Pithy quotations

From a collection of several dozen assembled at Harvard Magazine:

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. —Louis D. Brandeis

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. —Dean Acheson

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. —George Santayana

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. —Henry James

A democracy—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. —Theodore Parker, 1836

All the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught. —Norman Mailer

Ibuprofen-induced meningitis

An interesting case history, published in Discover Magazine's Vital Signs feature in June of 2011.  Some relevant excerpts:

“John was hospitalized uptown four days ago,” she told me. “It started then just like it did tonight, with a headache and confusion.” The 
spinal tap done uptown had shown a high white blood cell count, indicative of infection, but all the cultures were negative. John had stayed in the ICU and gotten better overnight—a surprise for the uptown staff, who then diagnosed viral meningitis....

In a Vital Signs column in this magazine 17 years ago, infectious-disease physician Abigail Zuger described the conundrum of a young woman with recurrent meningitis. Hospitalized four times in a matter of months, the patient exhibited high fevers, delirium, and a stiff neck—all signs of life-threatening 
bacterial, septic meningitis. CAT scans were normal. Spinal taps revealed high white cell counts in the cerebrospinal fluid—usually a harbinger of severe infection—but bacterial and viral cultures grew nothing. The patient was becoming ill and then abruptly getting better. The fourth time, to general eye-rolling, a medical student was tasked with asking the woman for the umpteenth time whether she had taken anything, anything, prior to getting sick. He hit pay dirt: Advil...

No more than 100 cases of ibuprofen-induced meningitis have been reported in the 
literature. But you have to 
wonder, given that ibuprofen 
is practically in the drinking water, how many more mistaken cases of “viral meningitis” are out there.

New evidence settles a Cold War dispute

I first read about the "Corfu Channel Incident" in the March/April issue of Archaeology magazine (article unfortunately not online).  The article there reported the discovery by marine archaologists of evidence that appears to settle a dispute between the U.K. and Albania from the early years of the Cold War.  Here's the relevant information from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology:

An international team of archaeologists has discovered the remains of the bow of HMS Volage, a British destroyer that struck a mine off the Albanian port of Sarande on October 22, 1946. The incident brought Communist Albania and Great Britain into diplomatic conflict...

Volage struck a mine on October 22, 1946 while assisting another British destroyer, HMS Saumarez, which had itself struck a mine. While neither ship sank, 44 lives were lost and another 42 British seamen were injured. This tragic episode was one of the first naval incidents of the Cold War, and brought then Communist Albania and Great Britain into diplomatic conflict.

A lengthy legal argument before the International Court of Justice at The Hague ultimately led to a ruling in favor of Britain. Albania disputed the findings, and the two nations severed diplomatic relations for nearly 50 years. The “Corfu Channel Incident” remains a case famous in legal circles, but it has largely been forgotten by most of the world...

“The area of Volage blasted off by the mine was forward of the deck guns,” says Delgado, “and included the forward mess, where some of the crew ate and slept, as well as storage compartments. The dishes, shoes and ammunition are evidence that fit.” The wreckage lies in proximity to the Albanian shore near the port of Sarande, and close to where a recent study by Albanian naval officer and historian Artur Meçollari indicated the mining incident occurred...

At the time, Britain claimed the Albanians had laid mines in international waters.   The new findings disprove that.  Text from the Archaeology article:

"The bow is very close to the shore, and in a different position than in the official record..." Auron Tate, director of the Albanian National Trust, followed the discovery with research in the British National Archives.  He found a four-minute reel of film, shot from another ship, confirming the Volage was close to shore when it exploded.  Together, the discoveries upend decades of Cold War gospel.  "All evidence proves that the British ships were not on innocent passage as claimed," says Tare, "but on a military operation."

By suggesting that the United Kingdom, and not Albania, was at fault in the blast, the Volage ruins "rewrite our understanding" of one of the first  incidents of the Cold War, says Delgado - a change with repercussions for geopolitics today.

Addendum:
But note also the information supplied by Anonymous in the comments, with a link to the proceedings of the International Court of Justice.

