A Twixmas present

The week between Christmas and New Years may be a festive period, but the garbage bin still needs to be wheeled out to the roadside.  We've had recent snow and ice, so I needed reliable traction, and when I put my left foot into a galosh*, I felt something under my sock.  Expecting a curled shoelace there, I was surprised to find instead a food stash.

Expecting the items to be seeds from the crabapple tree, I was surprised again when I looked more closely and realized they were kernels of corn -

- and was triply surprised because there are no corn kernels in our birdseed stash (which in any case is kept in a tightly sealed container).  The colors of the kernels led me to the source -

- colorful "Indian corn" we had used for years as front door Thanksgiving decorations had been meticulously harvested.

There was no doubt about the identity of the culprit.  The unanswered question was - why were they placed in the galosh?  We have a typical American suburban garage - that is to say one that it is littered with (first world problem) lots of stuff, including lawn and garden equipment, plants in containers overwintering, cartons of odds and ends that can tolerate low temps in the winter.  Lots of nooks and crannies.  So why did Mrs. mus musculus choose to traverse the floor, climb (probably along the zipper) of my galosh and drop the corn kernels there?

Factoring in the number of kernels missing from the cobs I have to assume there are other stashes elsewhere in the garage, probably not to be found by me until springtime.  So I can only conclude that the placing of corn in the galosh is not storage for her, but is a gift to me in the traditional European fashion of the Custom of the Shoes.  She apparently is deeply appreciative of our providing her with a non-freezing garage as a "shelter from the storm."  And she is offering me the corn perhaps not for my consumption, but rather as a not-too-subtle hint to "plant more of these please."

And so the year comes to an end on a pleasant note.

* had to look it up.  Perhaps the first and last time in my life I will ever use the singular form (from Middle English galoche, from Old French galoche (“shoe with a wooden sole”).

"Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global"

This is one of the three best books I read in 2025 (the others being Orbital and Playground).  As the title indicates, this book elucidates in extensive but clear detail how one early proto-language radiated from the area north of the Black Sea outward toward what is now Europe and southeast into what is now the Indian subcontinent.

An analysis like this requires more than just linguistic skills.  Understanding the processes involved requires familiarity also with the anthropology of the movements of people, their occupations, their trading networks, their social behaviors, and also an understanding of archaeological findings, including DNA extracted from ancient bones. The author, Laura Spinney, is not a professional linguist, anthropologist, or archaeologist.  Instead (and presumably for the better), she is a professional science writer, able to compress immense volumes of information into a form suitable for the general public.  After reading this book, I immediately placed a request at our library for her previous work - Pale rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world.

The book is interspersed with excellent maps clarifying the locations of peoples and languages (two of which I am embedding).  I can't summarize all of the text, but here are some salient excerpts (my transcription will lack the umlauts and diacritic marks on some words):

"Now, eight billion humans speak arouind seven thousand languages.  Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian... If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known... Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European." (11)

"The suggestion [in 1786] that an archaic link existed between Europe and the Orient electrified the public imagination... there was awe to be had in gazing upon Latin-Sanskrit word pairs like domus-dam (house or home), deus-deva (god), mater-mata (mother), pater-pita (father), septem-sapta (seven) and rex-raja (king).  Or in comparing the first three numbers in German (eins-zwei-drei), Greek (heis-duo-treis) and Sanskrit (ekas-dvau-trayas)..." (15)

"... when the future emperor Hadrian addressed the Senate around 100 CE, the senators mocked his Spanish accent (he was born in what is now the Spanish province of Seville).  The fragmentation of Latin was underway, but Hadrian still spoke recognisable Latin rather than an early version of Spanish..." (25)

"The catfish of the Dnieper were up to two and a half metres or over eight feet in length, and three hundred kilogrammes - over six hundred pounds - in weight... They are wels catfish, where wels, the common name of the species in German, shares a root with English 'whale'." (37)

"As in the Balkans, people used fleeces to pan for gold in those mountain streams.  It was in Georgia, in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, that the Greek mythological hero Jason found the golden fleece..." (56)

"A word meaning 'star'... shines steadily through all its descendants.  Waypoint for night travellers since all humans were African, it was known to Sogdian merchants on the camels as stare, to homebound Odysseus as aster, and to Icelanders fishing for herring after dark as stjarna." (77)

