Interconnectedness

YouTube link.

Devils Hole is a geothermal pool within a limestone cavern in the Amargosa Desert in the Amargosa Valley of Nevada, east over the Amargosa Range and Funeral Mountains from Death Valley. Its waters are a near constant salinity and temperature (92 °F or 33 °C). The cavern is over 500 feet (150 m) deep and the bottom has never been mapped...

The pool has frequently experienced activity due to far away earthquakes in Japan, Indonesia and Chile, which have been likened to extremely small scale tsunamis.

It's fascinating to watch the activity in this video as the water responds to an earthquake in Mexico.  People have disappeared after diving in this location.

TYWKIWDBI likes Nomorobo

There is an obvious downside to having a listed landline in a "swing state" in an election year.  We have been harassed with "robocalls" for months, but one evening while watching the CBS evening news I saw a segment about "Nomorobo."

...software that detects high frequency calling patterns, and answers any robo-generated number calling, and hangs up before people have to deal with it.

And the price was right: "Nomorobo costs nothing to install on your landline."

It doesn't block all spam or marketing calls - just the ones that are computer-generated.  But we are delighted with the result.  In the afternoon and evenings our phone will occasionally ring once.  Then stop.  And without even the annoyance of a message on the answering machine.  I don't know of any downside.

Here's the company's website.

Breast tattoo

As reported by the BBC:

Just 36 years old when the cancer struck, Alison, from Sydney, knew that, along with a good portion of her hair, she would lose her nipple and suffer extensive breast scarring in a lumpectomy. But the idea of recreating a nipple through plastic surgery didn't appeal to her. "I didn't want a fake nipple made from some other piece of flesh. I thought I'm just going to get a tattoo," she says...

After extensive deliberation, she settled on a New Zealand-based artist named Makkala Rose, a 24-year-old with a bold and colourful illustrative style.  The tattoo was applied in Melbourne during a gruelling 13-hour session on 1 July this year. Alison, happy with the result, posted a photo of her design to Instagram and Facebook...

"Because there's no nipple, I can blast it everywhere all over Facebook and Instagram, and they can't censor it, which I think is really funny," Alison says. 

Post-mastectomy and lumpectomy tattoos have been gaining popularity in recent years. Although women of all ages are choosing tattoos over breast reconstructions, they are particularly popular among younger women. 

See also my post in 2013: Medical nipple tattoos vs. "titoos"

Remembering the Whig party and the Know Nothings

Before the creation of the Republican party, the two-party system centered around the Democrats and the Whigs.  When the Whigs collapsed, they were replaced by the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings:

At one point or another, Presidents John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Harrison, and Chester Arthur and Rutherford B. Hayes and Abraham Lincoln, at some point, in all of their careers, all of those American presidents were all members of the Whig Party.  William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Miller Fillmore, they were all Whig Party members while they were president...

The Whigs were riven by internal divisions dealing with emerging things as the nation grew and changed. A lot of the division had to do with the issue of slavery and some other principled issues. But the Whig party, it had been a huge deal, and then it fell apart.

And political parties back then weren`t exactly what they are today. But when the Whig Party fell apart, the two-party system at the time fell apart as well. You have two parties and one collapses. It doesn`t just mean good news for the other party, it mean that is two-party system that counts on tension between the two parties, that falls apart if one party ceases to function.

And when the two-party system fell apart because the Whigs fell apart, when that two-party system rocked by them collapsing as a major party, what was left behind in American politics, for a while, at least, turned incredibly nasty – a little bit violent, but also nasty.

One of the things that happened in American politics at that time is that we got a series of secret societies that formed, basically to try to drive Catholics out of this country. One of them was a secret Order of the Star Spangled Banner. There was also a Secret Order of United Americans...

When the movement embodied by the societies spread out of the cities of the East Coast and spread out of New England and went big nationwide, it did go big nationwide, the movement, it was interesting, it morphed a little bit depending on where it was. It was very strikingly anti-Catholic in, say, Massachusetts.

