Old Reader's Digest puzzle

Assume the goose (as pictured) is on the bed.  Via Australia Reader's Digest.  Answer below the fold...

Apple iPhone upgrade warning

Everyone who has a phone understands about the need for upgrading the system periodically, but I was surprised by the urgency implied in this latest communication:

"Take this seriously. If your iPhone does not have Apple’s new update, you must install it now. We know attacks on iPhones have started. We have been warned the threat will extend well beyond those highly targeted initial attacks. And hundreds of millions of iPhone users are also now facing down an unwelcome surprise.

The last available analyst data says hundreds of millions of iPhone users with devices eligible for Apple’s current iOS 26 firmware have yet to upgrade. Those users had expected to be offered the update to iOS 18.7.3, avoiding iOS 26 for a little longer. But Apple withdrew that update for all but iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR.

It’s now a choice between upgrading to iOS 26.2 or no security update. A quick scan of online forums a week after all this was confirmed is a nasty surprise. Plenty of users say they intend to stick with iOS 18.7.2 and avoid the update altogether. That’s bad news...

Do not run your iPhone without these critical WebKit security fixes. “Users should urgently update all their impacted Apple devices,” James Maude from BeyondTrust told me. “Even though this only appears to be linked to a small number of targeted attacks it will quickly become a must have exploit for a range of threat actors."..

Check your iPhone. If you’re running iOS 18.7.2, you should update to iOS 26.2 assuming iOS 18.7.3 is not available. The period of maximum risk for vulnerabilities is the time between public disclosure and extensive patching. That’s right now."

The embedded text is from Forbes, which is not a fearmongering site, so I presume the threat is in fact serious.  I upgraded to 26.2 last night after receiving this notification.  There is some additional information at the link.  Readers of TYWKIWDBI tend to be well informed and may have insight and comments to offer.

"Quantum leap" - a potentially useful term

My understanding would be that a "quantum leap" would refer to the distance between one electron orbit to another within an atom [assuming that within an atom the word "distance" has any meaning at all...]

I'm looking forward to using this term to offer faint praise for someone's declaration of progress.

Credit to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Interesting tool

Image cropped for size from the original, posted in the antiques subreddit.  I'll place the answer "below the fold" so you can ponder the item for a while before peeking... 

Why some colonial Americans were born in "1722/3"

A letter to the editor in the August 2025 issue of American Philatelist magazine commented on a previous article about how the changeover from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar can result in some confusion for researchers, then offered this (to me) surprising observation:

"There is one other important difference that was not mentioned.  During colonial times in America, New Year's Day was legally celebrated on March 25, not January 1, though many celebrated in January.  This was also true in Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire.  This was an additional change in 1752, not noted in the article, when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar.

For those who research cemeteries for genealogy, you'll often see a date engraved on a grave marker such as 1722/3, reflecting this, for a date between January 1 and March 25."

I found additional information here: 

"Since ancient times, England had used the “Julian calendar”, instituted by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.  The Julian calendar followed a solar year of 365 days, but had a somewhat inaccurate method of calculating leap years, which over the centuries led to the addition of too many extra days.  Originally, January 1 was the date of the new year in the Julian calendar, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, the date gradually changed in various parts of Europe to March 25, to conform with Christian festival of the Annunciation.  England adopted March 25th as New Year’s day in the twelfth century.

"Between 1582 and 1752, not only were there two calendars in use in Europe, but there were even two different starts of the year in England.  The official start of the year was March 25, but many people celebrated January 1 as the “New Year’s Day”, following the continental example, and January 1 was often cited as such in almanacs. Therefore, a system of “double dating” was often used in English and colonial records.  For dates falling between the new “New Year” (January 1) and the old “New Year” (March 25), the year could be denoted as two years separated by a slash.  For example, “March 18, 1642/43”.   In the absence of double dating or other evidence, one may not know to which year a document is referring, according to modern reckoning."

I have not located any photos of American colonial gravestones displaying the split date; if anyone knows of such, please leave a comment. 

Addendum:  A grateful tip of my blogging hat to an anonymous reader who found a video that discusses similar unusual gravestones in an English cemetery (from whence the embedded screencap at the top).

Terms used by gen Z to discuss romance and relationships

Herewith, selections from a "comprehensive guide to the terms gen Z is using to talk about romance, sex and the pursuit of both."  These are the ones I found most interesting:

Bird theory – A TikTok trend loosely based on a test developed by couples researchers Julie and John Gottman, in which you point out something trivial – for example, “I saw a bird today” – and note whether your partner’s response is inquisitive or dismissive. If they do not want to hear more about the bird, you two are doomed.

Choremance – A date where two people bond while running errands, such as walking the dog or grocery shopping. In other words, how broke twentysomethings do affordable dating in a post-“$5 beer and shot combo” world.

Freak matching – When you find someone who’s just as obsessive about documentaries about the second world war or DVD collecting or collaging or whatever it may be, as you. Or, conversely, finding someone who hates the same things or people that you do (nothing builds intimacy faster than sharing a nemesis).

Kittenfishing – Catfishing-lite. Or, not exactly lying about who you are, but maybe using older (better) photos of yourself on a dating app profile, or making your job sound more important than it is. Also known as putting your best foot forward.

Monkey branching – A subgenre of microcheating, this means having someone ready in the wings to swing on over to, making a breakup easier. A rebound you tee up before things are officially over.

Orbiting – When a partner ceases communication, à la ghosting, but stays around like a phantom by keeping tabs on your digital footprint. As in, they’ll suddenly like an Instagram post after years of no contact, retraumatizing you all over again.

There are several dozen more offerings in a column at The Guardian.

An interesting chart re Venezuela's oil

I'll defer any personal commentary.  The source article at The Guardian makes note of China's expected public response to Trump's move and offers some speculation re future developments.

But I will add this.  The United Nations passed their General Assembly Resolution 1803 (XVII) way back in 1962 on the subject of "Permanent sovereignty over natural resources".

1. The right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources must be exercised in the interest of their national development and of the well-being of the people of the State concerned...

8. Foreign investment agreements freely entered into by or between sovereign States shall be observed in good faith; States and international organizations shall strictly and conscientiously respect the sovereignty of peoples and nations over their natural wealth and resources in accordance with the Charter and the principles set forth in the present resolution.

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