I saw it in the newspaper

Several examples harvested from Bad Newspaper, which has hundreds of these.

"Robocrop"

A new version of the world’s first raspberry-picking robot, a four-armed machine powered by artificial intelligence and able to do the job at the speed and effectiveness of a human, is to be employed on farms in the UK, Australia and Portugal over the coming 12 months.

The developers claim that Fieldworker 1, nicknamed Robocrop, can detect more accurately than previous models whether a berry is ripe, and can pick fruit faster because its grippers have greater reach and flexibility...

 “It has superhuman vision capabilities, and what we’re doing with that is detecting the spectral frequency of the state of berry ripeness,” said David Fulton, chief executive of Fieldwork Robotics. “Depending on the state of the berry ripeness, it emits a particular spectral range that allows us to get improved accuracy.”..

Moving along rows of bushes, the wheeled machine’s four arms pick berries simultaneously and drop them into punnets, ready to be transported to supermarkets. The robot, close to 2m tall, can now harvest between 150 and 300 berries (more than 2kg) an hour – the same rate as a human picker – but can run day and night.

Automation in farm fields is nothing new; I'm sure I've blogged laser-wielding drones zapping weeds.  This one I'm adding because of its clever nickname.

The complex definition of "genocide"

During the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves. In a vast landscape of murder that, as the judges acknowledged, included horrors like the systematic torture, rape and beatings of Bosnians in detention camps and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs, this episode alone appeared sufficiently genocidal to the judges. Only there did the perpetrators explicitly display the dolus specialis, or specific intent, “to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such” required for a killing to be considered an instance of genocide. Killings elsewhere in Bosnia may have been war crimes or crimes against humanity — acts that were equally grave — but the decision argued that wherever there were any other plausible reasons for why the killings took place, the court could not rule that genocide definitively occurred. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the “definitional complexity” of genocide by interpreting the intent requirement so narrowly...

Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944, by combining the Greek word genos, meaning “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing,” it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral...

After years of contentious deliberation and diplomatic negotiation, the [United Nations] convention limited genocide to five categories of acts: killing members of a group; causing group members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children from one group to another; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Each one of these acts could constitute genocide only if and when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group...

To invoke “genocide” is to immediately conjure up the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people and its associated architecture of murder: concentration camps and deportation trains, ghettos and gas chambers. This relation has at once augmented genocide’s moral force and undermined its legal uses. The Holocaust is viewed both as the awful standard against which all modern atrocities must be measured and as a supposedly unrepeatable catastrophe to which they must never be compared. The Genocide Convention effectively enshrined this paradoxical understanding of the Shoah and established a nearly impossible bar for genocidal intent based on its example. As a result, international courts have rarely recognized more recent mass killings as instances of the crime, and peoples seeking to have their suffering recognized as such have been bitterly disappointed...

Not long after it was adopted, genocide allegations began to flood diplomatic channels. In 1951, the American Civil Rights Congress presented a paper titled “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations, arguing that the United States was indeed guilty of genocidal actions against African Americans...

The strict legal interpretation of genocide has meant that courts might never recognize many of the worst atrocities of the past several decades as genocide. These include but are not limited to the killing of some 300,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan, the murder of more than a million during the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Iraqi government’s mass deportation and killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds in the late 1980s and the Yazidi massacres by ISIS in 2014. If Lemkin were alive today, he would most likely recognize the Chinese effort to indefinitely detain, re-educate, imprison and torture Uyghurs, and to destroy their mosques, confiscate their literature and ban their language in schools, as precisely the kind of cultural and physical genocide that he hoped his convention would eliminate. While China is a party to the Genocide Convention, it has refused — like the United States, France and Russia — to recognize the jurisdiction of the I.C.J., shielding itself from the court’s authority...

Yet in its remarkable parsimony, the 2007 ruling also reinforced the status of “genocide” as a somewhat inscrutable and unimaginable crime, underscoring the gravity of the offense while establishing such a high bar for genocidal intent that it would become virtually impossible to hold states responsible. It effectively meant that unthinkable atrocities could fail to satisfy the convention’s requirements if they were not accompanied by an overt statement of intent to wipe out an entire people, such as the written plan for a “final solution” that the Nazis adopted at the 1942 Wannsee Conference...

