29 January 2025

Some birds protect their nests with snakeskin


Here's the abstract, from The American Naturalist:
Many species of birds use shed snake skin in nest construction, but this behavior remains poorly understood. Ecological context is likely key for understanding how this unusual, but widespread, behavior evolved. We use comparative and experimental approaches to suggest that the evolution of this behavior is mediated by nest morphology and predator communities. First, we reviewed the literature and found that 78 species from 22 families have been reported to use shed snake skin in nest construction. All but one of these species are passerines and, using comparative analyses, we show that this behavior is disproportionately observed in cavity-nesting species. Second, we examined a subsample of North American species, all of which are reported to use snake skin in nest construction, to see whether the proportion of nests with snake skin differs between cavity- and open cup–nesting species. This analysis suggested that the proportion of nests with snake skin is roughly 6.5 times higher in cavity- than in open cup–nesting species. Finally, we used a series of experiments and comparisons to test four hypotheses whereby snake skin could award fitness benefits (nest predation, nest microbiotas, nest ectoparasites, social signaling) and found support for the predation hypothesis. Snake skin reduced nest predation in cavity, but not open cup, nests. These unequal fitness benefits highlight different ecological conditions between nest morphologies and likely explains why, across species, cavity-nesting birds show this behavior more frequently than open cup–nesting birds.
Embedded image from The New York Times, where the results are discussed.

Mississippi bill would criminalize masturbation to ejaculation


As reported by WBLT3 News (Jackson, Mississippi).  It's not clear how this would be enforced.  

"Shrimp fraud" in Gulf Coast cities

 As reported by USA Today:
Restaurants throughout the Gulf Coast are serving imported shrimp but telling their customers they're feasting on fresh crustaceans fished in the Gulf of Mexico, a series of new studies found.

SeaD Consulting, a food safety technology company, tested shrimp from randomly chosen restaurants in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Galveston, Texas; and Tampa Bay, Florida. Researchers found a significant number of the restaurants were passing off their shrimp as locally sourced, even though they were grown on foreign farms and imported to the U.S.

The cities with the highest "shrimp fraud rate" were Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, at 96%, according to SeaD Consulting. Only two of the 44 restaurants sampled were serving authentic shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, a study found...

The consulting company behind the research says the rampant misrepresentation hurts not only customers – who are put at higher risk of consuming tainted food – but also harms local fishermen struggling to compete with the low cost of imported shrimp from countries like India, Vietnam and Ecuador...

Earlier this month, a new law went into effect in Louisiana requiring restaurants selling imported shrimp to include a notice on their menus telling customers the shrimp is imported and listing the country of origin. A similar law went into effect in Alabama in October.

An interesting specialized tool


Posted at the often-interesting whatisthisthing subreddit, with the following thumbnail description:
"Thin yet heavy metal pen-shaped object with a removable clip.  One end is ball-shaped (but no ink could possibly flow), and the other end has a fishing-line-type loop."
A major clue is that the ball at the end is magnetic.

Here are two replies:  
    "It's a tool to remove foreign objects from your eye, used most often in welding and machine shops. The other end is a nylon loop that holds a drop or two of sterile water to attract non magnetic debris in the eye.

    "Optometrist here. If you have a medical eye doctor nearby you can save the ER trip. I've removed a ton of these in office myself, and any ophthalmologist can. Just don't go to a lenscrafters or pearl vision etc. and expect anything beyond glasses/contacts."
Lots of comments at the link from metalworkers.

26 January 2025

xoxoxoBruce has died

Reader Jim Armstrong left a comment in another thread noting that reader xoxoxoBruce had passed away.  I found independent confirmation in a Chevy truck forum.
I am totally shocked. Bruce was just at my house on the 10th. He had just picked up his newly painted SSR. He spent a lot to fix it up but never got to enjoy it. It was done at my old shop.
I just noticed that he texted me last Thursday the 17th, the day they said he past away, about coming up next week to fix some things on his truck.
Man this is hard too take. 😒He would send flowers to my wife every year on our anniversary saying what a mistake she made marrying me. He was such a jokester.
Going to miss all his emails and conversations.
RIP my friend 😫😭
I "know" a lot of my readers/commenters as a result of years of curating comments (I've never met any  reader IRL except my family).  The username xoxoxoBruce has been commenting on TYWKIWDBI for at least the past 8 years - maybe longer.  I never had to delete any of his comments, which were always pleasant and courteous.  I'm sorry to hear that he's gone.

