Pondering these icicles - updated

Lots of these photos on the internet today, for obvious reasons (this one from The Atlantic).  Am I correct in assuming that the lengths of the icicles on the lower power line would form a normal distribution (a bell-shaped curve without any skew?)  Eyeballing it seems to suggest this, but is it fair to assume the shape of the distribution?  I obviously don't have time to make the measurements...

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to reader Kniffler, who had ChatGPT analyse the image:

Blogcation

The Madison (Wisconsin) public library system is outstanding.  I have been a user (and supporter) since arriving in town over 25 years ago.   I routinely monitor the new acquisitions list and place requests.  When you are 27th or 83rd on the wait list there is no way to know when the book will arrive on your shelf at your local branch.  

This week I hit the jackpot.  Suddenly multiple requests were fulfilled all at once.  Foucault's Pendulum is an "old" (1980s) book by the author of The Name of the Rose, and has been called "the thinking man's Da Vinci Code.  Flesh won the Booker Prize for 2025.  Savage Peace; Hope and Fear in America, 1919 is a scholarly study of the post-WWI era in the United States when our society was under surprising and serious stress.  The Overstory, by the author of Playground, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer.

Two thousand pages to read.  I'm not a speed-reader because I take notes for possible blogging.  Since there are people waiting for several of these, I need to say good-bye to you guys for a week or more.  There is one room in our house that gets bright sunshine on winter afternoons, and if the cats will let me share it I will spend my time there rather than doomscrolling the internet.  I'll just have to hope that nothing important happens in the coming week.

Photo of the day

A sika deer with the severed head of a rival male that died in their battle skewered on its antler.  Photograph: Kohei Nagira/Wildlife Photographer of the Year.  Via The Guardian.

I find my self wondering how the impaled head became severed from the rest of the carcass.  Almost certainy not from the battle per se.  Did the victor have to drag the carcass around as he grazed until the flesh rotted, or did wolves perhaps scavenge the dead body up top the neck?

Addendum: found the answer in The Atlantic, which also posted the photo: "A local fisherman says the deer dragged the whole body for several days before finally tearing off its head."  Maybe he was able to stomp the neck area with his hooves.  (p.s. - both links have a bunch of excellent wildlife photos)

"Couple flirting on a fire escape" (1946)

Stanley Kubrick: Couple Flirting on a Fire Escape, Park Benches - Love is Everywhere series, 1946

Until I encountered this photo on Miss Folly, I didn't realize that Stanley Kubrick was a photographer before he was a filmmaker. 

Parents are refusing Vitamin K for newborns

"For most of his 10 years as a neonatologist, Dr. Timmy Ho encountered one or two parents per week who didn’t want their newborns to receive a vitamin K injection, a standard step to prevent bleeding.  Recently, in just one week, he saw three or four per day — numbers, he said, that were becoming more common.

One of the babies suffered a type of bleeding in the brain that vitamin K could have prevented, said Dr. Ho, who practices in Boston. He had never seen that before.

Vitamin K plays a crucial role in blood clotting but doesn’t pass to the baby through the placenta effectively, and there isn’t much of it in breast milk. Infants are deficient in it until they can eat solid foods. This can lead to bleeding, from minor oozing from the umbilical cord to potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal or brain hemorrhages.

One injection immediately after birth is very effective at fixing the deficiency, and it has been routinely administered in the United States for more than 60 years.

Now, the shot appears to have been swept up in broader anti-vaccine sentiment, even though it isn’t a vaccine..."

The story continues at The New York Times.

Guttation

I have no doubt I've seen this on plants and assumed it was deposition to dew from the atmosphere.

Guttation is the exudation of drops of internal liquid out of the tips or edges of leaves of some vascular plants, and also a number of fungi... 

At night, transpiration usually does not occur, because most plants have their stomata closed. When there is a high soil moisture level, water will enter plant roots, because the water potential of the roots is lower than in the soil solution. The water will accumulate in the plant, creating a slight root pressure. The root pressure forces some water to exude through special leaf tip or edge structures called hydathodes or water glands. Root pressure provides the impetus for this flow, rather than transpirational pull. Guttation is most noticeable when transpiration is suppressed and the relative humidity is high, such as during the night...

Guttation droplets are consumed by numerous insects of different orders, and is an important and highly reliable source of essential carbohydrates and proteins. Unlike nectar, guttation droplets are present in an ecosystem during the entire growing season.

But note...