I'll stop excerpting from The New York Times article here out of professional courtesy, preferring to send readers to the original, which I want to have linked here for future reference.  And I'll close the comments because the answer won't come from our Comments section.  What I want is for everyone to recognize the complexity of the term and the problems with its application to the real world.

Why the eagle couldn't fly

"Wildlife officials in Missouri rescued what they thought was an injured and flightless bald eagle... Rangers from the Missouri department of conservation, working with National Park Service staff, captured and transported it to Dickerson Park Zoo for examination and X-rays.

Veterinarians expecting images of broken wings or other trauma instead found themselves looking at a succession of photographs of the remains of the eagle’s most recent meal, namely a raccoon’s leg and paw in its distended stomach."

I'm not surprised by the eagle's eating habits, because I have seen them harvesting roadkill along Minnesota rural roads, but the size of this ingestion is impressive.

Related: The bald eagle is not the national bird of the U.S.

J.D. Vance's views on women

"JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021.

In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children.

“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip.

“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”"

The story continues at The Guardian.  These comments from three years ago pretty much give the lie to his recent claim that his disparaging remark about "childless cat ladies" was only a "sarcastic remark."

I can't believe that this man's background was vetted by any responsible member of the Republican party before Trump selected him as his running mate.  Scary to think that a man with these views could potentially be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Addendum:  relevant parody.  Also relevant: the books that JD Vance is endorsing.

Image cropped for size from the original at the source, credit Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

Matching dinosaur prints in Brazil and Africa

"More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart.

“We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar,” Jacobs said. “In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical.”"

Additional information at SMU News.  This was no surprise to me, because back in 2020 I started posting in TWYKIWDBI scans of ten pages of the "humor scrapbook" I started assembling in the 1960s.  Embedded in that scrapbook, from an uncredited source, was this cartoon:

Bumper snicker

First day of school

Also reposted from 2020, which was a good year for humor posts.  via.

A woman describes her encounter with a strange man

(You may need to unmute at the icon in the UR corner)

https://imgur.com/gallery/qRdd0Ab

Reposted from 2020 because we need more humor nowadays.

"Perfect days" is an interesting movie

 

When I posted the video of Nina Simone singing "Feeling Good" last week, I did so because I had just heard the song used as theme music for this surprisingly fascinating movie.

Here's the brief "blurb" that accompanies the YouTube trailer:

Hirayama is content with his simple life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Unexpected encounters reveal more of his story in a deeply moving and poetic reflection on finding beauty in the world around us.

It of course sounds underwhelming, and the absence of explosions, sex, and special effects probably diminish it in the eyes of most Americans, but I found it to be enthralling.  There is no overall "plot," and very little storyline; this is basically a "slice-of-life" movie showing how someone else in this world lives.

Hirayama’s ascetic existence is stripped back to basics: music, played on cassette tapes collected, we assume, in his long-ago youth; secondhand books bought from the budget section of the local bookstore; a point-and-shoot film camera with which he captures the things that please him; the interplay between the sky and the trees...

He listens to 60s and 70s American and British rock – the Velvet Underground, the Kinks, Otis Redding, Patti Smith – and Japanese folk from the same period. The song choices – in particular the Lou Reed track that gives the film its title and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good – are windows into his soul at any given moment. Hirayama has found harmony...

It’s possible that Perfect Days – Oscar-nominated for best international feature – is as much a manifesto as it is a movie – an argument in favour of an alternative way of being. Perfection, the film argues, is found in a pared-down approach to the world and a rejection of the thirst for new sensations and novelty that drives so much of society...

While watching this movie, I was reminded of my experience viewing Columbus and After Yang.

Related: Tokyo offers toilet tours amid flush of excitement over Wim Wenders’s Oscar hopeful and 

Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness

Addendum:  Only one little nit to pick, from the closing scene.  It absolutely drives me up the wall when filmmakers depict automobile drivers at highway speed jiggling the steering wheel left and right to emphasize that they are driving the car - a maneuver that would throw the vehicle out of control in real life.  Probably the worst example was Winona Ryder as a cab driver in Night on Earth.

Subtypes of sea-beans

I remember finding one on a beach in Florida during my childhood.  Apparently this fellow has collected 34,000 of them and presented his data here.  If my embedded image doesn't supersize enough, you might try the source image at Reddit.

