"You have 100 lb
of potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight. You let them
dehydrate until they're 98 percent water. How much do they weigh now?
These are "mathematical" potatoes; you can substitute grapes or jellyfish or amoeba if you want something with a higher percentage of wet weight.
But given the parameters of the question, what is the answer?
50 pounds. This is a veridical paradox.
13 August 2018
White supremacist "rally"
This weekend's "Unite the Right" rally in Washington, D.C. Many of the people inside the police cordon are journalists. The number of white nationalists was estimated to be a couple dozen. The counterprotestors numbered in the thousands.
Photo (annotated for clarity) via.
11 August 2018
Children can easily hack American election data
More information at the BBC.Bianca Lewis, 11, has many hobbies. She likes Barbie, video games, fencing, singing… and hacking the infrastructure behind the world’s most powerful democracy.“I’m going to try and change the votes for Donald Trump,” she tells me. “I’m going to try to give him less votes. Maybe even delete him off of the whole thing.”
Fortunately for the President, Bianca is attacking a replica website, not the real deal. She’s taking part in a competition organised by R00tz Asylum, a non-profit organisation that promotes “hacking for good”.
Its aim is to send out a dire warning: the voting systems that will be used across America for the mid-term vote in November are, in many cases, so insecure a young child can learn to hack them with just a few minute’s coaching...
Hacking the real websites would be illegal. So instead, Ms Sell’s team created 13 sites that mimicked the real websites, gaping vulnerabilities and all, for 13 so-called “battleground" states - parts of the country where the vote is expected to be tight.
Over the course of a day, 39 kids aged between 8 and 17 took the challenge - 35 of them succeeded in bypassing the trivial security. Pranks ensued...
While the hacks learnt here wouldn’t change actual vote counts - even if carried out for real - they could alter how the vote results were displayed on official websites. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the furore that would be caused were an official election website to declare the wrong candidate the winner.
The fallibility of these systems has been of concern since 2016’s presidential election, and in some cases well before that. Each state in the US is able to come up with its own system, and with budgets tight, many are relying on poorly secured databases and voting machines that run software that’s well over a decade old.
"Our boys need and deserve books"
Yesterday I was reading one of my John Dickson Carr mysteries, in this case a paperback edition published in 1943, and noticed the page above. Apparently during wartime you could mail a used paperback book to the Army and Navy libraries for a 3c stamp.
Also of some interest was the following list on the next couple pages at the back of the book, listing best-sellers for 1943 (for this company, which obviously leaned toward mysteries). But interesting anyway.
#232 reminded me how much I was enthralled by Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios when I read it decades ago - staying up most of a night to finish it, as I recall. I think (hope) I have sufficiently forgotten the plot twist that I'll be able to read and enjoy it again.
Hovenring
From Twisted Sifter:
Hovenring is the world’s first suspended bicycle path roundabout. Located in the Netherlands, Hovenring can be found between the localities of Eindhoven, Veldhoven and Meerhoven which accounts for its name, Dutch for “Ring of the Hovens“.I'll use this opportunity to start a new category for blog posts: Nice Things We Could Have Instead of a Border Wall.
No, they don't know your secret
It's just random extortion, as explained in the Washington Post:
“I know about the secret you are keeping from your wife and everyone else,” a mysterious letter read. “More importantly, I have evidence of what you’ve been hiding.”The letterwriter, GreySquare15, threatened to expose a secret — unless Strohl wired the sender $15,750 in bitcoin...Strohl, who lives in Washington’s Chevy Chase neighborhood, has been happily married for 14 years and said he recognized the letter was a likely scam. After posting about it on a community listserv the next morning, he realized he was one of several residents in the area to receive similar threats in the past month in a scheme the FBI says appears to target affluent neighborhoods across the country...The customized blackmail threats using a name or other personalized detail to bolster the all-knowing tone in the letters may draw on names and addresses found on publicly available sites or have been acquired through private data the fraudster bought.“Because of the amount of people’s personally identifiable data out there on the dark Web, criminals can purchase this type of information and attempt to use it against you,” Ames said. “But it’s a scam, and folks should not pay the demand money.”The fact that someone appears to have access to passwords or other information — even if the information is out of date — can be unsettling all on its own.
