Award-winning photographs of birds

Helmet shrikes Preparing to Sleep. Bronze Winner, Comedy Bird Photo. "We were on a safari, and returning to camp in Sabi Sands, South Africa, on a dark March evening. We stopped, having picked up some unusual sounds, although unsure what they were. Then we heard chattering and fluttering high above us. When illuminated with the lamp on the vehicle, we saw these helmet shrikes huddling together against a night that was starting to turn colder."

When Worlds Collide. Overall Winner and Gold Winner, Conservation. "Each year during spring and fall migration over 1.3 billion birds die in North America as a result of window collisions. A network of dedicated volunteers heads out each morning to pick up the pieces. For over 30 years FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) volunteers have patrolled cities worldwide in search of birds that have collided with windows. While their efforts have saved an impressive number of bird collision survivors, the majority do not survive the impact. But the fallen birds are never left behind. Their bodies are collected and their lives honored in the annual ‘Bird Layout’. The Layout brings volunteers together to arrange the dead birds in an emotive and provocative display. While The Layout honors the fallen birds and brings closure for the volunteers, it is also a critical event that raises public awareness and highlights a global issue. I have volunteered with FLAP for four years and attend The Layout annually. From hawks to hummingbirds, this 2022 display includes more than 4,000 birds.

Images and text from The Atlantic, Winners of the Bird Photographer of the Year 2024.

"Finally, a new look"

The title of this post is the lede for a New York Times fashion review article, which noted that some clothes resembled "cumulus clouds of cotton wadding and people-swallowing structures that send the imagination soaring up, up and away, while ignoring certain exigencies like sitting down."  Another resembles a "hooded insectoid cape."

I am a self-admitted ignoramus when the subject is haute couture, so I have to defer to the columnist who noted "Abnormal is the new normal, which pretty much sums up the current design challenge. That’s why Mr. Anderson’s Loewe show was so powerful — he made unusual clothes that seemed like exactly what you would want to throw on in the morning."

Peronally, I'll stick to normcore.

Top image cropped for size, credit Comme des Garçons, spring 2025, Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times.  The other two are Courrèges, spring 2025.

An ALL-CAPS rant includes "execution of a baby after birth."

Top image credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via The Guardian.  Text image via Mediaite.

Seeking input from the Trump apologists who are readers here.  What does he mean when he refers to 
"Democrat demanded late term abortion in the 7th, 8th, or 9th month, or even execution of a baby after birth."??  This phrase can't be written off as "just joking" or "misquoted."  It's beyond hyperbole to the point of being outright fantasy.  

Word for the day: deranged.  Etymology from the French dérangé ("disturbed").  Definitions: 1) Disturbed or upset, especially mentally. 2) Insane.  3)Malfunctioning or inoperative.   Anagrams: grenaded, dangered, nadgered, gandered, gardened ("nadgered" apparently Britspeak equivalent to "knackered",  new to me).

Trapped in rubble

"Amid the chaos in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Irina, a waitress at Ria Pizza, becomes trapped under rubble after a devastating Russian missile strike. The attack on the bustling restaurant, a beloved gathering spot, claimed the lives of 13 civilians and injured 61 others."

Photograph: Wojciech Grzędziński/Siena international photo awards, via a gallery of photos at The Guardian.

A "quartet of chaos"

An article in The Economist expresses concern about four world leaders not because of their individual activites, but because there is evidence that they are coordinating their efforts.

Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, was unusually blunt on a recent visit to Europe: “One of the reasons that [Vladimir] Putin is able to continue this aggression is because of the provision of support from the People’s Republic of China,” he said. China was, he added, “the biggest supplier of machine tools, the biggest supplier of microelectronics, all of which are helping Russia sustain its defence industrial base”. American officials are reluctant to discuss details of what they think Russia is giving its friends, but Kurt Campbell, deputy secretary of state, recently said Russia has provided China with submarine, missile and other military technology. Separately, America says that Iran has been busy sending Russia hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles.

These revelations are examples of the growing military-industrial ties between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. “We’re almost back to the axis of evil”, says Admiral John Aquilino, the recently-departed head of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, referring to the term applied by George W. Bush, a former president, to Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Others draw parallels with the Axis forces of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and fascist Italy, with worrying conclusions. “Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea…have now been co-operating for a longer time, and in more ways, than…any of the future Axis countries of the 1930s,” warns Philip Zelikow, in the Texas National Security Review, a military and security journal.