Onion sandwiches

"To the Romans, a slice of onion between two slices of bread was a good breakfast. To the British poor, a cheese-and-onion sandwich was basic sustenance. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up eating onion sandwiches in suburban Chicago, of wild-onion fame, liked onions on bread with peanut butter. In his novel Islands in the Stream, the sandwich is referred to as the “Mount Everest Special” because it is “one of the highest points in the sandwich-maker’s art.”

In Ireland, where egg-and-onion sandwiches are popular, the standard version is an egg-salad sandwich with thinly sliced green onions. Back in the United States, President Calvin Coolidge liked his egg-and-onion sandwich made with egg salad, too. His was reportedly a kind of oniony egg salad sandwich on rye bread, with one chopped sweet onion mixed with three hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, a little dry mustard powder, salt, and pepper.

In other cases, an onion sandwich is the simplest of concoctions. The writer Joseph Mitchell said of the proprietor of McSorley’s Old Ale House, the venerable Irish saloon in New York City, “He liked to fit a whole onion into the hollowed-out heel of a loaf of French bread and eat it as if it were an apple.” You have to choose from among the great ideas of others."

From a reading at Harper's Magazine, which in turn is excerpted from The Core of an Onion, which was published in November by Bloomsbury

If you received a check from the "National Cancer Research Center"...

... do some research before deciding how to proceed.

Our check (for $2.50) arrived yesterday inside a fundraising appeal, and I was immediately suspicious.  Unsolicited checks can be used as vehicles for scams in which your endorsement of the check commits you to obligations in the fine print.  That did not appear to be the case with this check.

The accompanying letter from Steven L. Blumenthal states -

"The $2.50 check is real.  You could put this letter aside, cassh the check, and forget all about our important laboratory research and national cancer education programs.  But what I really hope you will do is return the $2.50 check along with your own gift of $10.00 or more to help in our fight against cancer."

My wife immediately logged on to access the Charity Navigator website (I would encourage everyone to bookmark this worthwhile site for future reference).  The "National Cancer Research Institute" is, as indicated on their checks, a project of the Walker Cancer Research Institute, which is rated by Charity Navigator with one star (out of a possible four) for accountability and transparency, and 2/4 for finances.  They note that over 50% of the funds raised are used for additional fundraising.  So if you send them $10, about $5 of that will be used to send mailings to more people.

"Program expenses" receive 47% of the funds.  Regarding that "program," Wikipedia states:

The public education portion of the solicitation consists of an approximately 1/8 page list of "risk factors for breast cancer" on the back side of the solicitation. Overall, 52.11% + 43.14% (95.25%) of all donations go to either direct or indirect fundraising costs. The card states that 3.81% of funds go directly to research program services (38 cents out of a $10.00 donation). Thus, of the $12,568,927 raised by WCRI, $478,876.11 went directly to research. As a comparison, an NIH grant awarded to a single Investigator for a specific research study typically ranges from $25,000 to $250,000.

If you read the comments at Charity Navigator, you will see that some people say they cash the check and donate the money to "real" charities.  Or you can keep the money.  But note this - your name and address are on the check (with a scannable barcode), and...

Numerous complaints have been made by individuals who are receiving dozens of letters soliciting funds and are unable to persuade the charity to remove their names from the mailing list. The Center then sells those names to other charities, and people throughout the country have complained of being inundated by requests for money that they can not stop.

The choice is yours.  My check went into the shredder.

Reposted from 2012, because after five years this organization is still sending out these checks, and the public continues to find this old post (over 10,000 views so far...) via Google.  Perhaps it will be even easier to find if I make the date more recent.

Re-reposted from 2017, because people are still getting these checks in the mail.

Harvesting wild rice in Minnesota

LEECH LAKE RESERVATION, MINN. – Canoes and poles are being prepped. Folks sit in their driveways, whittling sticks. It can only mean one thing: Wild rice season has returned to northern Minnesota.

“You hear the buzz around Cass Lake and all around the reservation this time of year,” said Matt Frazer, with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s Division of Resource Management. “It’s the talk of the town right now.”