Girolami et al. (2009) found that guttation drops from corn plants germinated from neonicotinoid-coated seeds could contain amounts of insecticide consistently higher than 10 mg/L, and up to 200 mg/L for the neonicotinoid imidacloprid. Concentrations this high are near those of active ingredients applied in field sprays for pest control and sometimes even higher. It was found that when bees consume guttation drops collected from plants grown from neonicotinoid-coated seeds, they die within a few minutes

Etymology from the Latin gutta for "a drop," and hence its incorporation into the medical term "guttate psoriasis":

"Gutter" is also derived from gutta, after passing through French and Middle English.  Found the word while doing a crossword puzzle.  You learn something every day.

LED color temperature infographic

Found at Wirecutter (with discussion); saved because I keep forgetting and need to look this up.

"Journey to the West"

I recently read an interesting review of The Monkey and the Monk (Univ Chicago Press, 2006) and found a copy in our library system.  The book is an abridgement (to 500 pages!) of the 16th century Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West.

It is regarded as one of the great Chinese novels, and has been described as arguably the most popular literary work in East Asia. It was widely known in English-speaking countries through the British scholar Arthur Waley's 1942 abridged translation Monkey. It is a progenitor to the Xianxia literary genre that combines martial arts with high fantasy in Ancient China.

The novel is a fictionalized and fantastic account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who went on a 19-year journey to India in the 7th century AD to seek out and collect Buddhist scriptures...

Journey to the West has strong roots in Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist folklore, and the pantheon of Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas are still reflective of certain Chinese religious attitudes today, while being the inspiration of many modern manhwa, manhua, manga and anime series. Enduringly popular, the novel is simultaneously a comic adventure, a satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a source of spiritual reflection, and a rich allegory.

I have no doubt that this book would be an interesting read, but at my age the requisite time commitment becomes a formidable obstacle, and I've reluctantly turned the book back in.

But I do want to save (and share) the opening two pages:

And I'll retype some passages from the scans to make the keywords searchable:

"Before Chaos divided, Heaven tangled with Earth;

Formless and void - this, no human had seen.  

But when Pa Gu broke up the nebula,

Clearing began, the turbid parted from the pure.

Humaneness supreme enfolding every life

Enlightens all things that they become good..."

The text then makes mention of "cyclic time" - a fascinating concept offering echoes of perhaps the Mayan worldview?  Also that "in the order of Heaven and Earth, a single period consisted of 129,600 years."

I am fascinated by "origin stories" that peoples have created to explain the existence of the cosmos, earth, and humans.  In this classic oriental tale...

"At the end of the epoch of Xu, Heaven and Earth were obscure and all things were indistinct.  With the passing of 5,400 years, the beginning of Hai was the epoch of darkness.  This moment was named Chaos, because there were neither human beings nor the two spheres.."

Then the creation process continues.  The firmament acquires a foundation, then "the light rose up to form the sun, the moon, the stars, and the Heavenly bodies."  The earth becomes more firm, and "during the Yin epoch humans, beasts, and fowls came into being..."  Then the world is divided into four great continents...

To me this is fascinating stuff.  I am immediately reminded of the Babylonian concepts of the great depths of time and of course of the Mesoamerican Long Count.

Lady Macbeth

A painting by Charles Soubre (1877).  Judging by the items on the bedside table, I thought maybe this is where she returned the knife to the King Duncan's bedside, but the way she is holding her wrist makes me think this is the sleepwalking scene from the fifth act and she is looking for a place to wash her hands.

Via Miss Folly

"The Coster's Mansion" sheet music cover (1899)

The image will enlarge with a click, but the text is still small, so I'll enter the text of the chorus here:

"If yer wants to see me dining-room or step into me parlour,

     Or me orfice where I contracts all my biz;

If yer wants to see me bedroom, or the place we calls the larder,

    Why, you've only got to stop just where you is."

"Coster" is a shortened version of "costermonger."

This was one of the final images posted by Miss Folly, back in 2014.

A visual history of Mexico City (1300 to now)

This video absolutely blew me away.  I had known from very casual reading that Mexico City originally developed in an area of wetlands, but to "see" the process in timelapse is eye-opening.  I posted a Chicago timelapse earlier this morning.  Go to History Revived to access other similar videos.

Two images of an extrajudicial killing

Hats off to the Minnesota Star Tribune for posting this pair of images side-by-side.  I had seen the photo on the right and wanted to use it for the blog because of the extraordinary clarity of the image, but couldn't find a source to explain how such high resolution could be generated by citizen cellphone cameras.  The Star Tribune explains:

A widely shared image of federal agents surrounding ICU nurse Alex Pretti as one agent holds a gun to the back of his head appears as real as it does horrific.

But a closer look at the photo reveals a headless agent. Such bodily distortion is a red flag that an image used artificial intelligence. In this case, AI enhanced a low-quality screenshot of a bystander video, digital forensic experts said.