"... migrants had radiated east and west from the steppe around five thousand years ago, and in Europe their ancestry had replaced up to ninety per cent or more of the gene pool... No later movement had anything like their genetic, cultural or linguistic legacies: not the massive migrations set in train by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not the displacements that followed the Black Death, the 1918 flu or either of the world wars.  Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe." (102)

"The core vocabulary of Tocharian was clearly inherited from Proto-Indo-European.  You can see that in these Tocharian B - Latin - English triplets:  pacer-pater-father, macer-mater-mother, procer-frater-brother, and ser-soror-sister.  Or in the Tocharian B words for 'cow' (keu), 'ox' (okso) and 'to milk' (Malk)." (127)

"The yearning for a better world is alive and well and as doomed to disappointment as it ever was (the word 'utopia' contains that disappointment within it, since it means 'nowhere') (140)

"Like the Greeks, the Etruscans and Italic-speakers wrote from right to left at first.  Later they went through a phase called boustrophedon or 'ox-turning', when a line written right to left alternated with one written left to right, until they plumped definitively for left to right." (146)

[note the four major rivers emptying into the Black Sea all begin with the letter D] "An Iranic word for 'river' was danu, which is the root of both Don and Danube.  Dniester comes from Danu nazdya, 'river to the front'. and Dnieper from Danu apara, 'river to the rear'.  These names were the legacy of the Scythians... One remnant of the Scythians survived, however, by retreating to the safety of the Caucasus.  Their modern descendants, the Ossetians, call 'water' don."

"Smok or Zmij, or Zmei or Zmaj, depending on which Slavic-speaking country you happen to be in, is the archetypal serpent, denier-of-life, and any resemblance you may notice to J.R.R. Tolkien's dragon Smaug is not coincidental.  Tolken was a philologist... There was actually a Proto-Indo-European word, smeuk that probably meant 'to slide' or 'glide', and if the Slavic dragon names are derived from it then they are living exhibits of taboo deformation - the phenomenon whereby taboo words [names of Gods you are not allowed to speak] are rapidly recycled through euphemism and circumlocution." (230)

Page 264 includes an interesting discussion of shibboleths (words or phrases, the pronunciation of which identify nationalities or ethnicities), which I don't have time to retype.  See also this list of shibboleths.

BTW, it's also useful to at least browse the endnotes, where I discovered that "Some Indo-European languages do without a word for 'one' entirely.  If there is only one of something, after all, you hardly need to count it.  Old Irish did have a word for 'one' (oen), but if a person wanted to say 'one cow' they would just say the word for 'cow'. 

The book concludes with this language tree:

This will not be a book for everybody.  It will delight those with a general intellectual curiosity, but will be TMI for the casual reader.  On the other hand, it's easy to skim over the parts where the details are beyond one's personal needs or interests.  For those TL;DR people, I would encourage reading the excellent "Introduction" and the equally excellent "Conclusion" chapters.  The latter closes with this observation:

"Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic 'purity' a justification used by those who want to raise walls.  Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants.  It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died."

Centuripe

I previously posted an aerial image of this Italian mountaintop community about five years ago, but this evening image enhanced by city lights is much more impressive (click to embiggen).

This image (credit Fabrizio Villa / Getty), was one of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic. 

"Architectron" looks like a fascinating movie

"Coming soon."  I generally enjoy movies made by A24.  I'll do a proper review when it arrives.

The "Thinker of Hemangia"

I had not heard about this sculpture until I recently read about it in a book about the history of language (which I'll blog later).  Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

The Thinker of Hamangia (Romanian: Gânditorul de la Hamangia), also known as Thinker of Cernavodă or collectively The Thinker and the Sitting Woman, is an archaeological artefact, specifically a terracotta sculpture. This ancient Neolithic figurine is believed to date back to the Hamangia culture, which existed in what is now Romania around 5,000 BC...

The Thinker figurine is made of fired clay and depicts a person seated with their chin resting on one hand, suggesting deep contemplation. The figurine is 4.5 inches (11 cm) tall. This posture unmistakably conveys a meditative disposition, which led to its name, The Thinker, drawing inspiration from Rodin's renowned sculpture of a similar name. The recent finding of the "thinking" man seems to argue for the existence of a developed ideology of some type in this period, while it is impossible not to refer us to similar timeless types, such as the Karditsa Thinker of the Neolithic era, Thinker from Yehud of the Middle Bronze Age II, or even to the Pensive Christ in modern times.

