Divertimento #198

Deep-fried ranch dressing.  Ranch seasoning is mixed with buttermilk and cream cheese before getting coated in panko and plunged into the fryer. Served with a side of honey spiked with hot sauce.

Salient discussion in an explainlikeimfive subreddit post about why salt "brings out flavors" in food.  ?Try some in coffee to get rid of bitterness.

Teach your children how to play poker.  Don't start with the "order of hands."  Just one card hands, age 4, learn how to assess odds and bluff.

"Prop bets" in professional sports are endangering the integrity of the game.  Making the first pitch a ball could enrich the pitcher and his friends.

Minnesota farmers are facing a financial crisis because of tariffs and disruptions on global trade.

Sex toys are being thrown onto the floor in WNBA games, not as jokes or taunts, but to promote one of the memecoin cryptocurrencies.  "“This is empowering to every f—ing crypto community to start thinking outside the box. Get creative and f—ing do something that makes people actually laugh..."

More information than you will ever need to know about Manneken Pis (the "little pissing man" of Brussels).

Serious concerns being raised about Donald Trump's mental acuity.

"A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT.

Trump recalled: “I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump’s uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT."

Ham and Pickle Roll Up on a Potato Skin. Hollowed out potato jackets loaded up with sour cream, cream cheese, chopped pickles and ham, and garnished for good measure with crumbled potato chips.

A longread about sudden disappearances of psychoses after immunosuppressive therapy.

By the summer, her cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a twenty-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?”.. Christine found a handful of recent case studies that documented drastic psychiatric recoveries after people were treated with drugs that dampen immune activity...  “I think the consensus is that we are probably only aware of the tip of the iceberg of different kinds of antibodies that can produce autoimmune diseases, and certainly that holds for autoimmune psychosis,” he said.

"A Tourist Ended Up With a Wild Bat in Her Mouth — And Nearly $21,000 in Medical Bills."  The cost was not for treatment of rabies, but for the rabies shots.

Plastic turf fields are replacing grass for sports activities in the U.S.  "The allure of synthetic grass is strong, but installing fields can easily top $1 million, and many municipalities discover that replacements and repairs can cost many tens of thousands of dollars, experts said."  Apart from costs, there are concerns re health and surface temperatures.

Swimming pools can pop out of the ground if the surrounding area is soaked by rain. "Hydrostatic ground water pressure is a real thing and some pools are meant to never be drained due to that pressure. In the 70’s during the gas shortage I saw an underground gas tank that was pumped dry rise to the surface like a surfacing submarine."

An interesting longread about Minnesota wild rice.

A study published this spring in Communications Earth and Environment says off-reservation rice harvests are dropping 5% to 7% annually in part due to climate change, including wetter early summers and warmer winters... But concerns about genetic integrity of wild rice cultivation, long a tension for many Indigenous communities across northern Minnesota, came to a head in 2024... There’s heightened fear that cultivated rice, which critics say is genetically manipulated, could drift by wind or water into stands of natural rice and contaminate or kill wild rice..."

If you love rocks, minerals, and fossils, feast your eyes on the offerings at Sotheby's recent "geek week" offerings. 

Nixtamal & Wild Rice Bowl with Wóžapi & Bison Meatballs or Sweet Potato Dumplings. Bison meatballs or sweet potato dumplings garnished with mixed berry wóžapi sauce. Served on a bed of nixtamal (white corn, blue corn and yellow corn) mixed with wild rice and seasoned with maple and spices.  There’s also an optional crunch from spiced cricket-and-seed topping.

"The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing bones to access the marrow—a behavior shared by their earliest African ancestors—also crushed them into fragments and boiled them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource."

Serious concerns about why Tesla's auto-driving vehicles keep crashing.

"The Tesla Files... contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented... First responders couldn’t open the doors because the handles were retracted. The teenagers burned to death in the back seat... Tesla deliberately limited documentation of particular issues to avoid the risk of this information being requested under subpoena..."

A sequel to the "grannyshack." Developments with a skybridge or hallway connecting two homes have been popping up all over Seattle in recent years... On paper, what you’re looking at is a single-family home and two accessory dwelling units, an arrangement locally known as a 3-pack. These compounds popped up after Seattle eased building restrictions on A.D.U.s in 2019, as part of the city’s efforts to increase housing density and drive down prices. A.D.U.s are built on land that would not otherwise be developed — often, what would be a house’s backyard — and tend to cost less than conventional single-family homes.

Jelly kills hummingbirds.  "Jelly is like fast food—tasty, with plenty of calories when a bird needs a quick pick-me-up. But it’s also like fast food in lacking essential nutrients that birds need. When people tell me orioles bring their fledglings to jelly feeders, I cringe."

Why do bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts?

A longread about the utter carnage at Normandy on D-day.

If you find one of these under the sink in your hotel room, know that it is a panic button.

Fields in Ukraine are covered with a spiderweb-like conglomeration of fiber-optic cables.  This is basically "drone poop."  There are also innumerable "mini-mines" that will take your foot off, but not kill you.

"Both Russia and Ukraine use FPV drones that have about 10km of fiber optic cable on them, this fiber optic cable is constantly directly connected to the drone operators, making it completely immune to jamming and EW systems. The disadvantage is this kind of pollution."