It’s the latest altered imagery from Minneapolis to make the rounds online during the federal government’s immigration enforcement surge. Other digitally manipulated images circulated after Renee Good’s killing by a federal agent. The White House also shared a fake image of activist and attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, edited to make it appear that she was crying during her recent arrest for disrupting a church service. Video from the arrest showed there were no tears.

AI-enhanced and manipulated images are a new obstacle in the court of public opinion. Their proliferation online is eroding trust and inflaming divisions...

The AI image of Pretti’s killing is more nuanced than many, Farid said, because it combines something real with hallucinated elements.

In court, the edited image would never be admissible as evidence. But in the court of public opinion, an image that is based in truth but fabricated can make for difficult debates.

If someone calls out a friend for sharing the AI-generated image of Pretti and says, “This is fake,” for example, someone can argue that the person is siding with federal agents when really the person is only pointing out the image is digitally altered...

“The real poison here is not AI, it’s social media,” he said. “AI is just supercharging it. But if people could make these fake images and fake videos and there was no delivery mechanism, I mean, honestly, who cares? The problem is not the content itself. The problem is that these social media platforms eagerly absorb it and amplify it because it’s good for business.”..

At the very least, he advises people to slow down, think critically and look closely at images before spreading misinformation. He said images are made in an instant, often to provoke strong reactions and sow discord.

This article makes important points and should be shared widely.  The top right image will be labeled "fake" to imply altered facts, but the manipulation was done for visual clarity.  The photo of Nekima Levy's arrest was changed to present an alternate reality:

When I first saw it I assumed it was being distributed by a right-wing rag; I was deeply disappointed (but not surprised) that it came from a White House source.

We live in difficult times where visual (and auditory) information can be skillfully manipulated in an effort to manipulate our understanding.  Be careful out there.

Note:  Please limit your comments on this post to the use of artificial intelligence, not on the Alex Pretti killing per se.

"Attention span" problems viewing movies

Excerpts from an interesting essay in The Atlantic:

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones...

At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays...

In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie).

There's more at the link, of course.  I disagree with the suggestion that the inattentiveness is related to "cellphone addiction" or social media withdrawal anxiety.  Another powerful factor is the need to efficiently make use of one's time.

I am a cinema enthusiast, as evidenced by having two subsections of TYWKIWDBI dedicated to "movies" and "video-movies."  But I watch all my movies and streaming series on recordings rather than live.  I want to have the ability to stop the movie, freeze-frame for details, rewind to view for second or third times, and yes to fast-forward through the boring bits.  IMHO life is too short to do otherwise.

The same applies to sports.  A football game with 1 hour of game clock time may require 3 hours of viewing live on television (or at the stadium).  I can view all the content (including highlight repeats) by fast-forwarding a recording.

Timelapse of the development of Chicago

I have lots of concerns re AI, but I have to grudgingly admit that it can generate some absolutely awesome images and videos.  More re the concerns later, but first this embed of Chicago from 1870 to the present.  History Revived has lots of these.  I'll definitely do the Mexico City one later.  

"Daddy, what does 'petulant' mean?"

Perhaps we can illustrate the concept with an example.  The message above expresses a new domestic economic policy presented to the world via social media.  Newsweek looked into this matter:

Newsweek has contacted the White House and Transport Canada, which is responsible for Canadian certification, for comment via email. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declined to comment, referring questions to the White House.  It is the responsibility of the FAA to certify planes in the United States. The FAA can revoke aircraft certification if it is no longer in an airworthy condition, according to its website, but it remains unclear if it can do so for economic reasons...

John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University, told Newsweek that it is unprecedented for a government to cancel the certification of an aircraft for trade reasons.

He said: "Such action is typically used to ground aircraft that have been deemed unsafe to operate by the regulatory bodies. This action by President Trump is purely for commercial reasons, that Gulfstream would like to reduce competition for its Gulfstream- series general aviation aircraft by eliminating Bombardier Global Express aircraft from sales in the U.S. In his zeal to further protect the U.S. aircraft market, his stated intention to decertify all Canadian-built aircraft will have a significant impact on the domestic U.S. air travel market. There are over 1,000 Canadian-built commercial passenger aircraft in operation on any given day, a not insignificant number that would severely curtail services to/from regional airports throughout the U.S."

The CBC reports that that this new "policy" is already being walked back: "A White House official told Reuters that Trump was not suggesting decertifying Canadian-built planes currently ⁠in operation."

I hope that example illustrates the word for you, sweetheart.  You can get more information from the Wiktionary, which defines 'petulant' as "childishly irritable" with synonyms bad-tempered, crabby, grouchy, huffy.   All of those would be relevant.   