The Sitting Woman, on the other hand, assumes a contemplative posture by placing both hands on a single leg while sitting directly on the ground, without the use of a chair. Her left leg extends outward, her right leg is bent, her hips are distinctly delineated, and her facial expression is equally evocative..."

Interesting to me both for the artistic styling and the extreme age.  For a quick review there is a Wikipedia page for the 5th millennium BC to brush up on what was happening around the world at that time.

Related: Rodin's "Thinker" reinterpreted

Rodin's "Thinker" reinterpreted

An excerpt of a poem by W. H. Auden offers a different viewpoint of Rodin's iconic work:

Lifted off the potty,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.

Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool. 

The full text of his The Geography of the House is here. And we can't resist adding that even the Wikipedia entry describes the figure as "a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle."

Via The Dish.

Reposted from 13 years ago to accompany a new post.

An interesting side effect of piercing

The pale region "fades in and out during the day."  You can read an informed discussion in the comment thread at the piercing subreddit.

A collective holiday greeting to and from the readers of TYWKIWDBI

"Three suns are better than won! On two, the New Year!" - Skeetmotis

Happy Holidays & Merry New Year - from Dutch !

Greetings, all, from my right arm: on a sunny Jan day in southern Spain. - alecartuja

Merry Christmas from Canada. - James Colter

 In '26 may we rest as peaceful as a Galapagos sea lion on a park bench. - Erin

May the good vibes you give, be returned ten-fold. - The Slide Guy

Seasons Greetings from Professor Batty at Flippism is the Key

Seasons Greetings, however one celebrates! - Martia in Espana

"Laughing all the way!" Have a Merry Merry - Bulletholes

Hang in there. We will make it through. (Redwood Scout)

Merry Christmas from the Gulf Coast of Texas. - Reese Vaughn

Cold air. Warm hearts. Loud sweaters.  Presence > presents.

Merry Everything!  Tina, Jeremy, Josephine & Coco

Loki, resident prankster in the TYWKIWDBI household, 

will come out if next year is better.

I can add more if you will submit a phrase and a photo to the Comments section for this post...

Our cats love christmas for the tree or the tree-skirt, idk which. Merry Merry! - Dave J

Today I learned I should poke the eyes out of dead fish

I encountered the above image on the interestingasfuck subreddit, apparently a sign at a fish-cleaning station at a resort or motel.   I thought it might be a joke, but apparently not.  This was one explanation offered:

"So the eyeballs are buoyant. Might be the eyeballs themselves, but someone said gas builds up behind the eyes in the sockets after the fish dies, but either way, once you take all the filet meat off the fish and toss other scraps, the bony carcass with intact eye balls float. Stabbing the eyeballs makes that carcass sink.

Why do we care about that?

Because floating carcasses tend to decompose on the surface, produce smells, and attract more birds for longer periods of time. This is very unpleasant for anyone living, working, or spending leisure around that dock area. Sinking the carcasses forces the decomposition to happen underwater and feed underwater ecosystems, like other fish, crabs, etc. This is generally good for the water ecosystem and prevenrs smelly carcasses and overzealous gulls and pelicans from swarming the areas, also creating more bird poo, noise, and smells."

All of that makes sense.  When I was a kid and my dad cleaned walleyes at the dock, all of the scraps were just left on the shore for land-based carnivores and eagles and other raptors, or tossed in shallow water by the shore.  Perhaps the need for eye-piercing is more relevant at resorts used by large numbers of fishermen.

Addendum:  The best comment in the thread at the link was by "pop rocks" :

"Do they become Fsh?"

