The Ottoman empire was perhaps the most cosmopolitan in the world; its 30 million subjects were from seventy ethnic groups, speaking twelve major languages. (30)"In Aleppo in the mid-1700s, women constituted up to one-third of all commercial property buyers and investors... property laws in the Ottoman Empire were more favourable to women than in Western Europe." (49)England became an ally of the Ottomans in the 16th century after the pope excommunicated the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. She initiated trade relations with the Islamic world, sending exotic gifts, including clockworks. They returned perfumes and silks. England then exported tin and lead, which they stripped from Catholic churches and monasteries. The Ottomans used the lead and tin for weaponry against Catholic Spain, which delighted the English. (53)The Ottoman empire implemented a meritocracy rather than a hereditary aristocracy. "Rustem Pasha [was] originally a Catholic Croat swineherd... he became Suleyman the Magnificent's longest-serving grand vizier and married Suleyman and Roxelana's only daughter, the Princess Mihrimah - then the richest woman in the world." (74)"During the 1845-52 Irish Potato Famine... the Ottoman sultan declared that he was ready to send £10,000 to help Ireland's farmers. Queen Victoria... asked that the sultan send no more than £1,000, since she herself had sent only £2,000. He complied, to spare her embarrassment, but in secret also sent five ships laden with food." (79)"Images of women in the Ottoman Empire have been distorted by Western fascination with the harem... In practice, however, only about 2 per cent of marriages in the empire were polygamous... usually involved the taking of only two wives... and was often used as a good way of looking after widows or orphans who would otherwise have no support and nowhere to live. In most Christian European societies, the solution was usually the convent or the asylum for the elite, and the street for the rest." (88)"... coexistence and compromise between different manifestations of religious belief and practice is one of the abiding themes of Ottoman history... Orhan's Christian wife... was allowed to remain a practising Christian while at the same time being given the power to endow Muslim religious establishments." (90-1)"Christianity, as well as Islam, was a religion that originated east of Europe, and there is no reason why Islam could therefore not be considered a European religion in the same way as Christianity." (92)"... in 1830 Sultan Mahmud II had declared: 'I distinguish among my subjects, Muslims in the mosque, Christians in the church and Jews in the synagogu, but there is no difference among them in any other way. My affection and sense of justice for all of them is strong and they are indeed my children.'" (99)The most famous Ottoman admiral was Piri Reis, known now for his cartographic skillls, including his 1513 map - one of the oldest in the world to depict the Americas. (111)Ottoman court music was played by several instruments "according to open-ended modal systems" and was never written down. "This absence of notation encouraged improvisation and allowed a certain freedom in performance." (148)The medical scholar Aksemseddin described microbe theory 200 years before van Leeuwenhoek: "It is incorrect to assume that diseases appear one by one in humans. Disease infects by spreading from one person to another. This infection occurs through seeds that are so small they cannot be seen but are alive." (170)"The sultan's 'walled' tent palace was so large, according to the French traveller Antoine Galland, writing in 1673, that 600 camels were needed to carry the various parts." (259)"The Turkish word kosk (our word "kiosk") is a natural extension of the tent culture, evolving gradually into a kind of garden pavilion.. [and tourist information booths]... The key piece of furniture in the Ottoman home was a padded upholstered seat or bench, without arms or a back, that in most Western languages is still known as an 'ottoman'." (261)"The Seljuks are thought to have been responsible for the introduction of the tulip bulb into Anatolia from Central Asia, where the flowers grew wild... on the China-Kazakhstan border. By the 15th century the flower was regarded as the symbol of the Ottomans. It is still prominent in Turkish culture (stamps, coins, emblems, flags). The word for tulip in both Persian and Turkish is lale, often used as a girl's name. When written in Arabic script, lale has the same letters as 'Allah,' which is why the flower also became a holy symbol..." (266)
31 January 2024
Understanding the Ottomans
Open letter sent to President Biden by a coalition of young voters
*According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, young voters are deeply disturbed by your position on the war. Amongst voters under 35, 65% oppose “sending more military aid to Israel and only 22% approve of your handling of the Israel/Hamas war”.