Posting this for other readers and for other bloggers (Miss C, Marilyn, Jesse),

Addenda:  Here is a tribute to xoxoxoBruce, posted this morning at Nag on the Lake:
"I was saddened to learn via TYWKIWDBI that Bruce, who contributed links to this blog for the past two decades, has died. We never met in person but over the years we communicated regularly. When I was travelling he would send extra links because he knew I would have less time to round up my own. He sent me homemade Christmas cards and never forgot my birthday. A few years ago I posted a story about the world’s smallest bar which is about an hour from where I live. He sent me a gift certificate for cocktails there. I have often written about my love of Scotland so last year he sent me a bottle of Arran Gold liqueur.  I mentioned to Bruce that my dad was suffering from dementia but still enjoyed corny jokes. For many years Bruce sent me jokes to pass along to him. He also forwarded articles on antique firetrucks for my firefighter husband. I know he will be missed by the many friends he so easily made. I plan to pull out that bottle of Arran Gold and raise a toast to Bruce in front of the fire tonight."
(Marilyn's blog is very similar to TYWKIWDBI, for those readers here who have not yet found it.)

And a tribute from Miss Cellania:
"Bruce was a regular contributor to the comments section here, sent me links, and was a regular correspondent. I just received his Christmas card the other day, postmarked December 11th but for some reason it took more than a month to get here. Bruce was always ready with a joke, ready to be friends, and quite generous. Bruce helped keep me afloat a few years ago when I got laid off from Mental Floss and times were tough. I couldn't be more grateful."

25 January 2025

Humor for English majors

Queen Elizabeth was visiting sick children in a Scottish hospital, and after performing her planned duties, she wandered off to other parts of the hospital. Walking into an unidentified ward, she went up to a patient in bed and asked him how he was doing. He replied:
"O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my luve is like the melodie,
That's sweetly played in tune....."
Finding the response somewhat inappropriate she wished him good day and moved down the ward to a room where another man was sitting quietly. In response to her inquiry, he began singing:
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min' ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?"
Somewhat baffled by this sequence of events she found a third room, where her greeting was met with:
"Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie ...."
She gave up, and left the ward. On her way out, she encountered the head nurse. "Is this the psychiatric ward?" she asked.

"No, your majesty," the nurse replied. "It's......the Burns unit."
Reposted because January 25 is Burns Night.

24 January 2025

"Daughters"


In my opinion, an outstanding documentary.  It's not for everybody; the trailer will tell you whether it's for you.  

The world's largest flower


Rafflesia arnoldii, in the Palupuah forest of West Sumatra, Indonesia.  The Wikipedia page has tons of information...
Although Rafflesia is a vascular plant, it lacks any observable leaves, stems or even roots, and does not have chlorophyll. It lives as a holoparasite on vines of the genus Tetrastigma (most commonly Tetrastigma augustifolia). Similar to fungi, individuals grow as a mass of thread-like strands of tissue completely embedded within and in intimate contact with surrounding host cells from which nutrients and water are obtained. It can only be seen outside the host plant when it is ready to reproduce; the only part of Rafflesia that is identifiable as distinctly plant-like are the flowers, though even these are unusual since they attain massive proportions, have a reddish-brown colouration, and stink of rotting flesh. According to Sandved, the flower opens with a hissing sound.

The flower of Rafflesia arnoldii grows to a diameter of around one meter (3.3 feet), weighing up to 11 kilograms (24 lb)

...ecotourism [note the photo] is thought to be a main threat to the species. At locations which are regularly visited by tourists the number of flower buds produced per year has decreased.
Photo credit Adi Prima/Anadolu/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

Speaking truth to power


Embedded above are the closing moments of an inauguration prayer directed toward Donald Trump, delivered by The Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde, who is the Episcopal bishop of Washington.

Following the sermon, the president attacked Budde online, labelling her a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a lengthy social media post early on Wednesday. He argued that she had “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way” and described her tone as “nasty”.

Trump characterized the service as “boring” and “uninspiring”, and asserted that Budde and her church “owe the public an apology.”

Trump's allies joined in the criticism -

The Georgia representative Mike Collins suggested on social media that Budde “should be added to the deportation list”, while the Fox News host Sean Hannity called her a “so-called Bishop” who turned the service into a “woke tirade” and described her prayer “disgraceful” and filled with “fearmongering and division”. 

