17 July 2025
The future of clean energy
Visually-appealing puréed meals
The ongoing genocide in Gaza
NK: You know, when we talk about these hundreds and hundreds of people being killed around aid distribution sites, what are Palestinians in Gaza telling you? What are your staff members there telling you about the kinds of choices people are having to make right now?AS: It's very difficult. I mean, to be honest with you, we are lost for words to describe how things are in Gaza. Two-point-two million people are suffering, and not necessarily all dying, but in different ways. In that background -- against that background -- we see, and I have to say, you know, before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stepped in to distribute food, there were 400 places -- 400 centres -- where the UN and its partners were distributing food. That is for 2.2 million people. That's been reduced to about four centres. And now, three centres in the last few days. We're talking about 700,000 people squeezed into each centre trying to get food. It is chaotic, and people are being shot. And this has happened over the last six weeks. We see 700-plus people who have been shot and killed while trying to get food. They are not a threat to the Israeli Defense Force. So, why are they being shot? This is a crowd control issue. So, you can imagine, after six weeks, when people have been shot and killed every day trying to get food, they still go. And that is because their choices are just to either starve and die, or go to these places, struggle, step on each other, fight for this meagre resource, and get shot. And that's a very, very difficult choice to make. And they say we know the risk, but we will take that risk. We'd rather die one way or the other. So, it's that desperate.
A column at The Guardian collected some of the more outrageous statements by Israeli politicans in the past couple years:
“All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza,” said May Golan, minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel on 7 October 2023.
“Flatten everything [in Gaza] just like it is today in Auschwitz,” David Azoulay, council leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station, December 2023.
“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, wrote on X 7 October 2023. Vaturi also wrote: “The war will never end if we don’t expel everyone.” (2 November 2023) and “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery.” (9 October 2023)
“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview. This did not get much international coverage but was cited in the letter sent to the attorney general at the end of 2023 accusing the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring incitement to genocide.
“The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” said Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid in response to a Palestinian lawmaker bemoaning the loss of civilian life on 16 October 2023.
“There should be 2 goals for this victory: 1. There is no more Muslim land in the Land of Israel ... After we make it the land of IL, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom …” said Likud member of the Knesset Amit Halevi on 16 October 2023.
“They [the children] are our enemies,” said Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the National Religious party, part of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Rothman was responding to a question from a Channel 4 (UK) interviewer asking “the children are your enemies?”
"The Motorcycle Diaries"
13 July 2025
Four xrays of hands on the fourth of July
WWII prisoners-of-war in Minnesota - updated
"Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States.Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors.Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives."
12 July 2025
A "heat burst" is a rare weather phenomenon
"A rare weather phenomena known as a heat burst occurred in a remote area of northwest Minnesota before sunrise Thursday.At an automated weather station near the town of Fertile, Minn., the temperature rapidly rose from about 72 degrees at 3 a.m. to 93 degrees at 3:40 a.m. At the same time, the dewpoint went from the upper 60s to the low 40s — a staggering drop before normalizing back into the 60s."
Just 10 miles south, at the weather station in Waukon, Minn., the heat burst didn't occur. While it was 93 in Fertile, the temp stayed in the low 70s in Waukon.
In meteorology, a heat burst is a rare atmospheric phenomenon characterized by a sudden, localized increase in air temperature near the Earth's surface. Heat bursts typically occur during night-time and are associated with decaying thunderstorms. They are also characterized by extremely dry air and are sometimes associated with very strong, even damaging, winds.Although the phenomenon is not fully understood, the event is thought to occur when rain evaporates (virga) into a parcel of cold, dry air high in the atmosphere, making the air denser than its surroundings. The parcel descends rapidly, warming due to compression, overshoots its equilibrium level, and reaches the surface, similar to a downburst.
