Thoughts about "nuclear winter"

Excerpts from a blog post written by a world-famous man -

I feel embarrassed to be unaware of the subject, one that I have not even heard mentioned before. On the contrary, I would have understood much earlier that the risks of a nuclear war were far more serious than I imagined. I assumed that the planet would be able to withstand the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs calculating that, in both the United States and the USSR, countless tests have been carried out over the years. I had not taken into account a very simple reality: it is not the same thing to explode 500 nuclear bombs over 1,000 days as it is to do the same thing in one day...

A nuclear conflict between the two weakest nuclear powers would be sufficient, such as India and Pakistan – who nevertheless possess far more than 100 weapons of this kind – and the human race would disappear...

"The only way to eliminate the possibility of a climatic disaster is to eliminate nuclear weapons."

I'm not going to use this post to discuss the validity of the observations, but rather to reflect on the fact that these thoughts are expressed by a man who for the last 50 years has been a world leader.  I never knew that he was now a blogger.  This is his signature:
 
His name is easier to read at the link.  You'll be surprised...

Genetic history of the Union Jack

Via Camille Reads.

Down = Up

Report: 911 Response Times Are Down

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were slower to respond to 911 calls in August than they were in the same month last year...

Last year, the average response time for 911 calls was 4.9 minutes. The month after budget cuts began, the average climbed to 5.5 minutes and last month rose to almost 6 minutes....

(CBS News headline/story emailed to me by an anonymous TYWKIWDBI reader - to whom, a hat tip.)

Finding neat stuff in the back yard

David Murray, 39, was digging behind his bungalow when he unearthed a dog tag from a German prisoner.  He got permission from his landlord to continue excavations and within an hour he had located old bottles, buttons from uniforms and used ammunition...

David has now recovered more than 2,000 items from the camp, including a live GRENADE that had to be blown up by a RAF bomb disposal unit...

”It’s really incredible to think that 70 years ago 10,000 prisoners of war were walking around in my back garden.”

The Wynches Camp opened in 1939 and first housed Italian prisoners, but later took Germans – some of whom did not leave until 1947.  The 40-acre camp, which held up to 10,000 prisoners, was situated in Much Hadham, and David’s landlord owns 20 acres of the land it stood on...

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Another human foot has washed ashore !!

Finally!!  It's been almost a year since the last one...

Those of you who are long-time TYWKIWDBI readers will know that we have been following this series of bizarre events for about two and a half years.  I would venture to say that TYWKIWDBI is the only blog with a subcategory of severed feet.

Here's a synopsis:

A human foot was found washed ashore on Whidbey Island in Washington state on Friday.  The bare foot was found at about 11:15 a.m. by a tourist on the east side of the island, near the town of Greenbank.

It is the ninth severed foot to be found on the B.C.-Washington coast since August 2007, with seven of those in B.C.

Notably (or not), this one wasn't wearing a tennis shoe.

Something's afoot.

Library stacks

“The seven tiers of stacks in which many of the books of the New York Public Library are shelved. Elevators transfer the books to the room above as they are called for.” From Scientific American..."

The image brings back pleasant memories of my undergraduate years, when I had a stack pass at some old libraries and used to wander the lower levels finding all sorts of unsought and unexpected items.  (Not unlike browsing the Web now...)

Photo credit: NYPL Digital Gallery, via Make Bright the Sparrows.

Licorice and tantour

This photo of a late 19th-century licorice seller in Damascus is an eye-opener for people like me, who have only known licorice as a solid candy.

This photo (credit Sebah) shows a "city woman" (with remarkable "lift" footwear) on the left, a Druse woman in the center, and a peasant woman on the right, all from Damascus circa 1873.  At the link comments, I found this note about the Druse woman's hat: "The woman’s hat is called a tantour, and it is usually covered with a long veil falling on the shoulders of the woman. It is said to be the ancestor of the typical 15th-century French woman’s hat-with-veil."

Re the latter, I found this photo of a lady wearing a "hennin" -

in a post I wrote earlier this year about ancient hairstyles; I'm not sure of the date of the style being depicted here (the source was in French).

The top two photos come from a remarkable collection of about 40 photos of old Damascus, assembled at Poemas del rio Wang.

Holy Fire

"Worshippers hold up candles as they gather in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for the Orthodox ceremony of the Holy Fire. This photograph, in Gali Tibbon’s exhibition Echoes of Christian Jerusalem, is part of Visa Pour L’image, the international festival of photojournalism at Perpignan, France, until 12 September."

