How to style your hair like a Roman Vestal Virgin

Link.

For the first time, the hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins has been recreated on a modern head.

The Vestals were priestesses who guarded the fire of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, among other sacred tasks. Chosen before puberty and sworn to celibacy, they were free from many of the social rules that limited women in the Roman era. Their braided hairstyle, the sini crenes, symbolized chastity and was known in ancient texts as the oldest hairstyle in Rome...

Janet Stephens, the Baltimore hairdresser and amateur archaeologist who unraveled the secrets of the Vestals' trademark braids... reported her findings Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle. 

Working alone on a live model with only tools ancient Romans would have had, the process takes about 35 to 40 minutes, Stephens said. Vestal Virgins, however, would likely have had slaves to dress their hair. With two or more people doing the braiding, the hairstyle could have come together in less than 10 minutes, she said.

The Vestal hairstyle requires about waist-length hair to pull off, Stephens said.

More details at LiveScience.

Aussie with metal detector finds a gold nugget

YouTube link.

A nugget weighing 177 ounces (5.5 kilograms).  Story here (and many other places).

Who will suffer from the new tax increases?

First, look at the data in the cartoon above, published several weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal.  The numbers can be assumed to be correct.  Think about and decide where your sympathies lie.  The Wall Street Journal article notes that "the new law's effects will be highly individualized—and in some cases highly painful."

Then (if you want) you can read a rant about the WSJ article at Hullabaloo:

Tidbits of American history

Some final excerpts from Stephen E. Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.

“As a child, Meriwether absorbed a strong anti-British sentiment. This came naturally to any son of a patriot growing up during the war; it was reinforced by seeing a British raiding party led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton sweep through Albemarle in 1781.  Jefferson recorded: ‘He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco, he burned all my barns containing the same articles of last year, having first taken what he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stocks of cattle, sheep and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throats and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about 30 slaves.’ Tarleton also ordered all the county court records burned. This wanton act was roundly and rightly condemned...: ‘It is hard ot conceive any conduct in an army more outrageous, more opposed to the true spirit of civilization, and withal more useless in a military point of view, than the destruction of public archives.’” (24)

[During the Revolutionary War] “The journals of officers often read like tourist guides to taverns and scenery along the route, while enlisted men’s diaries recounted weeks of hunger and cold.” (40)

“When a private ran off from Fort Defiance in the fall of 1795, the officers offered two Shawnee Indians a reward of ten dollars for bringing him back alive and twenty dollars for his scalp.” (43)

 [The Arikawa] "brought corn and squash and other welcome vegetables to the expedition, and quantities of a bean the Indians acquired by digging in the underground storage bins of the meadow mice.” (180)

“The next day, the Americans killed nine more buffalo. They ate only the tongues; the wolves got the rest.” (190)

"A native speaker would say a word to Sacagawea, who would pass it on in Hidatsa to Charbonneau, who would pass it on in French to Jessaume, who would translate it iinto English for the captains.  Mackenzie thought Jessaume's English ranged somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent, magnifying the chances for error." (203)

Taking science reporting with a grain of salt

The chart above displays a history of studies of health effects of omega3 (fish oil) supplements, from early enthusiasm re a health benefit to later evidence of no such effect, explained as follows:

For a small study (such as Sacks’ and Leng’s early work in the top two rows of the table) to get published, it needs to show a big effect — no one is interested in a small study that found nothing. It is likely that many other small studies of fish oil pills were conducted at the same time of Sacks’ and Leng’s, found no benefit and were therefore not published. But by the play of chance, it was only a matter of time before a small study found what looked like a big enough effect to warrant publication in a journal editor’s eyes.

At that point in the scientific discovery process, people start to believe the finding, and null effects thus become publishable because they overturn "what we know". And the new studies are larger, because now the area seems promising and big research grants become attainable for researchers. Much of the time, these larger and hence more reliable studies cut the "miracle cure" down to size. 

The take-home point here is not about fish oils, but about any report that product XYZ is good for (or bad for) your health or well-being.  The mainstream media (and the 'net) is full of such stuff.  It's also important to ascertain who funded a given study.  If the National Association of WidgetMakers funds seven studies, six may be inconclusive or negative, and the seventh may show a benefit, and only the last will get publicized.

Graph and text via The Dish.

Barack Obama's ancestry online

I found the genealogical database on Obama compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner at WARGS.  It is exhaustively complete, tracking known information as far back as his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents in the 17th century.

If your family name (or that of a friend) is Dunham, Armour, Payne, McCurry, Clark, Wright, Childress, Black, Abbott, Clemmons, Donovan, Poland, Davis, Taylor, Wilson, Jones, Thomas, Godfrey, Williams, Smith, Walker, Martin... etc etc you may want to check out the list for possible connections.

I didn't find any obvious links to my ancestors, but of course, once you go back that many generations, we're all related.

WARGS also has geneaologies for European Royalty, European Nobility, and other US political figures (Biden, Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Gore, Reagan, Bush, Quayle, Agnew, Mondale and cabinet officers and governors (Sarah Palin, Jesse Ventura) and senators and representatives and many others.

Heart performs "Stairway to Heaven"

YouTube link.

On Dec. 26 the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors was aired on national television for the first time on CBS. During the event, which took place at the Kennedy Center Opera House, Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson of Heart performed Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” with Jason Bonham [son of Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham] on drums.

It's fascinating to see familiar musicians getting older.  BTW - at the end, Ann sings "...and she's buy-a-zhing a stairway to heaven."  Why the unusual phrasing of that word?  Am I missing some pop culture variation?