Peanut butter bacon cakes.  Pancake-battered, thick-cut bacon that’s served with peanut butter whipped cream, grape jelly and banana chips.

The word "anecdote" (1670s) originally meant "secret or private stories," from French anecdote (17c.) or directly from Medieval Latin anecdota, from Greek anekdota "things unpublished." "Procopius' 6c. Anecdota, unpublished memoirs of Emperor Justinian full of court gossip, gave the word a sense of "revelation of secrets," which decayed in English to "brief, amusing story" by the 1760s.

You may be surprised which U.S. university has the most varsity sports (42 different varsity sports teams).

The "marshmellow test" shows that cuttlefish have intelligence at least similar to young children.

"The soft drink Fanta was invented by Coca-Cola, an American company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party. The drink was technically fruit-flavored, but limited wartime resources made that descriptor not wholly accurate. Its ingredients were less than appetizing: leftover apple fibers, mash from cider presses, and whey, a cheese by-product. “[Fanta] was made from the leftovers of the leftovers,” says Mark Pendergrast, who, as the author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, revealed this hidden past. “I don’t imagine it tasted very good.”"

The Pope's childhood home in Illinois had 750 sq ft of living area.

A snail in New Zealand lays eggs from its neck.

If you've ever wondered how many penises are depicted in the Bayeaux tapestry, you can find the answer via a link at Neatorama (although scholars disagree on the exact number).  

"Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers. He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry."  Details, analysis, and commentary at the link.

"The inhabitants of Carthage were long thought to have derived from Levantine Phoenicians. But an eight-year study suggests they were more closely related to Greeks."

Savory Éclairs.  Choux pastry eclair with bánh mì or lobster filling. The bánh mì includes pork confit, chicken liver pâté, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber and sriracha mayo, garnished with micro cilantro. The lobster mixes lobster meat with celery mayo, Cholula hot sauce, lime and chives.

"Dr. Ira Leeds, a Yale Medicine colorectal surgeon, said ghost poops — or nirvana poops, as he calls them — easily (but noticeably) pass through the anal canal, sink to the bottom of the toilet, and leave no residue when wiping. These three factors are indicative of good bowel health."

A 19-year-old girl did 13 cartwheels in a row, then went blind.

"After consulting an ophthalmologist, it transpired that I had ruptured blood vessels in my macula, the central part of the retina responsible for detailed vision. The amount of blood was small – like a tiny ink dot – but enough to block my central vision. She said it would take far longer than two weeks to heal: if I was lucky, I might be able to see again in three months. I was legally blind – I wouldn’t be able to drive, finish my studies or watch TV."

"I’ve been on a new contraceptive pill for 8 months now and since then my hair has been growing straight."

Two AIs discuss the Shakespeare authorship question.

I have avoided or minimized references to Trump in this linkfest.  For those fascinated by that subject, McSweeney's has an ongoing post entitled "Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes."  As of the end of July there are details on 364 atrocities.

"The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment, which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago... Frank and Schmidt speculate such a civilization could have gone to space and left artifacts on other celestial bodies, such as the Moon and Mars."

"America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly... Religion provides what sociologists call the “three B’s”: belief, belonging and behaviors. It offers beliefs that supply answers to the tough questions of life. It gives people a place they feel they belong, a community where they are known. And it tells them how to behave, or at least what tenets should guide their action. Religious institutions have spent millenniums getting really good at offering these benefits to people.

Before and after photos of carotenosis (from overdosing on carrots).  Some salient discussion in the thread.

Winning photos from the Wildlife Comedy Awards (2022)

"European tourists who toted home bottles of water from a holy well in Ethiopia were likely hoping for blessings and spiritual cleansing—but instead carried an infectious curse and got an intestinal power cleanse.  Three people in Germany and four in the UK fell ill with cholera after directly drinking or splashing their faces with the holy water. Two required intensive care. Luckily, they all eventually recovered, according to a report in the journal Eurosurveillance."

Mushroom "calamari."  Deep-fried oyster mushrooms stand in for squid in this vegan and gluten-free ode to the crispy seafood bar snack. They’re ready for dunking with a side of chipotle sauce.

Donald Trump's behavior and actions doomed the previously-favored Conservative candidate for prime minister in Canada, resulting in a victory for Liberals.

"An idea circulating [on TikTok] is that a new wedding rule should be introduced, stipulating that guests must not say goodbye to the happy couple, but should just leave. That way, the newly spliced spouses are allowed to enjoy the most expensive party they will ever throw, rather than being persistently interrupted and pulled off the dancefloor."  For some reason it's called a "French exit."

Kosher salt is iodine-deficient.

The least common birthday in the United States is December 25.  The perfectly logical reason why is explained in this todayilearned subreddit post.

Headline of the day: Kansas babysitter checking for monsters finds man hiding under bed.

Mother of child who died of measles: “"Yes, absolutely; we would absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn't that bad, and they got over it pretty quickly," the mother replied, speaking again of her four living children.  The father then chimed in to falsely claim that measles is "good for the body" and that people who survive the illness are left with stronger immune systems that can fight off cancers later in life. This is a dangerous falsehood that Kennedy has also recently repeated."