10 July 2025
The Milky Way - horizontal and vertical orientations
Not The Onion
The cartoon equivalent of a "dad joke"
"The muumuu /ˈmuːmuː/ or muʻumuʻu (Hawaiian pronunciation: [ˈmuʔuˈmuʔu]) is a loose dress of Hawaiian origin. It is related to the Mother Hubbard dress, introduced by Christian missionaries in Polynesia to "civilize" those whom they considered half-naked savages. Within the category of fashion known as aloha wear, the muumuu, like the aloha shirt, are often brilliantly colored with floral patterns of Polynesian motifs. In Hawaiʻi, muumuus are no longer as widely worn as an aloha shirt, but continue to be a popular dress for social gatherings, church, and festivals such as the Merrie Monarch hula competition.The word muʻumuʻu means "cut off" in Hawaiian. The dress, which was originally used as an undergarment or chemise for the holokū, lacked a yoke and may have featured short sleeves or no sleeves at all. The muumuu was made of lightweight solid white cotton fabric and, in addition to being an undergarment, served Hawaiian women as a housedress, nightgown, and swimsuit. Holokū was the original name for the Mother Hubbard dress introduced by Protestant missionaries to Hawaii in the 1820s. In contrast to the muumuu, the holokū featured long sleeves and a floor-length unfitted dress falling from a high-necked yoke which was worn by the aliʻi as well as the common people. By the 1870s, the holokū of the aliʻi took on a more fitted waist and often a train seven or eight yards in length for the evening, and included ruffles, flounces and trimmings, while the modest loose-fitting train-less holokū continued to be widely worn by women of all classes as their daily dress. In time, upon the introduction of printed fabrics to Hawai'i, the muumuu, essentially a shortened and more comfortable version of the holokū, gained popularity for everyday wear."
An articulated T. rex foot
A fascinating video about Roman aqueducts
The engineering of roman aqueducts explained.
byu/cosmic_voyager01 inDamnthatsinteresting
Nonuplets thriving
"On 4 May 2021, nine children were born to Halima Cisse (Mali) in the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco. This is the first known incidence of nonpulets surviving birth. The record previously belonged to eight babies born in 2009 to Nadya Suleman (USA) aka "Octomom".Nonuplets are extremely rare, and until the arrival of the Cisse children, no cases had been recorded of nine babies from a single birth surviving for more than a few hours."
08 July 2025
There are a lot of good people in the world
Frostbite of the vocal cords
"Hypocorism" explained
Hypocorism: A term of endearment, often a diminutive; a pet name; a nickname. Rarely used for "baby talk", such as bow-wow for dog and choo-choo for train.
03 July 2025
A golden retriever lay in state at the Minnesota capital
There is no record of any other nonhuman ever lying in state, and Melissa Hortman, a former state House speaker still leading the chamber’s Democrats, is the first woman. The state previously granted the honor to 19 men, including a vice president, a U.S. secretary of state, U.S. senators, governors and a Civil War veteran, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
01 July 2025
"Past Lives"
The quick cut at the end showing them as kids was sublime. Gave me chills. There they are once again the two kids standing together but also apart on their divergent paths. The memory now in nighttime mirroring their present was beautiful visual poetry. A realization that their feelings for each other can only exist in a time and space both real and imaginary."
We should be celebrating the 2nd of July
This Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence with picnics, parades and, of course, fireworks. It's a tradition that's been in place for more than 200 years — and for more than 200 years, it's been kind of wrong.Image from Old Hollywood.
"It is the right day to celebrate the Declaration of Independence," author and historian Ray Raphael tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It is not the right day to celebrate the signing of the declaration or the right day to celebrate independence. The vote for independence was on July 2 — two days before — and the first signing of the declaration ... was not until August 2 — a month later."..
In his book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, Raphael explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation — like how America ended up lighting fireworks on the 4th and not the 2nd.
Raphael says that even the writers of the declaration expected July 2 to be the day that went down in history.
"Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, on the 3rd of July, the day after they voted for independence, saying the 2nd of July will always be remembered and will be celebrated with parades and illuminations and patriotic speeches," Raphael says. "He described the Fourth of July to the tee, but he called it the 2nd."
America ended up with the 4th because that's the day the Declaration of Independence was sent out to the states to be read. The document was dated July 4, so that's the day they celebrated.