Addendum:  I submitted the post to a family member who runs a campground in northern Minnesota.  This was her reply:

"I think it is illegal to dump minnows and dead fish into the lake.  Plus, It's a major operation to dispose of fish guts.  For years,  we used to collect it in big buckets and hauled it out to the woods in the back of an old, stinky truck.  Then the DNR told us we could not do that anymore.    Now, we need to freeze the fish guts after filleting the fish. We keep a deep freeze in the fish cleaning area up at the bath house. Early on monday mornings,  we need to dump the frozen fish guts into the big garbage dumpster for pick up.  The garbage man only accepts frozen fish guts.    Alternatively,  we have campers who frequently take the frozen fish gut bags home for their garden compost.  " 

This is a "timeout box" in an elementary school

As reported in The New York Times:

It has ignited an uproar in the school system, the Salmon River Central School District, a small district with 1,300 students on the Canadian border.

Within days, the school board enlisted a law firm to investigate what happened. It reassigned the district’s superintendent to “home duties” until the review is completed. And it placed several other leaders on leave, including a principal and the district’s special education director.

Officials also revealed that the box depicted in the social media post was not the only one: Two others had been installed in schools, according to the superintendent. They have been removed.

Images brightened and cropped for size from the originals at the link, where there is additional information and commentary.

Planning a collective holiday greeting card

Reposted to remind readers there is still time to offer greetings and pix to fellow readers.  I'll plan to post the submissions sometime between Christmas and New Year's.

I first tried this in December of 2009 as a Christmas card, then revived the concept in 2017 and again in 2018 as a New Year's endeavor.

Here are the instructions on how to participate:

1) In the comment section of THIS post, give me a LINK to a photo (or a bit of artwork or other image) that you have in your blog, or in your Flickr photostream or in some other online storage site that I can access. I'd prefer that you not email me the photo - just give the link and I'll go there and copy/paste it.* (but see addendum)

The picture can be of you, or your family, or your computer, or your cat, or whatever - it doesn't matter.  It should belong to you (not a commercial image with copyright issues).

2) With the photo link send a brief (~25 words) greeting, directed to the other readers and visitors.  This is to be a greeting to other readers, not a comment to me or about TYWKIWDBI.

3) Sign with the avatar name you use in commenting here, or in your blog, or your real name if you wish. This is not a venue to be used to say "Hi from anon."  I recognize that a number of readers here prefer to leave comments anonymously - which is fine - but this greeting card is for identifiable people.

Note - as various trolls have realized, for TYWKIWDBI I am the "autocrat at the breakfast table" and reserve absolute right to control the content.  For this venture I may edit comments for length and trim pictures if they are too big.  I may limit the number of entries if there are too many, and I will absolutely vaporize anything that hints of spam or might be offensive to other readers.

And it doesn't need to be "Christmasy" - this will be posted after Christmas as a New Year's greeting, so it can celebrate the end of the past year or express hope about the one to come.  But mostly it's just to say "hi" to other readers whose names you have seen in the comments.

*Addendum: I realize that not everyone has online places to store photos, so once again I will let you email me a photo/text/name if you have no other option.  You can send it to the blog's address: retag4726(at)mypacks.net.  

I'm looking forward to seeing what arrives.  This was last year's collective greeting.

Reposted from 2021 because collective greetings and good wishes are more necessary now than ever before.  Please note this feature is only for readers/commentors with established identities.  I know some readers prefer to click the "anonymous" button when writing a comment for privacy reasons, but I encourage you if you log in anonymously to establish some kind of identity by signing your comments with a cryptic identity ("old lady in Peoria", "the guy with two bicycles" or whatever).

This was the holiday greeting for December 2021.

Here is the one from 2022.

Listening to auroras

Well done and quite interesting.  Amazing that in the Sami region of northern Finland there are auroras 150 nights per year.

People having fun singing "Creep"

I've posted multiple versions of Creep in the past, so this might be a duplicate, but if so it's worth redoing because of the joy visible in the crowd - an emotion sadly seen too seldom nowadays.

Alexis conquers the hurdles - includes also the Scala Choir version.

Radiohead's Creep animated.

Creep covered by Chrissie Hynde/The Pretenders

Creep - featuring Donald Trump's "Walk of Shame"

and a reader sent me a link to a "bardcore" [medieval] version.

Children having fun with music

"El Cumbanchero" is a classic (1943) piece of Latin music whose title roughly translates as "party animal."  Lots of previous covers, including one by Liberace.

Monteggia fracture

A 26-year-old woman with elbow pain after falling on her outstretched hand while ice skating.  The radiograph shows a dislocated radial head and a fracture of the proximal ulna.  There are a few details on differential diagnosis and treatment at Wikipedia.

