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)

The world is full of fake crystal and fossil specimens - updated

Image cropped from the original posted in the whatsthisrock subreddit.  I suppose in all fairness one could refer to such a thing as an objet d'art, but they are typically marketed as an exotic and valuable mineral oddity to deceive the buyer.

Addendum:  another example -

The Reddit discussion thread says the fakes are even present at souks in Morocco.

Addendum: here is a real Thomsonite (with mesolite) specimen -

Gorgeous.

"Wide-based gait" demonstrated

Everyone who studies medicine learns that a wide-based gait (or broad-based gait) is a characteristic feature of cerebellar disease.  Other pathological gaits are demonstrated in this Stanford medical school instructional video.  Cat video via Miss Cellania at Neatorama.

Pawn = Queen chess puzzle

This may be an old puzzle, but it's the first time I've seen it.  At the start there is a pawn in the LR corner, which needs to be moved to the far rank to get promoted to a queen; then the queen needs to be moved to the LL corner.  Good luck.  Feel free to post your times in the Comments.  

Discussion thread in the Puzzles subreddit.

Play the puzzle online here.

"A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm"

Herewith some excerpts from Edwin Way Teale's classic 1974 book.  I've just finished what I think is my third reading of the book, and I wanted to save some miscellaneous thoughts and anecdotes here in the blog.  Page citations are approximate depending on your published edition.

"A mile below the village, and 153 miles from its beginning at Provincetown on Cape Cod, U.S. 6, the longest highway under one designation in America, passes on its way to Long Beach on the coast of California."  [I see a comment on the Wikipedia entry that "Route 6 runs uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric."] (16)

"By the time a calf is an hour old it can often outrun a man." (41)

"The life span of a gray tree frog may extend for as much as seven years; that of a bullfrog for as much as sixteen." (111)

"More than once we have caught a faint low "Gur, Gur" coming from the water.  It has been the voice of the pickerel frog.  This grating sound is often produced when the frog is submerged and resting on the bottom of the pond.  In the midst of this spring chorus of the frogs there rises the most beautiful of all our batrachian sounds, a pure sustained trill that goes on and on.  It is the mating-time music of the American toad." (112)

"On our 130 acres, I found, the combined length of these massive stone fences totals almost five miles.  Each begins about two feet below the surface to provide a solid foundation below the frost line." [I was surprised to learn that these walls were countersunk.  It would make sense, but I wonder how much of the depth is secondary to the addition of new soil since the walls were set up?] (144)

[Re the elderly naturalist stocking her mind with pleasant things to remember before going blind, see my post "What a wonderful attitude".]

"When he was nearing seventy, this mild-mannered collector of insects was following a lonely road on Staten Island with his net in his hand when he encountered three young thugs who blocked his way.  One pulled out a gun and demanded his money.  This so infuriated the naturalist... that he swung his net, whacked the thug over the head with the brass ferrule, then pursued the three down the road flailing them with his butterfly net.  Later a friend asked him: "But weren't you taking an awful chance?"  "I suppose I was," he replied.  "I didn't think of it at the time.  But I might have injured them severely." (221)

"I dug down through the snow to the rosette of a mullein plant.  I brought it home in a paper bag.  Sitting that afternoon beside the fireplace, I made a census of the small creatures that were hibernating between the woolly leaves as though between thick soft blankets.  My magnifying glass revealed a minute spider and a number of tiny brownish beetles.  But the real population of the mullein plant consisted of springtails.  I counted eighty-two snugly protected within the hibernaculum of this one rosette." (230) [English spelling of wooly]

"... a young buck was observed feeding on pussywillow catkins.  It would wrap its tongue around the base of a branch and then strip off all the aments at once with a sidewise sweep of its head." (251) [new word for me]

"But of all the creatures that have been attracted to the ground-up corn, the most unexpected were the honeybees.  Before the end of winter, in their earliest days abroad, when skunk cabbage flowers and pussywillow catkins were the main source of pollen, we found them crawling over our little piles of corn in search of a pollen substitute... On one small mound of grain, less than six inches in diameter, I counted thirty-five honeybees.  Continually they moved back and forth, gathering corn dust, the pale-yellow vegetable powder which they packed into the pollen gaskets on their hind legs." (278)

What a wonderful attitude

"Among all those we have heard about and known, among all the past and present dwellers in the village I think the most remarkable was the blind naturalist, Annie Edmond.  Even when she was past ninety, by feel and smell, she would identify wildflowers brought to her.  By hearing she would identify birds.  By feeling their bark and listening to the sound of the wind in their foliage, she would identify trees.....

She was nine years old when the blizzard of 1888 stuck and she remembered vividly how great rollers, pulled by oxen, packed down the snow to open the roads for sleighs.  Her memory for details of long-past events was particularly clear and accurate.  This proved a great boon during the last twenty years of her life after unsuccessful eye operations had left her in darkness.

"In my life," she said, "I am so glad I stocked my mind with pleasant things to remember and think about."

Many of those things concerned nature.  From time to time Nellie and I used to take her "olfactory bouquets" made up of sweetfern, spicebush, yarrow, catnip, sassafras, bayberry, and other leaves and plants whose fragrance would bring back recollections of her earlier days in the out-of-doors...

Excerpted from an old favorite book - Edwin Way Teale's A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974).  More tidbits to follow after I finish my re-read.