The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It was engrossed on parchment and on August 2, 1776, delegates began signing it.Although the section of the Lee Resolution dealing with independence was not adopted until July 2, Congress appointed on June 10 a committee of five to draft a statement of independence for the colonies. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with the actual writing delegated to Jefferson.Jefferson drafted the statement between June 11 and 28, submitted drafts to Adams and Franklin who made some changes, and then presented the draft to the Congress following the July 2nd adoption of the independence section of the Lee Resolution. The congressional revision process took all of July 3rd and most of July 4th. Finally, in the afternoon of July 4th, the Declaration was adopted.
28 June 2025
James Garfield - president for only 200 days
I have a new favorite president. Before reading this book, literally the only things I knew about James Garfield were that he was featured on the 20c prexie stamp (because he was the 20th president) and that he was assassinated while in office. Now I can add the following...
He grew up in Ohio in abject poverty – a one-room log cabin with a plank floor and windowpanes made of oiled paper. When he was two years old, his father died at age 33, leaving his mother with four children to feed. She farmed the land with the aid of his 11-year-old brother and saved money so that by age four James was able to get a pair of shoes. At age sixteen he began working on the Erie and Ohio Canal, but returned home after contracting malaria. By then his mother had saved $17, which was used to send him to Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a one-building prep school. During his first year he worked as a janitor in exchange for receiving an education.
So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more – one on penmanship and the other on Virgil. (p. 23)From there he moved to Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated in two years. He entered state politics in Ohio, then served in the Civil War in the Union Army, after which he was elected to Congress. He did NOT want to be president. He attended a nominating convention which was hopelessly deadlocked. On the 34th ballot, some electors voted for him. He rose to protest and was told to sit down. On the 36th ballot, he became the Republican nominee – against his will. He was described as shocked, sickened, and pale as death during the proceedings. (pp 40-46).
He never participated in the campaign which was conducted on his behalf, preferring to work and receive visitors on his 160-acre farm.
He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house…. he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room…” (p. 58)His campaign platform as a Republican emphasized civil rights and the welfare of the freed slaves, in which endeavor he was supported by Frederick Douglass. Voter turnout for the election was 78%, and he was elected by a narrow margin.
In the days that followed… Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring hi only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured – his time with his children, his books, and his farm – abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. (p. 64)The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a religious fanatic who was delusional to the point of frank psychosis. He borrowed $10 to buy a gun, used it to shoot the president not for any political or philosophical reason, but because he believed God wanted him to do it.
His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” (p. 237)The “insanity defense” was well established at the time. Interestingly, everyone at the time agreed that Guiteau was insane and that insane people were not liable for their actions. Everyone on the jury knew this also, but they were so angry that they basically said “he’s guilty – hang him anyway.”
Other interesting tidbits from the book: After Garfield was shot, the second physician who responded to the event was Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital, 39 years old, one of the first black men in the U.S. to receive medical training at a university, and obviously the first ever to treat a president. (p. 140)
The White House of that era was like a slum residence, perpetually damp with rotting wood and vermin-infested walls and the odor of raw untreated sewage, situated next to a malarial tidal marsh. (p. 176)
Garfield was a Republican who embodied the party’s enthusiasm for helping immigrants, freed slaves, and impoverished people. He believed the key to improving the country lay in educating those people. (182)
It has been said that Guiteau did not kill the President – he shot him, but the doctors killed him by repeatedly probing the wound with ungloved, unwashed fingers. Guiteau used this argument in his own futile defense (“General Garfield died from malpractice.”). The bullet had lodged on the left side of his body behind the pancreas, but the attempts to find it on the right side resulted in profound septic sequelae:
One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile. (p. 196)He apparently developed septic emboli:
Just two weeks after the surgery, another abscess formed, this one on Garfield’s right parotid gland… the abscess had become so filled with pus that it caused his eye and cheek to swell and paralyzed his face. Finally, it ruptured, flooding Garfield’s ear canal and mouth with so much pus… that it nearly drowned him. (p. 216)The woefully incompetent Dr. Bliss treating him [“Ignorance is Bliss”] tried to cope with the president's rapid cachexia by feeding him intrarectally. The eventual cause of death (determined by autopsy) was hypovolemic shock following a rupture of the splenic artery (probably from a septic aneurysm).