Harvesting wild rice — the Ojibwe call it manoomin, meaning “the good berry” — is weather-dependent and varies each season. Aug. 15 marks the official start of wild rice harvest in Minnesota, but anyone who knows wild rice knows that’s an arbitrary date that has ebbed and flowed in state statute.

“The manoomin makes its own schedule,” Frazer said with a laugh...

Minnesota’s green rice law makes it illegal to harvest unripe rice. Even within harvest season, someone caught harvesting rice that isn’t ready may get 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

If that seems like a harsh penalty for grain, know that wild rice is sacred and a cherished way of life for Indigenous people. The abundance of wild rice has declined over time in Minnesota, where most of the world’s natural wild rice grows. Premature harvesting can damage stalks and ruin future harvests...

Wild rice on reservations can only be harvested by tribal members or residents within the reservation. But nontribal members can harvest wild rice off reservations so long as they have a license.

More information at the StarTribune.  The first embedded video offers an overall presentation; the second shows the process of the harvest.

A "minimum wage machine"

Minimum Wage Machine (2008-2010, updated 2012, and 2016)

Custom electronics, change sorter, wood, plexiglas, motor, misc. hardware, pennies.
(approx. 15 x 19 x 72 inches)

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 3.24 seconds, for $11.10 an hour, or NY state minimum wage (2018). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box. The MWM can be reprogrammed as minimum wage changes, or for wages in different locations.

An interesting concept to teach about mindless work for minimal pay.  Reposted from 2019 because I wish someone would place machines like this in communities.

World birthrates are plummeting

Excerpts from a detailed article in The Guardian:

The fear of climate change has led to couples having fewer babies; about one in five female climate scientists say they will have no children or fewer children because of the crisis.**

It’s not the only reason for what governments and headlines are calling a baby crisis, a population crisis, a fertility crisis, a demographic crisis, an ageing crisis and an economic crisis. The cost of living, housing security and a lack of opportunity also play their part.

The upshot is that all over the world..., governments are concerned that women are simply not having enough babies....

It’s fairly clear that, when women are more educated, more liberated, and more able to access contraception, they start having fewer children. What’s not clear is how to convince them to have more. Cheaper childcare? More flexible workplaces? More help from the menfolk? Affordable housing? More optimism about the future?

Statistics show most countries are now below replacement rate – that’s 2.1 children per woman, enough to replace the existing population with a bit of a buffer...

“Governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live,” 

“The blame gets placed on women. Women are seen as the gatekeepers of population and are seen as hedonistic and selfish if they do not populate.”

** as an example, I'll offer this excerpt from the transcript of a podcast from To The Best of Our Knowledge, entitled "Love in the Time of Extinction":

Heather teaches environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her students are 18 and 20 year olds. And she told me about a day when she realized just how scared they really are.

- [Heather] Basically, this woman said, "This poem gives me hope." And I said, "Oh, tell me more about that." And she said, "Well, most of the time, I don't feel any hope at all and I don't wanna bring a child into this world." And she said, "But that poem makes me feel like maybe I could." And I said, "Oh my goodness, you're nervous about bringing a child into this environmental moment?" And she said, "Yeah." And I said, "Oh my goodness. How many other people in the room feel that you wouldn't have children because you're afraid of the environmental things that we're facing?" And all of them raised their hands. I don't have any interest in pushing people to have children. It wasn't about that. It was that I realized that they were not seeing a future that they could imagine anyone surviving in. 

World population trends

I'm embedding several graphs from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Population Division).  The trends shown are exactly what the late Hans Rosling was talking about in the videos I've posted here previously (he worked for the U.N.).

I have surprised (perhaps shocked) some people by calmly stating that the world has already reached "peak baby" (or peak child, if defined as younger than 15):

The stunning rise in world population that we grew up with was in large part due to improvements in infant mortality worldwide:

With more children living to adulthood, there is no longer the same drive for women to have large numbers of children as a social security safety blanket.  Given the choice (and appropriate information and products), women worldwide have chosen to have fewer children.



Note that the future of that curve falls below the theoretical "replacement rate" of 2.0.  In many places in the world the number of children per female is already below 2.  This has enormous implications for public policy, immigration policies, and economic forecasting.

See my companion post: "World birthrates are plummeting."