Firestorm aftermath
Everyone has seen photos and videos of the wildfires ravaging the western states. What always startles me is how many of the destroyed homes are not cabins nestled in a woodland - just ordinary houses in a residential subdivision. Also, as shown in the second photo, the startlingly narrow margin between survival and devastation.
Second image cropped for emphasis from the original, both of which credit City of Redding (California), via a gallery at The Guardian.
Related: The Hinckley Firestorm of 1894
The best video on "how to fold a fitted sheet"
If you search YouTube for "how to fold a fitted sheet," the resulting list seems to scroll endlessly. If I had to recommend one video on the subject, it would be this one, via Neatorama, where Miss C always posts excellent videos.
07 August 2018
"Natural wine" and "glou glou" explained
As explained by The Guardian:
‘Natural wine’ advocates say everything about the modern industry is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong – and have triggered the biggest split in the wine world for a generation...And more at Grub Street:
A recent study showed that 38% of wine lists in London now feature at least one organic, biodynamic or natural wine (the categories can overlap) – more than three times as many as in 2016. “Natural wines are in vogue,” reported the Times last year. “The weird and wonderful flavours will assault your senses with all sorts of wacky scents and quirky flavours.”
As natural wine has grown, it has made enemies. To its many detractors, it is a form of luddism, a sort of viticultural anti-vax movement that lauds the cidery, vinegary faults that science has spent the past century painstakingly eradicating. According to this view, natural wine is a cult intent on rolling back progress in favour of wine best suited to the tastes of Roman peasants. The Spectator has likened it to “flawed cider or rotten sherry” and the Observer to “an acrid, grim burst of acid that makes you want to cry”...
Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago...
The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. “It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert Parker, perhaps the world’s most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an “undefined scam”...
..as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked with pesticide and fertiliser to protect the grapes, which are a notoriously fragile crop...
The modern winemaker has access to a vast armamentarium of interventions, from supercharged lab-grown yeast, to antimicrobials, antioxidants, acidity regulators and filtering gelatins, all the way up to industrial machines. Wine is regularly passed through electrical fields to prevent calcium and potassium crystals from forming, injected with various gases to aerate or protect it, or split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio.
Natural winemakers believe that none of this is necessary...
Some quibble over which methods count as “natural,” from filtering to machine-harvesting to vineyard architecture. (“I’m offended by vines on a wire. It’s slavery,” a Spanish winemaker tells Lepeltier and Alice Feiring in their book The Dirty Guide to Wine.) Some use prehistoric winemaking methods, like subterranean fermentation in clay amphorae. The semiotics of what counts as “natural,” and why, and who gets to decide, can be a source of rancor... Whatever the process, the results can be downright funky: white wines that can be amber, orange, and cloudy. Red wines that resemble fizzy beet juice and occluded amethysts. The flavors can be intense and unfamiliar — savory, salty, and startlingly sour. These wines flout the conventions of connoisseurship, but among the city’s wine geeks and sommeliers, natural wine has an intense following. Justin Chearno, the wine director at the Four Horsemen, describes himself as “really, really, really evangelical,” especially early in his career. After Cork Dork author Bianca Bosker’s dismissal of “so-called natural wines” appeared last year in the New York Times, she says she received hate mail...
“There’s a lot of really fucked-up natural wine out there,” says Jon Bonné, author of The New Wine Rules, who was, for almost a decade, wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle...
But enough shit-talking. Let’s talk manure. That horse-shit scent, politely called “barnyard,” is the product of Brettanomyces, a bacterium present in many wines. Lepeltier, a partner at downtown bistro Racines NY, explained: “It triggers some sexual stuff. And I’m sure about that.” Lepeltier has a degree in philosophy and total certainty in her opinions and taste. Like a musky perfume, barnyard wines appeal to “something very, very primitive in us. So that’s one reason [people like it]. And the second thing is: You can recognize it.”And now it's time to explain "glou glou" -
As a recent feature in Fortune explained, “The French, perfecters of both making and consuming natural wine, have an onomatopoeic term for this, glou glou, the sound these easy-drinking reds and whites make hurtling down your throat on a warm June day.” This is wine designed to be gulped, not sipped. Glou glou is both demonstratively and deceptively simple. A visibly unfiltered wine shows off its maker’s rustic approach to viniculture. But that is only possible when the wine is elaborate — organic, biodynamic, location-specific, and labor-intensive.
