Unfriend

Via insanepeoplefacebook.

Disco spider

Chrysilla volupe, with iridescent colors.  Photo via, where the discussion is mindless drivel.

"When you flush a toilet, you breathe in toilet water"

This is not a new concept.  The flushing of toilets creates aerosols that emerge from and hover above the toilet bowl.  Those droplets may contain any microorganisms that were in the toilet water.  This is why everyone shares some of their microbiome with housemates or roommates.

And it may have relevance to coronavirus transmission:

Studies are showing that the novel coronavirus can be detected in stool samples and anal swab samples for weeks. In fact, scientists are testing wastewater as an early tracking system for outbreaks. And a recent case on an airplane identified the airplane bathroom as the potential source.

Here’s what we know: When you flush a toilet, the churning and bubbling of water aerosolizes fecal matter. That creates particles that will float in the air, which we will now politely call “bioaerosols” for the rest of this article...

How many airborne particles, exactly, are we talking about? Upwards of 1 million additional particles per cubic meter of air. Not all of the aerosols generated will carry the virus, of course. But, let’s be clear: When you flush the toilet, you’re breathing in toilet water, and whatever is in that toilet water — including viruses and bacteria.

The study also found that bioaerosols spread around the room and lingered in the air. In fact, basic aerosol physics tell us these bioaerosols will stay aloft until one of four things happen: they settle out onto surfaces, they are removed through dilution, they are removed through filtration or they are removed by your lung...

Continued at The Washington Post, where there are suggestions re coping mechanisms (toilet lids, ventilation, cleaning...)

Related:  How 2020 has changed public urination.

Selected octets and couplets from Lord Byron's "Don Juan"

And walking out upon the beach below
   The cliff, towards sunset, on that day she found,
Insensible, not dead, but nearly so,
  Don Juan, almost famished and half drowned.
But being naked, she was shocked, you know,
  Yet deemed herself in common pity bound,
As far as in her lay, 'to take him in,
A stranger' dying, with so white a skin.  (II, 129)

  [note "Juan" always scans as "Joo-an", not "wan."]

He ate, and he was well supplied, and she,
  Who watched him like a mother, would have fed
Him past all bounds, because she smiled to see
  Such appetite in one she had deemed dead.
But Zoe, being older than Haidee,
  Knew (by tradition, for she ne'er had read)
That famished people must be slowly nurst
And fed by spoonfuls, else they always burst. (II, 158)

[interesting knowledge of a refeeding syndrome]

Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda water the day after. (II, 178)

A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love
  And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus, kindled from above;
  Such kisses as belong to early days,
Where heart and soul and sense in concert move,
  And the blood's lava, and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart-quake, for a kiss's strength,
I think, it must be reckoned by its length. (II, 186)

Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler,
And daughters sometimes run off with the butler. (III, 22)

'All this is very fine and may be true,'
  Said Juan, 'but I really don't see how
It betters present times with me or you.'
  'No?' quoth the other, 'yet you will allow
By setting things in their right point of view,
  Knowledge at least is gained; for instance, now
We know what slavery is, and our disasters
May teach us better to behave when masters.'  (V, 23)

But let it go.  It will one day be found
  With other relics of a former world,
When this world shall be former, underground,
  Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped and curled,
Baked fried, or burnt, turned inside out, or drowned,
  Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled
First out of and then back again to chaos,
The superstratum which will overlay us.

So Cuvier says.  And then shall come again
  Unto the new creation, rising out
From our old crash, some mystic, ancient strain
  Of things destroyed and left in airy doubt,
Like to the notions we now entertain
  Of Titans, giants, fellows of about
Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,
And mammoths and your winged crocodiles.

Think if then George the Fourth should be dug up!
  How the new worldlings of the then new East
Will wonder where such animals could sup.
  (For they themselves will be but of the least.
Even worlds miscarry when too oft they pup,
  And every new creation hath decreased
In size, from overworking the material.
Men are but maggots of some huge earth's burial.)  (IX, 37-39)

[three octets with interesting views of catastrophism]

The courtiers stared, the ladies whispered, and
  The Empress smiled.  The reigning favourite frowned.
I quite forget which of them was in hand
  Just then, as they are rather numerous found,
Who took, by turns that difficult command
  Since first Her Majesty was singly crowned.
But they were mostly nervous six-foot fellows,
All fit to make a Patagonian jealous.  (IX, 46)

[hypersexuality of Catherine the Great; legendary Patagonian giants]

If he found not this spawn of tax-born riches,

Like lap dogs, the least civil sons of bitches.  (XI, 41)

[Use of the phrase in print in 1819]

'Where is the world?' cries Young at eighty. 'Where

  The world in which a man was born?' Alas!