Weather hell on the East Coast

When I started TYWKIWDBI in 2007, the first post indicated that the purpose was "to compile for the amusement of my friends an eclectic collection of gleanings from the internet..."  That's still the case, so this post today goes out to my schoolmates from the class of 1964.  

I've been exchanging emails recently with Pete W, who for education and career reasons became an expat from Minnesota and now lives in Roanoke, Virginia, near the foothills of the Appalachians.  I thought his comments the other day were informative:

"As far as our weather, I told the man who came to clear our relatively short driveway and spent FIVE hours doing only 70% of it, "I'm from Minnesota and I have never seen anything like this."

Saturday night past we had four inches of snow. Sunday at 1:00 we started 17 consecutive hours of freezing rain. End result was 4+ inches of frozen solid ice anchored to the sidewalks, streets, driveways, and ground everywhere. I've said for many years that 1/2 inch of ice is worse than a foot of snow, but this was 4 full inches of frozen solid (not just the top) ice. My yard is so slick it's truly like a skating rink that has just been Zambonied!  We are still digging out. No mail delivery until we clear access to our mailboxes, and today -- finally after 5 days -- I was able to pickaxe out that ice. Flat out brutal, and being a Gopher was of no use. Amazing. Schools still closed, of course, since buses can't go anywhere."

Apparently more bad weather is heading that way.  Just an FYI to classmates.  

A man and his dog

A painting by Antonio Rotta (1828 - 1903)

Antonio Rotta is notable for his mythological subjects and genre paintings. He was a student at the Accademia di Belli Arti in Venice and was one of the first classical genre painters. His disciplined training in academic schooling, and the use of commonplace subjects made his oeuvre very popular during his lifetime. His work was exhibited in Europe and the United States. He won a medal at the Paris Salon, 1878.

Via Miss Folly, where this is entitled The Old Man and his Best Friend? (I don't know if that's the artist's title for the piece).

Reposted from 2012 to incorporate a better image of the painting (via).  And reposted in 2022 in order to end the day with a nice picture at the top of the blog.

The difference between "chaos" and "randomness"

I recently wanted to write a post about a situation in a SNAFU/FUBAR condition [probably a Trump thingie], and realized while writing it that I didn't know whether to use the word "chaotic" or "random" and actually couldn't convince myself that I knew the distinction between the two (if any).

So I did what any modern lazy person would do - I asked AI.  The reply is embedded above.  I have to say I would never have predicted that chaos is governed by precise rules.  Unless the AI is wrong.  So now I'll throw this out to my readers, some of whom are mathematically or philosophically inclined, and at least one of whom is a copyeditor/poofreader in real life.

Addendum:  If this interests you, be sure to read the comment by Codex.

"All the fun's in how you say a thing"

Fifty-plus years ago a then-young English- and American Literature major walked out of a college bookstore with this hardcover copy of Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  The $7.00 expense was substantial in those years, but he considered the book an appropriate addition to his personal library.

Since then the book has traveled with him from Boston to Dallas to Lexington to Indianapolis to St. Louis and finally to Madison.  The next destination will be as a donation to our local Friends of the Fitchburg Library book sale.  Before saying goodbye to an old friend, I thought it appropriate to give it one final cover-to-cover read.  Herewith some gleanings from that book.

Uncommon words:

"With a big jag to empty in a bay"  (a load, as of hay)

"Not old Grandsir's/Nor Granny's surely..." (grandsire is archaic for grandfather)

"But there's a dite too many of them for comfort"  (???)

"Choked with oil of cedar/And scurf of plants"   ("scaly matter or incrustation on a surface")

"...they smelled/A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented" (?neologism)

"The lines of a good helve were native to the grain" (handle of an ax, hatchet, hammer (ME,OE))

(re turtle eggs) "All packed in sand to wait the trump together."  (sound of a trumpet)

"...nothing Fate could do/With codlin moth or rusty parasite" (codling moth larvae feed on apple)

"The storm gets down his neck in an icy souse" (soaking)

"By grace of state-manipulated pelf" (disparaging term for money, from ME/OF=booty)

"On our cisatlantic shore" (attaching the prefix meaning "on this side")

"But spes alit agricolam 'tis said." ("hope sustains the farmer")

"As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins" (container of size one-quarter of a barrel)

"We would pour oil on the ingle" (fire burning in hearth; fireplace (Gael.)

"And dayify the darkest realm" (presumably a neologism and the prerogative of a poet)

"The wavy upflung pennons of the corn" (flag borne on lance of knight [from Latin pinna=feather])

"For all humanity a complete rest/From all this wagery." (?working for wages?)

"The other way of reading back and forth/Known as boustrophedon, was found too awkward."