The members of this new quartet of chaos—whose ideologies range from Islamism to hardline communism—are riven by distrust, and they have very different visions of the world. Yet they are united by a shared hatred of the American-led order, and are keen to deepen their economic and military-industrial links. Their relationships amount to a kind of “strategic transactionalism,” says an American administration official. That is, the four regimes share a systematic intent to conduct bilateral deals that are in each participant’s narrow self-interest, and sometimes in the collective interest too.

The article continues at The Economist.  It's not a fun read.

Helene update

Whenever hurricanes occur, I always turn to Tropical Tidbits.  This is the latest update; the next one will be posted about midday Thursday, right before landfall.  Florida officials are warning residents that storm surges of 10-15 feet are "not survivable."  Note also the inland impacts at the end of the video.

Helena update

I couldn't resist the juxtaposition with the hurricane post above.  I'm getting ready to start season 5 after having thoroughly enjoyed the first four seasons.  Helena has become my favorite clone.

The topmost video is the least NSFW of the group (re gore).  And all contain potential spoilers.

For those unfamiliar with the Orphan Black series, go to Seeking Advice on Orphan Black and watch the trailer for season 1. 

Addendum:  I just finished binging all five seasons, and I loved the series, but I do need to point out one "movie mistake" which slipped by all the fact-checking:

This is a screencap of the medical record of the little Afghan girl who was brought to the village because her Wilms' tumor offered special research possibilities.  But notice her blood pressure:  90/138.  

I'm glad the teacher graded this with a smiley

Via Miss Cellania.

Geoglyphs damaged in Chile

The embedded screencap from The New York Times tells the story in a nutshell.

Vehicles — also including trucks from mining operations — run roughshod over the geoglyphs in Alto Barranco and other zones of the desert, scarring them with hundreds of tracks.

“When we saw the drone footage, we couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Pimentel said, noting that several key figures were now barely recognizable. The worst part, he added, is that “the damage is irreversible.”..

Marcela Sepúlveda, president of the Chilean Society of Archaeology, noted that big signs had been placed around archaeological zones to prevent damage, meaning that drivers should be fully aware of what they’re heading into. “The geoglyphs are gigantic,” she said. “No one can claim they didn’t see them. That’s impossible.”

Harry Potter reimagined as a redneck using AI

One can't help but be amazed by the capabilities of modern artificial intelligence in creating photorealistic humans and landscapes.  See also these examples based on Star Wars and Breaking Bad. If these videos are representative of what is going on with pop culture, imagine the potential for politics and pornography.

Embed and the two links via Neatorama.

Social unrest in China

Excerpts from an article this week in The Economist:

The term “three-generations-in-tobacco” has become a common shorthand in China. On social media it means a privileged elite whose members hand out coveted jobs (such as managerial roles in the state’s tobacco monopoly) to their own types, shutting out ordinary folk. Earlier this year a microblogger with more than 850,000 followers invoked the meme. “The result of this hereditary system is a closed circle of power that completely cuts off opportunities for people at the bottom to rise up!” he wrote. Hundreds expressed agreement. “The ruling class is solidifying,” one replied. Another fumed: “The children of the elite get ahead, and the children of the poor remain poor.”..

Many Chinese now talk of shehui guhua, or social stagnation. Among the less well-off, resentment is growing of what is seen as a self-replicating elite. Class enmity is on the rise...

Research led by two American scholars of China, Scott Rozelle and Martin Whyte, found that people in China once accepted glaring inequality, remaining optimistic that with hard work and ability they could still succeed. But now they are more likely to say that connections and growing up in a rich family are the keys to success, the academics found. This irks the Communist Party, which claims to have established a “people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants”, as the Chinese constitution puts it. In recent years China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called for greater efforts to promote social mobility while stressing the need to attain “common prosperity”...

Such talk has had little obvious impact on the public mood, however, beyond spooking businesspeople and wealthier Chinese. In August one user of Weibo, a microblogging platform, used his account (with more than 100,000 followers) to rail against the big pensions enjoyed by the elite. “Common folk, do you get it now?” he wrote. “Vested interests are untouchable, you can’t even talk about them,” he said. “They’re all parasites,” one person responded. “Vampires,” said another. “Social stagnation is getting worse,” a third chimed in. Someone even ventured: “Without another revolution, it’s impossible to resolve these bizarre injustices.” But China’s internet is heavily censored. Within a few days, the thread disappeared...

China’s middle class has expanded rapidly, from almost non-existent in the 1990s to around 400m people today by official reckoning. But within this new class, resentments stir, too. Competition for advancement is intense. Parents pour money into helping their children get as good an education as possible. In 2021 the government tried to level the playing field by banning most for-profit tutoring services for school students. But this gave the richest an even bigger advantage: they could afford the sky-high prices that tutors began charging for their illicit work...

