"Goodbye, Crook"

"Even during the height of the American Civil War, presidential security was lax. Throngs of people entered the White House every day. "The entrance doors and all the doors on the Pennsylvania side of the mansion were open at all hours of the day and, often, very late into the evening." Lincoln finally gave in to concerns for his safety in November 1864, and was assigned four around-the-clock
bodyguards...

On April 14, 1865, [William] Crook began his shift at 8 am. He was to have been relieved by John Frederick Parker at 4 pm, but Parker was several hours late. Lincoln had told Crook that he had been having dreams of himself being assassinated for three straight nights. Crook tried to persuade the president not to attend a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater that night, or at least allow him to go along as an extra bodyguard, but Lincoln said he had promised his wife they would go. As Lincoln left for the theater, he turned to Crook and said "Goodbye, Crook". Before, Lincoln had always said, "Good night, Crook". Crook later recalled: "It was the first time that he neglected to say 'Good Night' to me and it was the only time that he ever said 'Good-bye'. I thought of it at that moment and, a few hours later, when the news flashed over Washington that he had been shot, his last words were so burned into my being that they can never be forgotten." Crook blamed Parker, who had left his post at the theater without permission."

1959 comic book advertisements

I'm giving a goodbye read to old comic books before disposing of them.  Yesterday evening I encountered the above page of advertisements on the inside back page of an issue of Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

I presume the "Safety Deposit Bank Vault" was of a size that a thief could pick it up and put it in their pocket.  But I'm more intrigued by the "Record Your Voice At Home" advertisement.  I believe in that era my father owned an Edison Voicewriter, which I thought was rather sophisticated (and which generated a couple records which I don't expect ever to be able to listen to).  I'm surprised that an equivalent device was marketed in childrens' comic books.

"Ant bear" illustrated

Yesterday evening while I was playing Civilization V a "great person" was created and an illustration popped up on the screen portraying Landscape with an Ant Bear, by Frans Post.  Had to look it up.

Image brightened from the original, but it's still hard to see the ant bear (this one).

Television host, 1963

The program is "Music Hop" on the CBC.  The host is a young Alex Trebek.  Via.

Russian cursive looks like scribbles - updated

Image cropped for clarity from the original, where there is a little bit of relevant commentary about why this happens and how someone can use context to read it.  Readers here may be able to offer additional insights.

Addendum:   Several good comments from readers, and a hat tip to Aleksejs for providing this dissection of the cursive "chinchilla":

Addendum:  as several readers have noted, this is a good place to post a copy of Donald Trump's signature -

Green pigment in paintings turns brown with time

To anyone living in the 21st century, it might not be obvious that Renaissance paintings were once much colorful than they look now. “If you look at the paintings of, say, Leonardo da Vinci, they are very, very dark,” says Didier Gourier, a chemist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and an author of the study. “But they didn’t always look this way.”..

Presented with incredibly high-resolution images of the paint chips, they contrasted the color changes in verdigris sampled from the center of Bronzino’s painting against verdigris sampled right next to the frame, a shaded area that would have offered protection from light. Their suspicions were proven right when they found the frame-protected paint was far less deteriorated. When Gourier magnified a cracked paint sample from “Pietà,” he found that each crack had darkened, likely due to the diffusion of oxygen in the cracks. “The darkening is not systematic,” Gourier says. This inconsistency helps researchers pick out now-brown verdigris from originally brown paint, he says.

More at Atlas Obscura, via Neatorama.

Retrofitting highways for wildlife

It's not just a matter of protecting wildlife - projects like these are also important for driver safety.

COLLEGIATE PEAKS SCENIC BYWAY, Colo. — U.S. Highway 285 was once a death zone for the dwindling herds of elk and mule deer on Colorado’s Western Slope. But today it offers a lifeline, helping them travel from their summer range high in the mountains to winter foraging grounds along the Arkansas River. 

For the past year, a tunnel dipping under three lanes of speeding traffic has beckoned. And as frost descended recently on subalpine meadows and glittering-gold aspen, a huge bull elk, measuring at least nine feet from antlers to hoofs, entered the structure ever so cautiously. Infrared cameras on both ends captured his meandering.

The $3.5 million project is one of several planned for Colorado’s ever more crowded roads, on which some 4,000 bears, bighorn sheep, coyotes and myriad other animals died last year. The cost of the carnage exceeded $80 million, according to state officials.

