Minnesota "Name a snowplow" contest resumes

"The Minnesota Department of Transportation's "Name a Snowplow" contest is back for the third straight year.

The agency is accepting name suggestions for the next 10 days. Last year, MnDOT received more than 11,000 suggestions after putting out a call for the public to help name eight snowplows — one for each district in the state. "Betty Whiteout" was the runaway winner.

MnDOT was the first transportation department in the country to launch a snowplow naming contest — an effort to bring some levity to winter, Meyer said. Agency officials had seen an article in "Roadshow" explaining how Scotland names its entire snowplow fleet and posts maps showing their locations. The country calls the vehicles "gritters," the article said, which led to witty handles such as "Gritney Spears" and "Gritty Gritty Bang Bang.""

More information at the StarTribune.  Entries can be submitted to the DOT here.  "Gosh darn it, nothing vulgar please."  And politics-related names are verboten.

Addendum:  Here are the gritters of Scotland (hat tip for link to reader Marge):

Addendum:  The results are in (hat tip to Miss C for tracking down the results):

Reposted because the contest is open again for the new winter season.  Anyone (not just people lucky enough to live in Minnesota) can submit suggestions using this entry form, but remember no politics and "gosh darn it, nothing vulgar please."  And for the benefit of those in warmer climes who conflate snowplows with humble road graders, I'll offer this photo of what is being named:

Addendum:  2025 winners were led by We're Off To See the Blizzard...

Hilarious ASMR parody

 

 

Sadly, I've never learned how to embed a TikTok video, so the above is a composite I created from screencaps.  The one on the right shows the outreach vehicle of the "Tiger Van" used by the Como Zoo and Observatory in Minnesota.  The screencap on the left is from a luxury vehicle (Mercedes) video posted at mycarspace.  It's a bit odd because it is an ASMR video rather than a conventional sales promotion video.  ASMRs are designed to create a "pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and/or cognitive stimuli" (see my old post from 2018 about ASMR in movies).

With that introduction I'm sure you will enjoy the parody.  I can't embed it, but you can view the original this link.  Go fullscreen and be sure to unmute.

Story found in the "Minnesota Weird" section of Bring Me The News.

Minnesota in 1862 as a "distant mirror" for Gaza in 2023

This historic photo shows a concentration camp for the Dakota at Fort Snelling in 1862

An extended excerpt from an op-ed piece in the StarTribune:

"My 2013 "Account of the 1862 Dakota-US War" in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal was not a comparative study. But rereading it now, I am struck by how much that long-ago war in Minnesota resembled today's Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Long before their respective uprisings, the Dakota and the Palestinians had been forced off most of their land and confined to narrow strips where they could not make a living — the Dakota were limited to a 20-mile-wide strip on either side of the Minnesota River, the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip.

The U.S. and Israeli governments both allowed settlers to carve up additional land reserved for Dakota and Palestinians — on reservations in the Dakota case in the West Bank in Palestine.

Most Dakota and Palestinians were not militants. But those who were militant attacked at opportune moments when Americans and Israelis were distracted by internecine conflicts — Americans by their Civil War, Israelis by strife and protests over Benjamin Netanyahu's proposed restructuring of the judicial system.

Dakota warriors murdered, raped and/or mutilated some 500 Minnesotans; Hamas, 1,200 Israelis. Dakota and Hamas fighters took significant numbers of women and children hostage, whom they used as bargaining chips.

American and Israeli military responses were disproportionate. In the wake of the Dakota and Hamas attacks, many more Dakota and Palestinians died than did Americans and Israelis.

The histories leading up to both wars were also comparable. Israel was founded by Zionists, the first American colony by Puritans. Both thought of themselves as God's chosen people arrived in a promised land. Nineteenth-century Scandinavian and German Lutherans who flocked to Minnesota and the Dakotas in search of farmland were only one of the successive waves of immigration that fueled westward expansion and pushed the boundaries of "God's country," along with the Indians, farther and farther west..."