The party’s own elitism doesn’t help. Joining it requires a lengthy initiation, involving frequent attendance at meetings to study party literature. But for civil servants and white-collar workers in state-run firms—coveted types of work—membership is essential for advancement. The civil-service exam is highly regarded in China for its fairness, but who gets to join the party is at the whim of insiders. And within the state’s bastions, nepotism is rife...

Rampant and egregious inequality in assets and opportunities.  Elitism, nepotism, social stagnation.  The "common people" angry with their government.  Sounds like the United States...

Caffeinated ramen in a squeeze tube

I remember thinking years ago that "pink slime" was the ultimate in ultraprocessed food, but today I see at Boing Boing that some people are thinking even further outside the box.   This product is marketed as "boost noodle" by Nipponham and targeted towards consumers who have just one hand free to use for eating because the other hand is busy doing other things.

Indigenous people always get screwed

Always.  Always.  Everywhere, on every continent.  Throughout history.  And in prehistory.  They always lose.  Herewith some notes regarding the plight of the Maasi people in Tanzania.

Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.

The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.

For all its accomplishments, the cause of saving the planet has become a trillion-dollar business, a global scramble in which wealthy nations are looking to the developing world not just for natural resources, but for nature itself. The wealthy players include not only Europeans and Americans but Arabs and Chinese and others. On the African continent, political leaders are enthusiastic about what so-called green foreign investment might mean for their own economies (and, maybe, their bank accounts).

Such are the pressures being brought to bear on northern Tanzania, where the Maasai migrated with their cattle 400 years ago, settling in an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles of grassy plains, acacia woodlands, rivers, lakes, snowcapped mountains, salt flats, forests, and some of the most spectacular wildlife on the planet. They called it Siringet, which in the Maa language means “the place where the land runs on forever.” The Maasai see their recent history as a struggle to save that land from those who claimed it needed saving.

First came the British colonial authorities, who established the 5,700-square-mile Serengeti National Park, pushing the Maasai to an adjacent zone called the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with its famous crater, where they were promised they could live. Then came UNESCO. It declared both Serengeti and Ngorongoro to be World Heritage Sites, which came with new restrictions. Western tourists began arriving, seeking an experience of Africa that a thousand movies promised—one of pristine beauty and big game, not people grazing cattle. Tanzanian authorities began leasing blocks of land to foreign hunting and safari companies, many of which promoted themselves as conservationists—a word the Maasai have come to associate with their own doom. Spread among the villages that dot the northern tourist zone, the Maasai have meanwhile been growing in number—their population has doubled in recent decades, to about 200,000. Inevitably, the clash of interests has led to bitter and occasionally violent conflict.

Still, the threat unfolding now is of greater magnitude. It emerged soon after President Samia Suluhu Hassan took office, in 2021. “Tourism in Ngorongoro is disappearing,” she declared during one of her first major speeches. “We agreed that people and wildlife could cohabitate, but now people are overtaking the wildlife.” The Maasai listened with alarm, realizing that the people she was referring to were them.

Not long after Hassan’s speech, officials announced plans to resettle the roughly 100,000 Maasai who were living in and around Ngorongoro to “modern houses” in another part of the country. Meanwhile, in a region north of Ngorongoro, bordering Serengeti National Park, government security forces began rolling into Maasai villages. They were carrying out another part of the plan: annexing 580 square miles of prime grazing land to create an exclusive game reserve for the Dubai royal family, which had long hunted in the area. The government characterized the move as necessary for conservation. Traditional Maasai compounds, known as bomas, were burned. Park rangers began seizing cattle by the tens of thousands.

And more was coming: a $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, that included new plans for tourism and conservation. A $9.5 million deal with the Chinese for a geological park that overlapped with additional Maasai villages. An offer from Tanzania to make Donald Trump Jr.—an avid trophy hunter—an official “tourism ambassador.” New maps and proposals from the government indicated that further tracts could soon be placed off-limits, including a sacred site that the Maasai call the Mountain of God...

In Osero, the problems went back to 1992, when an Emirati company called Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC) was first granted a hunting license for the Dubai royal family. They had their own private camp and a private airstrip and, for the emir himself, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a compound on a hill, guarded by a special unit of the Tanzanian military police. When the rains ended each year, cargo planes full of four-wheelers and tents and pallets of food would buzz low over villages before landing, followed by private jets delivering the royal family and their guests. A few weeks later, they’d buzz out with carcasses of zebras and antelope and other trophies...