Hiking the 1000 miles of the Iditarod.  "A Minnesotan following a famous sled dog path was the first woman to arrive on foot Saturday night in the human-powered version of the race across interior Alaska.  Pulling a sled packed with 55 pounds of gear, Kari Gibbons hiked into Nome after a little more than 27 days navigating the Alaska wilderness to win the Iditarod Trail Invitational 1000.

A comprehensive takedown of state government support of horse racing the United States.  "Maryland uses as much as $91 million a year in slot machine revenue to prop up its horse racing industry. The state last year agreed to acquire the decrepit Pimlico track and invest up to an additional $400 million to upgrade it. Pennsylvania has sunk over $3.5 billion over the past two decades into its racehorse development fund."  Attendance is plummeting.  "Racing is a minute or two of speed and a lot of waiting in between. “For young people,” he said, “it’s too slow. Horse racing is just too slow.”

"So it gladdened my cynical old heart when I saw one of my goddaughters recently and learned of the latest high-school craze: visible pimple patches.  Hydrocolloid patches are a helpful skincare product for anyone of any age suffering from spots – but they’re especially good for teens who are, in my pretty considerable experience, more likely to pick and fiddle with their zits, worsening the redness and chances of scarring. Pimple patches prevent this habit from transferring bacteria from fingers to spots, and discourage touching and meddling generally."

And the final photo - soft serve beer:

"Soft Serve Royal Raspberry Beer is a new "drink" in the fair's Specialty Sips lineup, only it's ice cream ... but it's also beer with a roughly 4% ABV... Burrows found someone who made an additive that allows beer to freeze into a creamier texture than a slushy-like substance full of ice crystals. "

The seven foods embedded in this post are among the 33 new foods offered last year at the Minnesota State Fair.  I'll present some of the 2025 foods in a future linkfest.

Divertimento #197

An analysis of 50,000 punts in the NFL (2000-2018).  Begins with the Bears punting 10 times in one game (every time they had the ball).

Kratom is either a performance-enhancing herbal supplement or a lethal opioid.

"John Wayne’s racist comments, lack of World War II service resurface in heated Twitter debate."

A photo of a rhino with an "oxpecker Mohawk"

There is a beach in Thailand that nobody is allowed to touch.

Aerial photos from around the world show the sharp demarcation between the homes of rich and poor people.

The important distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.

The history and usage of the phrase "enemy of the people.' "The expression enemy of the people dates to Imperial Rome. The Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus in 68 CE. Its direct translation is "public enemy"... The words ennemi du peuple were used extensively during the French Revolution. On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated: "The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death".... Soviet Union... Cambodia... Albania... Nazi Germany... England... and Donald Trump.  "From his inauguration in January 2017 through October 15, 2019, Trump called the news media the "enemy of the people" 36 times on Twitter."

In major league there are now (1919) more foul balls than balls hit in play.

There is a subreddit devoted to insanepeopleFacebook entries.

A brief explanation of intermittent fasting.

Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum: "Over two decades of marriage, author Charles Dickens grew more popular and powerful, while his wife Catherine bore ten children. Charles apparently grew tired of Catherine, and blamed her for having ten children and also accused her of not taking good care of them. The couple separated after Dickens' affair with 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan was revealed. Catherine was compelled to leave the family home with only one of her children. More details of the breakup were revealed when a caches of letters was discovered at Harvard University. The stories she told her neighbors portray Dickens as cruel as one of his literary villains."

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century."

An anti-vaxxer Texas legislator says he is not concerned about the rise of measles and other viral diseases because we no have antibiotics.

"Toledo voters passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, a unique charter amendment that establishes the huge lake as a person and grants it the legal rights that a human being or corporation would have.  The final results weren’t even close, as it passed by a 61% to 39% margin."

A new and unusual disease in Africa is afflicting children.

"An ‘emotional support’ pit bull mauled a 5-year-old girl in an airport terminal."

"It's interesting growing up and learning that most adults are not smart."

A striking visual display showing the effect of mussels on cleaning the water in a stream.

A long longread about the history of arsenic poisoning.

Cows are fed magnets to collect metal particles they might ingest.  Cows also tend to face north...

An askscience subreddit thread discusses coronal mass ejections.

In defense of the funds expended on space exploration.

"At the height of the Empire, a select band of British people renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. These are the stories of three such pioneers, who defied Victorian norms at a time when Christianity was the bedrock of British identity."

The discovery of a human footprint in Chile from 15,600 yeas ago indicates settlement in Patagonia long before Clovis.

A graphic illustration of the popular perception of the ethnicity of Jesus Christ.

"Bill-wiping is not the hottest topic in ornithology, but curiosity has drawn the occasional researcher to the behavior over the years. Although they haven’t arrived at a definite, universal explanation, we can summarize their reports on the role of bill-wiping this way: It definitely acts like a napkin, probably as a file, and maybe even as a cologne spritzer."

"Should 11-year-old girls have to bear their rapists’ babies?" (2019 article)

A history of cannabis cuisine in British colonial India.

A poster from the BasketballsAreFlat society.

A history of contaminated water at the White House, and its possible role in the deaths of three American presidents.