Where is the world of eight years past?  'Twas there -

  I look for it - 'tis gone, a globe of glass,

Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere

  A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.

Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,

And dandies, all are gone on the wind's wings.  (XI, 76)

[continues for four more verses]

Oh gold!  Why call we misers miserable?

  Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall.  (XII, 3)

[good question.  Apparently it is an assumed association]

I'll have another figure in a trice,

  What say you to a bottle of champagne,

Frozen into a very vinous ice,

  Which leaves few drops of that immortal rain.

Yet in the very centre, past all price,

  About a liquid glassful will remain,

And this is stronger than the strongest grape

Could e'er express in its expanded shape. (XIII, 37)

[knowledge of ice wine]

Don Juan was Byron's magnum opus, a work often properly described not as a poem but rather as a "verse novel" because of its length.  I can't really offer a blanket recommendation; I reread it in order to revisit an undergraduate encounter with the text when I was a senior in college.  There are several thousand verses, and even at that it was unfinished at the time of Byron's untimely death.  The story of Don Juan provides a vehicle for Byron to comment on everything from politics to contemporary literature to ethics and mores.  The content thus becomes a bit dated and trivial, but the work as a whole does show his mastery of verse.

Daddy crocodile with his babies

The image was captured by expert photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee. His shot, snapped in India's National Chambal Sanctuary, is highly commended in this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year (WPY) competition.

Every one of these youngsters needs to survive into adulthood and to breed.

The freshwater gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) is critically endangered. Where once it could have numbered more than 20,000 animals across South Asia, the species is now down to perhaps less than 1,000 mature individuals - and three-quarters of these are concentrated in the Uttar Pradesh sanctuary.

Since it's a daddy croc, we can insert a lame "dad joke":  How do you distinguish a crocodile from an alligator?  "One will see you in a while, the other will see you later."  Thank you.  I'll show myself out...

Stained glass window

 By Neile Cooper.

Sleep paralysis in an Ernest Hemingway story

In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Ernest Hemingway describes the impending death of a hunter suffering from a gangrenous leg (boldface emphasis mine):

Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.

"Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull," he told her. "It can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena."

It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space.

"Tell it to go away."

It did not go away but moved a little closer.

"You've got a hell of a breath," he told it. "You stinking bastard."

It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not move or speak, he heard the woman say, "Bwana is asleep now. Take the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent."

He could not speak to tell her to make it go away and it crouched now, heavier, so he could not breathe. And then, while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from his chest.

This is a superb description of the phenomenon of sleep paralysis (the paralysis, the muteness, the chest pressure, the dyspnea, and the cessation when the victim is touched or moved), so vivid and precise that I have no doubt that Hemingway must have experienced it himself (his lifestyle would have been compatible with a high risk for the syndrome).

Back when I was active in academia, I developed a special interest and expertise in sleep paralysis, and had visions of someday publishing a book on its portrayal in literature and folklore.  That seems unlikely now, but since I have file boxes full of information, perhaps I can incorporate some of that material into posts for this blog.

Fulltext of Hemingway's story.

Reposted from 2013 (has it really been that long?) to add some new information about Hemingway.  In a recently-published book, a psychiatrist argues that Hemingway may have suffered from chronic traumatic enchephalopathy - the disorder that has been in the news because of its association with professional football and other contact sports.

The psychiatrist from High Point University in North Carolina wrote of nine serious blows to Hemingway's head — from explosions to a plane crash — that were a prelude to his decline into abusive rages, "paranoia with specific and elaborate delusions" and his suicide in 1961.

Hemingway's bizarre behavior in his latter years (he rehearsed his death by gunshot in front of dinner guests, for example) has been blamed on iron deficiency, bipolar disorder, attention-seeking and any number of other problems.

After researching the writer's letters, books and hospital visits, Farah said he is convinced that Hemingway had dementia — made worse by alcoholism and other maladies, but dominated by CTE, the improper treatment of which likely hastened his death. "He truly is a textbook case," Farah said.

Farah dates Hemingway's first known concussion to World War I, several years before he wrote his short story, "The Battler." A bomb exploded about three feet from his teenage frame.