By the time that movement was ready to spawn its sort of offspring or offshoots in California – well, in California, it didn`t that that much sense to be rabidly anti-Catholic. In California, the version of it became rabidly anti-Chinese, because those were the immigrants they had out there...

This movement in American politics around the time that the two-party system collapsed because the Whigs fell apart, it was nativism. They hated immigrants. They blamed everything wrong in the country on immigrants. And it started as disparate movements and disparate secret societies.

But eventually, they got a name. They became known as the Know Nothing movement, which is also a funny name. People remember it to this day in part because it`s a strange thing to call some sort of political movement... Their origins were in secret societies, if you were a member of the movement, you`re supposed to say, oh, I know nothing...

But for a brief period in our history, around the collapse of Whigs before the civil war, the Know-Nothings got really big and fast and they did that in the waste land of this two-party system getting rattled. The Whigs collapsed, two major party democracy fell apart for a time because of that, and so, we got these Know-Nothing politicians, this know-nothing movement across the country. They`re very successful.

The know-nothing mayor of Chicago declared there will be no city job for any immigrant of anywhere. The know-nothing mayor of Philadelphia said there would be no political appointments for any immigrant. Native born Americans only.

And they took over major cities. They took over the legislature in Massachusetts. They spread nationwide and they had more than a million members. Know-nothings were a big deal in American politics for a couple of years, as the normal party system broke itself down and stopped to function.

But then they collapsed...

The rest of the essay is here.  And here's the Wikipedia summary of the Know-Nothings:

The movement arose in response to an influx of migrants and promised to "purify" American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to republican values and as being controlled by the Pope. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, the movement strove to curb immigration and naturalization but met with little success. Membership was limited to Protestant men. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class membership was divided over the issue of slavery.

Finally, a Black Swallowtail caterpillar

This summer I seeded my plot in our local community garden with an abundance of food plants for Black Swallowtail butterflies, but my plans for raising a bunch of them were foiled by some freakish weather.  I thought this year would be a total loss in regard to Black Swallowtails.

Imagine my surprise a couple days ago when I went to the mailbox and saw this colorful fellow resting on a twig.  He/she had apparently wandered away from the clump of rue (another BST foodplant) we have planted by the mailbox.

I brought him in to a container on our screen porch, provided some rue and carrot tops, and then after two days of eating and producing frass, I found him like this this morning:

The caterpillar ignored the twigs I placed in the container and chose instead to create its mat of silk on the wall, and has suspended itself via a silken harness (which wraps behind the nonexistent "shoulders" of the cat).  The next step will be to convert that caterpillar body into a brownish pupa.

Addendum:  The chrysalis was fully formed by September 11 -

As of October 6 there have been no external apparent changes; looks like this butterfly is going to overwinter in the chrysalis.

Are you a descendant of Heline Gunhus Aasheim ?

If so, I have a family photo for you.

The large (8"x9") photo above (mounted on 11"x14" cardboard) has been in my family for at least three generations, but its relevance to the family has faded into obscurity.

The photo would have been taken about 1911 in south-central Minnesota (presumably Goodhue County or thereabouts).  The wedding participants were almost certainly all second- and third-generation descendants of Norwegian immigrants, who gathered for the wedding of the rather solemn couple in the center:

One interesting aspect of the photo is the abundance of young women wearing white; at a present-day wedding, white is usually reserved as the prerogative of the bride, but perhaps some other old Norwegian custom was influential here.

There is no need for this photo to stay in my family.  It is possible that the elderly lady near the right end of the front row in the closeup might be the sister of my grandfather, but even if true, the connection to my family is so tenuous as to render the image only of curiosity value.

If Heline Gunhus Aasheim was your great-great-ancestor, just leave a comment on this post and we can correspond to get the photo to you for the cost of postage.  Perhaps you can enlighten me about any connection of the Aasheim family to the Finseths or Distads.

A toddler solves the tricky "trolley problem"

YouTube link.