"Public enemy No. 1 for corn and soybean farmers, the Palmer amaranth weed, has made new incursions into Minnesota by way of livestock feed. .. This is bad news for corn and soybean farmers, both because the weed grows and proliferates quickly and because it is resistant to multiple herbicides. It can grow up to 8 feet tall with a woody stem thick enough to damage farm equipment that tries to mow it down... The weed, which grows up to 3 inches a day and can produce a half-million seeds per plant..." (photo at the link)

"Last month, the Swiss unveiled a smart new banknote to stash in their wallets. The purple 1,000 franc bill was the latest in the Swiss National Bank (SNB) series to undergo a revamp. And this is no ordinary note, it’s one of the world’s most valuable banknotes, worth around 880 euros ($1,007, £764)... In Switzerland, cash remains the dominant payment method. Here, there’s an assumption everyone carries cash, even in an increasingly digital economy. Most don’t get caught out buying a sandwich or paying for a haircut when the card payment machine is out of order."

"The archive [of Gabriel Garcia Marquez] includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. It was bought by the University of Texas for US$2.2 million.  The searchable, online archive features almost 30,000 items, so it’s easy to get lost in there."  And its free to use.

"Combining both brains and brawn, orcas have been known to kill sharks in surprisingly complicated ways. Some will drive their prey to the surface and then karate chop them with overhead tail swipes. Others seem to have worked out that they can hold sharks upside-down to induce a paralytic state called tonic immobility. Orcas can kill the fastest species (makos) and the largest (whale sharks). And when they encounter great whites, a few recorded cases suggest that these encounters end very badly for the sharks."

A Reddit thread discusses education in India following a report that 19 teenagers in India committed suicide after a softwar error botched their exam results.

Photos and videos of Freddie Mercury and his cats.

A story about Walt Disney's housekeeper.

"I dug through the privacy settings for the five biggest consumer tech companies and picked a few of the most egregious defaults you should consider changing. These links will take you directly to what to tap, click and toggle for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple."

"Italian police have arrested 34 people allegedly involved in a "bone-breaking" medical insurance scam in Palermo, Sicily.  The perpetrators allegedly broke people's limbs and staged road accidents in exchange for part of their insurance payout... The victims were anaesthetised with drugs and had their limbs held on blocks of stone or cement, which were hit with bags of weights or large rocks... Among those arrested are doctors and physiotherapists who allegedly filed false medical reports, and a lawyer who filed the insurance claims."

Don't wear mirrored glasses when you play poker.

"TIL light bulbs in the New York City subway system screw in "backwards" (i.e. with left-handed threads) so people won't steal them to use at home."

A list of works of fiction involving time travel.

"Cleopatra was born ~2,500 years after the Great Pyramid at Giza was built, and ~2,000 years before the first lunar landing. That fact means that Cleopatra is closer to our present time than to the times of Ancient Egypt's early dynastic past."

A suprising lot of things happen when you check "I am not a robot."

Escalators can be designed to be curved.

How to evaluate and grade sea glass.

If you're wondering about the workload and pay for Pat Sajak and Vanna White...

The smearing of Ilhan Omar (2019 article but probably still relevant)

Some Antarctic icebergs are green because they are heavily laden with iron.  "Writing Jan. 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Ocean, Warren and his colleagues report that the marine ice at the bottom of the Amery Ice Shelf has 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above. This iron comes from the rocks under the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which are ground into a fine powder as glaciers move over them."  This iron gets delivered to phytoplankton in the ocean that need it for nutrition.

A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in China: "The creatures are so well preserved in the fossils that the soft tissues of their bodies, including the muscles, guts, eyes, gills, mouths and other openings are all still visible. The 4,351 separate fossils excavated so far represent 101 species, 53 of them new."

A longread about cast iron skilets and the misconceptions about them.

"Meaning ‘atlas’ or ‘sheet of the world’ in Latin, the Mappa Mundi is an incredibly detailed 1.59m-long by 1.34m-wide map depicting the history, geography and religious understanding of the known world from the point of view of 13th-Century European scholars."

“We can be proud to say that, for the first time in 400 years, Manneken Pis is not peeing out fresh drinking water. The municipality is now intent on inspecting all the centrally located fountains to avoid similar waste.”

A complete list of the winners of the Costa Book Award.

A photograph of scalping survivor Robert McGee.

How to make leech traps.

"Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed.  The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure to treat patients who need critical and timely care."

"Padding is the extra time airlines allow themselves to fly from A to B. Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays experienced for decades into their schedules instead of improving operations."

"When a young Taiwanese woman named He took herself to a hospital this week complaining of a swollen eye, she expected to be treated for a simple infection.  Instead, the 29-year-old and her doctor were horrified to discover four bees living under her eyelids, feasting on her tears."

What is Michael J. Fox's middle name?  (scroll down to "early life").

Three tips for making a better cake from a mix in a box.

Woman eats 86 ounces of mayonnaise in 3 minutes.

Butterflies puddling.

Embedded images from the The New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons (Knopf, 1992).

Divertimento #196

"Her most popular videos by far are about vaginal lightening, which involves using a specialized treatment to lighten the vulva or general bikini area. (It does not, as the term would seem to imply, lighten the vagina itself, which is located on the inside of the body.) Most practitioners treat the labia majora, or the external lips of the vulva; many people request lightening the labia minora, or inner lips, as well, though this is not recommended and many practitioners will not do it.  In her practice, Taub estimates that she gets four or five requests for the treatment per day; in terms of the popularity of the services she offers, she says it is a “50-50” split between vaginal lightening and laser hair removal."

