Divertimento #197

An analysis of 50,000 punts in the NFL (2000-2018).  Begins with the Bears punting 10 times in one game (every time they had the ball).

Kratom is either a performance-enhancing herbal supplement or a lethal opioid.

"John Wayne’s racist comments, lack of World War II service resurface in heated Twitter debate."

A photo of a rhino with an "oxpecker Mohawk"

There is a beach in Thailand that nobody is allowed to touch.

Aerial photos from around the world show the sharp demarcation between the homes of rich and poor people.

The important distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.

The history and usage of the phrase "enemy of the people.' "The expression enemy of the people dates to Imperial Rome. The Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus in 68 CE. Its direct translation is "public enemy"... The words ennemi du peuple were used extensively during the French Revolution. On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated: "The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death".... Soviet Union... Cambodia... Albania... Nazi Germany... England... and Donald Trump.  "From his inauguration in January 2017 through October 15, 2019, Trump called the news media the "enemy of the people" 36 times on Twitter."

In major league there are now (1919) more foul balls than balls hit in play.

There is a subreddit devoted to insanepeopleFacebook entries.

A brief explanation of intermittent fasting.

Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum: "Over two decades of marriage, author Charles Dickens grew more popular and powerful, while his wife Catherine bore ten children. Charles apparently grew tired of Catherine, and blamed her for having ten children and also accused her of not taking good care of them. The couple separated after Dickens' affair with 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan was revealed. Catherine was compelled to leave the family home with only one of her children. More details of the breakup were revealed when a caches of letters was discovered at Harvard University. The stories she told her neighbors portray Dickens as cruel as one of his literary villains."

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century."

An anti-vaxxer Texas legislator says he is not concerned about the rise of measles and other viral diseases because we no have antibiotics.

"Toledo voters passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, a unique charter amendment that establishes the huge lake as a person and grants it the legal rights that a human being or corporation would have.  The final results weren’t even close, as it passed by a 61% to 39% margin."

A new and unusual disease in Africa is afflicting children.

"An ‘emotional support’ pit bull mauled a 5-year-old girl in an airport terminal."

"It's interesting growing up and learning that most adults are not smart."

A striking visual display showing the effect of mussels on cleaning the water in a stream.

A long longread about the history of arsenic poisoning.

Cows are fed magnets to collect metal particles they might ingest.  Cows also tend to face north...

An askscience subreddit thread discusses coronal mass ejections.

In defense of the funds expended on space exploration.

"At the height of the Empire, a select band of British people renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. These are the stories of three such pioneers, who defied Victorian norms at a time when Christianity was the bedrock of British identity."

The discovery of a human footprint in Chile from 15,600 yeas ago indicates settlement in Patagonia long before Clovis.

A graphic illustration of the popular perception of the ethnicity of Jesus Christ.

"Bill-wiping is not the hottest topic in ornithology, but curiosity has drawn the occasional researcher to the behavior over the years. Although they haven’t arrived at a definite, universal explanation, we can summarize their reports on the role of bill-wiping this way: It definitely acts like a napkin, probably as a file, and maybe even as a cologne spritzer."

"Should 11-year-old girls have to bear their rapists’ babies?" (2019 article)

A history of cannabis cuisine in British colonial India.

A poster from the BasketballsAreFlat society.

A history of contaminated water at the White House, and its possible role in the deaths of three American presidents.

"Public enemy No. 1 for corn and soybean farmers, the Palmer amaranth weed, has made new incursions into Minnesota by way of livestock feed. .. This is bad news for corn and soybean farmers, both because the weed grows and proliferates quickly and because it is resistant to multiple herbicides. It can grow up to 8 feet tall with a woody stem thick enough to damage farm equipment that tries to mow it down... The weed, which grows up to 3 inches a day and can produce a half-million seeds per plant..." (photo at the link)

"Last month, the Swiss unveiled a smart new banknote to stash in their wallets. The purple 1,000 franc bill was the latest in the Swiss National Bank (SNB) series to undergo a revamp. And this is no ordinary note, it’s one of the world’s most valuable banknotes, worth around 880 euros ($1,007, £764)... In Switzerland, cash remains the dominant payment method. Here, there’s an assumption everyone carries cash, even in an increasingly digital economy. Most don’t get caught out buying a sandwich or paying for a haircut when the card payment machine is out of order."