"I'm teaching a moral psychology class this semester, and we spent part of the first day discussing the trolley problem, which is a frequently used ethical dilemma in discussions of morality. When I returned home that night and was playing trains with my son, I thought it would be interesting to see his response to the trolley problem. I recorded his response so that I could share and discuss it with my class, given especially that we also will be discussing moral development from birth onward."

"We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set..."

In May, voters approved a bond election to help pay for a new high school stadium in McKinney at the price of $63.5 million.

Three months later, the district says the price has gone up to nearly $70 million. The district says the roughly nine-percent increase comes from more expensive concrete and labor than builders planned for.

Let me repeat that for the hearing-impaired:  70 million dollars for a high school football stadium.

Funded by private donations and rich alumni?  Nope:

The bulk of the funding for the project comes from a $220 million bond package that voters approved earlier this year.

Via American School and University, which adds -

When the McKinney stadium was being called the most expensive ever, officials pointed to other districts in football-mad Texas that were building comparable athletic facilities. The price attached to those projects did not include infrastructure costs, McKinney officials asserted, and if they were included, the projects would be more costly.

A stadium being built in the Katy (Texas) district is estimated to cost $62.5 million, and a stadium in the Allen (Texas) district cost about $60 million.

Why?  Because Texas.

In which Barbara serves her rhubarb cake to barbarians

YouTube link.

For the English translation, see reader nolandda's comment.

Via Miss Cellania.

Remembering Andrew Jackson

In the presidential contest of 1824, Andrew Jackson won the most electoral votes, edging out John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Because Jackson did not have a majority, however, the election was decided in the House of Representatives, where Adams prevailed. Adams subsequently chose Clay as his secretary of state. Jackson’s supporters were infuriated by what they described as a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay. The Washington establishment had defied the will of the people, they believed. Jackson rode the wave of public resentment to victory four years later, marking a dramatic turning point in American politics. A beloved hero of western farmers and frontiersmen, Jackson was the first nonaristocrat to become president. He was the first president to invite everyday folk to the inaugural reception. To the horror of the political elite, throngs tracked mud through the White House and broke dishes and decorative objects. Washington insiders reviled Jackson. They saw him as intemperate, vulgar, and stupid. Opponents called him a jackass—the origin of the donkey symbol for the Democratic Party. In a conversation with Daniel Webster in 1824, Thomas Jefferson described Jackson as “one of the most unfit men I know of” to become president of the United States, “a dangerous man” who cannot speak in a civilized manner because he “choke[s] with rage,” a man whose “passions are terrible.” Jefferson feared that the slightest insult from a foreign leader could impel Jackson to declare war. Even Jackson’s friends and admiring colleagues feared his volcanic temper. Jackson fought at least 14 duels in his life, leaving him with bullet fragments lodged throughout his body. On the last day of his presidency, he admitted to only two regrets: that he was never able to shoot Henry Clay or hang John C. Calhoun.

The similarities between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump do not end with their aggressive temperaments and their respective positions as Washington outsiders. The similarities extend to the dynamic created between these dominant social actors and their adoring audiences—or, to be fairer to Jackson, what Jackson’s political opponents consistently feared that dynamic to be. They named Jackson “King Mob” for what they perceived as his demagoguery. Jackson was an angry populist, they believed—a wild-haired mountain man who channeled the crude sensibilities of the masses. More than 100 years before social scientists would invent the concept of the authoritarian personality to explain the people who are drawn to autocratic leaders, Jackson’s detractors feared what a popular strongman might do when encouraged by an angry mob.

Excerpted from an interesting article - The Mind of Donald Trump.

Divertimento

 Iron Range meat and potatoes

How to break zip tie restraints on your wrists.  (Or, conversely, How Not to Restrain Your Victim...)

Clever sign in front of a progressive church.

A gene favoring obesity may have helped ancient Samoans conquer the Pacific. "By studying the genomes of more than 5,000 Samoans, researchers have uncovered a single gene that boosts a person’s obesity risk by upwards of 40 percent. Remarkably, this gene—which appears in a quarter of all Samoans—may have arisen in the population as they colonized the South Pacific."