An extended explanation of what it means when you start seeing "floaters" in your eyes.

In 2018 the NFL was entering the "golden age of punters", who "are now neutralizing and terrorizing the most electric return men in the NFL with kicks that spin and move and bounce and flip in all sorts of unpredictable, terror-inducing ways."

The life of a professional (licensed) safecracker.  "Charlie Santore was not arrested by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office that day, and he did get the safe open. It would also prove to be the first of many such calls, as more and more homeowners in the burn zone would return to discover nothing but a safe standing where a long-cherished family house used to be. Their belongings had been reduced to whatever was locked inside that box. Santore was there to help them retrieve those possessions, rolling up in his sagging Mercedes, ready to get to work."

“Wonder Woman” follows a long line of Jewish ties to comic book characters. Many superheroes were created by Jews, according to Haaretz, including Superman, Captain America, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Ironman, the X-Men, Thor and the Avengers. Since daily newspapers in the 1930s would not accept illustrations by Jews, Haaretz reports, many Jews found a home in comic book publishing.

4,400-year-old Egyptian tomb opened; walls covered with painted sculptures and figures.

The odd and unexplainable side effects of head trauma ("why some people become sudden geniuses").

Accumulated hippo feces create lethally anoxic water that kills all aerobic life in it.  The same article notes that "migrating wildebeest nourish the Serengeti by drowning en masse in the Mara, adding about 1,100 tons of dead meat to the river every year."  This is an Ed Yong article.

While writing the above entry I learned that the word "feces" is a plurale tantum - a noun that exists only in the pleural sense.  That's worth a full post in the blog.  Later.

How to "game the system" for recharging electric scooters.

The harsh life of musk oxen - including burial by an ice tsunami.

On Friday, J.K. Rowling's Pottermore, the official online companion compendium for all things Harry Potter, revealed another surprising tidbit that threw fans for a Quidditch loop. "Hogwarts didn't always have bathrooms," the tweet in question reads. "Before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the eighteenth century, witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence."  Also discussed here.

Jacqueline Ades sent a man more than 159,000 text messages — some of which were threatening — over the course of nearly 10 months...The two went on a single date... One text read: "I'd make sushi outta ur kidneys n chopsticks outta ur hand bones."

A longread about how genetic information is implemented.  "“The modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong … DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system … DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.” "This explains why humans seem to have only a few more genes than flies or mice (around 20,000), while a carrot has 45,000! There is no correlation between the complexity of living things and the number of genes they have. But there is a correlation with the evolving complexity of regulatory networks. Counting genes to understand the whole is like judging a body of literature by counting letters. It can’t be done."

"Scary" formatting of a church sign.

BBC article has photos of an unfortunate carpet python in Australia covered with 500 ticks.

A sports op-ed opining that in football "Kickers exist mostly so coaches will have someone to blame when they lose a close game," and suggesting that field goals should be reduced to one point.

If you rob a bank, don't make your getaway on an electric scooter.

"Saturn's rings are only 10 to 100 million years old. This is much younger than the planet itself, which is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old."  So the first dinosaurs and mammals on earth, had they looked up, would not have seen rings on Saturn.

"Europeans have found the secret to making some of the world's costliest medicines more affordable, as much as 80 percent cheaper than in the U.S.  Governments in Europe have compelled drugmakers to bend on prices and have thrown open the market for so-called biosimilars, which are cheaper copies of biologic drugs made from living organisms. The brand-name products — ranging from Humira for rheumatoid arthritis to Avastin for cancer — are high-priced drugs that account for 40 percent of U.S. pharmaceutical sales.  European patients can choose from dozens of biosimilars, 50 in all, which have stoked competition and driven prices lower. However, the U.S. government stops short of negotiating and drugmakers with brand-name biologics have used a variety of strategies — from special contracting deals to overlapping patents — to block copycat versions from entering the United States or gaining market share."

An allergy to corn can make your life a living hell, because it is in so many foods and non-food.products.

"Veterinarian school is costly. Recent studies conducted by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the industry’s largest nonprofit advocacy entity, show that the average veterinary student now graduates with $143,000 or more in debt; about 1 in 5 leave school with more than $200,000 to pay off. Veterinary salaries — which start at about $67,000 a year — aren’t keeping pace with rising tuition rates."  Many vets commit suicide.  "Another key driver of this suicide crisis: Veterinarians are consistently asked to act as animal undertakers. Euthanizing animals can cause what a recent study referred to as ethical conflict and moral distress, which arises when vets are forced to put aside their expert opinions and accept pet owners’ decisions about if and when to put their animals down. More so, this proximity to death makes dying seem like a reasonable way to ease suffering."

Very unfortunate optics of a cereal promotion.

Australian woman bitten in the nether regions by a carpet python that was in her toilet bowl.  A good reminder to look in the bowl before sitting down.  Pix at the link.

“Unlike most other hard liquors, tequila doesn’t spike your blood sugar, which means even people with type 2 diabetes can drink it — in fact, it may even lower glucose levels and increase insulin production.”  I doubt that's true, but haven't researched it.

"...at least 1,000 women and girls in the UK had been subjected to [breast ironing]... whereby mothers, aunties or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth."

