"Vocal fry" ("the creep") explained

Excerpts from a very interesting article in Science.  I had never heard the terms before.

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry.

Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad. 

Vocal fry, or glottalization, is a low, staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of the vocal chords*. Since the 1960s, vocal fry has been recognized as the lowest of the three vocal registers, which also include falsetto and modal—the usual speaking register.

Speakers creak differently according to their gender, although whether it is more common in males or females varies among languages. In American English, anecdotal reports suggest that the behavior is much more common in women. (In British English, the pattern is the opposite.)

Historically, continual use of vocal fry was classified as part of a voice disorder that was believed to lead to vocal chord* damage. However, in recent years, researchers have noted occasional use of the creak in speakers with normal voice quality...

The researchers also plan to test students in high schools and middle schools to learn why young women creak when they speak. "Young students tend to use it when they get together," Abdelli-Beruh says. "Maybe this is a social link between members of a group." Abdelli-Beruh also wants to compare the prevalence of vocal fry on radio stations. For example, she says that the popular-music station on her teenage son's dial features creaky announcers, but she does not hear vocal fry on National Public Radio, which targets an older audience. 

More at the link. You can hear a subtle example of vocal fry in this segment from This American Life (broadcast on NPR), but the best example I have found is the speech of "Grammar Girl" (click here to listen, because I don't know how to embed) (hat tip to Redditor maryjayjay).

I've heard this speech pattern, never paid any attention to it, and now probably won't be able to "unhear" it.

*A big "sic."  It drives me crazy when science publications misspell vocal cords.

p.s. - does anyone know why it's called "fry"?  Is it because it creates sort of a sizzling sound??

"The Three Stooges" official trailer

YouTube link.

This seems to be very well done (IF you like the Stooges...)

"Sand mining" - a spinoff of fracking technology

Sand has always been a valuable commodity in the construction business.  I remember decades ago reading (but not following) the investment advice of Peter Lynch, who recommended investing in sand and gravel companies because transporting the materials long distances was prohibitively expensive, so local companies have virtual monopolies.

Today I learn that sand is also a necessary component for fracking technology, so immense "sand mines" are being developed, with a variety of local environmental complications:

A controversial natural gas mining technique called "fracking" is creating a boom in Wisconsin sand mines with more than 20 new mines proposed, including some as large as 500 acres or more.

While the mines bring jobs, they also bring dust, traffic and other problems the state Department of Natural Resources and local governments aren't prepared to deal with... "The state is woefully unprepared for this," said state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma. "We're regulating sand mines like we regulate gravel pits. There is a big difference between a one-acre gravel pit and a 900-acre sand mine."

[The demand for sand results from] the increasing use of a natural gas mining technology called hydraulic fracturing, in which deep wells are sunk in shale and a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is pumped under pressure into the rock, fracturing it and freeing the gas. The sand granules, because they are round and made of hard quartz, then keep the fissures open and the gas flowing.

More at the Wisconsin State Journal.

18th-century wooden crutches (updated)

When I encountered the photo at the Science Museum, the term "crutches" didn't make sense - until I read further to learn that they were crutches for a leper.  They would have been used they way this legless beggar in Suzhou -

- propels himself on a wheeled dolly.  I suppose the eighteenth-century leper wouldn't even have had the benefit of a dolly.

Lower photo credit etherflyer.

Update:  When I posted the above six months ago, I thought it was one-and-done, but today I encountered this image at Got Medieval:

It's an illustration from the fourteenth-century Bodleian Alexander (MS Bodl. 264), depicting "A gentleman’s dispute among disabled beggars."  Carl Pyrdum notes at the post:

I feel compelled to point out–with some weird version of disciplinary pride?–that the medieval manuscript version of the theme boats three brawlin’ beggars to the cartoon’s two, a net improvement of fifty percent over South Park.  And it’s way bloodier than they dared, to boot (which you can see more clearly if you click [the image at the source] to expand).

I would add that the event pictured may not depict the social realities of the day, since the marginal illustrations sometimes reflected allegories or the whimsies of the artists rather than serving as frank documentary illustrations.

But it's something you don't see every day.  Also interesting that the technology remained unchanged for four centuries.