Valuable dollar bill

Potential value discussed in the currency subreddit thread.  I've never paid much attention to the serial numbers of bills that pass through my hands.  Perhaps I should start.

Addendum:  Suggestions from an anonymous reader -

"Don't forget about the duplicate printing of the 2013 B $1 star note. There are millions of them out there, it's just a matter of finding them. Depending on the condition of the bill, the serial number sequence (collectors will pay more for unique sequences as mentioned in the subreddit or ones like 10101010 or 12345678), and who may have the other matching bill, they can be valued at $20,000 to $150,000. New site: https://project2013b2.com/ Older separate site: https://www.2013b.com/ . Also, any bill that has a star at the end of the serial number is a reprint and can be worth more than the face value."

BTW, I've been rather delinquent in adding posts for the past couple weeks because of holiday/family/health/weather factors.  Expect this to continue for a couple more weeks.

Marked playing cards

If you look carefully, it's pretty obvious what the card on the left is.   Some relevant comments and a couple additional photos in the comment thread at the cardmagic subreddit.  Dealing from a deck like this in a poker game for money would be foolish; crudely-marked cards are used for magic tricks. 

Is the semicolon an endangered symbol?

According to the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves [an excellent book, by the way, which I recommend to all who love the English language], the semicolon was first used by Aldus Manutius in the 15th century (illustration at left; image credit to Auburn University).

Now, 500 years later, an article in Slate raises concerns about the imminent death of this punctuation mark: "A 1995 study tallying punctuation in period texts found a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18^th and 19^th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7."

A steep drop in semicolon usage in the mid-19th century has been attributed to the advent of the telegraph - the "Victorian internet" - because punctuation marks were billed at the same rate as words. The 20th century has seen a shift toward more concise writing, culminating in the travesty of text messaging.

I'm a great fan of the semicolon (even though Kurt Vonnegut would say that all it shows is that I went to college), so before it disappears I'll offer this little tidbit from the 1737 guide Bibliotheca Technologica which explains how the semicolon is used to guide cadence during speech: "The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell [count] one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four."

Reposted from 2008 to add the observation that computers seem to hate semicolons:

When I was leaving instructions for USPS to pick up a package for mailing, I reflexly employed a semicolon.  I find it interesting that in view of all the other acceptable symbols, the semicolon is banned.  Perhaps it serves some function in computer language that would lead to glitches in text transmission.

Addendum:  several readers have suggested that banning semicolons may help prevent malicious "code injection" into websites.  Interesting.

Train Dreams

I watched this movie last night and thought it was excellent.  It depicts the life of one man living in the Pacific Northwest from young adulthood until his death.  As suggested by the trailer it is a quiet, contemplative presentation with superb performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones.  

Re-evaluating the Roman road system

Comparisons to the durability of modern roads at Reddit.

Reposted from 2016 to add this interesting video on how the Romans constructed their roads (via Open Culture, where there is another video and additional links)

The bit about the "side ditches" is new to me, and interesting.  Perhaps there was a fee assessed for locals to use the roads and only limited access points.  A corollary would be that these Roman roads could be enormously disruptive to any local economy.

Reposted again to add this high-quality map of the "all roads lead to Rome" network:

The new embed is from an interesting article in The New York Times:

"... a study published last month in the Nature journal Scientific Data significantly updated the estimated size of the Roman Empire’s road system, increasing its total length to 187,460 miles from about 120,000 miles. Rome probably achieved peak road sometime around A.D. 150, when the empire was at its most prosperous and extensive. But the database tallies all the roads presumed to have existed during Rome’s life span, from roughly 312 B.C. to A.D. 400.

The data set does not reflect one particular year or even century because sadly, for the entire empire, we cannot confidently say how the road system changed within the entire Roman period,” Tom Brughmans, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who collaborated on the paper, wrote in an email. “We definitely have chronological information for some roads, but this is a minority...

Dr. Brughmans and his colleagues defined Roman roads more broadly to include any walkable path and used a practical, terrain-following mapping technique, rather than imposing unrealistic straight lines. The change substantially increased mapped networks in North Africa, Greece and the Iberian Peninsula..."