"Semantic bleaching" explained

Merriam-Webster defines "semantic bleaching" as a reduction of a word's intensity (or specificity).  The linked article illustrates the concept using the familiar change in usage of "literally."  I encountered the phrase today in a Guardian article - 

Around this time last year, rawdogging – originally slang for sex without a condom – wasn’t the sort of word you would hear in polite conversation or find in the pages of the Guardian and the BBC. Now, it’s everywhere and being used, largely by gen Z, for the most innocuous situations. Drink black coffee? You’re rawdogging caffeine! Don’t drink coffee at all? You’re rawdogging your mornings! Just finished a nine-hour flight with no entertainment but the flight map? Bro, you rawdogged travel!

The trend for rawdogging flights, which started getting attention earlier this summer, has propelled the term into the mainstream. But the word has been used in nonsexual contexts for several years and, over that time, undergone the early stages of “semantic bleaching”. Its obscene origins have been diluted and for a lot of people it’s no longer remotely scandalous; it just means doing something without assistance.

Language changes with time.  Prescriptivists are doomed.

Addendum:  The Atlantic just published an article about young men "rawdogging" activities:

Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals...

The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men. To be alive on Earth these days is to suffer the barrage of constant lures—sex, substance, gambling, sloth—so widely available and easily accessed that one must fight constantly to avoid their seduction... It is about living raw in some ideal, natural state unsullied by cultural decline. And that has always been impossible.

The essay (about rawdoggin, not semantic bleaching) continues at the link.

A courtship letter written in 1866

"This letter was performed by Taron Egerton at Union Chapel, London, for Letters Live, which stages live readings of famous and remarkable letters in front of an audience."

(You may wish to click on the subcaptions option on the video)  Via the incomparable podcast series This American Life.

If you have doubts about the pronunciation...

... the shirt worn by one of my cousins explains how to say the name.

Sometimes you get lucky

I enjoy video poker games and I believe I know the odds and proper choices well enough to be able to sit at a machine and lose money at the slowest possible rate.  A couple weeks ago I stopped in at a casino to see how long I could make $20 last, and after about a half hour I was startled to be dealt the hand in the embedded photo above.  I was stumped - didn't know what the best choice was, so I took a photo so I could look up the answer after I got home.

This game isn't basic jacks-or-better.  This is Double Double Bonus poker, with the enhanced odds for four-of-a-kind (posted at the top of the screen), compensated for by even odds for two pair, and somewhat lower payouts for other common wins.

I was dealt the flush, paying 5:1 odds.  Keep it and move on?  Or try for the straight flush, paying 50:1.  If I drop the King, I have two chances (7 or Queen) for the straight flush (out of 47 possible cards), plus 6 chances (out of 47) to retain a simple flush.  I dropped the King...

... and filled.  My choice was probably not the mathematically optimal choice [rough estimate the 47 possibilities would pay a total of 260 quarters = about 6 quarters per try versus keeping 10 quarters by standing pat].  I do think my willingness to go for it was based largely on the modest size of my bet (50c), and because I believe that happy memories are retained much longer than disappointments.

A nation that is in all four hemispheres

Geography trivia for the week: identify the only country that straddles all four hemispheres of the earth:  north and south, east and west.  There is only one such country, in the Pacific.  On the other side of the globe the prime meridian coming down from Greenwich crosses the equator below the coastline of Africa, south of Ghana in international waters.  That point has been designated Null Island and has been marked in the past by a buoy.

Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0. Although "Null Island" started as a joke within the geospatial community, it has become a useful means of addressing a recurring issue in geographic information science.

Kiribati is the answer to the bar quiz trivia question posed above.  The equator and 180th meridian intersect in Kiribati's territory (though not on an island).

How much money is enough?

The screencap is from this scene in Breaking Bad, in which Skyler asks Walt how much longer they are going to have to accumulate money.

There are several discussion threads online asking how much money is in that pile.  The answers vary depending on various estimates of the dimensions of the pile and the denomination of the bills.  The best answer I've seen is the opinion that, given the U.S. health care system, the pile is still not enough to pay for Walt's medical bills.

"Abigail" is a fun movie

I don't think Abigail is streaming free anywhere right now; I had the DVD home from the library and watched it last night.  The embedded trailer above gives a good sense of the movie being "campy" and outrageous.  Although billed as a horror/thriller, it's not really scary.  My delight came from the absolutely over-the-top portrayal of the iconic battle of vampires and humans.  At first you laugh at the ridiculous appearance of a tutu-clad 12-year-old as an ancient monster.  And then they turn the dial up beyond 10.

