The future of clean energy

Selections from a gallery of photos at The Atlantic showing the enormous scale of solar energy projects in China, which currently has 74% of all clean energy projects under construction worldwide.  Mountains, deserts, lakes, and industrial sites like the cattle feedlots are being covered with solar panels.  

Meanwhile the Trump administration is "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry."

Visually-appealing puréed meals

At the Reddit source there is a relevant discussion thread, including comments by people who have undergone facial reconstruction surgery and other ailments requiring pureed food.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza

Excerpts from the CBC's As It Happens transcript from several days ago, featuring an interview with Ajith Sunghay, who is the Head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

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"

I came of age in the 1960s, when Che Guevara was intermittently in the news, and an iconic image of him was frequently featured in underground culture.  At the time I never learned much about him other than that he was a revolutionary who was assassinated by the CIA, so it was a pleasure to discover this 2004 movie recently.  

The Motorcycle Diaries is a biopic adaptation of a book covering a formative period in Che Guevara's youth, when he left medical school to travel with a friend through much of South America.  The script is free of leftist dogma and revolutionary principles; it's basically a road trip/coming of age movie illustrating how Che came to be familiar with and sympathetic with the indigenous peoples of America, and realized that the borders between countries are artificial constructs.  

Four xrays of hands on the fourth of July

All of these xrays were taken at one level 1 trauma center.  The comment thread at the radiology subreddit is largely anecdotal and uninteresting, but one comment was salient - lots of people wake up the morning of the 4th of July not realizing that this will be their last day with two good hands.

WWII prisoners-of-war in Minnesota - updated

I watched this program on Minnesota public television while on a recent vacation back to my home area, and was delighted to find that is is available on YouTube.  It is an outstanding and uplifting program, and will be of interest to those outside Minnesota (I think a map in the video shows other POW camps scattered around the U.S.).

Somehow while growing up in the 50s and 60s I never learned that there were German prisoners-of-war living here and working on farms during the war.  It was win-win for American farmers and for the prisoners.  This video is well worth watching IMHO.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to reader Doyle Stevick, who found a 2025 book on this very subject:  The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America, by William Geroux.

"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." 

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.  

This from Wikipedia: 

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.

It would be scary to be outdoors while this is happening.  You learn something every day.

The Milky Way - horizontal and vertical orientations

Both images were entries at NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day (November 5, 2024 and July 2, 2025).  Relevant discussion at each link.

Not The Onion

I have no words.  Just waiting to see who else climbs out of the clown car.

The image is a nonclickable screencap.  Details at The Daily Mail, which seems oddly appropriate.

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

We all know T. rex were big, but wow...  The foot is up for bids at Sotheby's "Geek Week" auction.  Lots of amazing items there, priced for the megamillionaires.

Image from a "Photos of the Day" gallery at The Guardian.

A fascinating video about Roman aqueducts

Lots and lots of information I didn't know, most of it quite interesting.  Sadly, the speaker employs an execrable narrative style of pauses and emphasis that has to be tolerated to extract the info.

Reposted from 2022 to add a much higher quality video which uses animation to explain some of the engineering challenges facing the Roman architects.

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."

The children are now 4 years old.  Updated info at Neatorama.

There are a lot of good people in the world

From a Facebook post by the Longville Campground Residents.

Update on the Facebook post: "7/8/25 Update: We have found 3 possible foster homes for this liittle chick!  He’s on his way to meet the first family. If the family does not accept him, it’s on to number 2.  Thank you to all who shared the call for help, and the people who messaged they might have a match."

Frostbite of the vocal cords

Symptoms of painful swallowing and hoarseness, resulting from the recreational use of inhaled nitrous oxide.  Details at The New England Journal of Medicine.

Addendum:  a tip of the blogging cap to an anonymous reader who provided a link to Inside the Nitrous Mafia, an East Coast Hippie-Crack Ring (in The Village Voice).  It's a longread, but well worth perusing.

"Hypocorism" explained

I encountered the word in a crossword puzzle clue.  As an almost-eighty-year-old English major, I still learn something every day...

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. 

"Hypocorism joined the English language in the mid-19th century and was once briefly a buzzword among linguists, who used it rather broadly to mean "adult baby talk"—that is, the altered speech adults use when supposedly imitating babies. Once the baby talk issue faded, hypocorism settled back into being just a fancy word for a pet name. Pet names can be diminutives like "Johnny" for "John," endearing terms such as "honey-bunch," or, yes, names from baby talk, like "Nana" for "Grandma."

Etymology from Greek terms for "a small degree" + "caress".