Another likely concussion came in 1928, when Hemingway yanked what he thought was a toilet chain and brought a skylight crashing down on him.

Then came a car accident in London — then more injuries as a reporter during World War II, when an antitank gun blew Hemingway into a ditch.

The rest of the story is at the StarTribune.

Image harvested from the 1936 Esquire publication of the story.

Reposted form 2017 to add this photo of Dendrosenecio kilimanjari, a giant groundsel that grows atop Mt. Kilimanjaro:

"Modern monetary theory" - updated with explanatory video

This concept is counterintuitive, and totally new to me.

Modern Monetary Theory is an economic philosophy based on the idea that all state spending is "deficit" spending, since money comes into existence when the government spends it, and when the government raises taxes, it does so in order to take that money out of existence, both in order to control inflation and to limit the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy.

The corollaries of this are many, but the two standout ones are:

1. The government can create money to buy any good or service that the private sector isn't using without driving inflation (that is, if there's someone unemployed and the government gives them a job, that won't drive up wages because the private sector had already passed on using their labor, so the supply/demand ratio of labor to private jobs remains constant), offering full employment to everyone who wants to work; and

2. The government can create money to buy goods and services that the private sector is currently using without creating inflation, provided it can convince people not to spend that money -- for example, by creating "war bonds" that sequester the vast sums that get pumped into the economy during wartime, to prevent the workers who receive those sums from bidding against the materials that are being used in munitions factories.

These two facts are central to the Green New Deal, which proposes using a combination of a federal jobs guarantee and federal procurements of the materials needed for a sustainable energy conversion and climate change remediation to avert the climate crisis. 

The BoingBoing source for the excerpt above includes a nine-minute video of an academic lecture on the subject which is well worth watching [edited and condensed from probably a one-hour lecture].  The key concept is that the federal budget cannot be compared to a household budget; deficit spending and borrowing work differently when the entity issues the currency.

Related:

A Thorough Defense of Modern Monetary Theory
Economists worry that MMT is winning the Argument in Washington

Addendum:  For an outstanding longread on this subject, see Explain Like I'm Five: Functional Finance, written by TYWKIWDBI reader escapefromWisconsin.

Addendum:  This BBC video offers an excellent five-minute summary of the principles involved.

"Government spending is currently growing at an unprecedented rate to deal with the effects of the global pandemic. Many people worry that this could burden future generations with a crippling debt to repay. However, economist Stephanie Kelton, author of The Deficit Myth, argues that we need to rethink our attitudes towards government spending. Could the principles of Modern Monetary Theory help us not only navigate our way out of this crisis but also to build a fairer economy?"

Rastrum

"A rastrum (or raster) is a five-pointed writing implement used in music manuscripts to draw parallel staff lines when drawn horizontally across a blank piece of sheet music. The word "raster" is derived from the Latin for "rake". Rastra were used to draw lines on paper that had not been pre-ruled, and were widely used in Europe until printed staff paper became cheap and common in the nineteenth century. Some rastra are able to draw more than one staff at a time."

School supplies

Via Miss Cellania, where you can also see a kitchen miracle.

Language in Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel"

A disappointing reread of a classic work that captivated me in my late teens, when I eagerly consumed this and You Can't Go Home Again and The Web and the Rock and Of Time and the River.  Coming back to this as an adult, I found Wolfe's mastery of the language to be overshadowed by the tedious storyline of an endlessly squabbling dysfunctional family.  But so many new words and new uses of words I pretty much quit listing them halfway through the book [I'll come back later when I have more time, to fill in the definitions and etymologies - just wanted to post this now and get the book returned to the library]:

"... the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock..."  A protective bodily substance, perhaps referring to the complement system.

"... the big angel with the carved stipe of lily stalk..."  The stem of a plant, trunk of a tree, from the Latin for a branch.

"... she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane ends of memory..."  From the Latin to stray off-course, incoherent wandering speech.

"... when he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all the slow octopal movements of her temper, stirred him to red madness."  Octopus-like.

"With her desperate sadness she encysted herself within her house and her family..."  Obvious in context, but the first time I've seen it used outside of parasitology.

"... as he heard the bell ringing itself to sleep, jerking the slatting rope about in its dying echoes."  Violent shaking of anything hanging loose in the wind, from the use of slat as a verb to mean strike.