"But St. Louis prosecutors on Friday evening came to a different conclusion. The [police] officers, they say, were playing a deadly game — pointing a gun with one round in the chamber at each other and then pulling the trigger.

Police departments seize money and don't return it.  "When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana. So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it." "Police are systematically seizing cash and property — many times from people who aren’t guilty of a crime — netting millions of dollars each year. South Carolina law enforcement profits from this policing tactic: the bulk of the money ends up in its possession."

"Consistent with other analyses, Hiya’s report found that the number of robo-calls is on the rise. Roughly 26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, Hiya said, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam."

"The complete 14 Batman window cameos"

Many, many Americans do not understand how tax brackets work.

"The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said nearly 40 percent of children ages 3 to 6 used more toothpaste than recommended by dental professionals. For young children with emerging teeth, swallowing too much fluoride toothpaste can cause discoloration of their teeth, a condition called dental fluorosis."

"In fact, if you’ve been eating breakfast to stave off weight gain, researchers are increasingly learning that breakfast might have the opposite of the desired effect — it can promote more calorie consumption and weight gain. But even the best available studies in the mix have serious limitations.  Before we get into what the science says, it’s worth understanding how the myth of breakfast was created..."

Genealogical relationships of Presidents of the United States.  Some second- , third- , and fourth-cousins in the early years.  But Warren G. Harding is ninth cousin to both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.  Trump is related to three previous presidents, and Obama to five.

"A 24-year-old man in Fort Worth, Texas has died after a vape pen he was using exploded in his face and severed an artery to his brain"

The best article I've read on kleptocracy (written in 2019, but prob has increasing relevance today.

A home-made water-cooled 72,000 LED flashlight.  Video compares it to a 500-lumen flashlight.

Bumper stickers of a crazy sociopath.

A composite image of 100 vulvas.  "Vulvas are rarely seen outside porn and childbirth, which Dodsworth puts down partly to their position on the body. “Cocks are right there at the front. They are visible, whereas vulvas aren’t. If you’re a straight woman, you don’t see many.” And, as she writes in her book, they’re not easy to look at: “Let’s be honest, it’s tricky to witness our vulvas for ourselves, legs awkwardly astride pocket mirrors, bums shuffled up close to full-length mirrors, or taking a selfie with the unflattering lens of a smartphone.”

A young girl achieving her Make A Wish with a Disney princess.

"The healthcare industry has for decades attributed widespread understaffing issues to a nursing shortage... But according to research and projections conducted by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, most states have nurse surpluses that are projected to grow over the next decade. Instead, nurses’ advocates say, the shortage is simply a reluctance by companies to cut profit margins by hiring enough staff. “It’s a convenient argument for the industry to validate their underresourcing of registered nurses on the floor, simply saying there’s a nursing shortage, but there isn’t,” said Michelle Mahon, nursing practice representative and organizer with National Nurses United, the largest labor union of registered nurses in the US. “It’s a market decision that benefits the employer,” she added."

An account of the massive carnage resulting from an "inland cyclone" in Queensland in 2019.

A 2019 op-ed criticized Democratic party officials for trying to silence Ilhan Omar, whose "foreign policy views are far more in line with voters than the disconnected party establishment."

An octopus can kill a shark by suffocating it.

A BBC article on "fish pirates." “Approximately 20% of all global catch is illegal, unreported or unregulated,”... And the impacts are widespread, hurting the fish stocks themselves, the fishing industry and consumer trust. “If illegal fishing ultimately could result in stocks collapsing, this will then affect the livelihood of fishers across the globe.”

The embedded images are from a Smithsonian article on How Microbiologists Craft Stunning Art Using Pathogens. Details at the link.

And having read through all these links, what will you do with your newfound knowledge?

Divertimento #195

It has been years since I've done a proper linkfest with excerpted content.  For the past 3-4 years all the divertimentos have been gif-fests.  Those are quick and easy to assemble from piles of bookmarks, but a proper linkfest should include occasional brief excerpts to highlight content and help the reader decide which to visit.

I file bookmarks for linkfests in folders of 12 so I can open all simultaneously in tabs.  At present I have 155 folders with 12 links each.  Lots of the older ones are undergoing linkrot, so best to start getting some of this material out onto the blog.  I'm going to start with the oldest links, which begin in 2018.

The Ig Nobel prize winners for 2018

The biology prize was for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.  The chemistry prize for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.  The reproductive medicine prize for using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly.  And more.  Links at the link.

How the Boston underground (MBTA) was designed

The redesign was done in the 1960s, mostly re esthetics, colors, lighting, and information: "One common ground in our analysis was that we could transform the entire system by simply helping people figure out where they were and where they were going."

Iranians are properly considered not to be Arabs.  They are Persians.

"Given its location in the Middle East, Muslim majority, and language which resembles Arabic, Iran is often mislabeled as an Arab nation. A cognate of “aryan,” Iran means “land of the Aryans” and is excluded from the list of Arab League nations in the Middle East/North Africa region."

When you are buying a home, consider getting a sewer inspection.  "...shared a bunch of sewer inspection videos with me over the past year showing failed, relatively newer sewer lines. Each one of these drain lines requires an expensive repair that I would absolutely not want to get stuck with as a home buyer. I put together a short video of these defects."  Compilation video at the link.

Girl pulls 1500-year-old sword from lake.  I was reminded of a Python sketch:  "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."

