Today (10/6) is Mad Hatter Day

Explained here:

Mad Hatter Day is 10/6. The date was chosen from the illustrations by John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the notation "In this style 10/6". We take this as inspiration to behave in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (which is October 6 here, although in Britain Mad  Hatter Day occurs on June 10...but I digress...)

Mad Hatter Day began in Boulder, CO, in 1986, among some computer folk who had nothing better to do. It was immediately recognized as valuable because they caused less damage than if they'd been doing their jobs.

As I searched this topic on the 'net today, it was interesting to see how many observers misinterpret the 10/6 on his hat as being either a style number ("The Mad Hatter’s top hat, according to Lewis Carroll, was of the 10/6 style") or worse ("my birthdate (10/6) is on his hat although I think that is his hat size!"). The correct interpretation, of course, is that "the paper in the Mad Hatter's Hat was really an order to make a hat in the style shown, to cost ten shillings sixpence."

Reposted every several years.

Introducing Claire McCardell

Some readers may be quite familiar with this lady, but a recent article in The Atlantic was my introduction to her.

Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America’s most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman’s wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine.

As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she’d get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn’t an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself?

McCardell made a career out of asking such questions, and helped transform American fashion in the process, as Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson details in her lively and psychologically astute biography, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free. The young designer who came home from New Hampshire and devised a blue wool evening dress was often dismissed by her bosses for her “crazy” ideas—wool was for coats, not parties! She was told to keep copying the latest looks from Paris, as was customary in the American garment trade at the time. In those early years, McCardell didn’t have the clout to design apparel her way. But she had a core conviction, and she never abandoned it: Women deserve to be comfortable—in their clothes, and in the world...

McCardell insisted on putting pockets in women’s clothing; previously, pockets were reserved almost exclusively for men... She put fasteners on the side of her clothes rather than the back, so women could get dressed without a husband or a maid. She partnered with Capezio to popularize the ballet flat—and the idea that women didn’t always have to wear heels. When air travel became possible, and steamer trunks were replaced with slim suitcases, McCardell developed separates: tops and bottoms you could mix and match so that you didn’t have to bring a bulky parade of dresses for every occasion. She patented the wrap dress, mainstreamed the leotard, stripped linings out of swimsuits so that women didn’t have to sit sodden and cold on the beach. Ever worn denim? McCardell is the one who ignored its provenance as a humble workingman’s textile and brought it to women’s wear.

More at the link.  I don't plan to read the book and won't be reviewing it here, but I'm introducing her and the book because I'm sure this is the type of fashion designer my pragmatic mother would have loved.

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.

Reposted again because I received a comment today that these checks are still being mailed (although the size of the checks has declined to $1.95).  Also of note, when I went back to Charity Navigator to confirm the evaluation of this organization, I note they have changed their name to the Walker Cancer Research Institute, and their evaluation places them as a "Zero-Star Charity."  They pay their top four employees over $450K from a revenue of about $2M.

Advice to a time-traveler

I think this is the first New Yorker cartoon I've laughed at in years.

Beard

"Participant Andreas Pelowski from Germany poses during the European Beard Championship in Leogang, Austria, on September 20, 2025"  Credit Johann Groder / APA / EXPA / AFP / Getty.

I thought it was a mustache until I looked more closely.  One of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic.

The complexities of the Russia-Ukraine war

An article in last month's issue of Harper's Magazine reviewed two newly-published books examining the history of the current war between Russia and Ukraine.

Jonathan Haslam, a historian of Soviet foreign policy and the author of the new book Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, has a rather different analysis. He starts his story a quarter century earlier, in 1989—two years before Ukraine achieved independence. As for who started it: as the title of the book suggests, Ukraine has less of a role to play in his account than the United States does.

Some tens of thousands of Ukrainians have perished over the past three years, including more than ten thousand civilians; their country lies in ruins. At least one hundred thousand Russian soldiers have died, too. Yet an honest reckoning with the root causes of this death and destruction has largely eluded political leaders, who have instead been guided by demands for moral clarity—the expectation that they oppose the illegal act of invading another country without either U.N. authority or any credible argument for self-defense. In this sense, Putin’s invasion has been treated in much the way many liberals have treated Trump’s rise—as an unprovoked aberration, an alien force from nowhere.