A golden retriever lay in state at the Minnesota capital

I trust every reader here is politically aware enough to know that a political assassination occurred last month in Minnesota when State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot to death at their home.  Many of you may have missed the detail that when the gunman entered the Hortman's home he also shot their golden retriever, Gilbert.

This was not a hunting dog.  Melissa Hortman was training this dog for Helping Paws, a nonprofit that provides service dogs to people with disabilities, including veterans and first responders with PTSD.  Gilbert did not graduate from the program, so the Hortmans decided to keep him as a house dog.  There are no living witnesses to the assassination, so it is not known whether the dog came to the front door out of curiosity or to protect his humans, but it doesn't matter.  Governor Walz decided to include Gilbert in the memorial at the state 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.

If any readers consider a dog lying in state to be trivial, please read my post five years ago entitled Remembering Sugar Rae.  And if you still don't understand, please find a different blog to follow.

"Past Lives"

The storyline is very simple.  Lifelong childhood friends in Seoul, Korea are forced apart by circumstances when the girl's family emigrates to Canada.  About 12 years later they re-connect via the internet, but he is stuck in Korea, and she has career commitments in Canada and the U.S.  So, in a decision reminiscent of the memory-erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they agree to stop corresponding and Zooming online and pay attention to their real lives.  Another 12 years pass, and he is invited to meet her and her husband in New York City.  They meet, talk, and ponder.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  The three actors are excellent, and the dialogue with its hesitations and pauses is utterly realistic - which I value highly in movies that are dialogue-driven.  Regarding the overall tone of the movie, one of the reviews I read used the term "pitch-perfect", which is exactly correct.  This movie is not overly sentimental or overly analytical - and it's not a "rom com" because there is no comedy.  It is a serious contemplation of destinies, alternative possibilites, and stark choices that echo Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

As I looked through various reviews for salient commentary, the best I found was this comment, oddly enough in the YouTube trailer comment thread:

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."

Past Lives has won multiple awards internationally and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screeplay at the last Academy Awards.  I borrowed the DVD in our library, but the movie should be available streaming and it's available on Netlix.

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.

"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.

Image from Old Hollywood.

Reposted from 2014 because this is still a "thing you wouldn't know."

Addendum:  I found this info in the National Archives:

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.

Perhaps my previous source was inaccurate?  I presume Adams was celebrating the addition of the Lee Resolution, which allowed completion of the declaration.

The "changing room" illusion

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.

Reposted from 2016 because of the upcoming Netflix series Death by Lightning, which is scheduled to drop later this year.

Extremophiles

Extremophiles are real, and absolutely astounding.  Read about them, and be amazed...

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.

I've excerpted this text in toto from the June 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  I normally post only excerpts from my readings in order to drive TYWKIWDBI readers to the sources.  In this case I've embedded the full text from Harper's, but this is just an excerpt from an upcoming book by Christian Bok entitled The Xenotext: Book 2.  Bok is a poet (which some of you may have surmised from some repetitive patterns of the text above).  He is also the author of Eunoia, which I excerpted back in 2008; that book is unique in that each chapter is written using only one vowel.  When Bok's new book becomes available, I plan to read it.

It should be apparent to knowledgeable readers, but I'll clarify that the passages in the text refer to a multitude of different extremophiles, who inhabit an unimaginably vast range of microenvironments.

Posted for a member of my extended family - Dr. Doug Nelson, who has devoted his career to the study of extremophiles at UC Davis.

Humor scrapbook, part II

This is the second 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 (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

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.

 

Reposted from 2020

Counting asteroids

I'll never forget the moment Carl Sagan described the number of stars as being greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.  This video provides an equivalent perspective on the number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.  The successive zoom-outs are impressive, but especially the final image showing how little of the belt was sampled for the data.

Humor scrapbook, part I

Before there were blogs, there were scrapbooks.  Like many people in the pre-internet era, I saved clippings of interesting or humorous items in envelopes and folders and desk drawers, and eventually transferred them into "magnetic" photo albums.  Now I've reached the "downsizing" phase of my life, and have to decide what to do with the material.  I don't want to drag the albums around with me forever, but some of the material is too good to just throw in the dumpster.

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.

Reposted from 2020 because we're even more in need of humor than we were five years ago.

Blogcation over

I was sorry to say goodbye to family and friends "up at the lake."  I was serenaded nightly by loons, so I hope I can find some way to embed a 30-second recording of them yodeling.  Not sure how to do that.

I need to recombobulate for a day or two, then will resume blogging after the weekend.

Blogcation

My cousin's place on Girl Lake, Longville, Minnesota.  The cabin is a legacy site, so the setback from the lake was grandfathered (nobody can build this close to the water nowadays).  

