and illustrates many of the interesting features of ships.  This bow shape is designed to reduce drag.  I found more information at Wikipedia:

A conventionally shaped bow causes a bow wave. A bulb alone forces the water to flow up and over it forming a trough. Thus, if a bulb is added to a conventional bow at the proper position, the bulb trough coincides with the crest of the bow wave, and the two cancel out, reducing the vessel's wake. While inducing another wave stream saps energy from the ship, canceling out the second wave stream at the bow changes the pressure distribution along the hull, thereby reducing wave resistance.

Brutal

The Onion doesn't pull punches.  Also on the same page "Jealous Paul Ryan Asks Legislator With 37% Approval Rating What His Secret Is."

Some would call this "political theater"

A Guardian videographer captured this surreal moment when 28 photographers zoom in on Mark Zuckerberg. 

I also like this reverse angle which captured the absence of most Congressmen, who were apparently called away to urgent fundraising activities.

Paul Ryan is retiring. This man wants to take his seat in the House.

YouTube link.

Paul Ryan currently represents Wisconsin's 1st congressional district (the Milwaukee area).   The Republican who wants to take his place is Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist.  Paul Ryan does not endorse him:

“There are many qualified conservatives who would be effective representatives for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, and Paul Nehlen isn’t one of them,” said Kevin Seifert, the head of Ryan’s political operation. “His bigoted rhetoric and his reprehensible statements should disqualify him from holding any public office and we are confident voters in Southern Wisconsin feel the same way.”

There are currently three other candidates - one Republican and two Democrats (links with information about each at Ballotpedia).

To me, the most interesting one is Randy Bryce. who was featured in a recent article at Vox:

Bryce is a union ironworker and Army veteran. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, serving as a Sanders delegate from Wisconsin during the Democratic National Convention. He’s proud of his working-class roots — unlike a lot of other candidates, it’s typical to see Bryce standing on a construction site with a hard hat on in his campaign ads, rather than wearing a suit...

He’s indicated he’s a different kind of Democrat, and has also been cautious when talking about whether he would support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi if she were to run for speaker if Democrats can retake the majority in 2018...

Bryce is a supporter of Medicare-for-all and has said he would sign on to the bill that is currently proposed in the House. He’s running on a platform that focuses mostly on jobs and the economy and has made infrastructure a huge focus of his campaign...

I've embedded his first campaign video above.  It's very effective.

Epidemic of "zombie-like" raccoons in Ohio attributed to distemper

Coggeshall thought something was wrong with the raccoon, since it was out in broad daylight. What came next confirmed that. As Coggeshall left his garage to try to shoo the animal away, the raccoon stood up on its hind feet and flashed its sharp, white teeth and pink gums. Saliva dripped from its mouth.

Suddenly, it collapsed into a comatose-like state, Coggeshall said. It soon awoke from its lethargy, walked around for a bit, then got back up on its hind feet again.

“It was kind of startling,” Coggeshall told The Washington Post. “And it kept coming back to the house. It was at my door about two or three times.”

Over a dozen cases reported in the past week.  Details and a video news report at The Washington Post.  Photo credit Robert Coggeshall.

A mechanical model of Cardano's Hypocycloid

YouTube link.

I've seen animations of hypocycloids before, but not a working model.  Most interesting.

Found at The Awesomer, via Neatorama.

TYWKIWDBI supports The Guardian

The Guardian does not have a paywall.  Instead, they simply (and politely) request that visitors make a contribution - which I occasionally do.

I'm not asking readers of TYWKIWDBI to support the Guardian, but I do strongly suggest that when you find an interesting and useful website, that you make a donation - however small - both as a simple "thank you" and as an investment in our collective future.

"Glitter beer" contains titanium and mica

Glitter beer has become the “what will they think of next?” beer story of this spring, part of the larger trend of sparkly foods from doughnuts to pizza and cupcakes. Many news outlets have run stories of local breweries jumping into the fad...