*The same poll found your favorability rating among voters under 35 has fallen to just 25%. While young people are particularly opposed to handing the Israeli military a blank check, 80% of Democrats and 66% of all likely voters support a ceasefire.
*In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin the number of Muslim and Arab voters exceeds the margins you won by; your pollster Lake Research Partners found that support for your administration has “cratered among Muslim, Arab, and young Democrats in Michigan”, a state you won by only 150,000 votes in 2020. Now, just 61% of Michigan Democrats under 30 support your re-election, with 21% opting to vote third party.
*A New York Times poll shows you trailing Trump in 5 out of the 6 critical swing states by an average of 48-44%, which is in huge part driven by the fact that you currently are favored by voters under 30 by only 1 percentage point.
*You are “bleeding support” among young Black and Brown voters in particular, who powered your victories in the key swing states that delivered you the electoral college.
30 January 2024
Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky"
And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it – you've got to go sometime.I've been listening to this all week, wondering what the faint spoken words were. The above sentiment is expressed at 0:38 and "I never said I was frightened of dying" (by Patricia 'Puddie' Watts, wife of road manager Peter Watts) at 3:33.
— Gerry O'Driscoll, Abbey Road Studios janitorial "browncoat"
Fittingly, this "sky" song is the one that (coincidentally) plays during Dorothy's ride in the tornado in "The Dark Side of the Rainbow."
And, as I've always suspected, the sexual connotation of the vocals was intentional, as David Gilmour indicated in a Rolling Stone interview: "We wanted to put a girl on there, screaming orgasmically."
Unprecedented
Ocean surface heat continues to astonish seasoned observers and raises the prospect of intense storms later in the year. The hurricane specialist Michael Lowry tweeted that sea surface temperatures across the Atlantic main development region, where most of the US category 3 or stronger hurricanes form, “are as warm today in mid-February as they typically are in middle July. Incredible.”
Revisiting the second season of Fargo
Introducing the sidebar
29 January 2024
New information about lepidoptera
27 January 2024
"Handsaw" and "Heronsaw" explained
"Sylvia's Mother"
"Sylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's busy. Too busy to come to the phone.'Sylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's trying to start a new life of her own.'Sylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's happy. So why don't you leave her alone?'[refrain]And the operator says 40 cents more for the next three minutes.Please, Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her. I'll only keep her a whilePlease, Mrs. Avery, I just want to tell her goodbyeSylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's packing. She's gonna be leaving today.'Sylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's marrying a fella down Galveston way.'Sylvia's mother says 'Please don't say nothin' to make her start cryin' and stay.'[refrain]Sylvia's mother says 'Sylvia's hurrying. She's catching the nine o'clock train.'Sylvia's mother says, "Take your umbrella 'cause Sylvia, it's starting to rain.'And Sylvia's mother said, "Thank you for calling, and, sir, won't you call back again?"
Jim Croce's "Operator" (1972)
"Operator, well could you help me place this call? See, the number on the matchbook is old and faded. She's living in L. A. with my best old ex-friend Ray, a guy she said she knew well and sometimes hated.This backstory from a website about Jim Croce and his work:
[Refrain] Isn't that the way they say it goes? But let’s forget all that. And give me the number if you can find it, so I can call just to tell them I’m fine, and to show I've overcome the blow, I've learned to take it well. I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn't real - but that's not the way it feels.
Operator, oh, could you help me place this call? ’Cause I can’t read the number that you just gave me. There’s something in my eyes, you know it happens every time I think about the love that I thought would save me. [Refrain]
Operator, well, let's forget about this call. There's no one there I really wanted to talk to. Thank you for your time - Oh, you've been so much more than kind - You can keep the dime." [Refrain]
"I got the idea for writing "Operator" by standing outside of the PX waiting to use one of the outdoor phones. There wasn't a phone booth; it was just stuck up on the side of the building and there were about 200 guys in each line waiting to make a phone call back home to see if their "Dear John" letter was true, and with their raincoat over their heads covering the telephone and everything, and it really seemed that so many people were going through the same experience, going through the same kind of change, and to see this happen especially on something like the telephone and talking to a long-distance operator-this kinda registered."(reposted from 2013). Reposted again from 2015 because I heard a familiar song in the background of Fargo season 2 about a young man agonizing on the phone, which I wanted to post, but I looked up "Operator" and then realized it was the wrong tune. But I'll repost it anyway because it's a good one, and it's been on the back pages of the blog for almost ten years.