Physicist sells his Nobel prize medal for $765,000.  "That put the transaction at No. 4 on the list of 10 Nobel Prize sales over the past 30 years."  The top three are discussed at the link; two of them are familiar names.

RPG doesn't stand for "rocket-propelled-grenade."  It actually stands for "ruchnoy protivotankovy granatomyot"  "Rocket-propelled grenade" is a backronym.  Just like "save our souls" is a backronym for the easy-to-click Morse code signal.

A new menace: Asian long-horned tick.  "For the first time in 50 years, a new tick species has arrived in the United States — one that in its Asian home range carries fearsome diseases.  The Asian long-horned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, is spreading rapidly along the Eastern Seaboard. It has been found in seven states and in the heavily populated suburbs of New York City...  a woman who had been shearing her pet Icelandic sheep came to his department with ticks on her hands and wrists.  “I thought she’d have a few,” Mr. Rainey said in an interview. “But she was covered in them, easily over 1,000 on her pants alone.”

The elevation span (vertical distance from highest point to lowest point) is charted for every country.  You will need to click on the image twice to make the country names readable.

 

A truncheon is a prosthetic penis enhancer.  "First, surgeons sever the organ’s suspensory ligament, causing it to hang an inch or two lower, giving the impression of extra length. They then extract fat from the patient’s stomach and inject it into the penis shaft, increasing girth by around two inches. Erect, it’s worth noting, it remains roughly the same size, suggesting the motives for many men are not necessarily to enhance either their – or a partner’s – sexual experience."

How biomass is distributed among Earth's taxa.  Which of the following taxa has the greatest total mass on our planet:  protists (single-cells, amoebae), archaea (bacteria-like),  fungi, bacteria, plants, fish, arthropods...  Answer at the link.

Two-billion-year-old water found in a mine in Canada.  “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock,” said U of T geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar in a conversation with the BBC. “But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute—the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.”  The water has a salt concentration 8X seawater.

"French doctors do not know why clusters of babies have been born with limbs missing (13 babies).  Ongoing arguments as to whether the cause is environmental (pesticides etc) or coincidental.

Antoine Winfield's incredible interception for the Minnesota Gophers in 2018.  In the final minute of the game, Fresno State had the ball on the Minnesota 4-yard line, 1st and goal.  Then the interception.  And necessary because a simple deflection would have allowed Fresno State three more tries.  Winfield went on to star as a safety in the NFL for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Quarterback playcall language "Double Right Open. Z-Orbit, Scat Left, 787 F-Drag On 2".  Includes an explanation of the "Omaha!" emergency call.

The first known photo of a surfer - in 1890 !

Weatherman's exaggerated hurricane report.  Apparently he was instructed to lean into the wind for emphasis; nobody told the pedestrians.

An outrageous hospital charge.  There are of course endless examples of this, but nobody in the health care delivery field does anything to prevent or correct it.

Pennsylvania prisoners may not receive books; they have to pay $149 for an e-reader and then $2-29 for each e-book.  "The library of ebooks available contains 8,500 titles and consists largely of material that exists in the public domain and could be read freely through Project Guttenberg, “but that cost anywhere from $2.99 (Moby-Dick) to $11.99 (The Federalist Papers), all the way up to $14.99 (Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue)."  Shameful.

Scary earthquake footage.

"When a middle school in Stafford County, Va., had a lockdown drill... to prepare for potential mass shootings or other emergencies, a transgender student was barred from both the boys’ and girls’ locker room — where other students were taking shelter. She was instead instructed to sit in the gym and then the locker room hallway while teachers discussed where she should go... “Let me be clear. During an event that prepares children to survive an attack by actual assailants, she was treated as if she was so much of a danger to peers that she was left exposed and vulnerable..."

Bicycle converted into a water bike.

"Nonso Muojeke and his family, who fled Nigeria in 2006, were facing deportation from Ireland until his classmates began a campaign to save them. They gathered 22,000 signatures and delivered it to the justice minister, convincing the government to allow the family to stay."

If you are told there is a fee to cancel an appointment on short notice, ask if you can reschedule for a later time.  Then call back to cancel the later appointment.

The £750 Touch of Fur shawl by Fendi looks like a giant vulva.  Picture at the link.

Marie Antoinette's jewelry being auctioned off by Sotheby's.

"Shortly after she hoisted her sample from the well, the bottle ruptured from internal pressure. The water gushed out through the cracks, fizzing like soda. The gas erupting from it was not carbon dioxide, as it is in soft drinks, but hydrogen—a flammable gas."  An article at The Atlantic discusses endoterrestrials - organisms that live deep underground.

A hunting dog trapped in a hollow tree trunk died there, and his body became mummified. "Chestnut oaks contain tannin, which is used to tan animal pelts and prevent decay. Tannin is a natural "desiccant," or material that absorbs moisture and dries out its surroundings. The low-moisture environment stopped the microbial activity. And no microbial activity means no decay. "  What a horrible way to die (pic at the link).

A man died from a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease because he ate squirrel brains.

"Some bird species have been reported to fly at the upper levels of the troposphere. On November 29, 1973, a Rüppell's vulture (Gyps rueppelli) was ingested into a jet engine 11,278 m (37,000 ft) above the Ivory Coast."