Spam sushi

Why the United States didn't adopt the metric system in the 18th century: "In December 1793 [Joseph] Dombey was commissioned by the [French] Committee of Public Safety to journey to the United States in order to deliver the standards for the new metric system and purchase grain for the French Republic, but while on his way to America he was captured at sea by the British and died in a prison on Montserrat."

Seniors should understand that there can be significant differences in coverage between Medicare and private Medicare Advantage plans.

"Texas man filmed beating turtle to death with hammer says it was self-defense."

Watermelon kombucha

A gif of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Fulltext of Michelle Obama's convention speech.

GoFraudMe provides information on fradulent GoFundMe campaigns.

Global warming has released anthrax in Siberia, killing 1500 reindeer: "For the first time since 1941, anthrax struck western Siberia... the outbreak is thought to stem from a reindeer carcass that died in the plague 75 years ago. As the old flesh thawed, the bacteria once again became active. The disease tore through the reindeer herds." [on behalf of all the copyeditors and grammar Nazis on board here, we'll note that it should be "the carcass of a reindeer that died," not a "carcass that died." *sigh*]

Candied bacon BLT

"Pablo Escobar had so much wealth that he spent $1,000 a week on rubber bands just to keep his mountains of cash neat." (video at the link)

"Death from space." A brief video explains gamma-ray bursts.

Maps that show what country is directly across the ocean from you when you're are the seashore (taking into account the curvature of the earth...).

BBQ shrimp tacos

"Bondi management consultant Gareth Clear, 36, said his iPhone was in his back pocket and ignited after he had a fall from his bike while riding on Sunday afternoon.  "I just saw smoke coming out of my back pocket...and then all of a sudden I felt this surging pain," he said, adding that he felt a "searing heat" as the phone burnt through his riding shorts in a matter of seconds. "I just remember looking at my leg and I had this black discharge all down my leg and this smell of phosphorus​," he said." [he incurred third-degree burns.  Pix at the link.]

"The “full-bush Brazilian” is a new term when it comes to pubic hair trends, and it’s unique in the fact that, by definition, it’s a complete oxymoron..." [no pix at the link]

"A prison program called Paws for Life temporarily took in a group of deaf dogs in need of shelter as a wildfire burned its way up the California coast."

Water slide + dog (safe for work; not injured)

Deep-fried Spam curds

Discussion thread about Obama shortening some prison sentences.

"From 1958 to 1962, [Mao's] Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded."

An unexplained hole in the glass of a greenhouse.  Video here.

A Washington Post article details the plummeting participation in the game of golf.  Nike is "transitioning" out of the sport ("closing its main golf division and waving the white flag, saying it can’t make money off the game.")

"...a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service.  She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed."

Ghost Pepper cheeseburger quesadilla

A 41-shot table tennis rally.

Margaret Ives Abbott... was the first American woman to win a gold medal in an Olympic event. She won the women's golf tournament, consisting of nine holes, with a score of 47, at the 1900 Paris Games. Abbott won a porcelain bowl for first place in golf. (The 1900 Games were the only Olympics at which winners received valuable artifacts instead of medals.)

A slice of uncooked bacon that still has the nipple on it.  (You have to decide whether that's safe for work.)

"The Enduring Legend of the Girl Who Died in Odessa's Catacombs."  Pix at the link, including one that can be clicked to show the decomposing corpse.

2016 winners in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  Quality of the submissions, in my view, not as good as in previous years.

Bacon-wrapped Tater Tots

"Musician prevented from travelling on flight because her cello needed a visa.'"

"Born Free USA" collects old furs and donates them to wildlife centers, where they are used as objects of comfort for orphaned baby animals.

"Flood Destroys Home Of Hate Group Leader Who Claims God Sends Natural Disasters To Punish Gays."  Perkins claims that God sent this deadly flood not to punish the gays but rather “as an incredible, encouraging spiritual exercise to take you to the next level in your walk with an almighty and gracious God who does all things well.” In fact, he urges Christians to rejoice that God considers them “worthy of suffering for his sake." 