"The Holy Fire is described by Christians as a miracle that occurs every year at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday, the day preceding Orthodox Easter. It is considered by many to be the longest-attested annual miracle in the Christian world...

Before entering the Tomb of Christ, the patriarch is examined by Jewish Israeli authorities to prove that he does not carry technical means to light the fire. This investigation used to be carried out by Muslim Turkish Ottoman soldiers... the Holy Fire spontaneously descends on 33 white candles tied together by the Patriarch while he is alone inside the tomb chamber of Jesus...

As with all alleged miracles, many question the validity of the Holy Fire, noting, for instance, that cold-handed pilgrims generally withstand the fire for the same very brief periods of time as can be achieved with any fire.

Criticism dates at least to the days of Islamic rule of Jerusalem, but the pilgrims were never stopped, because of the significant revenue they brought to local governments even at the end of the first millennium. When the apparently uninitiated Crusaders took over the Orthodox clergy in charge of the fire, it failed to appear, increasing the scepticism among Western Christians. But feeling the lack of pilgrim revenues, Baldwin I of Jerusalem reinstated the Orthodox priests in charge, and the fire, as well as the stream of revenues, returned...

In 2005 in a live demonstration on Greek television, Michael Kalopoulos, author and historian of religion, dipped three candles in white phosphorus. The candles spontaneously ignited after approximately 20 minutes due to the self-ignition properties of white phosphorus when in contact with air. According to Kalopoulos' website:

If phosphorus is dissolved in an appropriate organic solvent, self-ignition is delayed until the solvent has almost completely evaporated. Repeated experiments showed that the ignition can be delayed for half an hour or more, depending on the density of the solution and the solvent employed.

Kalopoulos also points out that knowledge of chemical reactions of this nature was well known in ancient times, quoting Strabo, who states "In Babylon there are two kinds of naphtha springs, a white and a black. The white naphtha is the one that ignites with fire." (Strabon Geographica 16.1.15.1-24) He further states that phosphorus was used by Chaldean magicians in the early fifth century BC, and by the ancient Greeks, in a way similar to its supposed use today by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem."

There are no scratches like this on our door

‘Exploding Hand’ by Lee Miller, 1930 (thousands of scratches of society females’ diamond rings on a perfume shop’s glass door).

Photo found at Magpie's Nest.

(Don't) "Like"

After discovering the Oxford University Press blog yesterday, I explored a little further today, and found an essay on the history of the filler-word "like," which is one of my pet peeves.  I had assumed it was a recent innovation.  It is not.

The ubiquitous modern parasite like can perhaps be traced to early usage, but the causes of its unhealthy popularity in today’s American English remain a mystery...

Of some interest is the fact that the adverb belike once existed and may still exist, at least in dialects.  Consider the following: “All these three, belike, went together” (1741; OED).  Take away be-, and you will get a charming modern sentence: “All these three, like, went together.”  Belike meant “in all likelihood.”

My hypothesis is that at a certain moment like freed itself from the verb to be and became an independent filler.  It has been used in British dialects as it is used in American English for quite some time and was probably brought to the New World, where it stayed “underground” until approximately forty or fifty years ago...

It need not even be called an adverb, for it is a parenthetical word and should be flanked by commas (as is done in most modern editions that contain samples of such usage).  But the part of speech called adverb has always served as a trashcan for grammatical misfits...

Nowadays linguists are not supposed to be judgmental... They should describe language with equanimity and detachment, as a geologist describes rocks or, even better, as a prosector dissects corpses.  But language, in addition to being a means of communication, is an object of culture, a garden in which flowers coexist with weeds, and I wince when I hear: “She may, like, come later” and “Did she, like, attend college?”  To be sure, the egalitarian motto—be descriptive, not prescriptive—is a hoax, for teachers and editors exist (are even paid) for instilling certain values into students and authors.  So I describe like and condemn it...

There is a branch of linguistics called pragmatics.  It deals with the ways people organize their speech; the use of like belongs to it.  Whatever the source of the filler, it seems to function (or to have functioned at one time) as a marker of uncertainty and resembles as it were, a common parasite in British English...

Particularly disconcerting is the fact that the analogs of like swamped other languages at roughly the same time or a few decades later.  Germans have begun to say quasi in every sentence.  Swedes say liksom, and Russians say kak by; both mean “as though.”

More at the link.  And note that there is a LOT of interesting stuff in that blog's archives that will appeal to TYWKIWDBI readers).