A letter from John Hancock

Written on July 6, 1776, this letter accompanied the copy of the Declaration of Independence sent to New Hampshire.  This is a privately-owned document being sold* by a company called Moments in Time Memorabilia.  They have quite a few interesting historical items at their website.

* $2.5 million

Clouded sulphur (Colias philodice) - alba variant

In which I am reminded that "looks can be deceiving."

Butterfly season has started in Wisconsin, about a full week earlier than usual.  Unusually warm weather caused the crocuses in our front yard to emerge two weeks early, and as I was looking out the front door at them on March 11, I was gobsmacked to see a white butterfly fluttering from one patch to another, obviously nectaring.  For a butterfly enthusiast in the northern latitudes, the first appearance of the creatures in the spring signals the start of a new year of adventure.  I grabbed my camera and rushed out the door.

This little fellow was in a hurry, not lingering long on any one blossom, so I had difficulty getting good images.  He/she looked a bit unusual, but I had difficulty putting my finger on it, and it wasn't until I got the images transferred to my computer that I had any time to ponder the matter.

The butterfly wasn't pure white.  The underside of the hindwing had an obvious greenish tinge.  The top, however, was quite obviously white, with a black margin on the forewing, evident in this slightly blurry image captured while she was in flight between crocus clusters (flying to the right, wings at the low point of the downbeat):

And on this third image there is a curious yellow spot overlying the dorsum of the hindwing.  That made no sense to me, and I assumed it was some bit of pollen that come off a crocus stamen and had stuck to the wing.

There are seven species of the subfamily of "Whites" that have been seen in Wisconsin.  I checked them all, and the only one this could possibly be was the Cabbage White (Pieris rapae) - a common butterfly whose caterpillars can be pests for North American farmers.

I submitted my sighting to the database of the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association.  The following day I received a surprising email reply from the webmaster/dataminder, who is an expert on butterflies:

Fantastic sighting! It was a female, white form Clouded Sulphur. The earliest record by over a month! Can I submit this to the NABA sightings page?

That explained everything.  Colias Philodice is not a member of the butterflies known as the Whites - it's a "Sulphur," normally brilliantly yellow, and similar in size, behavior, and distribution to the Cabbage White.  They typically have a yellow spot on the dorsum of the hindwing, and occasionally a female can appear as an "alba" (white) variant.

Finally, as I was writing this up, I checked my own photos and found that not only had I previously photographed an alba variant of a sulphur, but I had posted in this blog an image of an alba female in copulo with a normal yellow male!

So, not only do you "learn something every day" - sometimes you have to relearn things over and over again.

The "Subwing" underwater glider

YouTube link. 

Developed by a Norwegian, it's a fiberglass glider that can be towed behind a boat, allowing the rider to "fly" underwater.

Product home page, via Dude Craft and Neatorama.

"sOccket" is a soccer ball/electrical generator

This is a very cool idea, currently beyond "concept" and into mass production.

The sOccket harnesses the kinetic (motion) energy of the soccer ball during normal game play and stores it for later power needs. After play, small electrical appliances, like an LED lamp, can be plugged into the sOccket. 

About 20% of the people in the world have no access to electricity; they can spend 10-30% of their resources on kerosene for fuel. The sOccket ball allows them to redeploy some of those funds. In addition, the ball is durable (3+ year lifespan), and replaces substitutes like the "ju-ju ball," made by tying plastic bags together.

Information at the company's homepage.

The power of the "sense of loss"

From an essay by Corey Robion in the December 2010 issue of Harper's Magazine:

"...victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth, whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose... This brand of victimhood endows the conservative complaint with a more universal significance. It connects his disinheritance to an experience we all share—loss—and weaves that experience into an ideology promising that what is lost can be restored.

People on the left often fail to realize this, but conservatism does indeed speak to and for people who have lost something. The loss may be as material as a portion of one’s income or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place. Even so, nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the zero-sum nature of politics, wherein the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they—and only they—who speak for them. Conservatism is not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the Party of Loss.