“This is 80 percent of our land,” a Maasai elder told me one evening during a meeting with other leaders in northern Tanzania. “This will finish us.” They had tried protesting. They had filed lawsuits. They had appealed to the United Nations, the European Union, the East African Court of Justice, and Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Tanzania in 2023. They’d unearthed old maps and village titles to prove that the land was theirs by law, not just by custom. They’d written a letter to John and Patrick McEnroe after hearing that the tennis stars were hosting a $25,000-a-person safari-and-tennis expedition in the Serengeti. People made supportive statements, but no one was coming to help.

He and other officials I spoke with said that they disliked even using the term Maasai. They invoked the spirit of Nyerere, saying that Tanzania was supposed to have a national identity, not tribal ones. Msando said he could understand the Maasai’s concern about losing their culture, even if he had little sympathy for it. “Culture is a fluid thing,” he said. “I am Chaga—the Chaga were on the verge of having their own nation. Today look at me. People do not even know I’m Chaga. My kids don’t even speak Chaga.” He was unapologetic: “The Maasai are not exempted from acculturation or cultural acclimatization, or cultural extinction.”..

After that, the security forces opened fire. They shot at the legs of elderly women waving grass as a sign of peace. They shot an elderly man, who fell and then was heaped onto a truck “like a sack of maize,” his son told me. He has not been found. The security forces shot at men and women trying to destroy the beacons, wounding them in their arms and legs and backs. They shot tear gas into bomas and burst into one where a traditional ceremony was being held, firing into the crowd. The moran waited for orders to retaliate, but the elders, seeing what the government was willing to do, called them off. “It’s only because we didn’t have guns,” a Maasai elder told me. “If someone helped us with guns, they cannot even fight with us, because they are very cowardly.” Another elder said, “You cannot fight a gun with arrows.”

Dozens of people with bullet and machete wounds, blocked by police from local clinics, limped their way across the border into Kenya for treatment. Several thousand more fled there for safety. Others hid in the forest. Then the burning and bulldozing began. For several days, security forces plowed through circles of stick fences. They crushed houses and corrals and lit the debris on fire, burning more than 300 bomas, including Songoyo’s, and finishing the work before the start of high safari season. In a statement issued a few days after the violence, the Tanzanian government said the new game reserve had “no settlements as it is alleged and therefore there is no eviction” taking place. It described what had happened as “normal practice for all wildlife and forest protected areas in Tanzania”—a necessary step to keep the Serengeti ecosystem from being “disrupted and eventually erased from the face of the Earth.”

Image and text from "The Great Serengeti Land Grab" in the May 2024 issue of The Atlantic.  My apologies to the magazine for harvesting such extended excerpts.  My goal as a blogger is not to take traffic from sources, but to drive traffic to sources.  The linked source article is a longread, with linked subsources.  The content focuses entirely on the Maasai, but the relevance to the history of British, American, and other megapower expansions is starkly evident.

A peculiarly American industry

I noticed a "childless cat lady" yard sign similar to one of these while running errands yesterday.  All of the ones I saw on a Google search were privately manufactured and sold on Etsy, Amazon etc.  When I went to the Harris/Walz campaign website, there were no such signs available.  In fact, there were only two offered: a bland one with both names, and a bizarre one featuring... Joe Biden?!

So unless these sellers specify that a portion of the purchase price is going to the campaign, it appears that these signs are serving only to affirm the homeowner's affinities.  We won't be featuring one in our yard for fear of retribution, but it will be interesting to see how many appear in various neighborhoods nearby in our swing state.  

It's also curious that the national Democratic campaign hasn't tried to monetize public enthusiasm, compared to Donald Trump's efforts to sell various items.  For all I know, maybe the cat lady signs are being manufactured and sold by Republicans who are sending the profits to Trump...

Does anything similar to this phenomenon happen in other countries?

This looks interesting...

"But then I wandered into a curio in the festival lineup, a Nigerian drama called “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos,” directed not by a single filmmaker but by a group called the Agbajowo Collective, made up of waterfront slum dwellers, community activists and a few technical helpers.

The movie was on none of my critical colleagues’ radar; it came to town without a U.S. distributor and, as far as I know, left without one. And it is excellent, a gripping magical-realist tale rooted in the real-life injustice of Lagos neighborhoods getting bulldozed by corrupt Nigerian government officials to make room for resort casinos from which they’ll profit — a community tragedy that continues. “Legend” is professionally shot, evocatively scored and edited like a thriller, with a meaty central performance by Temi Ami-Williams as a grieving mother who transforms into an avenging angel in a fable that feels like a distant cousin to “Beasts of the Southern Wild” but stands defiantly on its own collective feet.