I've embedded below four moments that did make me laugh; three will be recognizable to those who have already seen the movie...

The fourth one depicts the moment the fearless vampire killers set off down a dark hallway with their sharpened pool cues, protected by a bag of onions (the uber-rich girl who was tasked with getting garlic from the kitchen didn't know the difference).

Several critiques of the movie note that the story takes a long time to get going, then perhaps goes on a little too long, which is probably a fair assessment.  But it's fun if your head is in the right mindset, and a nice change from the Democratic convention.

The bald eagle is not the national bird of the U.S.

It was news to me when I read this in the Minnesota Star Tribune:

Congress will consider, and may pass, a bill officially designating the bald eagle the United States’ national bird.

“Wait — what?” Americans will say. “Hasn’t the bald eagle been the national bird since, like, the 18th century?”

Many think so, including Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources. But the bald eagle, although featured on the Great Seal of the United States and emblazoned on the country’s passports, currency, postage stamps and military uniforms, was never formally named the country’s avian representative.

That could change thanks to the legislation, which was spearheaded by the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., an effort initiated by an avid Eagle Center supporter and collector who discovered the oversight and sought to make the bird’s role official.

States have state birds (Minnesota’s is the loon, of course, since 1961). The United States has a national mammal, the bison, as well as a national flower, the rose, and tree, the oak. But no national bird.

Photo taken by me at the aforementioned National Eagle Center about 15 years ago.

Unusual find in a field

Rather unusual discovery noticed while hiking in a central Wisconsin field and posted on Facebook.  Identification at the link.

Death by mulch volcano

This 10-year-old maple blew over in a storm because the roots had rotted as the result of a mulch volcano.  There is an informed discussion thread at the Arborists subreddit, and an explanation of mulch volcanos at Leaf and Limb.

"Feeling Good" (Nina Simone, 1965)

"Feeling Good" (also known as "Feelin' Good") is a song written by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It was first performed on stage in 1964 by Cy Grant on the UK tour.

Nina Simone recorded "Feeling Good" for her 1965 album I Put a Spell on You. The song has also been covered by other famous artists [list at the link is extensive]... In 2022, American Songwriter ranked "Feeling Good" number one on their list of the 10 greatest Nina Simone songs.

Posted to accompany the cystic fibrosis post.

Related: "Sinnerman" (Nina Simone) from 2019, and this video which combines the music of Sinnerman with a mashup of movie scenes of people running:

Trikafta for cystic fibrosis

"... word began spreading of a forthcoming three-drug combination from Vertex. In clinical trials, neither patients nor doctors are told who is on the placebo and who is on the experimental drug. But in this trial, everyone could tell. The triple combo made patients’ lung function jump by a shocking 10 percentage points. Overnight, they woke up smelling for the first time the distinctive scent of their home. They could even taste their sweat becoming less salty. This was Trikafta.

In the fall of 2019, Trikafta was approved by the FDA... Jenny received her first box of Trikafta on November 17, 2019, at the end of yet another two-week hospital stay. She had gotten sick again in Nashville. Actually, she had been fighting off a cold before she left, and despite assiduously staying in her hotel room to keep up her treatment routine, she felt an infection settling into her lungs. At the conference, she heard a lot about Trikafta, but she didn’t expect to get it so quickly. CF centers were being inundated with calls from patients asking for the new drug.

In the hospital in Utah, she recorded a video that she sent to her sister with CF, Teresa, who now lived in Ohio. She is sitting on her hospital bed. “My Trikafta is here,” she says, her voice shaking and her eyes tearing up. The miracle drug she had been promised her whole life was now in her hands.

Teresa was also able to start the drug not long after. For her, Trikafta’s impact was immediate and unmistakable. The Purge [expectoration of voluminous amounts of sputum] started on the drive back from the doctor’s visit where she took the first dose. The mucus coming up was so thin that she was confused; it was nothing like the sticky gunk she’d had to work so hard to cough up. A month later, she went back for a sweat test, and her salt level was normal. Based on the results, you would not know she had cystic fibrosis.