A happy Olympic victory celebration.

Cracker Jack caramel sundae

The embedded photos are selections from Star Tribune restaurant critic Rick Nelson's gallery of new food at this year's Minnesota State Fair.  (The reason you don't see the walleye-on-a-stick or buttered-corn-on-the-cob-on-a-stick is that those aren't new.)

"You're a genius, Dad"

Posted in celebration of this evening's start of the college football season.

Instantaneous transformation from asshole to hero

YouTube link.

In praise of frugality and a "simple life"

From a story in Boston.com:

Late University of New Hampshire librarian and alumnus Robert Morin spent almost 50 years of his life cataloging books, writing short descriptions of DVDs, and entering ISBN numbers of CDs at the Durham campus’s Dimond Library. Morin, who died last year at the age of 77, was known to “live simply,” so few knew he had quietly amassed a $4 million estate.

Even fewer knew he then gifted his fortune to his alma mater. UNH announced in a statement Tuesday that the unexpected benefactor left $4 million to the school.

Morin was described as keeping to himself, with his financial advisor telling the Union-Leader that his client “never went out.”  But he did have a love for all movies and books.

Huddleston said that from 1979 to 1997, Morin watched more than 22,000 videos. He then decided he wanted to read every book published in the U.S. from 1930 to 1940 – excluding children’s books, textbooks, and books about cooking and technology— in chronological order. Morin had reached 1938, the year of his birth, at the time of his death.

More re the gift and its disposition at the link.  

Image cropped for size.  Credit Robert Murin, courtesy of the University of New Hampshire

If you're not already angry about pharmaceutical prices, read about insulin

As reported in the Montana Standard:

A massive spike in insulin prices is causing a health crisis for millions of diabetes patients who depend on the lifesaving drug, doctors say. Now, after years of rapid increases having nothing to do with available supply and not matched elsewhere in the world, those in the U.S. insulin supply chain are blaming each other....

From 2011 to 2013 the wholesale price of insulin went up by as much as 62 percent. From 2013 to 2015 the price jumped again, from a low of 33 percent to as much as 107 percent...

"This borders on the unbelievable," Davidson said, citing an extremely concentrated insulin which "in 2001 had the wholesale price of $45. By last year, the cost had skyrocketed to $1,447" for the same monthly supply....

Pricing of insulin, as with other medications, is controlled by the manufacturers, the insurance companies, and pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen who negotiate the prices that the insurance companies pay....

"We don't know what the benefit manager is paying for the insulin from the pharma company. It's backroom deals," Hirsch said. "You can call them rebates, you can call them kickbacks, you can call them bribes, but those are secret deals on which we don't have the details."...

"You may not be able to prove who's behind the price rigging, but remember these prices are not an issue in Canada or in Europe or other countries where the governments keep the drug makers from going wild. It's only in America."...Three pharmaceutical companies control almost all the world's supply of insulin. In addition to Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis, there is the Danish company Novo Nordisk, which says it makes half the insulin used by diabetics around the world, and the French company Sanofi, which says it has 18 percent of the market...

Lilly said it could not speculate on why individual costs went up. "Lilly does not set the final price a patient pays for our medicines. Wholesalers and pharmacies ultimately price the product at retail," said communication manager Julie Herrick Williams. "The patient's insurer, the type of plan, and the individual pharmacy all play a role in the price," she said. "Changes to the U.S. healthcare system are the primary driver for increased insulin cost for consumers. With the adoption of cost-sharing plans, like high-deductible health plans, more direct costs are shifting to the people who need treatments."

A single-payer system would eliminate many of these price-gouging practices.  Readers who are in favor of the current system (i.e. those who are healthy and/or wealthy) please chime in with your reasons for supporting it.

More at the link.  The Reddit discussion thread makes note of the advantages of traveling to Mexico to purchase meds.