How can you see this movie? At this juncture, I don’t know. I do know that Netflix’s international offerings have space for a “Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos” if the vagaries of film distribution allow it, which is an improvement over previous years, when a discovery like this might surface at a festival only to disappear forever."

I remember seeing and thoroughly enjoying "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which I reviewed for TYWKIWDBI.  If this is anything comparable, it will be worth viewing.

Comments excerpted from "Why I go to film festivals: Beyond buzz and applause there's treasure."

Ike

Taking a moment to remember an old-fashioned Republican (and the Supreme Allied Commander of Forces in Europe).  Photo from the New York Times, via the nocontextpics subreddit.

Some button batteries taste terrible

I don't use button batteries very often, so I was surprised to note the information on the packaging, which apparently is a new development this year.  The batteries are not only in child-resistant packaging, but they also taste bitter, and stain the mouth a bright blue color.

I knew ingesting button batteries was dangerous, but I didn't realize the rapidity of the toxicity: 

Ingested coin or button batteries result in thousands of emergency hospital visits each year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which notes that “the consequences of a child swallowing a battery can be immediate, devastating and deadly.”

“A button cell battery can burn through a child’s throat or esophagus in as little as two hours if swallowed,” according to the agency.

Detailed information is available from Energizer.  Their FAQs indicate that the reaction time (taste and color) are immediate, and that the blue dye is food grade.  I was seriously tempted to lick one, but I'll leave that up to some adventurous reader. 

Portions of the Sahara desert are turning green

"Preliminary satellite analysis shows accumulations of many tens to more than 200 millimeters of rainfall in the areas affected—roughly equivalent to what the region receives in a year. The rainfall accumulation estimates are based on NASA’s IMERG (Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM) data, which is one of the only options for systematically assessing precipitation in the Sahara over broad areas because ground-based rain gauges and radar stations are so scarce.

“What’s also fascinating is that normally dry lakes in the Sahara are filling due to this event,” Armon added. Several of these lakes are visible in the image as dark blue areas, including one in Morocco’s Iriqui National Park (shown in detail within the inset circle).

Excerpted from the NASA Earth Observatory website, where you can pull the slider across the image to compare August and September.  The map embedded below is from Bloomberg.

Jim the Penman

The embedded video is a "teaser," because as far as I know the entire presentation is not available in video format.  The full podcast is a product of the Smithsonian, and as expected is exceedingly well done.

Note the detail on the forged banknote.  All of that was created by hand, one line and dot at a time, by tracing a valid banknote in the attic of a rural farmhouse in New Jersey.

"During the mid-1800s, one third of all paper money in America was thought to be fake. It was the golden age of counterfeiting, and one exceptionally talented con artist stood out from all the rest. His fakes were nearly perfect…but for a trademark tell. Known to law enforcement only as “Jim the Penman,” this celebrity criminal led many Americans to wonder—can great art truly be criminal?"

Click here to access the 20-page transcript or the 40-minute podcast.  I recommend the latter; you will know within 5 minutes whether you want to continue to the end.

The gifts of old age

An excerpt from "Little Gidding," in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

"Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

Found while searching for something else, and posted on a whim.

Water ice... on MERCURY !!

The process of writing posts for TYWKIWDBI keeps driving me to various corners of the internet, where I encounter things that I not only didn't know, but couldn't even imagine.  As a child I was told that one of the special features of our planet was the availability of abundant water.  Later I came to understand via reading (and movies) that there are extraterrestrial "water worlds," including within our own solar system (Europa has more water than Earth does).

In 2009 I blogged Surprising quantities of water on the moon!, adding the exclamation point to the title.  Earlier this year it was Huge quantities of water ice detected on Mars, without the exclamation point because earlier studies of Mars geology had suggested that the planet had once had abundant water.

None of that previous knowledge prepared me for the shock of reading recently that NASA has found good evidence for water ice on the planet Mercury.  

"The yellow regions in many of the craters mark locations that show evidence for water ice, as detected by Earth-based radar observations from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. MESSENGER has collected compelling new evidence that the deposits are indeed water ice, including imaging within the permanently shaded interiors of some of the craters, such as Prokofiev and Fuller."

I have embedded above an hour-long video from the NASA channel presenting the recent conference summary.   Knowing that most of the readers of TYWKIWDBI fall into the TLDR category, here is my oversimplification.

It begins with the realization that although Mercury as a whole is incomprehensibly hot, it is not uniformly hellish.  This scan of a polar region shows temperatures ranging from 50 degrees Kelvin (-223 Celsius, -369 Fahrenehit) to 500 degrees Kelvin (227 Celsius, 440 Fahrenheit).  The temperature at which water freezes would be the 273K yellow shade.  The blues below that are subfreezing.