The glou glou aesthetic applies to more than wine. Glou glou is a stripped-down renovation that showcases a building’s “bones.” It’s not wearing makeup and looking great, because you’re well rested and have an elaborate skin-care routine. (Natural wine, like natural beauty, requires long-term commitment. Minimalism works best when it’s minimal only on the surface.) Glou glou is passing a Polaroid camera around the party (then arranging the Polaroids into an artful display and photographing that with your iPhone). Glou glou is serving caviar with potato chips, as they do at Brunette, a natural-wine bar run by a married couple, designers who ditched New York City for the Hudson Valley. The tabletops are unadorned marble. The walls are whitewashed brick.Glou glou is a maddening form of luxury, one that simultaneously rejects and performs elitism. Glou glou rejects the near past in favor of a modernized version of the old past. This makes glou glou incomprehensible to tastemakers from the near past — the ones who abandoned whatever elements of the old past glou glou seeks to resurrect. But here’s the worst part: Everyone who partakes in glou glou knows this. Glou glou is self-conscious, self-aware, and self-critical. Glou glou is how millennials do snob.Like all trends associated with millennials, glou glou boils down to economics...
Lots more at the links, both of which are longreads. None of this matters to TYWKIWDBI; we are perfectly content swilling an occasional bottle of cheap pinot grigio. My initial impetus for blogging this topic was the photo of that awesome piece of farm equipment at the top.
The average age of first-time mothers
From the New York Times:
... a new analysis of four decades of births shows that the age that women become mothers varies significantly by geography and education... First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South...Much more discussion at the link. The map embedded above is not interactive; the one at the link is. Also, these two graphs are instructive:
The difference in when women start families cuts along many of the same lines that divide the country in other ways, and the biggest one is education. Women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without — and often use the years in between to finish school and build their careers and incomes...
Young mothers are more likely to be conservative and religious, to value traditional gender roles and to reject abortion. Older mothers tend to be liberal, and to split breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities more equally with men, they found...
Being a young mother has benefits, she said: “I still have a lot of energy to deal with them, and when they get older, I won’t be too old.”
Oh, let them drink the red juice !
"A mysterious black sarcophagus was pried open in Alexandria, Egypt... Photos of the gruesome scene found inside the sarcophagus spread quickly online after archaeologists pried open the 30-ton vessel, revealing three decomposed bodies floating in an unidentified red juice. Netizens around the world immediately began speculating about what the substance could be, with many jumping to the outlandish conclusion that the liquid might possess magical healing powers...What kind of world do we live in where the authorities deny the common people their right to drink unknown fluids from the bottom of a 2000-year-old sarcophagus?
The wild theory went so viral it spawned a change.org petition entitled "let the people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus."
"We need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die," petition founder Innes McKendrick wrote on the site.At the time of publication, the petition had accrued 19,013 signatures...
...the Egyptian Antiquities Minister spoke out to assure the public that the liquid is not "juice for mummies that contains an elixir of life" — it's just sewage water that managed to leak into the ancient tomb through a small crack in the vessel's side.Well, there's that...
BTW, when I checked today, the number of names on the petition is now up to 32,034.
Photo via Popular Mechanics.
Why people are hanged "until dead"
"A popular story in Edinburgh is that of Margaret Dickson, a fishwife from Musselburgh
who was hanged in the Grassmarket in 1724 for murdering her
illegitimate baby shortly after birth. After the hanging, her body was
taken back to Musselburgh on a cart. However, on the way there she
awoke. Since, under Scots Law, her punishment had been carried out, she could not be executed for a second time for the same crime (only later were the words "until dead" added to the sentence of hanging). Her
"resurrection" was also to some extent seen as divine intervention, and so she was allowed to go free. In later life (and legend) she was referred to as "half-hangit Maggie". There is now a pub in the Grassmarket named after her."Image via.
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