Across the country, as development continues to encroach on natural areas, wildlife-vehicle collisions are taking a massive toll. More than 1.9 million animal-collision insurance claims were filed in fiscal 2019, a State Farm report found, with some researchers estimating the annual price tag of the resulting human fatalities, wildlife mortality, injuries, vehicle damage and other costs at almost $10 billion.

More at the Washington Post.

Concise (6-minute) explainer video about the Ukraine phone call

YouTube link

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Snowshoe for a horse

Found at 2000m altitude in Norway during rescue archaeology in melting snowfields.  The snowshoe dates to the Viking or Medieval period.  Truly remarkable preservation, but needs conservation because if left untended it would dry out and crumble.

Credit Secrets of the Ice, via The Rescue Mission to Save Civilization From the Big Melt.

I suppose we should place these spices on the left side of the kitchen cabinet...

Context.

The politics haven’t hurt Mr. Penzey’s business, he said, adding that he has lost some customers but gained some, too.  “If you are a company and you have values, now is the time to share them,” Mr. Penzey said. “Now is the time that it’s important to share them.”

Store locator.  Online orders (I recommend the gift boxes).

Stuffed bear

The images above are before-and-after photos of Holly - the winner of Fat Bear Week in Alaska's Katmai National Park.

"It was very hard to get a good picture [of Holly] out of the water," she says, "because she was a submarine for the entire month. She did not stop fishing, except to dig a belly hole big enough for her to sleep in."

More at NPR.

New England's "town pounds"

"Dozens of these stone enclosures—open at the top, usually square or circular, with a gap secured by a gate—remain scattered across New England. They were once a ubiquitous feature in the region. In fact, they were so necessary to the orderly functioning of a community that they were required by law. They were town pounds.

In 17th-century America, livestock were generally not fenced in as they are today. Back in England, grazing animals were guarded by herders. But in the New World, where labor was scarce, animals like sheep and cattle were turned loose to graze on common lands instead. (The town green, or common, was often used for this purpose.)

If an animal strayed and was found wreaking havoc on private property, it was brought to the pound, where it was corralled with other wayward creatures and watched over by a town-appointed “pound-keeper” (sometimes called a “pound-master,” or “pounder”) until its owner could retrieve it—for a fee...

Today perhaps a hundred town pounds remain across New England. (They exist in other areas too. In addition to having mapped two dozen of New England’s pounds, users of the site waymarking.com have located one in a Nevada ghost town, and several in the U.K.)" 

More at the  always-interesting Atlas Obscura.

Redesigning the speculum

"Improvements already made include a three-leafed design that eliminates the need to open the speculum as wide, an angled handle so patients don't have to hang off the exam table, and a silicone material that reduces the coldness felt upon insertion."

More at Freethink.

Bagpipe bungee jump

YouTube link.

Spiders detect electrical fields and use them for ballooning

Everyone knows that spiders fly through the air on strands of their silk.  But it's not just a matter of chance and favorable winds.  The relevance of a surprising factor (earth's electrical field) is explained in a recent issue of Cell:Current Biology:

... the involvement of electrostatic forces in ballooning has never been tested. Several issues have emerged when models using aerodynamic drag alone are employed to explain ballooning dispersal. For example, many spiders balloon using multiple strands of silk that splay out in a fan-like shape. Instead of tangling and meandering in light air currents, each silk strand is kept separate, pointing to the action of a repelling electrostatic force. Questions also arise as to how spiders are able to rapidly emit ballooning silk into the air with the low wind speeds observed in ballooning; the mechanics of silk production requires sufficient external forces to pull silk from spinnerets during spinning...

In the early 20^th century, atmospheric electricity was intensively studied, establishing the ubiquity of the atmospheric potential gradient (APG); from fair to stormy weather, an APG is always present, varying in strength and polarity with local meteorological conditions. Over a flat field on a day with clear skies, the APG is approximately 120 Vm⁻¹... Closer to the tree, around sharp leaf, needle, and branch tips, e-fields easily reach tens of kilovolts per meter... the spider’s unlearned response to e-fields is to engage in ballooning, and, on becoming airborne, switching the e-field on and off results in the spider moving upward (on) or downward (off) [video at the link].

Ed Yong discusses this research in his Atlantic column.

Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

Many of the spiders actually managed to take off, despite being in closed boxes with no airflow within them.