"The archive [of Gabriel Garcia Marquez] includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. It was bought by the University of Texas for US$2.2 million.  The searchable, online archive features almost 30,000 items, so it’s easy to get lost in there."  And its free to use.

"Combining both brains and brawn, orcas have been known to kill sharks in surprisingly complicated ways. Some will drive their prey to the surface and then karate chop them with overhead tail swipes. Others seem to have worked out that they can hold sharks upside-down to induce a paralytic state called tonic immobility. Orcas can kill the fastest species (makos) and the largest (whale sharks). And when they encounter great whites, a few recorded cases suggest that these encounters end very badly for the sharks."

A Reddit thread discusses education in India following a report that 19 teenagers in India committed suicide after a softwar error botched their exam results.

Photos and videos of Freddie Mercury and his cats.

A story about Walt Disney's housekeeper.

"I dug through the privacy settings for the five biggest consumer tech companies and picked a few of the most egregious defaults you should consider changing. These links will take you directly to what to tap, click and toggle for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple."

"Italian police have arrested 34 people allegedly involved in a "bone-breaking" medical insurance scam in Palermo, Sicily.  The perpetrators allegedly broke people's limbs and staged road accidents in exchange for part of their insurance payout... The victims were anaesthetised with drugs and had their limbs held on blocks of stone or cement, which were hit with bags of weights or large rocks... Among those arrested are doctors and physiotherapists who allegedly filed false medical reports, and a lawyer who filed the insurance claims."

Don't wear mirrored glasses when you play poker.

"TIL light bulbs in the New York City subway system screw in "backwards" (i.e. with left-handed threads) so people won't steal them to use at home."

A list of works of fiction involving time travel.

"Cleopatra was born ~2,500 years after the Great Pyramid at Giza was built, and ~2,000 years before the first lunar landing. That fact means that Cleopatra is closer to our present time than to the times of Ancient Egypt's early dynastic past."

A suprising lot of things happen when you check "I am not a robot."

Escalators can be designed to be curved.

How to evaluate and grade sea glass.

If you're wondering about the workload and pay for Pat Sajak and Vanna White...

The smearing of Ilhan Omar (2019 article but probably still relevant)

Some Antarctic icebergs are green because they are heavily laden with iron.  "Writing Jan. 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Ocean, Warren and his colleagues report that the marine ice at the bottom of the Amery Ice Shelf has 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above. This iron comes from the rocks under the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which are ground into a fine powder as glaciers move over them."  This iron gets delivered to phytoplankton in the ocean that need it for nutrition.

A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in China: "The creatures are so well preserved in the fossils that the soft tissues of their bodies, including the muscles, guts, eyes, gills, mouths and other openings are all still visible. The 4,351 separate fossils excavated so far represent 101 species, 53 of them new."

A longread about cast iron skilets and the misconceptions about them.

"Meaning ‘atlas’ or ‘sheet of the world’ in Latin, the Mappa Mundi is an incredibly detailed 1.59m-long by 1.34m-wide map depicting the history, geography and religious understanding of the known world from the point of view of 13th-Century European scholars."

“We can be proud to say that, for the first time in 400 years, Manneken Pis is not peeing out fresh drinking water. The municipality is now intent on inspecting all the centrally located fountains to avoid similar waste.”

A complete list of the winners of the Costa Book Award.

A photograph of scalping survivor Robert McGee.

How to make leech traps.

"Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed.  The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure to treat patients who need critical and timely care."

"Padding is the extra time airlines allow themselves to fly from A to B. Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays experienced for decades into their schedules instead of improving operations."

"When a young Taiwanese woman named He took herself to a hospital this week complaining of a swollen eye, she expected to be treated for a simple infection.  Instead, the 29-year-old and her doctor were horrified to discover four bees living under her eyelids, feasting on her tears."

What is Michael J. Fox's middle name?  (scroll down to "early life").

Three tips for making a better cake from a mix in a box.

Woman eats 86 ounces of mayonnaise in 3 minutes.

Butterflies puddling.

Embedded images from the The New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons (Knopf, 1992).