St. Paul (Minnesota) city council: all women, all under age 40 - updated
"Last fall, all seven city council seats were up for grabs. On 7 November, after a campaign season packed with candidates, Minnesota’s capital city elected its new city council – comprised entirely of women. Last week marked the group’s inauguration.Noecker’s fellow council members – Nelsie Yang, Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Saura Jost, Anika Bowie and Mitra Jalali – are all women of color and, like her, progressive in their politics. All council members are also below the age of 40.In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority-women state legislature. Today, women make up 62% of the Nevada state legislature – the largest percentage of any state.But experts have noted that no major city has achieved the feat of electing an all-woman city council like St Paul.Notably, St Paul has a population of roughly 300,000 people, the second most populous city in the state after fellow Twin city, Minneapolis. Around 46% identify as a race other than white, according to the US census."
“If you read my Twitter replies lately, the responses sure are something. They’re fighting for their lives in there,” Jalali said. “Let’s just say a whole lot of people who are comfortable with majority male, majority white institutions for nearly 170 years of city history are suddenly sharply concerned about representation.”“My thoughts and prayers are with them in this challenging time,” she added, the crowd erupting in cheers.
25 January 2024
A surprise on the underside of dresser drawers
Map of the periodical cicada broods
The middle strip is NOT a gradient
"Free" annual checkups are not actually free
When Kristy Uddin, 49, went in for her annual mammogram in Washington state last year, she assumed she would not incur a bill because the test is one of the many preventive measures guaranteed to be free to patients under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The ACA’s provision made medical and economic sense, encouraging Americans to use screening tools that could nip medical problems in the bud and keep patients healthy.So when a bill for $236 arrived, Uddin — an occupational therapist familiar with the health-care industry’s workings — complained to her insurer and the hospital. She even requested an independent review.“I’m like, ‘Tell me why am I getting this bill?’ ” Uddin recalled in an interview. The unsatisfying explanation: The mammogram itself was covered, per the ACA’s rules, but the fee for the equipment and the facility was not...Over the past several years, the medical industry has eroded the ACA’s guarantees, finding ways to bill patients in gray zones of the law. Patients going in for preventive care, expecting that it will be fully covered by insurance, are being blindsided by bills, big and small...Peter Opaskar, 46, of Texas, went to his primary-care doctor this year for his preventive-care visit — as he’d done before, at no cost. This time, his insurer paid $130.81 for the visit, but he also received a perplexing bill for $111.81. Opaskar learned that he had incurred the additional charge because when his doctor asked if he had any health concerns, he mentioned that he was having digestive problems but had already made an appointment with his gastroenterologist. So, the office explained, his visit was billed as both a preventive physical and a consultation. “Next year,” Opasker said in an interview, if he’s asked about health concerns, “I’ll say ‘no,’ even if I have a gunshot wound.”
24 January 2024
23 January 2024
22 January 2024
This is a "Scrabblegram"
The Scrabblegram is a form of constrained writing in which you must write a piece of text that uses all 100 tiles in an English Scrabble set, and no other letters. The blank tiles must be used, and as per the rules can be any letter.This example by David Cohen [embedded above] is considered one of the best examples in the genre: it is a remarkable piece of text because not only does it make sense and paint an amusing picture, but it also flows beautifully, rhymes and has the correct number of syllables for a limerick.