The Scientific Data link is a detailed longread with multiple supplementary maps and extensie discussion.  I would add a reminder that the video embedded in the middle of the post is concise and excellent in presenting information.

I will also add that I have read (but don't have a citation handy) that some scholars have suggested that the great pandemics of the world, like the infamous Black Plague, were facilitated by this roads network.  Diseases that might in earlier times have been limited to small regions were able to travel widely when the vehicles on the roads provided transit for rats, fleas, and other vectors.

How to escape from a frog

Apparently the key is to tickle open the cloacal sphincter.

After getting swallowed by a frog, [a water scavenger beetle] can scuttle down the amphibian’s gut and force it to poop — emerging slightly soiled, but very much alive...   A whopping 90 percent of the beetles they swallowed made it out the other end alive, all within six hours of being gulped down...

Beetles of other species didn’t fare quite as well and were excreted as corpses after a couple days in amphibio. Dead Regimbartia took days too, hinting that their living counterparts were actively engineering their great escapes...

Dr. Sugiura thinks Regimbartia beetles may use their legs to brace themselves and crawl through the gut, which can stretch several inches — an arduous journey for a four- or five-millimeter-long beetle. When they reach the end of that tunnel, the insects may be able to tickle open the cloacal sphincter, the ring of muscle that drawstrings the frog’s rear end shut, expelling themselves in a flood of feces.

You learn something every day.  More details at The New York Times.

Related:  When a Murder Hornet becomes a Tasty Meal (with video).

Carved conch shell

Image cropped for size; from the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

This shell from the 11th century, which was probably used to hold and pour sacred water during religious ceremonies, depicts the god Vishnu who is known for using a conch shell as a war trumpet. (Bengali or Orissan)

Via A London Salmagundi.

Reposted from 2015 (!) to add some new information about Neolithic shell trumpets.  BTW, both the source and the via in the old post above have undergone linkrot over the past 10 years.  The Philadelphia Museum of Art one can probably be found with a quick search, but I'm sorry to see the blog A London Salmagundi gone; they used to post some interesting stuff.

Here are some excerpts from the abstract and discussion of an interesting article in the Cambridge University Press:

The use of large Charonia seashells as labial vibration aerophones is documented in various cultures around the world. In Catalonia, north-eastern Iberia, 12 such instruments have been recovered from Neolithic contexts, dating from the second half of the fifth and the first half of the fourth millennia BC, yet they have received little attention in academia. Given that some examples retain the ability to produce sounds, their archaeoacoustic study offers insight into possible uses and meanings for Neolithic communities. While not all can still produce sounds, the high sound intensity of those that do may indicate a primary function as signalling devices that facilitated communication in Neolithic communities...

Based on the results obtained from the acoustic testing of the eight playable shell trumpets from Neolithic Catalonia, we argue that the primary acoustic characteristic of these instruments—their most notable and likely most functional feature—is their high sound intensity, which aligns with their interpretation as signalling instruments. In this context, techniques such as bending or hand-stopping, which involve a loss of energy, may aid expression but would likely hinder the effectiveness of signalling over long distances. A similar issue applies to overtones: producing them requires more effort and technical skill, and the resulting sound tends to be weaker in terms of intensity.

Shell trumpets may have enabled long-distance communication due to their high sound pressure levels, surpassing any other known prehistoric tool in acoustic power. 

So that corresponds with the observation that Vishnu used a conch shell as a war trumpet, and provides justification for such events in movies and fantasy literature.  You learn something every day.

"Brumation" illustrated

"Brumation is a term used to refer to dormancy of reptiles, which is metabolically somewhat different from mammalian hibernation.

The video above shows alligators lying dormant, not in tunnels in mud, but right in a frozen-over pond, with just their nostrils protruding above the ice.

If anyone has even the faintest doubts about the survival capabilities of this superpredator, this video should change your mind.

Reposted from 2018 to add a photo and excerpted text from the Minnesota Star Tribune:

“If the ice is clear, you can sometimes see snapping or painted turtles moving slowly under the ice,” said Jeff LeClere, zoologist and amphibian and reptile specialist with the Minnesota Biological Survey.

“All of Minnesota’s nine species of turtles overwinter aquatically,” he said.