Image credit: Minnesota Historical Society

Re the term "distant mirror" (an outstanding book, BTW).

Comments closed and previous ones deleted.  I was trying to focus on 1862, not 2023, but the subject matter is such that it brings out all the trolls and latent hate.

An interesting mathematical paradox

I got it wrong - and so will you.

There is no yellow circle in this image

It's an optical illusion resulting from normal subtractive color mixing.  I double-checked by opening the image in a separate tab, then enlarged the image to the max and took a screencap of the center of the "yellow":

Via Neatorama, where you can access some discussion and source information.

A reminder for Target shoppers

Today (December 3) is the last day to take advantage of Target's offer of a 10% discount on gift cards.  Using your Target red credit card, you can purchase gift cards for up to a total of $500 and snail-mail or e-mail those gift cards to friends and family.

Alternatively (or if you don't have friends and family) you can purchase up to a  $500 gift card and gift it to yourself.  I did this last night.  I charged my account $450 to purchase a $500 gift card, and emailed it to myself.  The email arrived a couple minutes later.  When it did, I added the $500 to my account.  Basically a free $50.

You're not cheating the company when you do this.  Target knows that customers gift themselves money.  It's basically a Christmas gift from the company to regular (Target-credit-card-holding) customers.

This post is basically my Christmas gift to regular TYWKIWDBI readers.

Today only.  

Demonyms

Image from a Reddit post, where the discussion comments are trivial.  Here's more information from Wikipedia:

A demonym (/ˈdɛmənɪm/; from Ancient Greek δῆμος (dêmos) 'people, tribe', and ὄνυμα (ónuma) 'name') or gentilic (from Latin gentilis 'of a clan, or gens') is a word that identifies a group of people (inhabitants, residents, natives) in relation to a particular place. Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place (hamlet, village, town, city, region, province, state, country, and continent). Demonyms are used to designate all people (the general population) of a particular place, regardless of ethnic, linguistic, religious or other cultural differences that may exist within the population of that place...

...demonyms are semantically different from ethnonyms (names of ethnic groups). In the English language, there are many polysemic words that have several meanings (including demonymic and ethnonymic uses), and therefore a particular use of any such word depends on the context. For example, the word Thai may be used as a demonym, designating any inhabitant of Thailand, while the same word may also be used as an ethnonym, designating members of the Thai people... 

Often, demonyms are the same as the adjectival form of the place, e.g. Egyptian, Japanese, or Greek. However, they are not necessarily the same, as exemplified by Spanish instead of Spaniard or British instead of Briton...

Several linguistic elements are used to create demonyms in the English language. The most common is to add a suffix to the end of the location name, slightly modified in some instances. These may resemble Late Latin, Semitic, Celtic, or Germanic suffixes, such as -(a)n, -ian, -anian, -nian, -in(e), -a(ñ/n)o/a, -e(ñ/n)o/a, -i(ñ/n)o/a, -ite, -(e)r, -(i)sh, -ene, -ensian, -ard, -ese, -nese, -lese, -i(e), -i(ya), -iot, -iote, -k, -asque, -(we)gian, -onian, -vian, -ois(e), or -ais(e).

Shakuntala Devi is a mathematics savant

This video mashup is quite old and of marginal quality, but it demonstrates her capabilities.  Wikipedia has some examples{

Examples of the problems presented to Devi included calculating the cube root of 61,629,875 and the seventh root of 170,859,375. Jensen reported that Devi provided the solution to the above-mentioned problems (395 and 15, respectively) before Jensen could copy them down in his notebook. Jensen published his findings in the academic journal Intelligence in 1990.

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. Her answer, which was 546,372,891, was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation, which took a longer time than for her to do the same.

On 18 June 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers – 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779. These numbers were picked at random by the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. 

Apparently there is a movie about her life story.

LFBOTs (Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients)

LFBOTs (Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients)... erupt with blue light, radio, X-ray, and optical emissions, making them some of the brightest explosions ever seen in space, as luminous as supernovae. It is no exaggeration that they give off more energy than hundreds of billions of stars like our own. They also tend to live fast, blazing for only minutes before they burn themselves out and fade into darkness.

