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.