The chief aim of the loser is not preservation or protection but recovery and restoration, and that is the secret of conservatism’s success. Because his losses are recent, the conservative can credibly claim that his goals are practical and achievable. He merely seeks to regain what is his; the fact that he once had it suggests he is capable of possessing it again. Whereas the left’s program of redistribution raises the question of whether its beneficiaries are truly prepared to wield the powers they seek, the conservative project of restoration suffers from no such challenge. Unlike the revolutionary, moreover, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless, the conservative asks his followers to do more of what they have always done. As a result, his counterrevolution will not require the same violence and disruption that the revolution has visited on the country. “Four or five persons, perhaps,” writes Maistre, “will give France a king.”

Book cover design

Nabokov's Lolita as a classic challenge:

Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a Lolita cover competition asking designers to do better.

Now the contest is being turned into a book, due out in June and coedited by Yuri Leving, with essays on historical cover treatments along with new versions by 60 well-known designers, two-thirds of them women...

For obvious reasons, of course, it remains as controversial a novel as it was a half century ago, if not more so. And, probably helped along by Kubrick’s breezy film, and many very terrible covers, the term "Lolita" has come to popularly mean something quite the opposite of the novel’s namesake, so a designer has that to contend with as well.

On the one hand, then, designers face the very real challenge of communicating some of that complexity in a cover, which can easily become overwhelming... On the other hand, I think there are also important ethical considerations that require careful negotiation...

There is additional discussion of the complexities of book cover illustration at the Imprint source, as well as more examples of covers submitted to the competition. 

A gallery of 185 Lolita covers (from 37 countries, over 56 years) was posted in 2009.

Embedded book cover design (showing pink walls coverging on a white ceiling): Jamie Keenan.

Rhinoceros horn hunting in museums

The story of this ongoing stupidity/cupidity is in Der Spiegel:

The large collection of African hunting trophies at the Offenburg Museum in the southwestern German city of the same name has long been a source of great pride at the cultural institution. It is based on around 80 stuffed animals donated to the museum in 1950 by Gretchen Cron, a wealthy woman who, together with her husband, spent much of her life hunting in exotic places until the outbreak of World War II. Cron felt so guilty about killing so many animals in danger of extinction that she donated her collection to the museum.

Among the trophies displayed was the head of a black rhinoceros, a species native to South Africa.

On Saturday, Feb. 18, four thieves entered the museum during broad daylight. Two of them distracted the museum staff and the two others rushed over to the rhino head. They removed the trophy from its display, mounted at a lofty 4 meters (13 feet), and broke off its horn with a sledgehammer. Museum officials described the act as "brazen and brutal."...

Health properties or not, the horns are extremely valuable, with a black market value as high as €50,000 ($65,500) per kilogram: more than its weight in gold. Depending on the size and quality, Europol estimates that a single rhino horn can be worth between €25,000 and €200,000.

Details at the link.


Photo credit: AFP / Museum im Ritterhaus Offenburg.

"Waterfall" braid

Instructional video here (and there are others at YouTube).  Photo via Reddit.

Addendum:  Please note that I (the blogger) did not create this braid.  I found it on the internet.  I can not tell you how to do it; you will need to search for instructions on the internet.  Leaving questions here is a waste of your time and mine.

Grim

An article in the December 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine offers a totally depressing view of a South Dakota reservation:

This is Pine Ridge Reservation today: somewhere between 13,000 and 40,000 Oglala Sioux spread across an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Unemployment is 89 percent, the few jobs in the tribal bureaucracy or the Prairie Winds Casino. More than half the population lives below the federal poverty line. The youth suicide rate is ten times the national average. One in three women is a victim of rape. Life expectancy is roughly equivalent to Somalia’s. Plagues of alcohol, drugs, domestic and gang violence. Pine Ridge is as profoundly damaged a place as exists in America...