LFBOTs are quite rare, and in many cases their sources are unidentified. But we’ve never seen anything with the intensity of an LFBOT named AT2022tsd—aka the “Tasmanian Devil.” Its strange behavior was caught by 15 telescopes and observatories, including the W.M. Keck Observatory and NASA’s Chandra Space Telescope. Like other phenomena of its kind, it initially emitted incredible amounts of energy and then dimmed. Unlike any other LFBOT observed before, however, this one seemed to come back from the dead. It flared again—and again and again.

The most common extragalactic transient luminous events, meaning flashes of light that evolve and vanish rapidly, are supernovae. The lifespan of their initial explosion is typically mere weeks. The “Tasmanian Devil” not only evolved faster than a supernova, but 14 individual flares were observed, lighting up over a stretch of several months, or about a hundred days...

The analysis continues at Ars Technica.

Watching this makes me want to grow a pine tree

A similar timelapse of the growth of a bell pepper.

Mailmen told to give priority to Amazon packages

Amazon delivers to your door in urban areas, but in rural areas Amazon relies on the U.S. Postal Service for that "last mile" of delivery.  As reported by the StarTribune:

Since early November, Bemidji has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages - and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first.

The result has been chaos at the Bemidji post office. Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say... Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state's San Juan Islands...

In Bemidji, postal workers said they had been told that Amazon was coming to town for years. It finally happened one morning in early November, when the post office was flooded with thousands of Amazon boxes and carriers said they were told they all had to be delivered by the end of the day.

Carriers who previously had delivered dozens of small parcels a day plus paper mail suddenly had to deliver between 300 and 500 boxes that they said had previously been handled by UPS...

For all the extra work, mail carriers weren't making much more money. Rural mail carriers are paid only for the amount of time the post office estimates it will take them to finish their jobs. And in Bemidji, the routes had been reevaluated in October, just before Amazon changed everything.

There are a lot of people in the business world who want the USPS to fail and have it restructured as a private business, because there is a lot of potential profit to be derived from it.

Snowflakes

Who gets offended by products such as these?  Or perhaps "who pretends to be offended in order to stoke controversy for their viewership base?"

New design for a coathanger

Kudos to this young woman for coming up with an interesting invention.  Her "Coat Hinger" is carefully designed to serve a niche market, and her presentation of the product is very professionally done.  Worth viewing, IMHO.  Details at her Kickstarter page.

Green "nightglow" in the skies of Mars caused by oxygen (!!)

The embedded image is of earth's nightglow, but the same process occurs on Mars, for rather unexpected reasons.

The international scientific team was intrigued by a previous discovery made using Mars Express, which observed the nightglow in infrared wavelengths a decade ago. The Trace Gas Orbiter followed up by detecting glowing green oxygen atoms high above the dayside of Mars in 2020 – the first time that this dayglow emission was seen around a planet other than Earth...

Under clear skies, the glow could be bright enough for humans to see by and for rovers to navigate in the dark nights. Nightglow is also observed on Earth. On Mars, it was something expected, yet never observed in visible light until now...

The atmospheric nightglow occurs when two oxygen atoms combine to form an oxygen molecule, about 50 km (~30 miles) above the planetary surface.

The oxygen atoms have been on a journey: they form on Mars’s dayside when sunlight gives energy to carbon dioxide molecules, making them split apart. When the oxygen atoms migrate to the night side and stop being excited by the Sun, they regroup and emit light at lower altitudes.

Oxygen on Mars.  You learn something every day.   

Stellar sea lion trapped by plastic debris

"The endangered mammal got tied up to the Nevelsk breakwater like a chained dog... To make the situation harder, there was a short cord tying the seal to the concrete slabs of the breakwater and leaving it no way to escape by itself..."

Some details about the complicated rescue at the always-interesting Siberian Times.