Yes, because we should deport Americans who express standard Christian values and use them to criticize us. FFS.
Budde said an interview with the New York Times that she felt her sermon offered a “perspective that wasn’t getting a lot of airtime right now” and a perspective of Christianity “that has been kind of muted in the public arena”.


“I wasn’t demanding anything of him. I was pleading with him, like, can you see the humanity of these people?
Following her sermon and the Trump response, the Episcopal Church as a whole has issued a "Statement on Creation Care," urging adherence to the Paris Agreement.

I'll leave comments open for a while, but if the thread devolves into a flame war, I'll close it.

Corny - but chuckleworthy

22 January 2025

A person leaves a nickel on their balcony...


Here's their report and a question:

I could be totally overthinking this. I have a small balcony facing a small wood. I have a few birdefeeders and I get all kinds of birds everyday. Basically, is it possible one of them pecked this perfect circle into my nickel?

I left it out there one day after seeing my first crow. That was a couple weeks ago and it didn't move at all til just a few days ago. I thought it may have been frozen to the deck. Eventually it had been moved and I noticed this hole! The back side seems to have the metal still present and folded over, I thought that might help confirm what had happened here. Anyone know how easily a bird could do this? Thanks!
The explanation was one that most readers of TYWKIWDBI could have predicted:
"A bird would not do that but it’s possible it took your nickel away and brought back another that it found.  I would continue to experiment."

Other replies:

"My crows brought me a bullet casing and a child’s Jack among other things they love shiny!"

"I had a murder of crows I left roasted peanuts (unsalted) and nickels out for. The nickels disappeared and one time, there was a very shiny dime and a silver gum wrapper in the spot where I fed them! Prized possessions."

"The Xmas tree fell a few years ago, and the string of beads broke.  Wife had the brilliant idea to put them and peanuts in a flower pot hung from a tree limb.  The crows rolled in.  I get gifts almost daily. Glasses, coins, beads, metal shot glasses, a car key to a jeep wrangler, dog tags, a medical alert bracelet, silver crosses, necklaces.  They hang out to see my reaction.  They harass the crap out of the local hawks, who think they want one of our chickens.  And, I might give them leftover hotdogs when I'm grilling."
I have heard of this, but never experienced it.  Our crows are gone for the winter, but I think this summer I'll leave out some shiny new nickels and see if they will exchange it for an old buffalo nickel or shield nickel.  Any reader experiences in this regard?

"Teen Paranormal Romance"


Posted at Reddit as "the newest for-real book section at Barnes & Noble."

When I initially encountered this, I dismissed it as rubbish, but based on a comment by a reader of this blog I've looked into it further and discovered that this may be a case where I jumped to a conclusion too quickly (a not-uncommon occurrence when blogging rapidly).

The category is explained in some detail at Wikipedia:
A type of speculative fiction, paranormal romance focuses on romance and includes elements beyond the range of scientific explanation, blending together themes from the genres of traditional fantasy, science fiction, or horror. Paranormal romance may range from traditional category romances, such as those published by Harlequin Mills & Boon, with a paranormal setting to stories where the main emphasis is on a science fiction or fantasy based plot with a romantic subplot included. Common hallmarks are romantic relationships between humans and vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts, and other entities of a fantastic or otherworldly nature.

Beyond the more prevalent themes involving vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts, or time travel, paranormal romances can also include books featuring characters with psychic abilities, like telekinesis or telepathy.

Paranormal romance has its roots in Gothic fiction.

A few paranormals are set solely in the past and are structured much like any historical romance novel. Others are set in the future, sometimes on different worlds. Still others have a time-travel element with either the hero or the heroine traveling into the past or the future...
Romance is not my cup of tea, but since I am a science fiction fan, I need to give this category its due.  For a deeper discussion of the genre from the viewpoint of someone in the publishing business, see "What is Paranormal Romance?" (pdf).

Thanks for the heads-up, Kirsten.

Reposted from 2010 (15 years ago!) to add a link to this story from the BBC:
Fans rush for hotly anticipated fantasy book sequel


Fans have queued up for Onyx Storm, the hotly anticipated new book by best-selling US fantasy author Rebecca Yarros, in one of the publishing events of the year.

"Onyx Storm is the third novel in Yarros's Empyrean series, set in a world of dragons, magic, warfare and steamy romance... In the US, some avid readers waited until 3am for the online release of an exclusive special edition from Target - but many who had stayed up complained on social media that the store's website couldn't cope with the demand...