"Behind her at the dashboard of his pung." (sleigh with boxlike body on runners [short for “tom-pung” = toboggan]

"The bulb lights sicken down." (presumably get weaker?)


Memorable lines or clever turns of phrase

(re a farmhand)
"Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in." (did Frost invent this phrase?)

(re a mountainside brook):
"Warm in December, cold in June, you say?
I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm
But all the fun's in how you say a thing."

"We love the things we love for what they are."

"Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it and yet not waste time either..."

"From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn't show."

"When I was young my teachers were the old...
I went to school to age to learn the past...
Now I am old my teachers are the young...
I go to school to youth to learn the future."

"But I may be one who does not care
Ever to have tree bloom or bear.
Leaves for smooth and bark for rough,
Leaves and bark may be tree enough." (the same sentiment as in this Denise Levertov poem)

(re life):
"It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.  The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing -
Too present to imagine."


Miscellaneous

"And the cagèd yellow bird/Hung over her in tune..."   In my edition, the word cagèd is printed with that accent (not true in many reprints of the poem).  I presume Frost did this to alter the meter of the line.  I didn't see him employ this device elsewhere in the book and wonder if it is a common technique used by poets.

"The new moon!/What shoulder did I see her over?"  (It is said to be unlucky to see the new moon over your left shoulder, but lucky to see it over your right shoulder.)

(re orchard on a northerly slope) (?true)
"No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
'How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard.  Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

(re barn doors):
"The advantage-disadvantage of these doors
Was that tramp taking sanctuary there
Must leave them unlocked to betray his presence.
They could be locked but from the outside only...
And it had almost given him troubled dreams
To think that though he could not lock himself in,
The cheapest tramp that came along that way
Could mischievously lock him in to stay."

"As a brief epidemic of microbes/ That in a good glass may be seen to crawl..." (I've heard the term "good glass" applied to telescopes.  Presumably the reference is similar here, to lens glass that is free of imperfections) ??

(re Santa Claus):
"We all know his address, Mount Hekla, Iceland./So anyone can write to him who has to" (???)


Links to my favorite poems

Mending Wall

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Birches (and audio)

The Road Not Taken


And now, goodbye old friend.

Reposted from nine years ago to take a break from doomscrolling.

The "Agartha" meme ("Himmler's favorite myth")

As reported in The Atlantic: 

Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it. But over the past year, memes about Agartha—a mystical, underground city in the center of the Earth full of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people—kept going viral and have become a staple of the youth internet...

Agartha memes usually feature supercuts—a video of short clips—comprising UFOs in the Antarctic, pyramid-laden civilizations, digitally altered images of Charlie Kirk with blond hair and chiseled features, stereotypical Nordic-looking people, and sugar-free Monster Energy drinks in white cans... But all of the Agartha memes share in common the concept of the subterranean Aryan paradise that Himmler yearned for...

Agartha was first developed as a mythical fantasy by French writers in the late 1800s but had no far-right associations at the time. After Himmler co-opted Agartha, neo-Nazis carried it and other Third Reich racist myths into the postwar era by creating a new philosophy and value system called “esoteric Hitlerism,” a fusion of racialist ideology and wacky mysticism. In the early 2020s, white supremacists turned those myths into internet propaganda...

Sellner positioned the memes as something that could be taken in jest. “Irony is the glue that holds this whole meme-universe together. Anyone who takes things deadly seriously or gets triggered has lost,” he wrote. This is the tone that a lot of people online have taken regarding the Agartha memes. No matter the underlying content, you’re not supposed to take the joke seriously, and if you do, the joke’s on you.

It’s a well-worn tactic, but also a common excuse used to launder noxious content. It’s not ironic or satirical for ethno-nationalists to joke about a mythical ethno-state when that fantasy is reflective of their extreme beliefs.

Editorial note:  the word is AgaRtha, with an "R", not Agatha (and there is a Wikipedia entry with lots of info).

Anti-vaxxers are now in charge

Offering a startlingly candid view into the philosophy guiding vaccine recommendations under the Trump administration, the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles — and perhaps all diseases — should be optional, offered only in consultation with a clinician.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who is chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that he did have “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,”.. 

In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said.

“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”

I'm a polio survivor with residual impairment.  The attitude of this man in a position of authority is deplorable.

Relevant:  Polio was that bad

The difference between freezing rain and sleet

This infographic was posted by the City of Roanoke (Texas) Police Department on their Facebook thread, with this clarification:

So many people are probably wondering: what is the difference between freezing rain and sleet? I mean, they can’t be that different, right?  Well, we picked something completely at random—and in no way related to police work—to showcase the difference between the two.

Found and posted by John Farrier at Neatorama.