Eichelberger said the German-made glitter he’s using does not affect flavor. It contains titanium
dioxide — a white compound that’s used as a pigment in paint and sunscreen — and tiny flakes of mica, a pearlescent mineral that’s the same stuff found in kids’ craft projects and teenagers’ hair.

All of that sounds not super great to put in your body, but if the Food and Drug Administration says it’s safe (it does), let’s have a glitter beer party! (Really, though, titanium dioxide is commonly used as a food coloring, and mica flakes have been in toothpaste for years.)...

Glitter beer has incited many eye rolls and much hand-wringing from purists, especially on beer Twitter. But appearance has always been a part of beer evaluation, and rather serious beer writer Jeff Alworth noted on his “Beervana” podcast that glitter allows a drinker to follow the usually hidden convection cycle of a beer as it is agitated while pouring and drinking.

More information at the Wisconsin State Journal.

Astronaut demonstrates rotational inertia

YouTube link.

"The effect shown in this clip is true for any object that has three different moments of inertia, e.g. as shown here for a prism. If you try to spin the object along two of its axes, it will spin in a smooth stable way, as shown here. In particular, these axes are the ones that have the highest and lowest moment of inertia. On the other hand, if you try to spin it around the axis with the intermediate moment of inertia, things get a bit chaotic. The reason is that any small perturbation (e.g. if you didn't throw it perfectly or if a whiff of wind blows) in the motion will cause the object to try to rotate about another axis of rotation as well. The net result is that you get the tumbling you see in the GIF. This effect is called the intermediate axis theorem, or the tennis racket theorem. In case you are interested in a more technical explanation, I posted a longer write-up here a while back."

More discussion at the Wikipedia entry on the Tennis Racket Theorem and at the Educational GIFs subreddit source.

Relevant re Congress' questioning of Zuckerberg

They may be pelting him with softballs:

Members of the House and Senate committees that will question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about user privacy protection next week are also some of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from Facebook employees directly and the political action committee funded by employees.

The congressional panel that got the most Facebook contributions is the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which announced Wednesday morning it would question Zuckerberg... Members of the committee, whose jurisdiction gives it regulatory power over Internet companies, received nearly $381,000 in contributions tied to Facebook since 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center is a non-partisan, non-profit group that compiles and analyzes disclosures made to the Federal Election Commission.

The second-highest total, $369,000, went to members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which announced later that it would have a joint hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee to question Zuckerberg on Tuesday. Judiciary Committee members have received $235,000 in Facebook contributions...

“Powerful interests provide lots of money to the committees that have jurisdiction over them, and they do it to gain influence with those members of Congress,” Wertheimer said. “It’s a fundamental problem that exists throughout the system and throughout the committee structure, and it undermines public confidence that the members are going to make decisions in the best interests of the American people.”

Overall, Facebook has contributed $1.1 million to House members, split almost evenly between the parties...

More at USA Today.  We all know how this bullshit system works.  If candidate A is running against candidate B, instead of giving $20,000 to candidate A, a company gives $10,000 to A and $10,000 to B.  Then, whichever one wins feels beholden to the corporation for its "support," which wasn't in fact support.  It stinks to high heaven.  

"Plus, nearly 30 members of Congress own Facebook stock, according to a story in Roll Call, including two Democratic members of the committee who will question Zuckerberg next week."

"This might come in handy someday"

The perfect comic to send to a friend or relative with hoarding tendencies.

More Pearls Before Swine.

Car with dashcam left at the dealership..

YouTube link.

There are lots of stories about cars being taken on joy rides by service technicians, but this customer left his dashcam on and was able to document not just the frivolous "test drive" but the failure to provide service.

"Paid Over $700 for transmission service and it wasn’t even done! Car was on the Hoist for 11 minutes! And charges for Over 90 minutes labour!! "

'Qui ouvre une école, ferme une prison.'

The title is a quote from Victor Hugo: "Each time you open a new school, you shut down a prison."

Photo cropped for size and emphasis and brightened from the original here.