In anticipation of Onyx Storm's release, the first two Empyrean books, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, went back to the top two slots in the New York Times fiction bestsellers list...
Our library has 76 copies of the book on order, and already 750 patrons have placed their names on the waiting list.  I'd be delighted to hear comments from readers about the first two books.

20 January 2025

President Eisenhower's farewell address (1961)



Wikipedia summary.

Best known for his precient comments on the military-industrial complex, the speech also cautions against mortgaging the future of our grandchildren for immediate gains:
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Fulltext here.

Related:  His Republican administration imposed a 91% marginal tax rate on millionaires, and in 1963 he opined that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary.

Reposted from 2019 because today I found a video in the National Archives discussing Eisenhower's role and intention in crafting the speech.  

Amazing science fact of the day: aquaporins


Some of the greatest migrations of living creatures on our planet occur in the oceans.  Most people are familiar with the "horizontal" migrations of whales, sardines, eels, and seabirds.  But other migrations occur "vertically," with creatures moving up to the surface in the daytime and retreating to darkness at night (or vice-versa).

Some of that migrating biomass consists of plankton, and some of those plankton are microplankton, which are single-celled and have no appendages.  Not only do they not have fins - they don't even possess cilia to move themselves around.  They are just single-cell balloons - and yet they have evolved the ability to move themselves vertically by several hundred meters in coordination with the dark/light cycle.  Ask the smartest person you know how a single-celled animal can propel itself in the open ocean and see if they can postulate a mechanism.

I heard the answer to this in an episode of my favorite science podcast - the BBC's Science in Action.  They offer a 30-minute summary each week of the newest developments in all of science - virology, space exploration, global warming, quarks, botany, anthropology, etc., via brief interviews with the researchers.  The link I've embedded discusses this plankton migration (from the 8- to 18-minute marks).

The key mechanism is that the organism adjusts its buoyancy by inflating itself to six times its deflated size (pix embedded above of a pair of small deep-water bioluminescent Pyrocystis noctiluca, and a pair showing their adjusted size near the ocean surface). 
Further investigation showed this expansion happens as a natural part of the plankton’s cell cycle. Once a single-celled plankton divides into two, an internal structure called a vacuole, a kind of flexible water tank, filters in fresh water, causing the two new cells to massively grow in size. These two daughter cells, now swelled with the lighter freshwater, sail upward. “What we realized is that this is a very clever way to essentially slingshot in the ocean during cell division,” Prakash says. “So, what happens during normal time? You’re making a lot of proteins, you have tons of sunlight, and you make a lot of biomass until you get heavier and you sink. Then, you do cell division in the deeper waters and use inflation to get back to the size of the mother.”
Note that the Pyrocystis is inflating itself with fresh water despite living in the ocean.  It amazes me that a single-celled organism has basically a desalination method.  And they do this without diluting their own cytoplasm.  Their cell membrane has aquaporins that transport water molecules without the dissolved ions.  

The links above are for the general public; the primary research was published in Current Biology.

Who makes up etiquette rules ?

Apparently I've been eating bread wrong my entire life.  I read something in a book recently that suggested that I have been departing from societal norms, so I looked it up.  Here's Rule #3:
"The only correct way to butter and eat your bread is to:
Using a knife, put a bit of butter on the side of your bread plate first;
Then, tear off one bite-sized piece of bread at a time and butter that piece only, right before putting it into your mouth.
Many people make the mistake of buttering the whole slice of bread and then biting into the slice."
I quite understand not to do any "communal dipping" into olive oil (Rule #7) (and not to double-dip nachos into the group salsa), but who determines that bread is placed on the left (Rule #2) and passed to the right (Rule #6), or that at formal/business dinners, bread should not be eaten until the first course is served (Rule #1).  

Hygiene and health-related rules are fine, but other prescriptivist dogma seems archaic and silly.  IMO.

"Touch" (2024 Icelandic film)


There are at least six movies and two series entitled "Touch" or "The Touch", so the title of this post specifies that I'm referring to the Icelandic movie released in 2024.
"Based on the Icelandic best-selling novel by Γ“lafur JΓ³hann Γ“lafsson, Touch is a romantic story that spans several decades and continents. Touch follows one widower’s emotional journey to find his first love who disappeared 50 years ago, before his time runs out."
This is easily the best movie I've watched in the past year.  The acting is superb, the cinematography beautiful, the storyline intriguing and ultimately satisfying.  It is currently streaming on Prime, probably with ads; I watched it without ads on Apple+TV.  The DVD is not in our library system yet.  

This film was chosen as the Icelandic entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, coming up in March of this year.  It has been shortlisted for that honor.

18 January 2025

Word for the day: steezy


As defined by the Urban Dictionary:
"A snowboarder term that combines the word "style" with "ease" to create the act of doing a trick with style and ease to make it done with super steez. A rider with steez, such as myself, would be referred to as "steezy" whether it be because of his/her sick tricks, gangster apparel, or watevs."
I was introduced to the word by my grandniece, so I'll illustrate it with her photo from her Facebook feed.  I will grant her some privacy by leaving her anonymous for the present, although her artistic skills were featured in TYWKIWDBI eleven years ago.

Those wishing to dive more deeply into the jargon might wish to explore REI's Snowboarding Glossary or Burton's Debatably Definitive Glossary of Snowboarding Terms and Slang, which says that steeze is "no longer widely used and is not considered "cool” in some circles" (and just when I've learned it...)

17 January 2025

"Invisible second patients"

 Most people know about this, but may not be aware of the extent or severity of the problem...
"Not long after his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Tom Lee picked up a book on caregiving, one of the many he’d devour in those early, frightening weeks, when the future felt suddenly impossible to imagine. Amid all the information and advice, he read a line that stopped him cold. “It said, make sure you take care of yourself, and leave at least 15 minutes to yourself every day,” he remembers. “I thought, 15 minutes? Are you kidding me? That’s not even enough time to open a book. When I read that, I really started to wonder what I was in for.”

He first noticed something was wrong in 2017, when Antoinette was 69. She started repeating questions and sometimes struggled to grasp complex ideas. For years, she’d done the couple’s taxes, but that fall, for the first time, she had trouble with the calculations. “I sat down with her, and we went over it a dozen times,” Lee says. “And she just couldn’t get it.” By the following summer, they had a diagnosis.

Six and a half years later, she is in what doctors refer to as mid-stage Alzheimer’s. “That’s when things start to really fall apart,” he says. Patients begin forgetting who they are and where they live. They become moody, withdrawn, combative. As their sleep and circadian rhythms unravel, patients sometimes stay up all night, requiring their caregivers to stay up, too. Routine tasks such as getting dressed become difficult without help, and speech gets more confused. “Toni went through a period where about two-thirds of her words were uninterpretable,” Lee says. “They were words she made up, and she would rhyme things as she spoke.” These days, almost nothing she says makes sense. “You ask her if she’s hungry, and ‘no’ could very well mean ‘yes.’” This middle period is also when patients begin to wander, or fall. One day last summer, Antoinette walked away while Lee was out watering tomatoes in the garden. He found her a quarter-mile down the road, talking to a neighbor’s mailbox.

“As a caregiver, you watch bit by bit as your time slips away,” he says, “and then one day you look up and realize that things you once took for granted, like finding an hour to read or listen to music or go for a run—all that’s gone. You become totally absorbed in caring for this person, making sure they are safe and secure and that their basic human needs are met.”

Across the country, there are more than 11 million people like Tom Lee: unpaid caregivers for someone with dementia. Usually, that someone is a family member or a loved one—the burden falls disproportionately on women—and the majority of caregivers spend one to three years in that role. Often they spend many more.

They are all part of an accelerating crisis. Nearly seven million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia. As the population ages, that number is growing—to a projected 13 million by 2050...
I have been a caregiver in similar circumstances (and the same precepts would apply to families who have children with special needs).   The difficulties are intense and unavoidable, and they push you to the boundaries of your compassion.  The discussion excerpted above continues at length in the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine

I will add that in my opinion, the people who have the power to effect changes in the system (executives in businesses, state and national congresspeople) tend to be wealthy and are able to turf these caregiving responsibilites on to paid helpers, and they have very little personal incentive to enact meaningful changes in the status quo.

Your living room couch is like a "block of gasoline"


Like everyone else, I've been reading the accounts of the fires in California, and have been amazed at the totality of the destruction.  This observation was quite striking:
Plastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum burns fast and hot. A retired Maryland state fire marshal told Newsweek that, from a fire perspective, a typical couch is akin to a block of gasoline... 
In 2020, the Fire Safety Research Institute set two living rooms on fire, on purpose. Both were identical in size and full of furnishings in an identical arrangement. But in one room, almost everything was synthetic: a polyurethane-foam sofa covered in polyester fabric sat behind an engineered-wood coffee table, both set on a polyolefin carpet. The curtains were polyester, and a polyester throw blanket was draped on the couch. In the other room, a wood sofa with cotton cushions sat on a hardwood floor, along with a solid-wood coffee table. The curtains and throw blanket were cotton. In the natural-material room, the cotton couch appeared to light easily, and then maintained a steady flame where it was lit, releasing little smoke. After 26 minutes, the flames had spread to the other side of the couch, but the rest of the room was still intact, if smoky. Meanwhile, in the synthetic room, a thick dark smoke rose out of the flame on the polyester couch. At just under five minutes, a flash of orange flame consumed the whole room all at once. “Flashover,” firefighters call it—when escape becomes impossible. In the natural-material room, flashover took longer than 30 minutes. Perhaps that difference helps explain why, although the rate of home fires in the U.S. has more than halved since 1980, more people are dying in their homes when they do catch fire.
The Newsweek link strongly urges readers to have automated sprinklers installed in their homes.

Embedded photo of Palisades fire residua, credit Noah Berger / AP, via The Atlantic.

15 January 2025

"Gated reverb" explained


In a Zoom session I attended this morning, one of the participants discussed "gated snare/gated reverb,"referring to a sound of the 1980s that was totally familiar to me, but using terminology I had not previously encountered.  A brief search led me to this video, which offers a concise and amply illustrated explication of the genesis and evolution of the sound and its technological basis.

13 January 2025

Why does this exist ? - updated with some answers


At Target recently I saw a display for holders for lip gloss that attach to the back of one's cellphone.

I don't use lip gloss but I understand that some people do, and that in some professions it may need to be reapplied frequently.  What I don't understand is why it would be stored on the back of a phone.  Perhaps for influencers taking selfies?  It seems distinctly odd, but it's not my generation, so perhaps someone can explain.

Addendum:  reader Nuray found an entire iPhone case with a lip gloss holder incorporated into it:


The one at Target is a glue-on, like a PopSocket.  I found an article at Vox that discusses the trend in lip gloss:
By all accounts, it seems like lip products have become more than just cheap, everyday essentials to mindlessly throw into your purse. In the post-pandemic era, where our mouths are unmasked most of the time, they’ve evolved into miniature status symbols for influencers and casual “makeup girlies” alike...

Lee notes another important selling point for lip augmentations: “Fuller lips are not only a feature of beauty; they’re also a sign of youth.”... Right now, Gen Z seems to be experiencing a collective crisis over looking old, which has resulted in an interest in so-called anti-aging skincare for many tweens. That said, it’s not a surprise that young people are running to lip products that offer color and a sheen but promise dermatological benefits...

Aside from the skincare aspect, there seems to be excitement among people on social media who collect these lip products in large numbers. MacKenzi Nelson, art director at beauty PR company Helen + Gertrude, says this current hoarding of lip gloss represents a pre-existing consumer trend....

Additionally, Nelson says that the “sensory” element of these products has a lot to do with their popularity, as they provide “a moment of ritualistic self-care, comfort, and play.” Li agrees with this sentiment, stating that the lip products are “definitely habit-forming.”...

Other brands, like Topicals, include their lip glosses alongside other items you would find in a wealthy person’s bag, like a Louis Vuitton wallet and a roll of cash, on their Instagram... Chanel’s foundation can range from $55 to almost $80, while its Rouge Coco Gloss retails at $40. Non-drugstore but not-exactly high-end brands like Rhode and Summer Fridays offer lip balms and oils are under $30...

In a moment of economic downturn and general doom about the world, it’s comforting to know that we can impulsively spend money on the latest it-girl item and delight in the same vain activities as Kylie Jenner or Hailey Bieber.

12 January 2025

Denmark's coat of arms includes an elephant


Denmark's coat of arms was in the news this past week because it has been redesigned.  
The Danish king has shocked some historians by changing the royal coat of arms to more prominently feature Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.

Less than a year since succeeding his mother, Queen Margrethe, after she stood down on New Year’s Eve 2023, King Frederik has made a clear statement of intent to keep the autonomous Danish territory and former colony within the kingdom of Denmark.

For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden.

But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear [upper blue arrow] and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.
There is some discussion of the geopolitics at The Guardian, but what interested me was the presence of an elephant [lower blue arrow] dangling from the coat of arms.  Had to look it up.  Turns out that is the Order of the Elephant.
The Order of the Elephant (Danish: Elefantordenen) is a Danish order of chivalry and is Denmark's highest-ranked honour. It has origins in the 15th century, but has officially existed since 1693, and since the establishment of constitutional monarchy in 1849, is now almost exclusively used to honour royalty and heads of state. 

The elephant and castle design derives from the howdah, a carriage that is mounted in the back of an elephant. This type of carriage was mostly utilized in the Indian subcontinent, and the Danish knew about and thus had the ability to adopt this design since they ruled certain parts of India as part of their small colonial empire. The unfamiliar Indian howdah has been replaced in this instance by a familiar European castle, although the Indian rider has been kept on the elephant.
Recipients of this award include Tycho Brahe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Niels Bohr, Sir Winston Churchill, and Nelson Mandela.

46,000 years old... and alive


I've annotated with a yellow star in the images above a rodent's nest, found underground in the permafrost of Siberia.  From that nest scientists isolated a roundworm (a nematode), which wiggled to life after being warmed.
Organisms from diverse taxonomic groups can survive extreme environmental conditions, such as the complete absence of water or oxygen, high temperature, freezing, or extreme salinity. The survival strategies of such organisms include a state known as suspended animation or cryptobiosis, in which they reduce metabolism to an undetectable level. Spectacular examples of long-term cryptobiosis include a Bacillus spore that was preserved in the abdomen of bees buried in amber for 25 to 40 million years, and a 1000 to 1500 years-old Lotus seed, found in an ancient lake, that was subsequently able to germinate. Metazoans such as tardigrades, rotifers, and nematodes are also known for remaining in cryptobiosis for prolonged periods. The longest records of cryptobiosis in nematodes are reported for the Antarctic species Plectus murrayi (25.5 years in moss frozen at -20°C), and Tylenchus polyhypnus (39 years desiccated in an herbarium specimen).
And the fact that the creature is parthenogenic raises other interesting aspects:
In summary, our findings indicate that by adapting to survive cryptobiotic state for short time frames in environments like permafrost, some nematode species gained the potential for individual worms to remain in the state for geological timeframes. This raises the question of whether there is an upper limit to the length of time an individual can remain in the cryptobiotic state. Long timespans may be limited only by drastic changes to the environment such as strong fluctuations in ambient temperature, natural radioactivity, or other abiotic factors. These findings have implications for our understanding of evolutionary processes, as generation times may be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages. This is particularly interesting in the case of parthenogenetic species, as each individual can find a new population without the need for mate finding, i.e. evading the cost of sex. Finally, understanding the precise mechanisms of long-term cryptobiosis and cues that lead to successful revivals can inform new methods for long term storage of cells and tissues.
Detailed information and discussion in the PLOS Genetics article (not behind a paywall).

10 January 2025

The movies of 2024


The YouTube source has a transcript of the audio, but I haven't yet found a time-stamped listing of the source movies.  I'd appreciate if someone can locate that.  Done by a couple readers; see their notes in Comments.

It's a long list, obviously, so I won't copy/paste the content here.  But it's easy to open this post in one window and open the comments in a second window [not tab] to view them side-by-side.

Addendum: My thanks to the readers for those lists.  I know it's crazy to choose movies based on 2-second-long clips, but after cross-checking the Rotten Tomatoes scores to weed out the under-80s, I found seven movies to watch.  

07 January 2025

Phrazle is a variant of Wordle


I just discovered Phrazle a couple weeks ago.  It is essentially a variant of Wordle that asks you to identify a phrase rather than a six-letter word.  For Wordle I developed a personal strategy that simplified the game to the point of rendering it not very challenging.   I decided to see if the same would apply to this one.

New Phrazles are offered every twelve hours, and each gives you six chances to guess the phrase.  Previously used phrases are compiled here; readers of The Guardian have complained that too many of the phrases are "Americanisms."  Solving a short phrase does require a bit of luck when you enter the first guess (I try to test the vowels first):

- and short phrases with repeating letters can also be difficult:


It is not necessary that your entry be an actual phrase, so in a long mystery phrase one has the opportunity to test a good proportion of the commonly-used letters -


Note that if you solve one of the words on the first try but don't know the whole phrase, you can use that space to test out other letters (see above).  Sometimes solving one word will reveal the answer, as in this case where the second word had to be "thick" -


The hardest one I have encountered was "Butterflies in my stomach" because only 11-letter words could be entered in the first spaces and I don't have a lot of those in my head.

The first time I played I failed because I was confused about the color rules, but after that it has been pretty easy...


I'm going to move on to other online games, but decided to post this for other wordsmith readers who might enjoy giving it a try.  Feel free to offer your own suggestions and data in the comments.

05 January 2025

Carl Sagan's foreboding (29 years ago)

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” 
-- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, 1996

Reposted from last year because it's so damn accurate and needs to be read more widely. 

03 January 2025

Surprisingly valuable collectible coin



It was graded "Poor" (grade 1) by PCGS - the lowest possible grade.  Normally coins are priced higher for higher grades from poor up to brilliant uncirculated and proof.  The odd valuation on this one is discussed in some Reddit comments: "Because it’s rad! Full of character - wholesome, as they say - it took years of honest wear for this coin to get this way, and for it to return so near to its original unstruck planchet, while still being recognizable as this exact year’s issue - is kind of special, rich in history."  "It doesn’t have the dings of being in commerce to me though. People will carry a coin special to them in their pocket every day and I’ve only seen a coin look that smooth from them doing that. And it takes a long time." "Think how rare it is for a coin to get just that amount of worn without also getting damaged...scratched, cleaned, environmental issues, rim dings."

I have numerous similar-quality Indian Head pennies, buffalo nickels, and Barber dimes, but sadly the same valuation criteria don't tend to apply.

Impressive dismount

Food for bears

Biologists estimate about 200 [grizzly] bears each year feast on moths in the eastern portion of the carnivores’ range. Each gram of moth offers bears about eight calories, which means some bears will eat up to 40,000 a day.

A bear could, in about a month’s time, get one-third of the calories they need to build up fat for hibernation at these moth sites,” says Frank van Manen, leader of the interagency grizzly bear study team with the US Geological Survey...

At a time when other food sources, such as whitebark pine nuts and cutthroat trout, have been hit by global heating, disease and invasive species, the army cutworm moth population has remained remarkably stable, making it a critical ingredient in the grizzly bears’ continued recovery in the US...

Researchers believe the army cutworm moth population remains healthy, and because they arrive from many locations as far east as the Missouri River and as far north as the Northwest Territories, no localized issue, such as pesticide use or flooding, can crash their populations..."
The story continues at The Guardian.  I was surprised at the long distances these small moths migrate.

Reposted from 2023 to accompany an adjacent new post.

"Grizzly bears are mostly vegan"

The title on The Atlantic article startled me, although I've actually blogged this fact before.
Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week. (The typical modern American, meanwhile, derives about a third of their daily calories from animal-based foods.) In the decades after colonizers began to introduce new settlements and animals to the West Coast, the bears probably did start eating more meat. And humans were likely the ones to blame.

California grizzlies, like most other brown bears, were never averse to eating meat. Chemical signatures in the skulls, teeth, and pelts of museum specimens, analyzed by Alagona and his colleagues, reveal that land animals made up just under 10 percent of the bears’ diet, even in the precolonial era—on par with the tastes of grizzlies elsewhere. (Marine meat made up less than 2 percent of the menus of the bears sampled.) And if modern brown-bear habits are any indication, what land animals the grizzlies were eating were probably mostly small, sluggish, newborn, or already dead. Grizzlies, for all their heft and roar, are kind of crummy hunters. “By and large, they’re just too slow,” Garth Mowat, a bear biologist at the University of British Columbia, told me.

Then, European colonists made meat-eating much, much easier—and perhaps more necessary. Livestock proliferated around California, many of them untended and unfenced. Indigenous populations dipped, which likely led to a bump in some wild-animal populations, Alagona told me. Swelling settlements thinned woodlands and pared back grasslands, potentially chipping away at the bears’ vegetarian menus. By the early 17th century, California grizzlies were probably eating quite a bit more meat—as Alagona’s team found, maybe nearly triple what they were consuming before.
The story continues at the link.  Check the other link for a report on bears eating 40,000 moths in a day.

Prehensile opossum tail useful for nest-making


A tip of my blogging hat to Marcie O'Connor at Prairie Haven for posting a video of an opossum gathering leaves for its nest using its prehensile tail (scroll down in the December journal entry).  Her video was captured using a motion-sensing night-vision camera, so I've embedded above a daylight version from the North Carolina Museum of Natural History.  Another video, from Manhattan (NYC) shows an opossum carrying its leaves up a tree to its nesting site.  I knew the tails were prehensile, but didn't know they were used for this purpose.

Pancake ice


It's truly amazing all the different forms ice can take.  Having spent much of my life in northern climates, I've seen many of them, but this photo (cropped for size) from The Guardian is my introduction to pancake ice (in eastern France).  You learn something every day.
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