How Minnesotans organize their ICE protests

Excerpts from an excellent article in The Atlantic:

(B)ehind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.

At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy. As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, schoolteachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb...

“Overall, this community has exercised enormous restraint,” Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which represents many minority-owned businesses that have been hit hard by the ICE raids, told me. “But we have been pushed, probably intentionally, towards civil unrest.”..

I went upstairs to see breakout sessions where people were being trained for direct confrontations with ICE. Inside a classroom, several dozen people ranging in age from 14 to about 70 faced off against three trainers playing ICE agents, in a loud fracas that lasted several minutes. Afterward, the trainers offered the volunteers a critique. One gray-haired lady said she had found the exercise difficult, “not being a ‘Fuck you’ person.” Others got tips on how to brace themselves more effectively so that the agents could not easily knock them down...

The nonprofit groups that run these training sessions are not organizing or directing the anti-ICE protests taking place in the Twin Cities. No one is. This is a leaderless movement—like the Arab Spring protests—that has emerged in a spontaneous and hyperlocal way...

Inside the schools, many administrators have been making their own preparations over the past year. Amanda Bauer, a teacher at a Minneapolis elementary school that has a large portion of immigrant students, told me that administrators informed parents last fall about their emergency plans for ICE raids by phone or in person, because they were already concerned about leaving email chains that could be mined by a hostile government...

Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis...

A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.  Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.  “I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”...

Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.

All this sheltering has created an economic crisis that has grown worse by the day. Many immigrant-owned businesses have seen their sales drop by as much as 80 percent, said Allison Sharkey, of the Lake Street Council. Large numbers have shut their doors entirely, fearing for themselves or their employees. Sharkey called it “an assault on our entire Main Street.”..

Apologies to The Atlantic for my excerpting so much material (and both photos).  My goal as a blogger is never to steal traffic from sources; on the contrary I want to drive readers to the sources.  This article was written by Robert Worth.  These are his credentials: "Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. A former bureau chief for The New York Times, he has spent more than two decades writing about the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. He is the author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, which won the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize."

"The Dutch Angle" explained and illustrated

Last night I started watching The Third Man because I wanted to hear the opening musical theme and the closing one where Anna walks out of Holly's life.  But I got trapped and wound up watching the entire movie again - for perhaps the fourth or fifth time.  

The nice thing about rewatching a classic movie is that it is no longer necessary to pay attention to the storyline, and therefore it's easier to study and enjoy the other aspects of the film, such as the cinematography.  My attention last night was on the rather dramatic angles of some of the shots (reiniscent of Citizen Kane).  A brief search of the internet yielded the proper technical term: the Dutch Angle.

"In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, vortex plane, oblique angle, or a Durkin, is a type of camera shot that involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame. This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side. In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. The Dutch angle is strongly associated with German expressionist cinema, which employed it extensively..."

The video embedded at the top offers a concise 5-minute discussion of the technique, and the video embedded below presents just for fun clips from dozens of movies showing the ever-increasing angle of the shots - the final one being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

"The Third Man" theme played on a zither by Anton Karas

""The Third Man Theme"... is an instrumental written and performed by Anton Karas for the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man. Upon release the theme proved popular, spending eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's United States Best Sellers in Stores chart. Multiple versions have been performed and recorded, selling tens of millions of copies, and its success influenced the release strategy of later film singles.

The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed. One night after a long day of filming The Third Man on location in Vienna, Reed and cast members Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Orson Welles had dinner and retired to a wine cellar. In the bistro, which retained the atmosphere of the pre-war days, they heard the zither music of Anton Karas, a 40-year-old musician who was playing there just for the tips. Reed immediately realized that this was the music he wanted for his film..."

Here's the trailer for the movie -

 

The video taken by The Lady in the Pink Coat

Video from the Lady in the Pink Coat
byu/tommyknockerman8 inLeakednews

You have probably seen her on the "back" side (sidewalk side) of the action in the videos filmed from the street.  Immediately after the shooting there was open concern online as to whether the Lady in the Pink Coat was safe and whether her cellphone footage was safe and would be released.  Here it is.

More comments (lots more) from me later.  And hopefully a better copy of the video.  Just embedding this here for now.

Baby, it's cold outside

Reposted from 2013 to add updated incredible numbers (see embed above) for this morning's weather.