Point #2 is that some areas in craters are in permanent shadow from incident light:

Water would arrive via the impact of icy comets or meteors -

The non-water dust/rocks in the impacts would provide a modicum of cover for the ice, delaying its sublimation.

Recent instrumentation has shown the depth of water ice in these craters

I just speeded through the video myself while taking the screencaps, so I need to go back and listen in detail for the nuances.  (on second speed-through I heard comment that liquid water is still impossible on Mercury because the absence of an atmosphere would result in only meta-stable liquid form that would immediately volatilize.)

I'm just totally gobsmacked, especially by the cosmic implication that all this water is flying all around the universe and crashing into planets that have moderate temperatures, and that this has been going on for billions of years (see early universe link below), which raises in my estimation the likelihood of water-based life elsewhere in the universe close to certainty.

You learn something every day.

See also:  Water was plentiful in the early universe and Origin of water on earth.

Standing on a water lily

This old photo from the archives of the Missouri Botanical Garden depicted a young woman playing a violin while standing on a water lily.  Photographers of that era were capable of image manipulation, and its possible a support was placed under the lily pad.  But a recent project conducted by horticulturalists around the country demonstrated that the event was probably real.  

Botanical gardens across the world competed in a friendly fashion to see how much weight a giant Victoria water lily pad could support.  

Horticulturists in Denver then tallied the results and awarded first place to the five-foot Missouri water lily, which took on water once it shouldered 142.1 pounds.  Second place went to a Victoria lily at the Naples Botanical Garden in Florida for holding 135 pounds, while the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh took third place honors with a water lily that held 105.8 pounds.

The result would not come as a surprise to a jacana.

Sheriff asks Ohioans to write down addresses of Kamala Harris supporters

"An Ohio sheriff instructed residents to keep a list of homes displaying campaign signs in support of the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Tim Walz, in remarks on social media that caused alarm.

Bruce D Zuchowski, the Republican sheriff of Portage county, posted the remarks on Friday to his personal and professional Facebook pages, warning that undocumented immigrants would arrive if Harris were elected over his party’s nominee, Donald Trump...

The Portage county commissioner, Tony Badalamenti, publicly denounced the post and resigned from the county’s Republican central committee in a video posted to Facebook, the Portager reported.

“This is not the leadership I want to be part of,” Badalamenti said.

Referring to Zuchowski’s actions, Badalamenti added: “It scares people. It’s called bullying, from the highest law enforcement in Portage county, the sheriff’s office.”...

Others condemned Zuchowski’s comments as an act of voter intimidation, especially given the sheriff’s high-ranking position in law enforcement..."

Embedded image from the USA Today report on the same subject.

"Drunk brick"

"Drunk Brick or the Hollywood Bond do not follow the traditional rules of masonry. This type of bond is an artistic rendering of brick courses designed to make the construction appear as very rustic and thrown together, as they do not follow any specific pattern. One could say that it has the look of a fairytale cottage."

I found lots of pix and anecdotal reports (especially in real estate listings), but haven't found a good comprehensive review of the subject, or why the "Hollywood Bond" name applies.

Parody of "Last Train to Clarksville"

“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump claimed during a debate segment on immigration. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

When the ABC debate moderator David Muir informed him that the story had been debunked, Trump stood by the claim, saying he had seen it “on television”.

The rumour had also been disseminated by JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, who in the aftermath of the debate justified doing so.

Trump and Vance seem to be doubling down on the assertions.  Trump posted this AI-generated image of himself protecting cats and ducks on an airplane:

How many newtons does the spring scale read?

I got this wrong, which is why I'm posting it.  Answer in this video:

Via the theydidthemath subreddit.

Cannabis products should never be packaged like this

I presume these are gummies, but in any case no cannabis products should be marketed with cartoon-like images that might lead children to think they are candy.

Image cropped for size from the original at Politico, where this is discussed.

Bipartisan assessment of the Harris/Trump debate

"Thoughts and prayers for Trump's political career.

 It was painful, but we are all in a better place now that the suffering is over." - The Lincoln Project

Note how many of the video clips are from FOX News and how many comments are by Republicans.  (reader comments closed for this post)

Michael Jackson, 1995

MTV Awards performance, remastered in HD.  "Billie Jean" at about the 3:30 mark, and the "Dangerous" segment begins at about the 7 minute mark.

Hard to believe this was almost 30 years ago...

Sunbeam and Turkish rugs

I prefer to end my blogging day by leaving interesting photos at the top of the page, so here is a sunbeam penetrating a natural arch in China, and some Turkish rugs lying in the sun - both of them from The Atlantic's collection of Photos of the Week.

