A young lady reading a book

The furniture (and the size of the book) mark this as a century-old photo, but the young girl looks like she would be comfortable holding a Kindle in 2010.

Credit: Clarence H. White: Miss Grace, 1898 (Source: Yale Visual Resources Collection), via the always-interesting Ordinary Finds.

Is that an eyeball in her hair?

We've given out little eyeballs for Halloween treats in the past; that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this photo.  Those are very interesting inclusions in her hairdo; a very imaginative young woman of an earlier era.

Credit to Vintagephoto, via Mudwerks.

Advice for people who "hate what America has become"

American scientific ignorance embarrasses the National Science Foundation

In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang.

They're not surprising findings, but the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), says it chose to leave the section out of the 2010 edition of the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators because the survey questions used to measure knowledge of the two topics force respondents to choose between factual knowledge and religious beliefs...

"Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion. If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, even if scientists think it is not, how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate? Part of being literate is to both understand and accept scientific constructs."

Alma

Skilled animation - just a little bit spooky. The resolution is good enough for fullscreen viewing. Credit to Rodrigo Blaas via Vimeo.

Sunday smörgåsbord

Not many leftovers to offer this week - just some thin gruel because of figuring taxes and watching the Masters.  I'm even throwing in some old links I misfiled.

The Spitzbergen Treaty says "All citizens and all companies of every nation under the treaty are allowed to become residents and to have access to Svalbard including the right to fish and hunt..."  The treaty covers 39 countries, including the U.S. and most of Europe.  Something to keep in mind in case things get bad where you live...

A woman in Brooklyn found a counterfeit penny.  It was made out of solid gold.  The story behind it is quite interesting.

About half of U.S. households will pay NO federal income tax for 2009.

President Obama has authorized the assassination of a U.S. citizen, without a trial and away from a war zone.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has provided a list of 512 "Patriot" groups active in the U.S. in 2009.  "Of these groups, 127 were militias, marked with an asterisk, and the remainder includes "common-law" courts, publishers, ministries and citizens' groups. Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the "New World Order..."

A tax on plastic bags in Washington, D.C. has raised some $$, but more importantly it has dramatically reduced the number of plastic bags being distributed (from 22 million per month [!!] to 3 million per month).

A report that Willow Palin led, or participated in, a severe disturbance of the peace in Alaska resulting in the vandalizing of a vacant home.  That is not the parents' direct fault, but the more damning accusation is that her mother then used her influence to cover up the incident and prevent her daughter from being charged with a crime.

The restaurants of premier chef Gordon Ramsey have been caught in a "sting" and found to have been serving pre-prepared food.  Undoubtedly very good food - but somewhat at odds with the celebrity's principles.

Defecation-induced orgasm can apparently be treated by seminal vesiculectomy - in case you were wondering...

The image credit is "Mädchen mit Puppe" by "H. Schönhauser 1904" (Vienna, Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde).

The "Collateral Murder" video

Read the explanation here before deciding whether to watch the video.

An excerpt:

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded...

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

About 2000 comments on the Reddit thread already, including these:

Why isn't this on CNN yet?*
Its on the front page of Al Jazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/
Because, they're an actual news organization.
Because Tiger Woods returning to the golf course is more important...

If it's any consolation it's on the front page of Norway's biggest newspaper. Link

Update: The story is now posted at CNN.

Addendum:  An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's column this past week re the U.S. government's response to the existence of Wikileaks:

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government.  As The New York Times put it last week:  "To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret."  In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization.  It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction...

Second addendum:  some measured interpretation of the incident.

Third addendum:  Some salient comments from "WordyNinja" on a different Reddit thread re the concept that the important aspect about this video is not to place blame on the soldiers, but to be concerned about the suppression of its release and the creation of phony cover stories:

We don't get angry at a cop who shoots a teenager holding a toy gun in a dark alleyway [think Sgt. Al Powell in Die Hard]. We mourn for the child, grieve for the police officer having to be in that a situation, and very rarely assign blame in the wake of such a tragedy. BUT... If that same cop panics and plants crack and a real gun on the body to cover up his mistake, it's almost as if he had shot the kid out of malice.