Garfield does not get credit for any particular legislative achievements, because his time in office was too brief. Rather, his legacy is reflected in how his illness and death united the people of the country during the fractious time in the aftermath of the Civil War. And since Guiteau’s act had arisen in connection with the corrupt “spoils system” for giving out lucrative government job contracts, the popular revolt after the death led to the establishment of the civil service system. After his death, Garfield’s widow assembled his books and papers in a wing of their farmhouse, establishing the nation’s first-ever presidential library.
The book is Destiny of the Republic. A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published by Doubleday in 2011. I'm pleased to add it to my list of recommended books.
Addendum 2016:
I am delighted to report that the superb television series American Experience has just released a program entitled "Murder of a President," about President Garfield; it is based on the book I reviewed above in 2012. The two-hour program is playing on PBS stations around the country, and it can be viewed online here.
25 June 2025
Extremophiles
Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on Level 104 of the Mponeng Mine near Johannesburg. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323º Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for one hundred millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Stadtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via DNA. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hair spray.It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. It thrives in the acidic runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc. It abides in the shallows of the Dead Sea. It breathes methane. It can withstand temperatures of 333º K, hot enough to melt phosphorus. It resides in a fumarole of scalding seawater, deep in the bathyal fathoms of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It can endure pressures equivalent to sixty-five tons of force per square inch, nine times greater than the pressure at the nadir of the ocean and one tenth of the pressure required to crush graphite into diamond. It lives in the muck at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It is ideally adapted to devour the wreck of the RMS Titanic. It does not die while suffering immolation in the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin. It eats jet fuel.It feeds on nylon byproducts. It feeds on stainless steel. It inhabits a dormant volcano in the xeric waste of the Atacama Desert, where the rain falls only once per century. It blooms in a barren salina ten times saltier than the sea. It breathes hydrogen. It resides in micropores of superdense granite, crushed down 3,500 meters below the bedrock of the earth. It can withstand temperatures of 343º K, hotter than the flash point of aerosolized kerosene. It is adapted to devour the rubber tubing in the engines of the F-22 Raptor. It does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the space shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. It does not die among the tornadoes of hellfire raging unchecked in the oil fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War. It gorges on plumes of petroleum venting from the wellhead of the Deepwater Horizon.It eats arsenic. It eats uranium. It resides inside the core of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It thrives in hydrochloric acid. It can withstand temperatures of 373º K, hot enough to boil the water in its own cells. It is ideally adapted to dwell inside any steel drums of radioactive waste now entombed at the Yucca Mountain Repository. It lives in the stratosphere. It can survive exposure to the vacuum of outer space. It can survive the effects of g-forces more than two thousand times greater than the surface gravity of the earth. It is the only known organism capable of exceeding the speed of sound. It can, in fact, repair damage to its DNA. It never evolves.It devours plutonium. It can endure long-term exposure to acids that eat away at human flesh. It can withstand temperatures of 383º K, hotter than the polar zones on the planet Mercury. It can hibernate for five hundred millennia in the core of a snowflake deep beneath the permafrost of Siberia. It awaits discovery in the abyssal fathoms of Lake Vostok, four thousand meters below the ice of Antarctica. It survives direct immersion in liquid nitrogen. It survives one thousand times the dosage of gamma radiation that can kill a human being. It is ideally adapted to eat hot graphite in the ruins of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island. It resides on the surface of a heat shield in the clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is fossilized inside the Murchison meteorite. It does not die in the conflagration during the collapse of the World Trade Center. It does not die in the crucibles of Treblinka.It resides in a soda lake, whose pH level equals the alkalinity of lye. It can withstand temperatures of 393º K, hot enough to melt sulfur. It can lie dormant for forty million years, hibernating inside the gut of a honeybee shrouded in a jewel of amber. It evades its predators by hiding in the firmware of the Intel Pentium III microchip. It propagates itself through the use of networked computers. It can pass itself off as a thought inside the human brain. It can survive direct blasts of cosmic rays. It is, in fact, the only known organism to survive being shot, point-blank, by the proton beam in the U-70 Synchrotron. It does not die in the incineration of Hiroshima. It does not die in the planetary firestorm after the impact of the Chicxulub meteor.It survives. It resides inside the robot scoop of the Viking 1 lander during tests for perchlorates on Mars. It can live through exposure to supercooling temperatures at the brink of absolute zero. It can hibernate for 250 million years, living as a spore encased in a halite nodule found in the Carlsbad Caverns. It can withstand temperatures of 423º K, hotter than the nose cone of the Concorde in supersonic flight. It can endure multiple meteor impacts. It can endure multiple atomic attacks. It lives nowhere on earth, except in one petri dish of agar, locked in a fridge at a level 4 biocontainment facility. It is totally inhuman. It does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the moon. It awaits your experiments.