“I think of it like, ‘Oh, back when I used to have CF,’ ” Teresa said on a recent call with Jenny and me. “I don’t feel like I have CF. I feel completely normal.” She has been able to stop using her vest and inhaled medications, freeing up that time for her adopted children and the farm where she lives with her family. Before Trikafta, every small exertion was a negotiation with her lungs. Should she go upstairs? How many breaths would that take? Now she’s running around milking the goats, trimming their hooves, throwing 30 bales of hay into the barn..."

If you have a family member with CF or a friend with such, or a friend who has a family member etc., I urge you to read The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything.  It's quite a remarkable (and happy) story.  

Image cropped for size from the original at the link.  Credit Fumi Nagasaka for The Atlantic,

The Milky Way behind the Three Merlons

This was an Astronomy Photo of the Day last week.  I had to look up The Three Merlons:

The Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Italian for 'Three Peaks of Lavaredo'), also called the Drei Zinnen (German for 'Three Merlons'), are three distinctive battlement-like peaks, in the Sexten Dolomites of northeastern Italy. They are one of the best-known mountain groups in the Alps.

Today I learned about "epenthetic schwas"

I've seen several online articles recently about the grammatically correct way to write the plural or possessive forms of names like Harris and Walz...

It all felt a bit, as some social media users described, like apostrophe hell: Would it be Ms. Harris’s and Mr. Walz’s or Ms. Harris’ and Mr. Walz’s? The Harrises and the Walzes? The Harrises’ family home and the Walzes’ family dog? It was enough to see double, made worse by the fact that stylebooks, large news organizations and grammar geeks were all split or contradicted one another.

Discussion continues at the source, but to me the only interesting part was this:

People can easily pronounce the plural or possessive of Harris or Walz, both of which contain epenthetic schwas, Ms. Holliday said. When a word ends in an S or Z sound, we insert a schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet — to break up a block of consonants.

So, like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who discovered that he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, I now realize that I've been using epenthetic schwas all my life! 

[epenthetic = inserted into a word].

See also Any vowel can become a schwa (2020)

Why Trump wants Joe Biden back

I've set it to start after the first minute of silliness.  For the TLDV crowd, if 18 minutes is too long, just use the slider to hear the 11:28 - 13:00 segment.  I'll close comments for this; I don't have time today to be curating arguments.

Stories to make your day a little happier

Selections from a group of 49 "Uplifting Posts That Will Put A Smile On Your Face" at Izismile.

Swifties4Kamala

“I feel like us US Swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous Project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down to the polls in November,” the 22-year-old posted to his 70,000 followers. He added a sobbing emoji. “Like if we don’t want democracy to end we really need to move and push blue votes.”

Fourteen thousand likes later, the coalition Swifties4Kamala was born. Dozens of people signed up to help and run accounts on X, Instagram and TikTok, as well as strategize activities and communications. Within three weeks, Swifties4Kamala amassed more than 180,000 followers across its social media platforms...

Long dismissed as unserious, in part because it has long been thought of as the domain of women and young people, fandom is now a potent political force in the 2024 elections – an election in which young women and LGBTQ+ people are expected to vote, rally and otherwise participate in politics at historic levels...

Memorably, the first fandom to seize on Harris’s candidacy was not the Swifties, but the Angels, fans of the singer Charli xcx. Hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, Charli xcx tweeted: “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her album Brat and its brash party-girl aesthetic. The internet was immediately awash with green-tinted supercuts of Harris – the Brat album’s signature color – while CNN reporters tried to decode the meaning of “brat” for less online audiences at home...

In 2022, after Swift urged her millions of Instagram followers to vote, Vote.org recorded more than 35,000 voter registrations. Ticketmaster’s botched rollout of the Eras tour led to a 2023 Senate hearing. Swift’s endorsement is one of the coveted prizes in the 2024 election; although she has not said anything about this year, the odds are not looking good for Donald Trump and JD Vance. Not only did Swift endorse Democrats in 2018 and 2020, but she is also probably the world’s most famous “childless cat lady”...