A lone gunman theory has its comforts: if Putin is just an evil man, nothing needs to change except opposing his crimes and follies. If the truth is even a little more complex, however—and Hubris proves that it is complex indeed—focusing blame on Putin alone launders the complicity of a far wider range of participants, and of the long-term policy they helped make. At stake is not only the path to peace in Eastern Europe but the future and purpose of American power in the world...

Like his fellow realist John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, Haslam identifies NATO’s expansion eastward as a wound to Russia’s pride. This isn’t to say that he accepts Russia’s nonsensical rationale for the invasion as “self-defense.” But, as he argues, Russia’s leaders and population had been humiliated, and the country found itself increasingly isolated—things American politicians did nothing to counteract and occasionally celebrated. This didn’t guarantee, let alone justify, a war. But it did set up the conditions for one...

Bush continued NATO’s expansion, pushing the alliance into seven new nations, including the Baltic countries sharing a border with Russia, thus raising Russian hackles further. After all, the arrival of NATO in places that had been part of the Soviet Union itself was far less a response to Russian military threats than it was a ratification and recognition of the West’s superior economic and political power. But America’s support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003–04 as well as Ukraine in 2004–05—coinciding with Bush’s Iraq War—pushed things too far. “The United States,” Haslam explains, “had become accustomed to looking down on Russia as a defeated power of little or no account,” asserting the power to occupy other countries while highlighting the diminution of Russian power. The double standard was glaring, even as the consequence of the Bush years was to normalize illegal invasions—and to destabilize the Middle East, awakening Putin’s interest in the great game of European imperial designs there.

More at the link, which I won't try to summarize or excerpt further.  I will, however, express my dismay at the choices of the color palette for the embedded map of NATO encroachment on Russia.  

"Of Oz The Wizard"

This appears to be a full-length video of the original Wizard of Oz movie rearranged alphabetically according to spoken dialogue (and credits).  It's probably TL;DW but is surprisingy engaging to explore.

Via Kottke, where there is embedded a similarly adapted Star Wars movie.  Creator comments here.

Why facts don't change some people's minds

Via Laughing Squid

Troglodyte's home

This is a relatively long video.  A speeded-up compressed version is here.

This post has been cancelled

So to speak.  I originally posted the image above as a contest to guess what it is:

It's certainly a representation of a skull.  For what purpose?  A functional item, or an objet d'art?  If it's art, of what era/style?  Jewelry - from when?  Toy/game - which one?  European, American, Asian, Incan?  Your grade will be based 1/3 on era (century), 1/3 on geography (continent) and 1/3 on use/purpose.

Answer tomorrow, with source credits.

But it turned out to be too easy.  Ponder the photo for a moment to see what you would have guessed, then look beneath the fold for the answer...

An Instance of the Fingerpost

"This is the best book I've read this year [2010].

Most reviews describe An Instance of the Fingerpost as a "historical mystery," but the mystery component is in my view a minor part of the book.  Granted, the plot does revolve around the question of who put poison in the wine bottle, but as a whodunit it would pale next to the works of classic mystery writers.  The value for me was to step right into the 17th century and get a sense of people's lives and attitudes and beliefs.

The story is told by four narrators (which, as my wife reminded me, is basically the format for Rashomon), and, as in that movie, the narrations differ on key points.  By the time I was on the third narrative, I started going back to read the first one again to compare salient points.  Doing so was not  onerous, because Pears writes in a style that's very easy to read, and despite writing about the 17th century he seems to avoid the temptation to litter the text with archaic words.

The most difficult aspect (for me, perhaps not for you) was that much of the action and motivation of the characters center on the Restoration of the English monarch in the 1660s, which I have never much understood, or frankly cared about.  But I did learn a lot about ordinary people's lives and the role of women and the birth pangs of medical science and the conflicts of religious dogma and the ethics of the time.

This is not a quick read; you're looking at some 600+ pages even if you don't flip back and forth to compare stories.  But it won't take long to figure out if you like it or not; I should think in an hour's time, after reading a chapter or two, you'll know whether or not you're going to enjoy it.

After finishing this book, I checked out another novel by this author (The Dream of Scipio), but found that one too cumbersome to follow as it shuttled between three people in different centuries; Pears is an art historian by profession and has written some mysteries about that field of study, so perhaps I should try one of those.

Those who have read the book, please feel free to chime in with your own thoughts."

Reposted from 2010 to add additional commentary:

For as long as I can remember I've been recording the titles of books I've read and given them a "grade" from 1-4+.  Those rated 3+ were worth the time and the 4+ are ones I might like to read again in the future.  Last year I posted in TYWKIWDBI a list of my 4+ rated books.

As I noted at that time in a comment, I'm reaching such an advanced age that common sense suggests that if I'm ever going to re-read the best stuff, I'd better get started.  So this summer I picked from my list this book, which I had read in 2010.  As I started the re-read I realized that there were important plot points I had forgotten, including the identity of the person who poisoned the wine bottle, and the ultimate fate of several key characters.  Which was good.

Once again I was in awe over the scholarship of the author, whose breadth and depth of knowledge about 17th century history, science, medicine,  law, ethics etc is extensive.  And again I was pleased by the style of the narration.  But once again I quickly tired of the details of 17th century royal politics and intrigue.  By the time I finished the first three sections by the "unreliable narrators" I was tempted to demote the book to a 3+.  But then I encountered the wonderful fourth section by the "truth-teller" (Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, if you want to keep track of him in the first 3 sections).  That final section sorted out all of the mysteries and puzzlements and discrepancies among the first three narrations, and I was delighted to discover anew the identity of the poisoner and the surprising fate of the principal characters.

I need to avoid any comments that might serve as spoilers, but I will append some notes I made during the second read...

Several references to the "elaboratory" of scientist Robert Boyle.  The word is now obsolete, but hints at the relation of "laboratory" and "elaborate."

A comment re a planned public dissection of a human cadaver elicits the comment that "All that will happen is that you will furnish a rarity show for any spoitty undergraduate who cares to come along and watch."  Perhaps related to the modern term "raree show" as cheap entertainment.

One character has an inflamed eye which he has been treating with ingredients he prepared himself... "What ingredients were they?"  "Dried dog excrement," he said.  "What?"  "I had it from my doctor... the king's physician... and a man of good family.  It is an infallible cure, tested through the ages.  A pedigree dog, as well.  It belongs to the warden." (p. 97)  The status of medical diagnosis and care of this period are recurrently cringeworthy.

After three characters eat at a tavern, they call for the shared pipe:  "... Wood took a sip of his drink, and called over to the serving hatch for a pipe to be brought.  Lower added his call for one as well, but I declined.  Not that I object to a little tobacco in the evening, especially when my bowels are tight, but sometimes pipes which have been overused by the general clientele of taverns do have a taste of sour spittle..." (p. 196)

"It had been a complicated case and the town was by no means convinced of her guilt.  She had killed a man whom she said had raped her, but the jury judged this a lie because she had fallen pregnant, which cannot occur without the woman taking pleasure in the act.  Normally her condition would have spared her the gallows, but she had lost the child and also any defense against the hangman.  An unfortunate outcome, which those who believed in her guilt considered divine providence." (204)  

"The old couple in charge of the house had promised us a hot bath when we introduced ourselves at midday and I was eager to take up the offer: I had not immersed since the previous autumn and felt that not only could my constitution stand it, my morale would be immeasurably lifted..." (207)

"... he knew nothing of the law and believed it to have something to do with justice.  As I had once done myself, until I studied it..." (293)                

"To gain a post worth £50 a year, a friend of mine had to lay out near £750 in bribes, all borrowed at interest, and consequently must defraud the government of more than £200 per year to live decently and pay his debts..." (318)

When asked why marriage does not appeal to her, a woman replies "To hand over my hard-earned fortune to my husband?  Be unable to do anything without his permission?  Risk being disinherited of my own money when he dies?  Oh, yes.  A wonderful dream..." (430)

"Euripides talks of Tithonus, whom Eos loved so well she begged Zeus to give him eternal life.  But mistakenly she asked not for youth as well and he suffered an eternity of decrepitude until even the cruel gods took pity on him."  The legend goes on to say that Tithonus was transformed into a cicada.

"In each generation the Messiah would be reborn, would be betrayed, would die, and be resurrected, until mankind turns away from evil, and sins no more." (845)  This is an ancient belief that is carried on in part in modern Hasidic traditions.

Here is the Wikipedia page describing and illustrating fingerposts.  The reference in the book title is to an aphorism from Francis Bacon: "When in a Search of any Nature the Understanding stands suspended, then Instances of the Fingerpost shew the true and inviolable Way in which the Question is to be decided.  These Instances afford great Light, so that the Course of the Investigation will sometimes be terminated by them.  Sometimes, indeed these Instances are found amongst that Evidence already set down."

Enough.  But in closing I will add this photo of the large-print edition I received from our library.  I should think some graphic designer or copyeditor caught hell for the design mistake...

"Coyote tooth dentures"

Coyote tooth dentures on display at Eastern California Museum. These human dentures were made by melting celluloid toothbrush handles. In the early 1900′s a man who lost his teeth shaped melted toothbrushes to his gums, and then pressed the teeth of dead coyote into them." 

Reposted from 2016 while I visit the dentist today.  The photo and text are from a Tumblr site that has undergone linkrot, but I found the same information reposted at The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. 

Two amphipods

"Two amphipods from the Cyproideidae family, each only measuring around 3 millimeters in body length, rest on a coral. Commonly called “ladybugs of the sea,” these tiny creatures display striking coloration and symmetry."  Credit © Yury Ivanov / Ocean Photographer of the Year, via The Atlantic.

Because I like to end the blogging day with an interesting photo.

An Honest Trailer for Severance

It has been about five years since I last posted a video from Honest Trailers.  This one about Severance has quite a few insightful and LOL observations in the dialogue - although it's probably only funny if you've seen the series.

Congratulations to Damn Interesting

Damn Interesting celebrates its twentieth blogiversary this week, which makes it about two years older than TYWKIWDBI.  

"In that time, our small, independent crew of authors, editors, illustrators, and podcasters at Damn Interesting published 797,626 words (798,231 if you count this post), released 410 podcast episodes, curated over 45,000 interesting links, made a few games, won a few awards, published one paper book, served up zero ads, and gained twenty years of, let’s say, experience."

The content is similar in many ways to what I post here.  Perhaps worth a visit from those readers here not already following it.

Two new captchas

I've posted the abover one before (but can't find the link).  Here are two new ones sent to me today.  I don't have any source credit ot offer.

Choose all images with blueberry muffins:

Introducing Euler's number (e)

I saw this math quiz question today on the theydidthemath subreddit.  Pi is obviously slightly bigger than 3.14, but I didn't know whether a higher power is more important than a higher base.  

Turns out the answer is "sometimes" - depending on whether the number in question is larger or smaller than Euler's number.  Explanation at the link is way over my head.  Posted for those who enjoy such things.

The beheading of Lady Jane Grey

She was only 16 or 17 years old, and had been de facto Queen of England for nine days.

Painting by Paul Delaroche (1833), via Rob's Webstek.

Reposted from 2012 because I found it while searching for something else.

TYWKIWDBI continues to support Wikipedia - updated

[from 2009] This blog uses Wikipedia extensively as a quick source for reference material. We therefore made a contribution this morning to their annual fund drive. When we did so last year [2008] one reader sent us a list of the Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia. We have read that list and elected to repeat our contribution this year.

Addendum: I don't know whether the following is worth moving "above the fold," but I'll give it a try. In response to my initial post above, I received the following admonishment -

Hey, I'll leave you a message again this year! Do you know what the key difference between the previous year's balance sheet and last year's balance sheet at the Wikimedia Foundation was?

Previous year's cash overage that was stuffed into the bank: $3 million.

Last year's cash overage that was stuffed into the bank: $6 million.

Thanks to donors like you with no more independent thought than a sheep within a flock, you just helped the Wikimedia Foundation stuff even more money into the bank, and NOT spend it on the program services that you "thought" it would be spent on.

I can't help it if you're stupid.

Now I'm a thrifty person in a thrifty family. We drive two cars that are combined 25 years old with a quarter million miles on them. We don't like to throw money around. But we generously tip servers in restaurants and donate to selected charities and otherwise disperse our money appropriately in response to received value. I made what I consider to be a rather modest contribution to Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a token of thanks for saving me hundreds of hours of searching the net for information.

The primary argument at the anti-Wiki link seems to be that too much of donated money goes into the pockets of Jimmy Wales, Amazon, Google, and other corporations because of excessive salaries and referred business. Mr. Wales makes $400K. So what? Good for him. There are a hundred college football coaches who make more than that.

I found the football coach salaries just now in 5 seconds using Google. Google gets some of my paltry donation? Fine. Great. I Google every day of my life. Amazon? They can have some money. Why is someone so concerned re my giving money that he takes the time to write a message on my blog to reprimand (and try to insult) me???

Perhaps it's not just the money. There are allegations that Wikipedia "pollutes the minds of children" because they have articles about... sex. Someone writing the anti-Wiki material has gone to great length to collect all of the salacious Wiki entries in one place (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean...) Perhaps if Wiki were eliminated, then all these aberrancies of behavior would disappear from life? From the internet? Children could get their information from schoolmates instead?

There are inaccuracies in Wikipedia! Really??? Not as reliable as the Encyclopedia Brittanica? Control of the information is in the hands of a few selected editors who perhaps have personal agendas they wish to promote? The Illluminati of cyberspace?

I'm not going to waste any more time on this rebuttal. There's a whole new day's worth of new stuff out there for me to search for blogworthy topics. Bye now.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2009, after making a contribution for 2012.  TYWKIWDBI also made contributions in 2010 and 2011, but I think this old post best explains the controversy.

Addendum:   Reposted yet again for 2015, because I continue to make modest annual contributions.  Some readers have suggested I put a "tip jar" on TYWKIWDBI.  Personally I'd prefer that you send such donations to Wikipedia.  (p.s. - for completeness, here are this year's counterarguments).

Addendum:  Reposted yet again, to encourage readers to follow my example.

Addendum:  Reposted for 2022, for the same reason.

Addendum:  Reposted for 2025 because I continue to use the site almost every day.

Words for the day: "shoulder pal" and "kidult"

When I clicked on the link I thought it said "My weird week of wearing shoulder pads," so the "shoulder pals" was a bit of a surprise.  

"There was a time when adults who owned collections of stuffed toys were relatively uncommon, weird even. All that has changed recently: the rise in popularity of toys such as Squishmallows and Jellycat Amuseables has been linked to the growing “kidult” market (adults buying toys for themselves) which accounted for almost 30% of toy sales last year. On the whole, cuddly toys are something people keep at home, on their beds or on display shelves. But that’s changing too – plush toy keyrings such as Labubus are now everywhere. And some “Disney adults” (self-professed grown up Disney fans who might, for example, go to the theme parks without taking children with them) have gone one step further: attaching toys not just to their bags, but to themselves.

“Shoulder pals” (variously known as “shoulder plushies”, “shoulder toys” and “shoulder sitters”) are small toys made in the likeness of Disney characters. They have magnetic bases and come with a flat metal plate designed to be placed under your shirt, so the toy perches on your shoulder. Since the first one, baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, was brought out in 2018, these toys have become a common accessory at the Disney theme parks."

The source article at The Guardian goes on to describe the experiences of a person who wears the shoulder pads not at Disneyland, but in the "real world." I sometimes mock fashion innovations and marketing ploys, but I rather like the concept of "kidult" if the trend can bring just a few moments of levity into otherwise stressful lives.

"I’m relieved when I finally take Remy off. I’ve never felt fully relaxed while wearing a shoulder pal – partly out of self-consciousness, and partly out of concern that it might fall off. But I can’t deny that the responses I’ve had to Remy and his friends have been much more positive than I thought they were going to be. Wearing something so silly and unexpected has invited conversations with strangers, made my friends laugh and created, as Potten puts it, “a little bit of joy in a hard world.

Image cropped for size from the original at the source, credit David Levene/The Guardian.

Lake Nokomis [Minneapolis] in the 1920s

Image from the Historic Minneapolis Facebook page.  Here's a recent view via Google Maps:

This is Google's 3D view.  The angle is different from the 1930s image, but it's still interesting to compare the changes that have occurred as the result of development.  I agree with this comment posted at the stie:

"One the best things that the city did early on in its existence, was keeping the shoreline of our lakes public, and not allowing real estate developers to build homes on the lake shorelines."

Posted for my high school classmates, some of whom grew up in this neighborhood.

A Fairburn agate and a Waterline agate

Image from the whatsthisrock subreddit, where this is identified as a Fairburn agate ("the rarest agate in the world").  More info from Wikipedia -

"Fairburn Agate is a type of gemstone found in the agate beds of southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska. It is also the state gemstone of South Dakota. Fairburns are characterized from other types of agate by their colors and the shape of the bands... fortification banding distinguishes fairburns from other agate types. Fortification banding means that the concentric layers have sharp changes in direction which cause the bands to form angles in ways which are especially distinguishable from other agate types."

An illustration of the fortification banding -

As a child I spent inordinate amounts of time searching for agates in Minnesota.  I still have a jarful in the garage that I've never polished.  Here's another spectacular agate posted at whatsthisrock:

"Beautiful “Waterline Agate” as they are commonly called. The combination of the concentrically banded agate bordering the waterline agate complimented by the pocket with botryoidal chalcedony is absolutely stunning. This is a beautiful expression of the mineral quartz."

Is there a GenZ 2.0?

I've seen quite a few reports on the internet observing (or lamenting) the fact that young Americans can no longer be expected to adopt a liberal/progressive viewpoint.  Lots of reasons have been proposed, with no concrete data to explain the phenomenon.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine has an article entitled How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard:
Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.  Herewith some salient excerpts:

Harvard, like many American universities, has long been seen as a bastion of liberalism. In its attacks on the University, the Trump administration has often pointed to a lack of ideological diversity on campus—a charge that even Harvard’s own leadership has conceded, at least in part, by launching formal efforts to address it.

But whatever you think you know about the politics of Harvard’s faculty, its student body is an increasingly different story—one that reflects a broader shift in Gen Z politics. In poll after poll, the youngest members of Gen Z have shown a surprising conservative tilt. In the last presidential election, a Democratic polling group found, white men under 20 voted for Trump at higher rates than those in their late-20s—and at higher rates than white baby boomer men. And the latest Yale Youth Poll revealed a whopping 18-point partisan gap between voters aged 18 to 21—who leaned Republican by 11.7 points—and those aged 22 to 29, who leaned Democrat by 6.4 points.

In April, a theory about this shift went viral on X.

“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” Rachel Janfaza ’20, an analyst focused on youth politics, wrote. “There really are two Gen Zs.” Her post included a graphic contrasting “Gen Z 1.0,” the liberal-leaning older cohort, with “Gen Z 2.0,” their younger, more conservative peers.

According to Janfaza, the pandemic marked a dividing line. Older Gen Zers were in college when it hit, able to quarantine with roommates and friends; younger ones were still in high school, isolated at home. The two cohorts also came of age in different political climates: Gen Z 1.0 came up during Trump’s first presidency, when resistance meant protesting at the Women’s March or walking out of school for climate action. Gen Z 2.0 grew up under President Joe Biden—disillusioned with institutions, skeptical of pandemic rules, and more likely to lean into contrarian conservatism.

Now, Gen Z 2.0 is filling college campuses around the country, including at Harvard. They’re revitalizing conservative institutions, shifting the boundaries of campus discourse, and getting ready to shape national politics.

Much more at the link.  Please at least browse it before waxing eloquent in the Comments with your own theories.

"Blonding" of a tree

Excerpts from the discussion thread at the often-interesting arborists subreddit:

"That is an ash tree that has been stricken with the Emerald Ash Borer. That happens from the woodpeckers going for the larvae. As the woodpeckers go, the outer layer of the gray bark falls off, leaving that brownish color...it's called "blonding." While there are treatments, they can be expensive, and the infestation must be caught much earlier than this. This particular tree is a goner."

"And the price of removal goes up (or at least it should) as the tree's wood gets sketchier. So much of this job is intentionally making wood fall apart the way we want it to; it's way harder when the wood has a chance of randomly disintegrating while we're climbing. EAB is the current poster child of sketchy trees."

This medication capsule is full of little rings

Image via the mildlyinteresting subreddit, where the discussion is mostly trivial.  These are not "timed-release Spaghetti-O's.  The explanation can be found at this pediatric gastroenterology page, with radiographic images at Radiopaedia.

You learn something every day.

"Seeking a chalk artist..."

"I'm hoping to find a sidewalk chalk artist (or two) in our neighborhood.

We recently needed one piece of white chalk for a household project, and wound up with 47 extras in a rainbow of colors.

We would like to commission the drawing on our driveway of a large, colorful (and totally imaginary) flower, perhaps with several equally exotic butterflies hovering over it, and maybe a caterpillar on the stem.  

Two artists (siblings, best friends) can work together if they can amicably share the box of chalk prize.  No tryouts or portfolio review necessary - first response gets the commission."

I posted the above in a neighborhood Facebook page.  Here is the completed magnum opus -

In addition to the flowers there are seven butterflies, a spider, and a rabbit.  My sincere thanks to Louisa and Maddy.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I've been doing crossword puzzles every day for mental exercise for as long as I can remember, but this week was the first time I've ever encountered supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as a crossword clue.  

Everybody who is my age knows the word, but to be honest I didn't realize it had a definition, so I had to look that up for the blog.  Apparently its history goes back to the 1930s:

"The word is a compound word, and said by Richard Lederer in his book Crazy English to be made up of these words: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable", with all of these parts combined meaning "Atoning for being educable through delicate beauty." 

The Oxford English Dictionary first records the word (with a spelling of "supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus") in the column titled "A-muse-ings" by Helen Herman in the Syracuse University Daily Orange, dated March 10, 1931. In the column, Herman states that the word "implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful".

The word was popularized in the 1964 film Mary Poppins, in which it is used as the title of a song and defined as "something to say when you don't know what to say".

The Sherman Brothers, who wrote the Mary Poppins song, have given several conflicting explanations for the word's origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. In another instance, they wrote:

When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. ... The word as we first heard it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus."

There are additional "things you wouldn't know" at the link, including information about the backwards version, a Mahatma Gandhi pun ("super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis") and an old Randy Rainbow parody.

Why Moses has been depicted as a man with horns

"It all goes back to Ancient Hebrew, which, like a lot of ancient languages, didn’t have quite enough words for all of the things the writers of the Bible wanted to talk about... Specifically, it didn’t have a word for a ray of light, so most biblical authors used the Hebrew word for horn... So, in Exodus chapter 34, after spending several days on Mt. Sinai, taking down God’s dictation of the Ten Commandments, Moses’ face is described as being “horned.” The writers of the third-century–B.C. Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, got the gist and rendered the word as glorified...

Jerome translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin, bypassing the Septuagint entirely—and because the Hebrew said “horns,” “horns” was what went into the Vulgate... And so, for the next dozen centuries, Moses had horns...

You might be wondering how depicting one of the Bible’s key figures as having horns—a feature commonly associated with the devil—could have become so popular. The answer is that horns weren’t actually associated with the devil until fairly recently. Scripture itself offers few, if any, visual descriptions of Satan, and what is there rarely mentions horns

[B]y the time Michelangelo was working on Julius II’s tomb, it was pretty widely known that the idea of a horned Moses stemmed from an overly literal translation. Which, of course, raises the question of why Michelangelo chose to portray his Moses with horns anyway..."

Discussion continues at Christ and Pop Culture.

Doom and gloom in the world of art

Excerpts from an article at artnet:

"The art world is in a precarious state as it heads into the second half of 2025. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties. Smaller galleries are exiting and downsizing discreetly. Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.

“I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”...

Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.

“The industry is in a free fall,” Siegel said. “Galleries are closing left and right. They have overextended. Everyone thought the light would never stop shining. The ramifications of the past two years have been dramatic. It’s been a disaster, basically.”

In the U.K., firms must file financial disclosures, which reveal razor-thin profit margins for galleries big and small, as falling turnover collides with stubbornly high fixed costs...

I have covered the art market since 2006, and I have never heard people as down as they have been this summer. Suddenly, they are openly talking doom and gloom, instead of fighting against that narrative..."

A "gigantic jet" is a "transient luminous event"

As reported on the NASA website:

Did you see that gorgeous photo NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took on July 3, 2025? Originally thought to be a sprite, Ayers confirmed catching an even rarer form of a Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) — a gigantic jet...

Gigantic jets are a powerful type of electrical discharge that extends from the top of a thunderstorm into the upper atmosphere. They are typically observed by chance — often spotted by airline passengers or captured unintentionally by ground-based cameras aimed at other phenomena. Gigantic jets appear when the turbulent conditions at towering thunderstorm tops allow for lightning to escape the thunderstorm, propagating upwards toward space...

Sprites, on the other hand, are one of the most commonly observed types of TLEs — brief, colorful flashes of light that occur high above thunderstorms in the mesosphere, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Unlike gigantic jets, which burst upward directly from thundercloud tops, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, following powerful lightning strikes. They usually appear as a reddish glow with intricate shapes resembling jellyfish, columns, or carrots and can span tens of kilometers across.

More details about the image at the APOD site.

Related: "Jet lightning" and "ELVES in the sky"

Zodiac signs change over time

I trust most readers here regard horoscopes derived from zodiac signs as curiosities from the history of science.  For those interested in the subject, there is an article in the New York Times detailing how the precessional "wobble" of the earth's axis results in changes in the zodiac constellations associated with calendar dates. 

My embedded image is a composite created by combining several of the excellent illustrations at the link.

A teacher expresses doubts about her career

"I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner. At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.

Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow."

The author is Kathleen West, a daughter-in-law of one of my high school classmates; she is currently teaching at a public middle school in northeast Minneapolis.  The essay has been published in her Substack.

Bohemian Rhapsody in isiZulu

There are approximately 10,000 covers, variations, and adaptations of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Over the years, all of them have been posted at Neatorama.

The Ndlovu Youth Choir was formed in 2009 at a childcare facility in Elandsdoorn, Limpopo, South Africa. They are all grown up now, but are not about to change the name. They released their first album in 2019 after appearing on the TV competition show America's Got Talent, when they made it to the final round. 

The Ndlovu Youth Choir got authorization from Queen to cover "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the isiZulu language of the Zulu people of South Africa. Or partially, because some of the song is in English. It is also partially a cappella, with a band joining in halfway through. The singing is sublime, the staging is sumptuous, and the video is pure eye candy. You can see more from the Ndlovu Youth Choir at their YouTube channel. -via Damn Interesting 

Medieval mindset in Afghanistan

"Women and children on Monday in Mazar Dara, Kunar Province, where male rescuers would not pull women from under rubble or tend their wounds, witnesses said".Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Excerpts from a report in the New York Times:

The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.

“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.

Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out...

More at the link.

Medieval mindset in Florida

(I'll append a fulltext when I find one)

"A woman reacts as she stands at the site of an apartment building that was hit during Russian drone and missile strikes in Kyiv..."  Photo credit Reuters, via The Guardian.

My heart just ached when I came across this photo of a young woman viewing damage to an apartment building in Ukraine.   My first thought was that she probably has all her "stuff" up there - clothes, books, memorabilia, perhaps some valuables.  Perhaps now she has to find a new place to live.  And none of this is her fault.  She's just trying to live her best life, and then this happens.  It is heartbreaking.  Wish I could help her.