Colliderix flash game

Arguably the most "dangerous" part of TYWKIWDBI is the link in the right sidebar that takes you to the "flash games" category.  If the links haven't undergone linkrot, there should be 28 posts there that will take you to a wide variety of potentially very addictive games - many of them physics-based, logic-based, or math-based.

Colliderix is the newest addition.  The game presents you with green and red objects which will disappear when they come into contact with another object of the same color.  You generate movement by clicking on the wooden objects, which then disappear. 

The game is challenging, and frequently frustrating because success often depends on timing rather than strategy per se.   Fortunately there are video "tutorial" walkthroughs that will help you through the rough patches.

Here's the link.  Don't start this game late in the evening.

"If you can't stop people pissing in lifts..."

Lena May Jeger was a British Labour MP in the early 1950s. While campaigning for office in the postwar period, she discovered that the ambitions of national politicians are often quite different from the concerns of the populace.

[She] was canvassing in a block of flats when she met a woman in the lift and addressed her on the issue of German rearmament. “People have been pissing in this lift,” replied the woman. “What are you going to do about it?” To which Jeger said that, if elected, she could not promise to be able to stop this. “Well,” riposted the woman, “if you can’t stop people pissing in lifts, how are you going to stop Germans rearming?”

Lawn chair

I presume the framework is made of plywood, and then it's filled with dirt and seeded.

Source, via.

Cyber-bookshelf

Credit to Brian Stauffer, via The Atlantic.

Word for the day: Clbuttic

The phrase "clbuttic mistake" describes the situation that arises when a spam filter or word processing program detects the letters "ass" in the word "classic" and replaces them with the letters "butt."

"Passport" becomes "Pbuttport."

"Clbuttic" is featured in a BBC article which also discusses the unfortunate auto-substitution that occurred when sprinter Tyson Gay was in the Olympics ("Homosexual eases into 100m final at Olympic trials") amd explains that a Canadian magazine with a proud 90 year history of being named "The Beaver" is now finding that it can't reach subscribers online because of spam filters.

Deborah Morrison, publisher of the Winnipeg-based journal, told the BBC News website: "Back in 1920, The Beaver was a perfectly appropriate name."  And while its other meaning is nothing new, its ambiguity began to pose a whole new challenge with the advance of the internet. The name became an impediment to our growth."

Similar concerns in part prompted Beaver College in the US state of Pennsylvania to change its name in 2001.

Some caterpillars use bacteria to alter leaves

The larvae of some leaf-eating insects live not on the surface of the leaf, but inside it; these are the leaf-miners, whose munching paths can be quite prominent.  Since the leaf is home as well as food, it is useful to the critter to help the leaf stay alive.  It's now been discovered that some larvae use commensal bacteria to enhance the health of at least part of the leaf, creating green islands within a dying leaf.

The bacteria were the true agents behind the green islands. When Kaiser cured the leaf-miners of their infections using antibiotics, they seemed perfectly healthy. But they completely lost the ability to stem the yellowing of leaves. As a result, 85% perished before adulthood; for comparion, the typical mortality rate of Wolbachia-carrying larvae is just 10%. Worst of all, since Wolbachia is passed down from mother to offspring, later generations also suffered the same lack of beneficial bacteria, the same inability to produce green islands and the same high odds of an early death.

The bacteria manipulate the leaves using their own signalling chemicals – a group of plant hormones called cytokinins. These substances perform many tasks in a leaf: they maintain the supply of chlorophyll; they prevent the leaf from dying; and they control the flow and storage of nutrients. They’re the barrier that stands between a living leaf and a rotting one. Stick cut plants in cytokinin solution and they’ll stay green for longer. What better tool for a bacterium or an insect looking to prolong the life of its leafy home?

More details at the Not Exactly Rocket Science link.  Amazing.  You learn something every day.   I'm going to look for these kinds of leaves this autumn.

How to defeat a chain lock

Via Bits and Pieces.

A bit of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie"