Divertimento #196

"Her most popular videos by far are about vaginal lightening, which involves using a specialized treatment to lighten the vulva or general bikini area. (It does not, as the term would seem to imply, lighten the vagina itself, which is located on the inside of the body.) Most practitioners treat the labia majora, or the external lips of the vulva; many people request lightening the labia minora, or inner lips, as well, though this is not recommended and many practitioners will not do it.  In her practice, Taub estimates that she gets four or five requests for the treatment per day; in terms of the popularity of the services she offers, she says it is a “50-50” split between vaginal lightening and laser hair removal."

An extended explanation of what it means when you start seeing "floaters" in your eyes.

In 2018 the NFL was entering the "golden age of punters", who "are now neutralizing and terrorizing the most electric return men in the NFL with kicks that spin and move and bounce and flip in all sorts of unpredictable, terror-inducing ways."

The life of a professional (licensed) safecracker.  "Charlie Santore was not arrested by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office that day, and he did get the safe open. It would also prove to be the first of many such calls, as more and more homeowners in the burn zone would return to discover nothing but a safe standing where a long-cherished family house used to be. Their belongings had been reduced to whatever was locked inside that box. Santore was there to help them retrieve those possessions, rolling up in his sagging Mercedes, ready to get to work."

“Wonder Woman” follows a long line of Jewish ties to comic book characters. Many superheroes were created by Jews, according to Haaretz, including Superman, Captain America, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Ironman, the X-Men, Thor and the Avengers. Since daily newspapers in the 1930s would not accept illustrations by Jews, Haaretz reports, many Jews found a home in comic book publishing.

4,400-year-old Egyptian tomb opened; walls covered with painted sculptures and figures.

The odd and unexplainable side effects of head trauma ("why some people become sudden geniuses").

Accumulated hippo feces create lethally anoxic water that kills all aerobic life in it.  The same article notes that "migrating wildebeest nourish the Serengeti by drowning en masse in the Mara, adding about 1,100 tons of dead meat to the river every year."  This is an Ed Yong article.

While writing the above entry I learned that the word "feces" is a plurale tantum - a noun that exists only in the pleural sense.  That's worth a full post in the blog.  Later.

How to "game the system" for recharging electric scooters.

The harsh life of musk oxen - including burial by an ice tsunami.

On Friday, J.K. Rowling's Pottermore, the official online companion compendium for all things Harry Potter, revealed another surprising tidbit that threw fans for a Quidditch loop. "Hogwarts didn't always have bathrooms," the tweet in question reads. "Before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the eighteenth century, witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence."  Also discussed here.

Jacqueline Ades sent a man more than 159,000 text messages — some of which were threatening — over the course of nearly 10 months...The two went on a single date... One text read: "I'd make sushi outta ur kidneys n chopsticks outta ur hand bones."

A longread about how genetic information is implemented.  "“The modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong … DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system … DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.” "This explains why humans seem to have only a few more genes than flies or mice (around 20,000), while a carrot has 45,000! There is no correlation between the complexity of living things and the number of genes they have. But there is a correlation with the evolving complexity of regulatory networks. Counting genes to understand the whole is like judging a body of literature by counting letters. It can’t be done."

"Scary" formatting of a church sign.

BBC article has photos of an unfortunate carpet python in Australia covered with 500 ticks.

A sports op-ed opining that in football "Kickers exist mostly so coaches will have someone to blame when they lose a close game," and suggesting that field goals should be reduced to one point.

If you rob a bank, don't make your getaway on an electric scooter.

"Saturn's rings are only 10 to 100 million years old. This is much younger than the planet itself, which is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old."  So the first dinosaurs and mammals on earth, had they looked up, would not have seen rings on Saturn.

"Europeans have found the secret to making some of the world's costliest medicines more affordable, as much as 80 percent cheaper than in the U.S.  Governments in Europe have compelled drugmakers to bend on prices and have thrown open the market for so-called biosimilars, which are cheaper copies of biologic drugs made from living organisms. The brand-name products — ranging from Humira for rheumatoid arthritis to Avastin for cancer — are high-priced drugs that account for 40 percent of U.S. pharmaceutical sales.  European patients can choose from dozens of biosimilars, 50 in all, which have stoked competition and driven prices lower. However, the U.S. government stops short of negotiating and drugmakers with brand-name biologics have used a variety of strategies — from special contracting deals to overlapping patents — to block copycat versions from entering the United States or gaining market share."

An allergy to corn can make your life a living hell, because it is in so many foods and non-food.products.

"Veterinarian school is costly. Recent studies conducted by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the industry’s largest nonprofit advocacy entity, show that the average veterinary student now graduates with $143,000 or more in debt; about 1 in 5 leave school with more than $200,000 to pay off. Veterinary salaries — which start at about $67,000 a year — aren’t keeping pace with rising tuition rates."  Many vets commit suicide.  "Another key driver of this suicide crisis: Veterinarians are consistently asked to act as animal undertakers. Euthanizing animals can cause what a recent study referred to as ethical conflict and moral distress, which arises when vets are forced to put aside their expert opinions and accept pet owners’ decisions about if and when to put their animals down. More so, this proximity to death makes dying seem like a reasonable way to ease suffering."

Very unfortunate optics of a cereal promotion.

Australian woman bitten in the nether regions by a carpet python that was in her toilet bowl.  A good reminder to look in the bowl before sitting down.  Pix at the link.

“Unlike most other hard liquors, tequila doesn’t spike your blood sugar, which means even people with type 2 diabetes can drink it — in fact, it may even lower glucose levels and increase insulin production.”  I doubt that's true, but haven't researched it.

"...at least 1,000 women and girls in the UK had been subjected to [breast ironing]... whereby mothers, aunties or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth."

"But St. Louis prosecutors on Friday evening came to a different conclusion. The [police] officers, they say, were playing a deadly game — pointing a gun with one round in the chamber at each other and then pulling the trigger.

Police departments seize money and don't return it.  "When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana. So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it." "Police are systematically seizing cash and property — many times from people who aren’t guilty of a crime — netting millions of dollars each year. South Carolina law enforcement profits from this policing tactic: the bulk of the money ends up in its possession."

"Consistent with other analyses, Hiya’s report found that the number of robo-calls is on the rise. Roughly 26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, Hiya said, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam."

"The complete 14 Batman window cameos"

Many, many Americans do not understand how tax brackets work.

"The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said nearly 40 percent of children ages 3 to 6 used more toothpaste than recommended by dental professionals. For young children with emerging teeth, swallowing too much fluoride toothpaste can cause discoloration of their teeth, a condition called dental fluorosis."

"In fact, if you’ve been eating breakfast to stave off weight gain, researchers are increasingly learning that breakfast might have the opposite of the desired effect — it can promote more calorie consumption and weight gain. But even the best available studies in the mix have serious limitations.  Before we get into what the science says, it’s worth understanding how the myth of breakfast was created..."

Genealogical relationships of Presidents of the United States.  Some second- , third- , and fourth-cousins in the early years.  But Warren G. Harding is ninth cousin to both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.  Trump is related to three previous presidents, and Obama to five.

"A 24-year-old man in Fort Worth, Texas has died after a vape pen he was using exploded in his face and severed an artery to his brain"

The best article I've read on kleptocracy (written in 2019, but prob has increasing relevance today.

A home-made water-cooled 72,000 LED flashlight.  Video compares it to a 500-lumen flashlight.

Bumper stickers of a crazy sociopath.

A composite image of 100 vulvas.  "Vulvas are rarely seen outside porn and childbirth, which Dodsworth puts down partly to their position on the body. “Cocks are right there at the front. They are visible, whereas vulvas aren’t. If you’re a straight woman, you don’t see many.” And, as she writes in her book, they’re not easy to look at: “Let’s be honest, it’s tricky to witness our vulvas for ourselves, legs awkwardly astride pocket mirrors, bums shuffled up close to full-length mirrors, or taking a selfie with the unflattering lens of a smartphone.”

A young girl achieving her Make A Wish with a Disney princess.

"The healthcare industry has for decades attributed widespread understaffing issues to a nursing shortage... But according to research and projections conducted by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, most states have nurse surpluses that are projected to grow over the next decade. Instead, nurses’ advocates say, the shortage is simply a reluctance by companies to cut profit margins by hiring enough staff. “It’s a convenient argument for the industry to validate their underresourcing of registered nurses on the floor, simply saying there’s a nursing shortage, but there isn’t,” said Michelle Mahon, nursing practice representative and organizer with National Nurses United, the largest labor union of registered nurses in the US. “It’s a market decision that benefits the employer,” she added."

An account of the massive carnage resulting from an "inland cyclone" in Queensland in 2019.

A 2019 op-ed criticized Democratic party officials for trying to silence Ilhan Omar, whose "foreign policy views are far more in line with voters than the disconnected party establishment."

An octopus can kill a shark by suffocating it.

A BBC article on "fish pirates." “Approximately 20% of all global catch is illegal, unreported or unregulated,”... And the impacts are widespread, hurting the fish stocks themselves, the fishing industry and consumer trust. “If illegal fishing ultimately could result in stocks collapsing, this will then affect the livelihood of fishers across the globe.”

The embedded images are from a Smithsonian article on How Microbiologists Craft Stunning Art Using Pathogens. Details at the link.

And having read through all these links, what will you do with your newfound knowledge?