What's the significance of a hand pulling an ear? - updated

(Other than as a sign of otitis media in a child.)  The item at the top comes from the collections of the British Museum (via A London Salmagundi), where it is described succinctly as -

Plain gold box-setting from a finger-ring containing an oval sard intaglio: hand pulling ear; inscribed.

- and filed as probably Roman, of 1st-3rd century.  I had to look up "sard" (carnelian)*, but when I searched the web for further information, what I found was another hand pulling another ear in the Naples Archaeology Museum (via this Flickr user):

 I don't have time to dig more deeply.   Someone out there must know the answer.

*According to Pliny the Elder, sard derives its name from the city of Sardis in Lydia, but it more likely comes from the Persian word سرد sered, meaning yellowish-red.

Addendum:  In keeping with a long-standing tradition at TYWKIWDBI, no question that I ask goes unanswered by the readership.

Reader Pearce O'Leary found a reference to this behavior in A Popular Handbook to the Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum:

Nolandda noted that the inscription reads "ΜΝΗΜΟΝΕΥΕ (a.k.a. Μνημονευε or μνημονευε) : I remember, hold in remembrance, make mention of."

Others found a similar ring offered at Christies and a cameo in the same style in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum:

On this cameo, a hand pinches an earlobe between the thumb and forefinger; above, there is another object, perhaps a knotted scarf or a diadem. Surrounding the imagery, a long inscription in Greek, comprising a sentimental message that addresses a man: "Remember me, your dear sweetheart, and fare well, Sophronios."

In Roman art and literature, the ear-tweaking hand is a common motif, signifying a request for attention. Gems such as this were mementos of love, and were probably given as gifts. The knotted object is not common, but very likely it, too, was a symbol of remembrance, its purpose perhaps similar to the modern custom of tying a knot in a handkerchief so as not to forget something important.

And finally:

I remember doing this a lot as a kid, when we had my favorite dishes for lunch or dinner.

In Brazil, pinching the earlobe means "very good, excellent." The gesture usually comes with the slang expression "daqui, ó" (which would mean literally "from here"). I can definitely see a connection between this gesture and the "don't forget" connotation explained above.

Very possibly, this gesture came from the Portuguese, Spanish or Italian colonies in Brazil.

One additional observation, from one of the "anons" here:

Interestingly enough, the earlobe is a pressure point in the Ayurvedic pressure-point system of massage. And pinching or massaging the earlobe is said to stimulate brain circulation and generally improve memory, learn better, etc. In India, bad schoolwork or behaviour will result in having the ear pinched quite strongly by teacher or parent. A common school punishment is to hold the earlobe and stand in a corner or hold the lobes and do squats. Also apologies (especially for forgetting something important) maybe rendered with the ear lobe holding gesture.

Thanks to all of my great readers!

Reposted from 2014 because this popped up when I searched TYWKIWBI for ear + corn.

Saying goodbye to sweet corn for the year

Labor Day marks the effective end of Midwesterners going to local farms to bring home newly harvested sweet corn.  We have several local farms with a mile or two of our home, so it's easy to pop over every 3-4 days for fresh produce (it costs less than a dollar a cob at the farm). 

After three or four pulls on the outer bracts and some picking off of residual silk ("angel's hair"), the corn is ready for two minutes in the microwave and a lathering of butter.  We have been spoiled by the introduction of the super-sweet bicolor variety, which has outstanding flavor.  Every now and then we encounter some anomalies:

I'm guessing the one on the left was a little dehydrated (anyone know?), but it tasted fine.  And the one on the right might earn a ribbon at a state fair as the worst phyllotactic defect.  But both tasted fine.

To mark the end of the season, we had a family gathering in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at which my cousin Karl (back home from Barcelona) incorporated our local corn into an outstanding paella:

I'm sorry to see the season end, but now it's time to start putting the garden to sleep and getting some service done on the snowthrower... 

Olive oil in a squeeze bottle

I spotted an unusual (for me) food product in a Bloomberg article: olive oil in a squeeze bottle.  All my life I've poured olive oil out of uncapped bottles, and the oil -  perhaps because of its surface tension? - invariably drips down the side of the glass bottle, which then has to be wiped clean.

Graza had introduced its two olive oils—Sizzle, for cooking with heat, and Drizzle, for dipping... a little more than a year after it hit the market, Graza was already in Whole Foods and preparing to expand its distribution to both Walmart and Target.