"There were two beds; he exulted in his unaccustomed occupancy of an entire mattress, dreaming of the day of manlike privacy.  But Eliza did not allow this often: he was riven into her flesh."  I need help with this one, because to me riven means torn apart.  But I did find an archaic use of rive "to pierce."

"Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed - his wife was full of swart rich laughter."  Dark, swarthy.  From the Middle English and likely related to German schwartz.

"Will and Pett gave a heavy set of carving steels.  'I hope you always have something to use them on,' said Will, flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell."  I have only ever seen this word used in reference to stripping blubber from a whale, a la Moby Dick.   Not sure what such a hand motion might be.

"... eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver - eating strange fabulous foods - swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues, dormice and camels' heels..."

"The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esemplastic power of his imagination..."

"... bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before."

"None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance... Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches."

"... he would summons her by ringing out the number he had given her on the courthouse bell."

"His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health."

"And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master's swingeing wit..."

"... with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand."

"Oh, boy, you are fine.  There is no atom in you that is not fine.  A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you.  God bless you: the world is yours."

"Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur."

"The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the hills."

"He lighted a cigarette, watching its red glowing suspiration in the mirror..."

"His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy..."

"The leaves were out in a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich black earth..."

And a couple longer passages that speak for themselves:

"Yes, and the exciting smell of chalk and varnished desks; the smell of heavy bread sandwiches of cold fried meat and butter; the smell of new leather in a saddler's shop, or of a worn leather chair; of honey and of unground coffee; of barrelled sweet pickles and cheese and all the fragrant compost of the grocer's; the smell of stored apples in the cellar, and of orchard-apple smells, of pressed cider pulp; of pears ripening on a sunny shelf, and of ripe cherries stewing with sugar on hot stoves before preserving ; the smell of whittled wood, of all young lumber, of sawdust and shavings; of peaches stuck with cloves and pickled in brandy; of pine sap, and green pine needles; of a horse's pared hoof; of chestnuts roasting, of bowls of nuts and raisins; of hot cracklin', and of young roast pork; of butter and cinnamon melting on hot candied yams..." [this continues for four similar paragraphs in Chapter 8]

"This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift to his wife - a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear, and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures, of any life that differed from that of his village.  "There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared." [chapter 12]

"I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming.  Why here?  Why there?  Why now?  Why then?" [one of my favorite passages, and a fair exposition of a sort of butterfly effect and the interdependence of all things]

"“Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.” [perhaps the iconic quotation from this novel]

A moving performance

YouTube link

Most unusual video of the year so far.  Not dancers per se; these are professional acrobats.

p.s. - I'm not "back to blogging" officially yet.  It's more like when you take a staycation at home but make a quick run back to the office to see what's going on.

Climate change in Minnesota is altering the forests

Excerpts from an interesting longread at the Washington Post:

Birds from southern Minnesota are now popping up far north in Ely, on the edge of the famous Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Splashes of red maple leaves are now visible each fall amid the pines and spruces of the iconic North Woods, where they once would have been harder to find.

Frelich, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Forest Ecology, thinks that if the state's warming trend remains unchecked, such subtle changes will become starker and more devastating in the decades ahead. He thinks the boreal forests that soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could disappear entirely, taking with them a third of the state's native species of trees, flowers, birds and pollinators.

In an extreme scenario, he has warned, prairie land could expand across much of Minnesota by 2100, upending everything from the timber industry to tourism to the state’s very identity...

Minnesota is home to a landscape like none other in the United States. It has the boreal forests to the north, with their stately conifers and the moose and lynx that roam them; temperate forests in the middle, dominated by deciduous trees such as oak and maple; and prairie stretching to the south and west.

But rising temperatures are altering those boundaries...

Palik pointed out bitternut hickory from southern Minnesota and Illinois. Black cherry and white oak, whose historical range has been 100 miles or more to the south. Ponderosa pine from Nebraska and South Dakota.

What is becoming clearer over time is that the nonnative trees from warmer, drier climates are largely thriving here...

This resonates with me because the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota is my favorite stomping ground for summer vacations.  The article details studies being done by forestry professionals and interventions they are testing to ameliorate the anticipated changes in the climate.

Record high water temperatures in the Great Lakes

 It's not just the Caribbean that's getting hot.  The data above from July; I've not seen data for August, when the temps normally cycle to their annual peak.  Local residents are happy; so are the algae.  The fish, not so much.

Time lapse video of plants growing