Humor scrapbook, part II
The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.
23 June 2025
Counting asteroids
Humor scrapbook, part I
So, I'm scanning the pages into TYWKIWDBI. This is the first of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook. The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (and in any case, old "magnetic" photo albums don't lend themselves to the rearranging of paper content, which starts to shred when you try to remove or rearrange it.)
The text on all the types of "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.
20 June 2025
Blogcation over
10 June 2025
Blogcation
The "cosmic calendar" - depicted visually and verbally
07 June 2025
Too many people just can't recognize satire
06 June 2025
Rainbow airglow with visible gravity waves
The disturbing childhood of R. Crumb
"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”
05 June 2025
02 June 2025
The ultimate legacy of our lives
"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."
30 May 2025
"Sami Blood"
Sami Blood is set in Sweden in the 1930s and concerns a 14-year-old girl who experiences prejudice at a nomad school for Sami children, and decides to escape her town and disavow her Sami heritage.
The film premiered at the 73rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section, in which it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label Award and the Fedeora Award for Best Debut Director.
Reposted from 2018, because today I rewatched the movie with new eyes, after having discovered that the "Fin-" part of my Finseth family name indicates that some ancestor had been from the Sami ethnic group.
The movie is a bit dark because it examines prejudices the southern (Uppsala) Swedes had (1930s) against the subarctic Samis - prejudices that starkly resemble ones the Europeans in North America had against the Native peoples there. The acting was superb - especially by the lead - Lene Cecilia Sparrok - who is a Norwegian Southern Sami reindeer herder/actress.
29 May 2025
An observation on political dialogue - updated
"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know we know they are lying.
We know they know we know they are lying.But they are still lying."
Map of British English dialects
Rotate your insulin injection sites
"In this case, surgical resection was performed for cosmesis. Histopathological assessment showed amorphous eosinophilic deposits, positive Congo red staining, and apple-green birefringence under polarized light. The specimen also stained positive for thioflavin T under fluorescence."
28 May 2025
A pianist with phocomelia
Credit to Alex at Neatorama for finding and posting this. Reposted from 2009.