RAMON TWIST
 Ponies grazing among wreckage in the long afternoon light, graffi ti-covered tribal housing tumbles down the hillside. The houses are falling apart, surrounded by burst garbage bags dug through by slinking dogs, dead cars on blocks, windows smashed. Most basements are rotting with black mold and mildew, and half the houses on the hill have had their electricity shut off. A small boy plays in the dirt, shirtless, his face almost catlike, the sign of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome...

 KIMBERLY LADEAUX

Custer was owned by the Oglala Sioux, they couldn’t beat us. That’s why we own what we still own. Until the day I die I’ll take pride in it. Look at what we have, it’s not much. No lights, barely surviving off food stamps. But we’re still here, we’re surviving. 

Kimberly sits in the candlelight and drinks a can of Camo Black Ice malt liquor, chasing each gulp with water and grimacing.

It’s only $2.50 a can. If we lived in cities we could buy a Budweiser or a Bud Light, something that won’t kill us off, but you know, we’re at the reservation, some of us don’t even have cars. Camo’s just the way you gotta take it, I guess. Gets you drunk faster...

 There are more biographies and photos at the link.

Bronte microbooks

From an article in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine:

In 1821, Charlotte’s mother died, leaving widower Patrick, a curate in rural West Yorkshire, to care for their six children. The two oldest died four years later of tuberculosis (which would eventually take them all before Patrick himself died). The four surviving children created what their father called “a little society among themselves.” Charlotte, age 10, and Branwell, 9, began a series of plays based on the adventures of their toy soldiers, set in their make-believe world of Glass Town and Angria in Africa. The youngest sisters, Emily and Anne, would follow along with stories, and the self-described “scribblemaniacs” kept at it into early adulthood.

About 20 of these texts took the form of handsewn miniature books two inches tall. Harvard’s Houghton Library has nine of them, given by the poet Amy Lowell... Sotheby’s was set to auction a Charlotte Brontë mini still in private hands just as this issue went to press, at an estimated price of as much as half a million dollars.*

* It sold for $1.1 million.

Image from the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Attractive book covers

Seven of Stephen Jay Gould's books are being republished in paperback format.  I always enjoyed his essays in Natural History magazine, but at the moment I'm admiring the design of the covers, described as a "quilt-like use of cover illustrations derived from a plate originally used in The Cabinet of Oriental Entomology (1848), by John Obadiah Westwood."

How state government works

Perhaps an analogy to the making of sausage or processed meat would be relevant here - you might not want to know.  From an article in the May 2010 issue of Harper's Magazine:

Among America’s state legislatures, it has been said (and it is largely true) that New York’s is the least efficient in passing laws, the most profligate in its operations, the least open in rules of participation, the least deliberative, the least democratic. One can look in almost any direction in Albany and find a problem: there are the lobbyists who infest the legislature... or the campaign-finance laws... or the tortured shapes of the gerrymandered districts... or that in 2007, 89 percent of legislation passed with no debate; or that transcripts of the few debates that do occur can be accessed in nearly all cases only via the Freedom of Information Law; or that the Legislative Ethics Commission, empowered to oversee the conduct of its own membership, has in its twenty-three years of operation brought not a single case against a legislator...

Another benefit of this arrangement is that if only those bills the leadership supports can possibly pass, members are free to propose legislation they know never will. In so doing, they can at least appear to be interested in satisfying the policy demands of their constituents, even if they can’t or don’t want to. This surfeit of hopeless legislation clogs the system: New York State lawmakers during 2008 proposed a record 18,000 bills—7,000 more than the U.S. Congress and more than any other state legislature. Only 9 percent passed...

Bills the leadership wants passed still get passed, mind you, only now with no review by the membership. During an overnight session last June, for example, the assembly passed 202 bills—about one every 3.9 minutes—many of them introduced that day. In March 2009, the state budget was negotiated by the three men in the legendary backroom, presented to the membership at a length of 3,000 pages on March 30, approved by the assembly one day later, and then by the senate, with few changes, four days after that. Not a single committee had reviewed it.  

Lots more at the Harper's source.