Via the inestimable Cynical-C.

Unexplained "sand spike" concretions

Excerpted from Oddities of the Mineral World (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976.)

No discussion of concretions would be complete if mention were not made of a real puzzler, a truly unique type of concretion that apparently remains unexplained—sand spikes...

Briefly, the locality consisted of a series of low, sandy hillocks and banks near the Mexican-American border close to Mt. Signal, Imperial County, California. When they were first discovered, many of these unique concretions were weathering out on the surface of the ground. It became apparent, however, that there actually were beds of these strange concretions 3 feet to 8 feet underground!

These concretions consist of a ball-like end coupled with a tapering spikelike formation. In uncovering a bed of spikes over 95 percent of the formations were found pointing west. Spikes of similar types or formats seemingly occurred in the same bed or within lenslike concentrations of the sand-spike formations...

They are composed of absolutely nothing but the identical sand forming the soft little hillocks and banks in which they occur—solid sandstone with no fossil material inside. The mineral cementing the grains together is apparently calcite.

What are they? No one really knows—other than they obviously fall under the heading of concretions by virtue of their method of occurrence and basic mineralogical composition. The long points, westerly oriented, are the most provocative aspect of this truly unique locality. Some say that they are fossils of an ancient type of bulbous seaweed that drifted heavy-end eastward on some ancient shoreline... It has also been suggested that they are some type of fulgurite, which is positively incorrect, and not by any stretch of the imagination are they prehistoric man-made artifacts.

See also this 1934 article in Rocks and Minerals and this one from the American Journal of Science in 1936.

Via Allan McCollum and The Agateer (newsletter of the Madison Gem and Mineral Club).

Russian accordion player

YouTube link.

He begins with Bach's familiar Tocatta and Fugue, presented in a unique style...

The rest of the playlist is at this Reddit thread.

How a plant creates lattice-patterned leaves

The image above is of a "lace plant."

Aponogeton madagascariensis is commonly known as Madagascar Laceleaf, Lattice Leaf or Lace Plant. It is an aquatic plant native to Madagascar and is popularly sold for use in aquaria. It is endangered in the wild.

If you had asked me how a living structure creates such a pattern, I would have had no idea.   But yesterday I saw the answer at Fresh Photons:

“The lace plant is an aquatic monocot endemic to the river systems of Madagascar. The lace plant undergoes programmed cell death (PCD) between longitudinal and transverse veins (designating the ‘window’), creating a lace-like pattern over the entire leaf surface. PCD stops four to five cells from the vasculature creating a strip of control cell that will never undergo PCD; these cells are pink in colour due to the pigment anthocyanin found within their vacuoles. The next layer of cells in are markedly green in colour due to the pigment chlorophyll and are in the early stages of PCD. The cleared cells in the centre are in the later stages of PCD and will soon die and break away from the tissue. I chose this photo because I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the colours between anthocyanin and chlorophyll. ” -Christina Lord

Very cool.  You learn something every day.

Retractable chains for winter driving

YouTube link.

Only those of you who live in a northern climate and drive on snow-and-ice-covered roads will be interested in the video, which depicts a device that can be deployed as needed during a trip without getting out of the vehicle.  It's a clever concept.  I can't say that I've ever seen such a device in use.

Can someone "decide not to decide" ?

My question is prompted by a story in the paper about a nationally-prominent politician (I'll omit his name because I'm questioning his language, not his politics).

"I've decided not to decide," ** told the State Journal on Wednesday when asked about a possible presidential run. For now, ** said he and his family are enjoying settling back down in his hometown.

"I have learned that whatever you do you are going to get criticized, so you should do what you think is right," ** said.

There's one type of situation where I think the phrase could be used - when one is offered choices and declines all of them, as for example when you are told "Decide which of my daughters you're going to marry" or "Decide which cheesecake dessert you'll have" - and you "decide not to decide" (on either or any of the choices) and walk away.

But when the choice is binary (run for president/don't run for president), then I think the phrase is a tautology.  You are not deciding.

 Oh, I understand why he and others do this.  If a politician says "I haven't decided," then he/she believes that will be interpreted as indecisiveness and lack of conviction.  But if they phrase it as "I have decided not to decide," they feel they will be perceived as a decision-making potential leader of the people.

To me this is emblematic of the b*llsh*t of politics, and I'm just thoroughly tired of it.

Cabin photos

A sand dune shack on Nantucket Island, MA. Photo credit: Spencer Sight.

Ladder House near Dale, Norway. Photo credit: Olga Gladykowska.

Saami hut in Amarnas, Sweden. Photo credit: Charles Gaspar.

Island cabin on Senja, Norway. Photo credit Kristian Helgesen.

Four selections from the many hundreds assembled at Cabin Porn.  The bottom Norwegian one appears to me to be constructed in the old Viking tradition of upending a boat.

Cleaning a Civil War battlefield

April 1865. "Cold Harbor, Virginia. Collecting remains of dead on the battlefield after the war." Memento mori. Wet plate by John Reekie. 

Click photo for bigger.  The Battle of Cold Harbor was in May and June of 1864.  It's interesting that scavengers and insects defleshed the skulls in less than a year.  A page at the National Park Service had this photo -

- of a stump from the "Bloody Angle" Confederate entrenchment.  The trunk of the 22-inch [diameter?] tree was completely severed by bullets.

Image cropped (while preserving the watermark) from the original at Shorpy.

Bad Lip Reading visits the National Football League

YouTube link.