In 2013 I added this video of Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt reversing the traditional male-female stereotypes for the song when they performed it for a holiday special with the Muppets:

Compare that modern version with the original from the musical romantic comedy "Neptune's Daughter" from 1949, where the heavy-handed seduction of Esther Williams by Ricardo Montalban is almost painful to watch:

And I'll close with a shout-out to young Lucas, who lives across the street.  At 9:30 last night after he finished his activities at school, he braved sub-zero temps to clear our driveway to facilitate our travel to a medical appointment this morning:

"The Ark Before Noah"

Cultures around the world are awash with "great flood" myths.  Wikipedia has a list of flood myths that includes too many for me to count today.  It takes no leap of imagination to assume that ancient peoples traversing mountains and seeing fossilized obvious seashells on mountains used basic logic to accept that in ancient times a huge flood must have covered the world.

I have previous reviewed a very scholarly book discussing in details the great floods after the ice age and the submersion of Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in southeast Asia.  Also related is my old post on The Black Sea Deluge as a source of ancient flood myths.

This post is about another book, published in 2014 (Doubleday) and recommended to me by a reader many years ago.  The author has the awesome title of "Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures" at the British Museum.  He is the person in charge of the gazillion cuneiform tablets stored at the museum, and he can read those nicks in the clay the way that I can read cursive.  This book focuses on an "ark tablet" in the museum holdings that presents in detail a myth of a world flood and the survival of mankind thanks to a man who builds an ark.   Here is the tablet (more pix at the link):

And here are some of my excerpts and thoughts after browsing the book...

Modern scholars generally agree that the ark described in Babylonian times was constructed of reeds (which are huge and plentiful in Mesopotamian wetlands).  Jewish scholars recognize that the word translated into the Hebrew Bible as "gopher wood" if pronounced slightly differently would also mean "reeds."

While I was pondering this problem, I was simultaneously reading about ancient Babylonian versions of the flood story. Of course, there are different approaches regarding how to reconcile these with the Torah's account, which are not our concern here. But I suddenly realized that they describe the ark as being made of reeds - which, in Hebrew, is kannim, the very word that our verse uses, albeit vocalized differently. And this was apparently the standard technique used for creating boats in ancient Mesopotamia - they were made of reeds, sometimes hybridized with a wooden frame for greater strength. (Note that this technique would have been unknown to later generations in other parts of the world, where boats were made exclusively from wood.)

It is also clear from three different cuneiform flood tablets that the ark was round like a circle (p 129).  And see this 2012 post.

There are two Hebrew sources for the description of the flood ("J" and "P").  The "J" says forty days of rain and everything dies.  The "P" source says flood rose for 150 days to cover  mountains, then takes 150 days to go down.  (217)

The kingdom of Judea was conquered in battle by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 597 BC, and the people of Jerusalem were taken into exile in Babylon -"all the officers and fighting men, and all the skilled workers and artisans - a total of ten thousand.  Only the poorest people of the land were left."  Those Judeans were then incorporated into Babylonian society, where they would have learned of the flood story. (227).  They would have seen the immense Tower (ziggurat) of Babel - seventy meters in height, way more than anything in Jerusalem.  It is incorporated into the 11th chapter of Genesis.

It is during this time of exile that two important shifts occur (pp 240s).  The Judeans incorporate the ark story into their own heritage, because all the intelligent young men of the society are being educated in Babel.  Conversely the Babylonian society, famously polytheistic, begins to view the gods in a more monotheistic arrangement (in accordance with the strictly monotheistic Jews).  The second commandment of the Judean Hebrew bible states "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" indicates a recognition of the existence of other gods.  But the Babylonians conversely start blending their various "gods" into Marduk - previously the "king of the gods" but now viewed as a single god with multiple manifestations:

The Judeans life in exile in Babylon is arguably the reason for their creation of their bible, nicely delineated on page 247:

"In the years before Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC the Judeans certainly did more than sit about and weep.  They adjusted and settled.  In time they became Mesopotamian citizens.  By the time Cyrus arrived by no means all of Nebuchadnezzar's displaced persons wanted to go "home" to Jerusalem.  However, the Judeans' ancient and somewhat ramshackle religious identity had meanwhile been crystallising into permanence due to their encyclopaedia of history, custom, instruction and wisdom.  They became literally the people of the book.  From this angle it can be argued that the Babylonian Exile, far from being the disaster it is usually judged, was ultimately the process that forged what became modern Judaism."

And that eventually led to the formation of Christianity six centuries later.  A fascinating idea.

There is more in the book than the ark story, including some discussion of the Babylonian Map of the World (the earliest known map of the world):

Inside the inner circle are the great rivers and the major cities.  They are surrounded by a great sea, beyond which are huge mountains.  The resemblance to the famous T and O map of the world is compellling.

I'm going to stop here.  If you are interested, the book should be in most public library systems.  It's TMI regarding cuneiform lettering and texts, but fascinating in its overall scope.  I highly recommend Chapter 11 (excerpted at length above) and Chapter 14 ("Conclusions: Stories and Shapes") for the TL;DR readers.