The squeeze bottles are the kind of move that seems almost gallingly simple in retrospect. Sometimes packaging is just as much the product as what’s contained inside it... inventing a new approach to package a familiar commodity has historically gone a long way toward convincing consumers that your product is the best. Before Kleenex’s pop-up tissue box, bundles of kerchiefs were often sold without storage boxes, and before Colgate’s toothpaste tubes, you had to scoop the stuff out of a jar with a little spoon...

Cladoptosis, abscission, and marcescence

I always enjoy finding a word that describes something I knew existed but for which I didn't know the term.  Today that word is cladoptosis.

Anyone who tends a garden (or just walks in a woods) knows that if tree branches are shaded by crown growth, those branches will drop their leaves, then eventually die when they no longer provide any net benefit to the tree.  

The etymology is straightforward: from the Greek κλάδος kládos "branch" [think "clade"], πτῶσις ptôsis "falling" [as in eyelids].

Related term: abscission (ab = away + scindere = cut) [think "scissors"] for the normal shedding of leaves (or other body parts that are no longer needed).

And the opposite term: marcescence (when a tree retains leaves that would normally be shed, as is common in some young oaks (pic at right).

The terms come into play when one spots a squirrel's drey high in a tree, retaining the dead leaves in midwinter because the branches were harvested to create the nest before the onset of normal abscission.

See also: Stars in tree twigs.  Top photo via Northern Woodlands.

A modern athlete

One of the "Photos of the week" from a gallery at The Atlantic, where there are several other pix of athletes in the paralympics.  Image credit Umit Bektas / Reuters.

(Title pending)

People having fun in the Netherlands.  Enjoyable to watch, but I had no idea what title to use on this post.  Suggestions welcome.

The "sustained two-shot" technique explained

Via Neatorama.

Anti-vaccine mom's duplicity exposed on Facebook

I found and bookmarked this years ago, but just ran across it while searching for something else and decided to put it up.  The discussion thread at the MurderedByWords subreddit has some droll humor about boxed wine.

Jaws

 Gray wolf on the left.  Spotted hyena on the right.  The top comment at the NatureIsFuckingLit subreddit is worth quoting in toto:

On the surface, it’s tempting to look at the robust, bone-crushing jaws of the spotted hyena and the longer, more slender jaws of the gray wolf and see it as nothing more than a clear-cut case of “better vs worse,” of “superior vs inferior,” and to a degree this outlook is understandable, as seen in other nature subreddits and forums. One of these animals has jaws capable of crushing a zebra’s femur into splinters while the other has jaws that look barely any more fearsome than the average dog. However, peeling back the layers, you find that the jaws of both spotted hyenas and wolves are perfectly designed for killing in their own way, representing some of the fiercest jaws on planet.

Starting with the hyena, it is clear from the outset how fearsome this animal’s jaws are, nothing short of being built like sledgehammers. Its short, robust skull and jaws maximize both durability and mechanical advantage whilst biting, while its strongly interlocking jaws joints and massive jaw muscle attachment sites allow of incredibly powerful bites that do not let go not matter what. However, the real piece de resistance are not the jaws themselves, but the massive premolars housed within them, which are large, conical and built like mallets, allowing spotted hyenas that pulverize bones with ease. With such jaws and teeth, working in concert with their powerful physique and absurdly powerful necks, hyenas are capable of extraordinary feats of predation, with solo spotted hyenas taking down prey as large as adult wildebeest on the regular, marking them as some of the deadliest jaws on the African continent…

Wolves, on the other hand, went a different route. Rather than developing jaws like sledgehammers, their’s are built like meat-cleavers. The jaws of wolves, though more powerful built than most dogs, are also more elongated and slender to increase the contact area of their bites. This is amplified by their loose jaw joints and smaller jaw muscle attachment sites, which, while weakening the wolf’s bite, increases its gape significantly, allowing it to open its jaws far wider most other predators can and bite onto a larger area of the prey. The real stars of the show, however, are its blade-like canine teeth which, unlike those of hyenas, are strongly curved and flattened at the sides, giving them a uniquely blade-like structure. This allows the canine teeth of wolves to carve grievous, hemorrhaging wounds into their prey with every bite, capable of bleeding a bull elk dry or cleave open its leg muscles to stop it dead in its tracks. With these jaws, wolves, despite the weaker strength of their jaws and overall very slight physique, are also capable of astounding feats of predation, able to kill prey as large as mature bull musk oxen and adult cow moose without the aid of a pack.

Indeed, all told, both spotted hyenas and wolves, despite the seeming weakness of the latter, have incredibly formidable jaws, with both being equally effective in their own way and ranking as some of the fiercest jaws on planet. (credit: Mophandel)