"The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. .. Parents have described their children collapsing mid-run like “marionette dolls,” or going to bed with a fever and waking up paralyzed from the neck down. AFM wasn’t a one-off, but likely a new biennial normal. It’s still rare, affecting just one in 1 million people, but that’s little comfort for the roughly 400 children who’ve been affected, many of whom are looking at lifelong disability or paralysis."

"Workers were readying commercial space at the T.B. Converse Building, located on North Patterson Street in Downtown Valdosta, when they found an estimated 1,000 teeth buried in a second floor wall."

"Scientists say West Coast waters now have a hypoxia season... "If there are crabs in the pot, they're dead. Straight up," Bailey says. And if you re-bait the pots, "when you go out the next time, they're blanks, they're absolutely empty. The crabs have left the area." A hypoxia event will kill everything that can't swim away—animals like crabs, sea cucumbers and sea stars."  Just like the Gulf of Mexico.

A list of films that feature miniature people.  Over 60 movies, from Alice in Wonderland to Ant Man.

The Human Terrain is a map depicting population around the world using vertical bars for number of people.  You can pan and zoom.  Cool.

"The international team of scientists reviewed two datasets, including a large registry from Sweden, and found that removal of the appendix was associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. They also found that the human appendix contains clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein in a form associated with the disease. There’s more work to be done, and the authors are not advocating that people preemptively remove their appendixes, but they hope that the research could provide a pathway towards treatment."  That was in 1918, and coincidentally this week I heard a science podcast reporting that genomic studies have found tentative links between manic-depressive disorders and the pancreas.  The human body is more complex than we realize.  

A hotel sign suggests that your end of the hallway might not be very peaceful.

"A Scottish man has had his peanut-butter smeared genitalia bitten off by an English bulldog. Paramedics were unable to recover them for reattachment."  I was sorry to read that the dog was later put down.  It wasn't the dog's fault.

"Inaccessible Island rails live only on Inaccessible Island; it appears, as far as any evidence shows, that they never even made it to the neighboring Nightingale Island."  They are flightless, but apparently their distant ancestors flew there (then discovered they didn't need wings).

Placebo pills actually work.  "You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos — as well as they do to drugs, with some patients — is long and growing."

Some phonograph records have "locked grooves." "It is usually a silent loop that keeps the needle and tonearm from drifting into the label area. However, it is possible to record sound in this groove, and some artists have included looping audio in the locked groove."

An impressive sea-stack.  "A few years ago, a helicopter landed several scientists on the stack; they were the first humans to set foot there for ages. They stayed there overnight and examined the surface where they found the remains of a medieval house, walls, cultivation ridges, and a corn grinding stone."

"The average wedding in the U.S. now has five bridesmaids—according to an annual survey conducted by the wedding-planning platform The Knot—a number that is up from four in 2007 and appears to be steadily rising. It’s now common, several wedding experts told me, for a bride to have 10 or 11 maids. “In the South, forget it,” says Meg Keene, the author of A Practical Wedding Planner. “You’re going to have 50.”

In the Czech Republic there is "Vila Mátma, or “My Darkness Villa,” where clients spend seven days or longer alone and in complete absence of light... There’s not much to do in the dark, at Vila Mátma or any other darkness-therapy center. And that’s more or less the point. Depending on the facility, clients sleep, exercise, and meditate. They eat and bathe in the dark. They sometimes write, draw, sculpt, or play an instrument, all in total darkness. Without access to their phones or to the internet—or even to a clock or calendar—they tend to spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts, and on occasion chatting with a therapist or “guardian.” Not infrequently, clients report intense audiovisual experiences, most likely vivid dreams or hypnagogic imagery (the sort of micro-dreams you experience in between wakefulness and sleep), which can be pleasantly mind-expanding or downright terrifying. At the BRC, the procedure costs 2,000 Czech koruna a day, or just under $100, and patients must reserve the one-person facility for a minimum of a week at a time."

Horseshoe Bend is what happens when a patch of public land becomes #instagramfamous. Over the past decade photos have spread like wildfire on social media, catching the 7,000 residents of Page and local land managers off guard. According to Diak, visitation grew from a few thousand annual visitors historically to 100,000 in 2010 – the year Instagram was launched. By 2015, an estimated 750,000 people made the pilgrimage. This year visitation is expected to reach 2 million."  I remember visiting national parks in the 1960s-70s when they were mostly empty.

Impressive graphic zooms along the U.S. - Mexico border when you scroll with your mouse.  This was important in 2018, and looks to become important again.

"A video released by the US Forest Service shows the moment when a gender reveal party in Arizona went horribly wrong, sparking a wildfire that burned nearly 47,000 acres and caused more than $8 million in damage."

Football-throwing championship won with two-handed passes.

The history of Nancy Drew books.

In a 5-minute video, conservators at The British Museum explain how they decide whether to wear gloves or not when handling an object.

Enough for now.  That emptied 10 folders of 12 links each, yielding about 50 useable links (the others have undergonelinkrot or are now behind paywalls, or are now irrelevant (politics), and some I moved to my blog-it-now folder because they were extra good. But it only cleaned out my bookmarks for 2018.  There may be some copy/paste errors; if so, let me know. More to come...

Embedded photos from the 2015 Nikon Small World photography competition.  Identification of the subject matter and photo credits via the link.