The Black Sea deluge

Another addition to my list of recommended books, this one explaining in detail the hypothesis that an immense and abrupt irruption of water into the Black Sea from the Aegean/Mediterranean seas was responsible for major cultural disruptions and may have been the basis for the "great flood" hypothesis seen in so many cultures.

In prehistoric times what is now the Black Sea was an immense freshwater lake, fed by glacial meltwaters.  When the outflow drainage at the Bosphorus closed and when the climate changed (disappearance of glaciers, aridity of the overall watershed), the lake evaporated to a smaller size.

The schematic at right shows the approximate relative sizes and shapes of the ancient freshwater lake and the current Black Sea.  That freshwater lake was a magnet for early human civilization because of the presence of water, game, and arable land.

When the Bosphorus "opened up," the inflow of seawater was on a scale not seen anywhere in the modern world.  The Mediterranean was open to the Atlantic, and the sea level was about 500 feet higher than the lake.  When water found a crack in the Bosphorus the flow would have started as a trickle, then as the passage eroded the flow would increase exponentially.  

"Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile."  

The lake then began to rise 6" per day, and depending on the gradient, the shore would expand by as much as a mile a day - every day, without pause.  The people living on the shores of the lake would be forced to flee.

"It is hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at them.  They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of the other languages, new  ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake."

The diaspora is detailed in several chapters of the book.

"All these people appeared in Europe shortly after the flood.  All have been described [by archaeologists] as outsiders: people who migrated from some distance... all seem to have been more culturally advanced than those [original European residents] whom they displaced.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, at that time in the middle of the sixth millennium B.C., Europe began a rapid ascent into what has been called a "Golden Age"...

The diaspora also happened in the other direction, creating enormous population changes in Anatolia and the Middle East.

"In the [Mesopotamian] epic of Gilgamesh the seven sages are credited with building the walls of Uruk and bringing the arts of civilization to the Sumerians - irrigation, farming, and the use of copper, gold, and silver.  The question of where the Sumerians came from is still unanswered."

"The oldest known written versions of the flood were committed to clay tablets over two millennia after [this flood] event in Sumerian, the language of the first known writing, a language with no known roots and no known descendants..."

The final point to make is that the story of the flood would have been passed by oral history down through dozens of generations.  Archaeologists have noted that the peoples who fled to Europe tended to settle some distance away from freshwater lakes and streams.  But those who fled to the fertile crescent would have been reminded of the great flood because their new territory was also subjected to annual flooding from the Tigris and Euphrates, which may explain why the legend was maintained there until the invention of cuneiform writing.

If you don't have time for the book, you can browse the high points at the Wikipedia page for the Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

Other interesting bits from the book:

"[King Darius I the Great] governed skillfully and managed a vast empire long before that of Alexander the Great, a regime that encompassed all the prior realms of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Ionians, Persians, and Medes, extending to the east as far as the Indus Valley, to the west into Europe, and to the south into Africa, flourishing in economy and culture."

"Apparently what had so deeply moved Smith was the realization that the [cuneiform] fragments he had assembled contained an independent version of the biblical deluge.  The heathen words told almost exactly the same story as the Hebrew narrative, right down to the selection of a survivor of the deluge through the intervention of a god, the forewarning that gave time to build a wooden ark, the refuge in it of every kind of animal, bird, and reptile, the grounding of the boat on the side of a mountain, the details of dispatching a swallow, raven, and dove to find land, the offering of a sacrifice, and the pledge that the gods would never again return the world to its primeval watery chaos."  "... after the feast one of the goddesses flung her jeweled necklace into the sky to be the sign of a covenant never again to drown the world."  "There was no doubt that the deluge described so vividly in the Gilgamesh legend had been inscribed on stone tablets long before the writing of the first books of the Old Testament."

The fact that the Mediterranean basin had once been a desert is confirmed by the discovery that the Nile River has an immensely deep central gorge (now filled with sediment) as a result of erosion when the Nile used to empty into a much lower basin.  The separation of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic occurred during the Messinian time interval between 7.2 and 5.4 million years ago.  "The transition from sea to land and back to sea had taken less than half a million years."  "Although no humans lived five million years ago, had any been present, they would have witnessed the Mediterranean desert disappearing permanently beneath a mile of salt water in a matter of a single human lifetime."

"... the Sumerians and Akkadians, and even the Greeks, did not believe in a reward after death.  Death might be postponed through a petition to a god, but  no one could escape it.  The body returned to clay, and a duplicate "phantom" entered a new abode through an aperture in the grave, leading to an immense, dark, silent, and sad netherworld where one had a torpid and gloomy existence forever."

Reposted from 2022 to accompany other posts.