20 January 2024
An ode to Dot (Dorothy)
These four balls are congruent in terms of color
Pubic lice
Huge quantities of water ice detected on Mars
The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has detected an area about the size of the Netherlands where water could make up as much as 40 percent of the material near the surface...FREND detected a water-rich region measuring some 41,000 km2 (15,800 square miles). Within the upper 1 m (3.3 ft) of soil, up to 40 percent of the material seems to be water, which the team says most likely exists as ice...“This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”
"... a new radar survey of the Medusae Fossae Formation region on the Martian equator has revealed what appears to be giant layered slabs of buried water ice, several kilometers thick...There's as much water buried there, scientists say, as can be found in Earth's Red Sea; if it were brought to the surface and melted, it would cover Mars in a shallow ocean between 1.5 to 2.7 meters (4.9 to 8.9 feet) deep...There's no liquid water on Mars now, that we know of. Where all that water went remains a mystery: did it disappear into space as vapor, or is it sequestered inside the planet, locked away where we can't see it? The Medusae Fossae Formation may hold some answers to this question..."
New collegiate sports record
17 January 2024
Word for the day: fermata
Nabokov’s character Van Veen, from Ada, suggests that he is “an epicure of duration,” who “delight[s] sensually in Time.” Veen’s “greatest discovery,” Nabokov later said, was “his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats . . . not the beats themselves, which only embar Time.” What Nabokov describes in his typically florid style, without naming it, is the fermata. A simple but profound music notation, a fermata on a note or rest stops time between beats, freeing the musician (or conductor) to decide when it ends. On my own fourteen-mile fermata, from the town of Las Terrenas to Salto El Limón, I passed on foot through clusters of modest little houses with tin roofs. I saw people, a woman in hair curlers cooking on charcoal briquettes, and people saw me, the men in faded military uniforms who stopped to offer me a ride in their jeep. I refused their offer, and was abandoned back into my solitary pursuit.
Fermata is the Italian name for the sign (𝄐), which in English is commonly called a Pause, and signifies that the note over which it is placed should be held on beyond its natural duration. It is sometimes put over a bar or double bar, in which case it intimates a short interval of silence. [examples in the image embedded above].
16 January 2024
University of Minnesota Dance Team jazz routine
The team competed in two dance categories, winning its 22nd national championship for its pom performance, a style that involves holding pompoms. But it was the jazz routine choreographed to Aerosmith's "Dream On" that went viral over the weekend. Videos ricocheted around YouTube and TikTok.A sequence in the choreography took the dancers through a long series of one-legged spins, ending with all 20 dancers flipping an aerial turn in unison."That's a hard skill to get on, with 20 people on the floor," Tumbleson said. The dancers and coaches initially planned that only a few dancers would execute the aerial, but the team decided to choreograph the routine with all the dancers making the flying turns.
For a long time, Tumbleson said, dance did not get the same recognition as other sports. Social media is changing that, especially through moments of virality like the team just experienced.
Origin of the "butterfly effect" theorem
Edward Lorenz was a weatherman during World War II, tasked with forecasting cloud cover before American bombing raids in the Pacific. But meteorology in those days was largely guesswork and produced only crude predictions. After the war ended, Lorenz decided to try to unlock the secrets of the weather using more sophisticated methods and harnessing the nascent power of computing. He created a simplified, miniature world on his LGP-30 computer: Instead of the millions of different variables that affect weather systems in the real world, his model had just 12 variables.One day, Lorenz decided to rerun a simulation he’d done earlier. To save time, he decided to start midway through, plugging in the data points from the prior snapshot. He figured that so long as he set the variables at the same levels, the weather patterns would be repeated just as they were before: same conditions, same outcomes.But something strange happened instead. The weather in his rerun simulation was different in every way. After a lot of scowling over the data, Lorenz realized what had happened. His computer printouts had rounded data to three decimal places. If, for example, the exact wind speed was 3.506127 miles an hour, the printout displayed it as 3.506 miles an hour. When he plugged the slightly truncated values from the printouts back into the simulation, he was always off by a tiny amount (in this case, just 0.000127 miles an hour). These seemingly meaningless alterations—these tiny rounding errors—were producing major changes.That observation led Lorenz to a breakthrough discovery. Minuscule changes could make enormous differences: Raising the temperature one-millionth of a degree could morph the weather two months later from clear blue skies into a torrential downpour, even a hurricane. Lorenz’s findings were the origin of the “butterfly effect” concept—the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas—and, ultimately, of chaos theory. They also explain why meteorologists are still unable to forecast the weather beyond a short time frame with much accuracy; if any calculation is off by a tiny amount, the longer-term forecast will be useless.