27 May 2025
Children in Gaza are being shot in the head
Chana Joffe-Walt:"One of the hardest places to see through chaos in the middle of a war-- fog of war, all that. This is especially true for the war in Gaza. There is very limited information moving in and out of Gaza. Israel has banned international press from entering the strip for nearly 18 months, except for a few brief trips, accompanied by and under the control of the Israeli military. One rare outside group has gotten a view on the ground of Gaza-- medical workers. Since the start of the war, over 100 American doctors and nurses have traveled to Gaza, treated patients there for weeks at a time, and come back out. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah talked to a dozen of them who volunteered there...Ike Sriskandarajah:"Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from the US-- he's also volunteered as a doctor in the war in Ukraine and with Palestinians in the West Bank. He's closely studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though his family is from a small ethnic minority in what is now Pakistan.Feroze Sidhwa:"The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well, and she just pointed at these two kids, and just pointed at her head, and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head. I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong. I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that. But then, I looked at these kids, and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans, and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head. And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.Ike Sriskandarajah:"Feroze works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.Feroze Sidhwa:"But to see four kids with gunshot wounds to the head already admitted to the hospital when I get there, it certainly struck me as being very unusual...Feroze Sidhwa:And what I wrote down is that I was going through the ICU, and I found an eight-year-old girl shot in the head overnight. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. It's a transcranial gunshot wound, definitely non-survivable...Feroze Sidhwa:Yeah, the bullet didn't stop. And then, let's see, the next day. So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died, and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head.The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later...Ike Sriskandarajah:At the same time that Feroze was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients-- he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.Mark Perlmutter:One of the kids was there with a family member. I ripped up his shirt, and there was a bullet entry wound right over the heart. And then I picked up the dressings on his forehead, and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.Ike Sriskandarajah:Oh, my god. What was the kid doing when this happened?Mark Perlmutter:Walking with their adult to get water.Ike Sriskandarajah:Was there a street battle happening?Mark Perlmutter:I didn't ask if there was a street battle going on, but it happened twice in the same day.Ike Sriskandarajah:Could you say the second time?Mark Perlmutter:Yeah, right next to that kid was another kid who got shot in the head and the chest. And that child had no adult with him, so I couldn't get a story. It's hard to see it.Ike Sriskandarajah:These weren't kids injured by collapsing buildings. They were kids who'd been shot-- direct gunshot wounds into 12-year-olds, eight-year-olds, even toddlers...Ike Sriskandarajah:13 children in 14 days. Even with all the other traumatic injuries and deaths they saw, the kids who were shot really stuck with Mark. It was haunting him.Mark Perlmutter:Early on, I thought it was just an isolated jerk carrying out, because every army has jerks. War changes people, and so you can absolutely have rogue people behaving inappropriately...Adam Hamawy:When I was in Iraq, there were civilians that were injured. There were children that were injured. And that's called incidental, collateral damage, all the terms that we use to cleanly justify what's happening. But the scale was, I mean, not even-- not even close to this.I mean, I probably took care of, like, five, six children the whole time I was in Iraq, and I wasn't there for three weeks. I was there for eight months. I mean, it didn't look-- it didn't appear that they were intentional targets. Those you could really say that they were wrong place, wrong time.I didn't see targeted gunshots to little kids that were five, six years old or 10, 15 years old. In fact, I mean, I'm thinking back. I mean, I don't think I saw a gunshot wound to a kid at all when I was there...Adam Hamawy:These are little children that are being shot, and these aren't stray bullets. These are aimed. They're precise. So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It's not going to explain the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since October.Ike Sriskandarajah:The medical worker I spoke with who spent the most time in Gaza also saw the most kids shot-- 50. She showed me a picture she took of a scan of a five or six-year-old's skull. There's a bullet in the middle of it. She was told this child was playing with their friends when an armed quadcopter drone came overhead and shot the child...Ike Sriskandarajah:Feroze reached out to as many American medical workers as he could-- doctors, nurses, paramedics. He created a survey to send out and compiled all the answers. The results stunned him.Feroze Sidhwa:Almost everybody had the exact same experience. Almost universally, they said the same thing, which I really was surprised by.Ike Sriskandarajah:Out of the 53 American medical workers surveyed who did emergency care for children in Gaza, 44 said they saw kids shot in the head or chest...Ike Sriskandarajah"Feroze published an op ed in the New York Times with the results of the survey. A group of the doctors wrote two letters to then President Biden outlining what they saw. Feroze thought that would mean two things-- they'd get a call from the White House and there'd be an investigation...Ike Sriskandarajah:I talked with three people who worked at the US State Department and reviewed allegations like this, including the person who, until recently, was the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, a position that used to be called the War Crimes Ambassador. They all agreed the doctors' report sounded credible and significant enough to investigate.Each of them said the next step should be asking Israel for answers. One, who is involved in vetting US weapons transfers, told me if this had been another country other than Israel, this is what would have happened...So we asked the Israel Defense Forces how they explained the reports from American medical workers. They declined both my interview requests, but sent a statement, saying, "The IDF does not target minors and takes extensive measures to prevent harm to civilians, including children. The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm and operates in full compliance with international legal obligations. For security reasons, we cannot elaborate on operational policies."
“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
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