Addendum:  A hat tip to Got Medieval for some additional information.  The small "trestles" that the men are supporting themselves on were called "scabella," and the men "scabellarii."  They are "footless," and the upright man wielding the crutch has lost one foot as well.

I would presume these are victims of leprosy, but since their hands are intact, perhaps these are battle injuries, or even ?the result of ergot poisoning.

The use of drones in North Dakota

From the StarTribune...

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three counties. He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead, its sensors helped pinpoint the suspects, showing they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

That was just the start. Police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since then. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said...

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate...

For decades, courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant, ruling that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing plane and is not protected. Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes.

More at the StarTribune.  Photo credit Eric Gay, Associated Press.

And now a post about initial conjunctions

For as long as I've been writing this blog, I've used conjunctions to begin sentences.  And none of the copyeditors who visit TYWKIWDBI have reprimanded me for doing so.  But I still wondered if it was o.k.  So today I'm posting this excerpt from Language Log.  After confirming the well-documented Biblical propensity for initial conjunctions, Mark Liberman examined the writings of the United States Supreme Court (graph above) -

I grouped these files into five-year periods from 1801 to 2005 (e.g. 1801-1805, 1806-1810, etc.), and counted the frequency of sentence-initial and and but in each time-slice... (Of course, the number of authors per year is much lower, and stylistic variation among individual justices and clerks is a plausible source of year-to-year variation.)... After two centuries of apparent decline, the use of sentence-initial coordinators seems to have been rebounding a bit recently... One thing is clear, though. For the past two centuries the U.S. Supreme Court has been using sentence-initial and at rates substantially higher than those found in COCA's "academic" section...

And now on to something completely different...

Jumping on eggs without breaking them

YouTube link. 

There are some days when blogging about current events is such a bummer that I have to search for something - anything - to lighten up TYWKIWDBI. The video above is such a filler.

It is possibly the most ridiculous thing I have seen to come from British television (and that's saying a lot). Perhaps one of my older readers from across the pond can tell me whether this video clip is from an actual "news" program of the era, or perhaps from a comedy program?


Update:  More than three years have passed since I blogged this, but today a visitor left a comment partially explaining what we're seeing.  I watched the video again (still rather incredulously), and decided it was worth a repost.

Coping with canine congenital megaesophagus

YouTube link. 

This is our cute dog Bella. She was diagnosed with congenital megaesophagus soon after we found her at 4 months old. Megaesophagus means that her esophagus is enlarged and lacks the muscle mobility to swallow food while horizontal. This is her "Baileys Chair," which she needs sit in while eating and for 10 minutes after she eats. She eats soft dog food with a little water mixed in. She is now seven months old and doing great.

The first fifteen seconds tells the story. It's cute the way she's learned to flip the tray. In humans, megaesophagus can result from achalasia or Chagas' disease.

Bank Robbery

The bank account was supposed to teach 18-year-old Daniel Ganziano about fiscal responsibility...  By fall, Ganziano had just $4.85 left in the account — too little to withdraw from an ATM — so he let it sit.

He had all but forgotten about the account until he received a letter from TCF on Oct. 12 saying six days earlier, it had charged him a $9.95 "monthly maintenance fee" because his account had too little money in it.

The $9.95 charge made his account overdrawn by $5.10, which triggered another fee. At TCF, any account overdrawn by more than $5 is charged a $28-a-day overdraft fee. The net result: Ganziano was $33.10 in the hole.

By then, his nascent savings account was in a downward spiral. At $28 a day, the charges were adding up quickly.

When he and his mother went to the nearest branch that weekend to close the account, they were told they would first have to pay the accumulated fees, which totaled $229.10.

It's all quite legal, of course.  He didn't pay attention to the rules.  The rest of his story is at the Chicago Tribune.

Via BoingBoing.

Islamic art and "Magic Eye" images

From a book by Oliver Sacks about the physiology and psychology of perception:

David Brewster, a nineteenth-century scientist… observed a related form of stereo illusion. Gazing at wallpaper with small repetitive motifs, he observed that sometimes, with the proper convergence or divergence of gaze, the patterns might quiver or shift and then jump into startling stereoscopic relief, seeming to float in front of or behind the wallpaper.