Image cropped for size from the original at The Guardian (credit Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

Iconic photo from the 2024 Olympics

Podium worship by Elsa Garrison (400mm, 1/250th sec, f/3.5, iso 2500)

“To me what makes this picture special is that it embodies the Olympic spirit: athletes supporting and celebrating each other. Throughout the week I had been following Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, the American gymnasts, on social media and in their interviews. They had been singing the praises of the Brazilian gymnast, Rebeca Andrade, so I had a feeling that if Andrade were on the podium they would do something special. My colleagues were photographing the ceremony down on the ‘field of play’, so I went up to the lower bowl and found a spot that was as close to head-on as possible. I chose the lower bowl so that I could still see their faces, but I was also high enough to get a clean background.”

From a gallery of interesting Olympic photos at The Guardian.

That's not a mule

"Hannah Huckabay regularly combs livestock auctions online for horses she can rehabilitate and train at her Colorado ranch. But when she saw a video in February of a mule for sale in Kansas, she could hardly believe what she was seeing.

The stocky animal’s short black mane shot straight up like a mohawk, and its white belly stood out against its tan coat. As it nervously paced in its corral, Huckabay said it bore a striking resemblance to Przewalski’s horse, a critically endangered species she’d learned about while studying equine science.

“I was like, ‘There is no way. That is not a mule,’” Huckabay recalled thinking. “That’s a purebred Przewalski.”

Such a find would be incredibly rare. Once extinct in the wild, around 2,500 Przewalski’s horses remained worldwide as of 2022. They’re native to Mongolia and in June, seven were reintroduced to nearby Kazakhstan as part of an effort to return them to their natural habitats. They are the only truly wild horse remaining (mustangs are feral horses).

But scientists say Huckabay’s hunch appears to be correct. Hair samples from the animal Huckabay purchased — along with a second horse recently surrendered at a Utah sanctuary — were sent to Texas A&M University’s animal genetics lab. Both appear to be Przewalski’s horses, said Rytis Juras, the genetics lab’s director who tested both samples..."

The story continues at The Washington Post.  Image cropped for emphasis from the original (credit Kinsey Huckabay)

Homo Naledi

This video is concise (12 minutes), informative, and presented in a professional manner.  New information for me and perhaps some readers - definitely worth a view if the history of modern humans is of interest to you.  A tip of the blogging cap to my cousin Otrastan for sending it to me.

The poems of Shel Silverstein

This week I reread a book I first encountered about 40 years ago - Don't Bump the Glump, by Shel Silverstein. Above are some sample pages.

I was disappointed to discover that I had totally misremembered my favorite creature. It really ought to be a Quick-Digesting Geeth. That's what I'm going to continue to use if/when I recite the poem for anyone.

Reposted from 2009 because it has been buried too deeply in the archives.

How do you slice a pie... chart?

I have never seen a pie chart sliced like this one (describing the sexual and racial composition of the American population).  I don't see any advantage over radial wedges, unless its to enable placement of the segment labels within the diagram, and I find it hard to compare the size of irregular polyhedrons.

A quick search led me to "11 pie chart alternatives and when to use them," which didn't include this pattern exactly, unless its a type of Voronai diagram.

Posting this because the readership here has a huge range of knowledge and skills, so perhaps someone can offer an informed comment.

If nothing else, the search at least led me to this old Dilbert cartoon:

Interesting rock from Lake Michigan

Image cropped for size from the original found at the whatsthisrock subreddit, where the top comment on the thread describes it as "crinoid stem hash, with some bivalve cross sections thrown in."

Hans Rosling explained world economic trends back in 2006

I'm sure I originally posted this many many years ago, but I can't find that post now, and it's worth calling it to readers' attentions again.  Sadly, Rosling has died, and his lectures on this subject are unappreciated.

Here is a later version focused on the subject of world population:

These are two of the finest lectures I've ever heard.  And during 30 years in universities, I've heard thousands of lectures.

World population growth rate is declining

"...world history can be divided into three periods marked by distinct trends in population growth. The first period (pre-modernity) was a very long age of very slow population growth. The second period, beginning with the onset of modernity (with rising standards of living and improving health) and lasting until 1962, had an increasing rate of growth. Now that period is over, and the third part of the story has begun; the population growth rate is falling and will likely continue to fall, leading to an end of growth towards the end of this century."

Most people don't understand this.   I have presented this concept several times using the outstanding lectures of Hans Rosling.

LOTS more relevant charts at the OurWorldInData website.

Reposted from 2016.