This winter dormancy, called brumation, requires them to be deep enough to avoid being fatally frozen in ice and to slow their metabolism drastically to conserve energy. Most don’t move at all once this turtle equivalent of hibernation begins. It also minimizes their need for oxygen, which they absorb from the frigid water through a process called cutaneous respiration...

Softshell turtles tend to bury themselves about an inch beneath sand, silt or gravel, while other species sidle under logs or rocky nooks. Map turtles like to congregate along the wing dams, which are rock structures along navigation channels of the Mississippi River, LeClere said. Having shelter can lessen the threat of winter predators such as otters...

Some turtles, such as painted or snapping turtles, simply seek the right depth at the bottom of a lake or pond. They may congregate in areas where natural springs or a lack of shade encourages quicker melting — with vital access to sunshine and food — in the spring.

The embedded image is a screencap from a video posted at this Field Ecology Blog.

Prices falling 500-700%

For the past year I have sincerely tried every possible way to avoid blogging anything about Donald Trump, in part because I find the topic so depressing and aggravating, and because the available material would overwhelm all the other more interesting and useful material I would like to post.

But... some things are so egregiously stupid, so extraordinarily incomprehensible that they beg to be emphasized.  An average, normal 5th grader knows that you cannot reduce things by hundreds of percentages.  Yet the above (which I understand he posted on Twitter for all the world to see) is expressed by a man who considers himself a business genius.  

Does even his base believe this utter crap?

Addendum:  As long as I'm creating a Trump post, I might as well throw in this viewpoint from the U.K.:

I think I'd better close comments for this post.  Let's move on to turtles and Neolithic shell trumpets.

Addendum:  I have read (I not on Twitter) that the post about drug prices was one of 400 posts in a 4-hour period, which some are interpreting as a mania-like episode due to dementia.  Somebody in the Republican party needs to stop him for their own good.

Superb Paleolithic art

I previously blogged about the deteriorating conditions of the famous cave paintings at Lascaux. On a more upbeat note, there is another extensive cave system - the Chauvet Cave - that also has spectacular Paleolithic art. Especially when you consider that the images embedded above were drawn 30,000 years ago - it's truly impressive artwork.

All of the source links from this 2008 post have undergone linkrot over the years, but I'm reposting it for 2025 to add some interesting observations from the most recent issue of The Atlantic:

When the American republic was founded, the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. No contemporary thinker imagined it could possibly be older. Thus Thomas Jefferson was confident that woolly mammoths must still live in “the northern and western parts of America,” places that “still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us.”

The idea that mammoths or any other kind of creature might have ceased to exist was, to him, inconceivable. “Such is the œconomy of nature,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

Those illusory behemoths roaming out there somewhere beyond the Rockies remind us that the world of the Founding Fathers is in some ways as alien to us as ours would be to them... The originalist fallacy that dominates the current Supreme Court—the pretense that it is possible to read the minds of the Founders and discern what they “really” meant—in fact turns the Founders into ventriloquists’ dummies. We express our own prejudices by moving their lips.

It is fascinating to me that Thomas Jefferson, arguably one of the best educated and progressive thinkers of colonial America, would not have any concept of the age of the earth (or the cosmos, of course).  

Chest of a man taking a diuretic

This 76-year-old man has a history of coronary artery disease, as evidenced by the old midline thoracotomy scar from a coronary bypass.  I'm posting the image to feature his amazing gynecomastia, which developed as a side effect of his taking the prescribed diuretic spironolactone (physical exam and laboratory evaluation ruled out other potential causes).

A diagnosis of spironolactone-induced gynecomastia — an adverse drug effect seen more frequently in men taking more than 100 mg per day — was made. The mechanism is multifactorial and includes androgen-receptor blockade and increased peripheral conversion of testosterone to estradiol. 

An abstract at PubMed lists other causes of drug-induced gynecomastia:

"The drugs definitely associated with the onset of gynecomastia are spironolactone, cimetidine, ketoconazole, hGH, estrogens, hCG, anti-androgens, GnRH analogs and 5-α reductase inhibitors. Medications probably associated with gynecomastia include risperidone, verapamil, nifedipine, omeprazole, alkylating agents, HIV medications (efavirenz), anabolic steroids, alcohol and opioids."

Trivial/juvenile comments will be blocked.

