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.