No blogging for two weeks - and no curation of comments.  Feel free to comment on old posts, but I won't review them for publication until I get back.

The "cosmic calendar" - depicted visually and verbally

This subject has been filmed before, including perhaps by Carl Sagan? but it's worth emphasizing.  Posting this now so that later I can add extended text from Orbit 13 of Orbital, which has I believe the best text description of the cosmic calendar.

Addendum:  I'll add the text description now so I can quit blogging for a couple weeks.  With apologies to the author/publisher - I really shouldn't excerpt so much, but here goes...

Too many people just can't recognize satire

Embedded above is a screencap from a post on X that I saw reposted on Facebook, where there were thousands of comments, the vast majority of which seriously argued that this is not a walkable community.  Others asked why you would walk miles to a gas station, and some suggested walking seven miles to a liquor store would be a good idea.  These must be the same people who become congressmen believing stories from The Onion.

Lots more similar posts from @bankertobuilder.

North Korean postage stamps created as instruments of propaganda

Rainbow airglow with visible gravity waves

The original image (at APOD of course) explains the phenomenon, and you can mouse over that image for additional information about the constellations and gravity waves.

Why "covered parking" might be designed like this

A fragmented but lucid discussion at the whatisit subreddit entry.

The disturbing childhood of R. Crumb

Those who came of age in the 1970s will remember Fritz the Cat and other cartoons by Robert Crumb.  Here is an abbreviated summary of his developmental years:

"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.”

That passage from a review of the new book Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life in the current issue of Harper's.

Bike tunnel in Switzerland

Awesome.  Looking forward to comments from readers.

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..."

Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.

"Sami Blood"

This is an excellent movie.

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. 

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."

I found this quotation in Scribal Terror back in 2021 (it's sad that blog is no longer active).  At the time it was attibuted to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn in his 1973 work, The Gulag Archipelago.

After I posted the quotation here, an anonyous reader found documentation that this attribution is spurious and that the source is apocryphal.  The discussion at the Quote Investigator site is worth reading, and the sentiment expressed in the quotation is worth preserving, so I'll leave the quotation here.

Map of British English dialects

Discussion at the source includes the definition of a dialect, the inaccuracy of borders, and the meaning of "British."

Rotate your insulin injection sites

These accumulations of subcutaneous amyloid developed on the lower abdominal wall of a 47-year-old man at the sites of his repeated insulin injections.

"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."

A pianist with phocomelia

VERY impressive. This seems to be part 1 of several parts, but I haven't located the others yet.

Credit to Alex at Neatorama for finding and posting this.  Reposted from 2009.

Children in Gaza are being shot in the head

The children being shot in the head are not victims of accidental crossfire; they are being individually targeted for assassination.  Most news sources that provide news about Gaza tend to focus on the ongoing genocide, and the mass starvation, without details about the children being intentionally head-shot.  I only learned of this phenomenon from a podcast on This American Life.  Herewith some excerpts from a transcript of their "Solving for Why" segment of the "Chaos Graph" podcast on April 25:

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."

What follows the above segment is an interview with an Israeli soldier about the possible whys and hows of the described events.  I've already excerpted too much from This American Life, so I'll offer apologies to them and suggest that the very few readers who will be interested in more details should read the full transcript at this link, or even better listen to the full podcast (I had to stop twice and do other things while listening, because the information is so unsettling).

Here are several observations from medical personnel from the op-ed published in the New York Times.

“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.”

Other related articles: Mother Jones interviews Sidwha, and a denial by The Times of Israel.  

Most of the press coverage about Gaza is about the ongoing starvation and genocide.  I hope to address that later.  In the meantime I'm sending some additional $$ to the World Central Kitchen.  I fully realize Israel has assassinated WCK workers delivering food to Gaza and have an ongoing blockade of food trucks at the border, but if I do nothing I will have no answer to the question "What did you do during the genocide in Gaza?."  

"Thanks to your support, WCK has offloaded 49 trucks of essential food supplies at the Kerem Shalom crossing after more than 80 days of border closures. This milestone brings us closer to resuming meal production in Gaza, where our operations had been paused after serving over 130 million meals and 26 million loaves of bread. While awaiting approvals for additional deliveries, our field teams remain ready to restart operations, with trucks loaded, fuel secured, and kitchen systems prepped. In the meantime, we’ve distributed over 2 million liters of clean drinking water, reaching 170,000 liters in a single day, bringing hope and dignity to communities in need. Thank you for standing with us to help nourish those facing unimaginable hardship."