Minnesota vs. Wisconsin 2025 - battle for the Paul Bunyan's Axe trophy

Posted as memorabilia for me and a few friends and family members.  This is not a "game for the ages" for anyone other than Minnesota Gopher fans.  Highlights at 4:00, 6:25, and 6:50 for those curious and in a hurry.

Thinking of refugees on Thanksgiving

If you have nothing else to be thankful for on this day, be thankful that you are not a refugee - political refugee, war refugee, climate refugee, whatever.  I fully understand that some migrants are economic opportunists seeking to game the system, but the vast majority are helpless victims of circumstances beyond their control - from wildfires, floods, droughts, ethnic cleansing, national geopolitical policies, and wars.

The top embedded image is from the border between Poland and Belarus, where the migrants are political pawns in an autocrat's power struggle with the EU.  They have been displaced from their homes, have only what they can carry, lack food and shelter and are facing an oncoming winter entirely at the mercy of strangers.

Here's an old photo of a Syrian refugee child:

“I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon,” photographer Osman Sağırlı told the BBC. “İ realized she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera.”

It's tempting to succumb to "compassion fatigue" when reading about the never-ending world crises, or to consider oneself safe from geopolitical conflicts, ignoring the potential of becoming a climate refugee.

Reposted from 2021 to add a WTF development:

Foreigners seeking visas to live in the U.S. might be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, including diabetes or obesity, under a Thursday directive from the Trump administration.

While assessing the health of potential immigrants has been part of the visa application process for years, including screening for communicable diseases like tuberculosis and obtaining vaccine history, experts said the new guidelines greatly expand the list of medical conditions to be considered and give visa officers more power to make decisions about immigration based on an applicant’s health status.

We (and other countries) have always in modern times screened immigration applicants for health status - especially communicable diseases - which is why Ellis Island exists.  But extending those guidelines to chronic or potential disorders gives the immigration office a new method to exclude persons for unexpressed criteria, such as religion and race.

A concise summary of the Oxfordian narrative

I have excerpted the following from the Summer 2025 issue of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter:

"Where do you begin when, at a dinner party, someone says to you, “What’s this authorship nonsense all about? Who is this Oxford anyway?” Have you ever wished for a conversational aid; a simple statement to which you could refer that succinctly describes why you are an Oxfordian? The Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ) is horrifically complicated and requires real commitment, deep reading and thoughtful analysis to have a full appreciation of the issues. It’s difficult to explain quickly to people unfamiliar with the topic.

What if we could consolidate and summarize “The Case for Oxford?” What if we tried to winnow down all the research, wisdom and weight of circumstantial evidence accumulated over the past hundred years into a clear set of statements? Is it even possible to declare what all Oxfordians agree on? This spring, a group of Oxfordians in England, the United States and around the world attempted to do just that... 

The Oxfordian Narrative was deliberately kept to one page with six statements. This core principles section is supported by a few Frequently Asked Questions, all composed from information available in more detail on the SOF and DVS websites...

The following set of statements has been compiled to provide speaking and written prompts for Oxfordians engaging externally with the media and more widely. The core principles are concise, positive and authoritative, and are supported by a section of Frequently Asked Questions. They form the basis of the Oxfordian narrative and represent the common ground that is respectful of the many differing views held by our members."

A new existential threat to lemurs

"...in their native Madagascar, the endangered animals are facing a growing threat: City-dwellers with cash to spare love to eat them. They say that the meat from fruit-eating lemur species tastes sweet and that consuming these primates promotes strength and good health. The meat from these tree-dwellers is valued for its cleanliness and “purity.” The startling revelation comes from the first-ever assessment of Madagascar’s urban lemur trade. Conducted over the past four years, it concludes that more than 10,000 lemurs were sold for pricey dishes across 17 cities in the country...

Though dining on wild species from African forests often evokes people trying to survive hunger in desperate situations, this new work suggests that people from a wealthier rung of society in Madagascar, those making perhaps thousands of U.S. dollars a year, are a distinct threat to these endangered primates...

All buyers and sellers included in the survey reported they were aware of the illegality of the trade and feared being caught, jailed or fined. But the economic benefits motivated their actions. They were also aware of how rare the animals were becoming. More than half of the interviewees said they expected to have fewer lemurs to trade in the future because of declining populations..."