"One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls."
"I know it seems counter-intuitive but one of the most glaring signs of our warming climate is that of our coldest temperatures."
15 January 2024
14 January 2024
"Beach grass" from a garden in Vienna
In the United States, politics fills a "moral vacuum"
Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive...The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education...These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures... The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste...And then it mostly went away...If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.
The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.
Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.
A galaxy with no stars (yet)
Artist depiction of hydrogen gas observed in galaxy J0613+52. The colors indicate the likely rotation of the gas relative to the observer (red=away, blue=toward). This image was made using a starfield from STScI POSS-II with additional illustration by NSF/GBO/P.Vosteen
"While examining a discrepancy between data from the Nançay Radio Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), O’Neil discovered an error, “The GBT was accidentally pointed to the wrong coordinates and found this object. It’s a galaxy made only out of gas—it has no visible stars. Stars could be there, we just can’t see them.”Known as J0613+52, this LSB is unlike others that have been observed before. “What we do know is that it’s an incredibly gas rich galaxy. It’s not demonstrating star formation like we’d expect, probably because its gas is too diffuse. At the same time, it’s too far from other galaxies for them to help trigger star formation through any encounters. J0613+52 appears to be both undisturbed and underdeveloped. This could be our first discovery of a nearby galaxy made up of primordial gas,” adds O’Neil."
Owlets can vocalize while still inside their egg
"Great horned owls find their voice while they are still doubled over in the dark of their moon-shaped egg. Having punctured the small air cell inside the egg’s membrane with their budding beak, the proto-owlets inflate their lungs and start chittering."
Historic snowstorm underway - updated
10 January 2024
Optical illusion best viewed from a distance
"Dogs intended for consumption"
Activists from Animals Hope Shelter inspect a truck containing hundreds of dogs intended for consumption after it was seized by police [Semarang, Indonesia]. Photograph: Daffa Ramya Kanzuddin/AFP/Getty Images
One of the "Photos of the Day" at The Guardian. I haven't tried to track down the story.
State and local tax systems are regressive
“When you ask people what they think a fair tax code looks like, almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least. And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that. There’s an alarming gap here between what the public wants and what state lawmakers have delivered.”
Nationally, the average state levies an effective state and local tax rate of 11.3 percent for its lowest-income 20 percent of residents; 10.5 percent for the middle 20 percent; and 7.2 percent for the top 1 percent (see Figure 1). This means the top 1 percent are contributing 37 percent less of their incomes toward funding state and local services in their states than the poorest families.
States such as Florida, Tennessee, and Texas are often described as “low tax” due to their lack of personal income taxes. While this characterization holds true for high-income families, these states levy some of the nation’s highest tax rates on the poor. This is indicative of a broader pattern. Nationally, we find evidence that states with lower taxes for their highest-income earners tend to have higher taxes for their lowest-income residents.
“When you ask people what they think a fair tax code looks like, almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least,” said Carl Davis, research director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which conducted the analysis.“And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that. There’s an alarming gap here between what the public wants and what state lawmakers have delivered.”
Superb acting in "Seance on a Wet Afternoon"
Female penis and male vaginas in cave insects
"Male genitalia are sometimes used as devices for coercive holding of females as a result of sexual conflict over mating. In contrast, female genitalia are usually simple. Here we report the reversal of intromittent organs in the insect genus Neotrogla (Psocodea: Prionoglarididae) from Brazilian caves. Females have a highly elaborate, penis-like structure, the gynosome, while males lack an intromittent organ. The gynosome has species-specific elaborations, such as numerous spines that fit species-specific pouches in the simple male genital chamber. During prolonged copulation (∼40–70 hr), a large and potentially nutritious ejaculate is transferred from the male via the gynosome. The correlated genital evolution in Neotrogla is probably driven by reversed sexual selection with females competing for seminal gifts. Nothing similar is known among sex-role reversed animals."