…it seems likely that such “autostereograms” have been experienced for millennia, with the repetitive patterns of Islamic art, Celtic art, and the art of many other cultures. Medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, contain exquisitely intricate designs done so exactly that whole pages can be seen, with the unaided eye, in stereoscopic relief. (John Cisne, a paleobiologist at Cornell, has suggested that such stereograms may have been “something of a trade secret among the educated elite of the seventh- and eighth-century British Isles.”)

In the past decade or two, elaborate autostereograms have been widely popularized in Magic Eye books.

--Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye, pp. 137-8.

Those unfamiliar with "Magic Eye" books can read about them at Wikipedia.  The embedded image is "Geometric arabesque tiling on the underside of the dome of the Tomb of Hafez in Shiraz."  For extensive research on Islamic design, visit the Catnaps.org website compiled by TYWKIWDBI reader John Lockerbie.

Addendum:   Those seriously interested in this subject matter should look at the two links submitted by reader Dan Noland: a comparison of Islamic design patterns with the molecular arrangement of quasicrystals,  and another discussing Medieval Islamic architecture, quasicrystals, and Penrose tilings.

Addendum #2:  Here is some additional insight from Mr. Lockerbie:

The asymmetry of the design is interesting in that, as suggested, there may be at least two possibilities, perhaps at least three. Firstly, there is the probability that a number of artisans worked on the ceiling, directed by a master craftsman. Each may have deliberately attempted to work in slightly different and personal interpretations within the overall piece maintaining its form and balance. Secondly, the individual fitting of the tiles may have required small adjustments to the work in order to take up discrepancies both in the tiles as well as in the ground on which they are set.

Thirdly, and a very commonly presented argument in the Islamic world, is that no designed work should be perfect: each must demonstrate an irregularity as to do otherwise would be to show yourself in competition with Allah. 

If the latter is correct, then it's possible that the first two reasons might be actively subsumed within its argument.

Incidentally, the most unusual eccentricity of the design to my eye is the lack of geometrical coherence of the central yellow-based pattern around the central hole. With sixteen-point geometry establishing the surrounding star pattern, I would have anticipated something far better aligned to its points.

That last observation re the asymmetry is quite compelling; I hadn't even noticed that part of the design until he pointed it out.  Interesting.

I don't understand anti-Mormon bigotry

As I follow the Romney candidacy and the endless parade of "anybody-but-Romney" candidates, I often puzzle over the deeply-felt and sometimes vicious bias against Mormons held by some Christians. 

I'm aware that anti-Mormon bias was expressed by Conan Doyle when he wrote "A Study in Scarlet," and this summer I did read The Mountain Meadows Massacre book, which details an incident that would have justified anti-Mormon sentiment a century ago, but why it persists nowadays I find a bit baffling.  I spent a decade in Kentucky, where snake-handlers were considered to be devout Christians - so why not Mormons?

James Fallows addressed the question in October:

The great majority of messages came from people who said: You're wrong, Mormons are an outright menace, and that's because they are Mormon. What they believe is either (a) dangerous in its essence, or (b) an indication of  deeper intellectual or character flaws in the candidate, because no sane person could believe the elements of the Mormon faith. Or (c) both...

The only thing I'll add for now is that while I am no fan of Mitt Romney's, I don't envy him having to deal with this sort of thing -- which of course is stronger in the Republican primary electorate than in the population as a whole. Most white people have an idea of what anti-black (or Latino or Asian) prejudice sounds like. Most goyim have an idea of what an anti-Semitic rant sounds like. But even having grown up in an area with lots of Mormons and had LDS friends all my life, I hadn't been fully exposed to the intensity of anti-Mormon views [example at the link]...

The most humorous comments I've heard were on the December 2 "Mel and Floyd" program broadcast on WORT radio. To paraphrase their banter, evangelical Christians hate Romney because he believes that when you die, you go to another planet and become a god.  But this is actually more moderate than that of some other Republican candidates... and perhaps more plausible, because at least we know there ARE other planets.

They asked the question:  If during a debate, Romney shakes hands with an anti-Romney, might that result in a huge explosion?

The correspondence of Edward Gorey

I blogged some illustrations yesterday from The Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Today I found a report in Salon discussing a new book about the correspondence between Gorey and an author with whom he was collaborating.

The covers are interesting.  Since they don't commemorate a philatelic event, I suppose they would be described as "illustrated" rather than "cacheted."  There are five more examples at the Salon link.

"The agony of the feet"

In early November, another incident in the severed feet saga occurred in western Canada, as noted by the National Post:

The B.C. Coroners Service is investigating the discovery of another foot over the weekend.... Eight feet belonging to six different people were discovered along the B.C. coast between August 2007 and August 2011. Six of the feet have since been identified as belonging to four people. The remaining two appear to belong to two men whose identities are yet to be determined.

The CBC adds these details:

Officials said that on Friday a youth attending a camp at the Sasamat Outdoor Centre spotted the boot, which was floating in a few metres of water off the northwest shore. When the boot washed up Saturday morning and a sock and bones were found inside, authorities were called in...

The coroners service said the autopsy did not show any tool marks or impressions on the bones to indicate the foot had been mechanically separated from the body... The metal eyelets are significantly rusted, which suggests that it could have been in the water for some time.

Although it is the ninth foot to wash up in southwestern B.C. in the past four years, the coroners service said there are "some significant differences between this and the other eight cases."

For one, this is the first foot to be found in fresh water, not saltwater. It is also the first to be found in a hiking boot rather than a running shoe...

For new readers, I should repeat my previous clarification about severed feet that "It's not a fetish for me, and I don't monitor the web for additional incidents or set any Google alerts, but having posted so many stories in the past, I now have a set of readers alert to new developments."  This time I'll add a hat tip to Elizabeth, who notified me about an ABC news report in October that provided a mundane explanation for several of the feet, 
and to Andre, who noted that BoingBoing is also devoting valuable column inches to the severed feet stories.

Writing posts on this subject typically presents two challenges - coming up with a catchy title, and searching the 'net for an illustration without wading into the world of fetishism. The title this time is a parody of ABC's "Wide World of Sports" motto (via the National Post).  The image shows "Zombie stocking Christmas 'gornaments'" available from the Neatoshop.

"Big banks don't want your money"

Remember "Bank Transfer Day" last month, when the 99% were supposed to "punish" the large banks by moving their money to local banks and credit unions?  A column at Reuters suggested that the megabanks couldn't care less:

...it doesn’t make sense to be the customer of a small-enough-to-fail institution. This doesn’t apply to small depositors at retail banks, of course, who are federally insured. But for institutional clients, whose funds are uninsured, the moral-hazard trade here is clear...[explained at the link]

And the big banks don’t particularly want all those retail-deposit funds — they’re getting precious little interest on them, and they come with all manner of expensive obligations to mail out statements and provide smiling service at teller windows and generally do the whole customer-service thing, which as we all know big banks are very bad at. Historically, they’ve done what they have to do on that front because they’ve been able to extract all manner of overdraft fees and interchange fees and the like, but that fee income is shrinking now, thanks to Dodd-Frank, and the fact is that millions of small bank accounts are actually unprofitable now for the big banks, and those banks won’t shed many tears if those customers go off to a credit union instead...

Via The Dish.

A Gothic salt cellar

From the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

A marvel of exquisite craftsmanship, this small, gold-mounted rock-crystal salt cellar, which rests on a high, knopped stem above a tapered, conical base, is a rare example of Early Gothic goldsmiths' work. The crystal salt cellar is meticulously carved with a pointed prow, a flat yet sloping stern, a keel that is rectangular in profile, and simple notching for the double oarlocks. Three interconnected hollows in the interior are arranged symmetrically along the boat's axis. The upper surface of the rim of the vessel is decorated with seed pearls, and emeralds; below is a border of tiny ivy leaves. One-fourth of the hinged lid can be lifted by means of a tiny handle in the form of a serpent. The gems and pearls in combination with the serpent probably had an apotropaic meaning, as serpents' tongues were thought to warn against poison by breaking out into a sweat...

The diminutive scale and costly materials suggest that this luxury object served as a receptacle for a precious commodity for the table, such as salt or a spice. Ecclesiastical salt cellars, used in the sacrament of baptism and for the hallowing of water, appear only rarely in medieval inventories, but such a usage for this object cannot be excluded...