Harriet Beecher Stowe as a young woman

A few weeks ago I posted a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe as a young woman because I was so startled to see her as something other than a mature or elderly woman.  It's the same with Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This daguerreotype is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated "1850s," which would make Ms. Stowe about 40 years of age (looks younger to me...)

Just a reminder (to me) that everyone was young once.

Via Turn of the Century.

Black Swallowtail "mating avoidance flight pattern"

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to pick a day for a hike when huge numbers of butterflies were out.  Sulphurs had emerged from alfalfa fields by the thousands, Monarchs were migrating, Pearl Crescents were on the goldenrod, but best of all the Black Swallowtails were out in force.  I usually consider myself lucky to see one or two; that afternoon I saw over a dozen in one field.

And as I watched, I saw a phenomenon I'd never encountered before.   Mating behavior is pretty easy to spot in this species, because they are large butterflies, and there's a subtle color diffference between male and female, and they are not very territorial, so when you see a "chase" you know it's a prelude to (attempted) procreation.

That afternoon I watched a female rebuff a male by flying away from the thistle where he had approached her.  He gave chase.  Instead of flying horizontally, she started to go vertical.  Totally vertical.  She was flapping herself up and up and up and up - to I would guess over a hundred feet in the air.  He was following along right behind her.  Understand these are large, powerful fliers who can move like the wind horizontally, but the vertical ascent was much slower and more laborious.  I watched these two black specks get smaller in the sky, and then...

Then she plummeted to earth.  I don't mean that she flew down.  She fell like a rock.  It was hard to see exactly, but it appeared that she just folded her wings above her head and let gravity take her down, because I didn't see even a flutter.  The poor male was left hovering a hundred feet in the air wondering where in the hell she had gone.  I would guess his pursuit is based on pheromones rather than visuals, so her sudden descent, probably right through her previous pheromone trail, might be totally undetectable.

I didn't see this just once.  I saw it four times with at least three different groups of BSTs, so I'm confident it was a standard avoidance maneuver rather than an accident or the quirk of an individual.  Later I spoke to a friend who's much more knowledgeable about butterfly behavior than I am, and he indicated that this type of flight pattern is well recognized, and has been documented among other butterflies, some of whom use it as a predator avoidance mechanism.  He suggested that I should document this somewhere - so that's why I'm writing this blog post.

Can a diaper keep you "twice as dry" ??

I Googled the phrase, which seems to be applied mostly to antiperspirants and other personal hygiene products.  "Dry" is pretty much an absolute term, so from a strictly grammatical standpoint, I don't think something can be "twice as dry" as something else.  "Half as wet" would be logical (and measureable), though clearly for advertising purposes, no one wants to tell the public their product will leave you half as wet as someone else's.

Perhaps I can understand it in meteorological terms, if someone says that a desert air with 10% humidity is "twice as dry" as air with 20% humidity, because both are "dry" compared to normal experiences.  But if I hang up a wet towel and check it a few hours later, I don't say it's twice as dry as it was earlier, because it wasn't dry at all at the reference point.  Same thing with a baby's diaper.

I'm not going to think about this any more.  Gotta move on.

Maybe our politicians should dress like this

Somewhere this past week (?Reddit), I saw a suggestion that elected officials should wear clothing like that shown above on Valentino Rossi, MotoGP motorcycle rider - with logos showing what groups provide their campaigns with financial support. 

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea...

Photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP, via The Guardian.

The history of "Ms."

I routinely use "Ms." as a form of address on letters to women of unknown marital status, and I had always assumed that the term was a modern contrivance created several decades ago.  That apparently was a Ms-understanding on my part, as the Oxford University Press blog explains:

The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress”... and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality... While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women...

Ms. didn’t really take off until the politically-motivated language reforms of second-wave feminism and the cultural impact of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s. Many of the form’s popularizers at that time thought of Ms. as a blend of Miss and Mrs., but some evidence suggests that it derives more directly from Miss, or possibly from Mistress.

It may have come from all of these, at different times. The 1885 citation from the Vermont Watchman (see illustration left), which has just come to light, provides a new link in the development of Ms. This newspaper ad, masquerading as a news story, contrasts Ms. Parrtington with Mrs. Dull, suggesting that Ms. is meant to abbreviate Miss...

The earliest example of Ms. found so far is on the tombstone of Ms. Sarah Spooner [top], who died in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1767... the Ms. on her tombstone is not a stab at language reform or a slip of the chisel, it’s just a shortening of Mistress by a stonecutter trying to save space on the already crowded slab.

The "S" is superscripted to the right of the "M" at the end of the second line of text.   The rest of the history of the term is discussed at the link, which concludes "This confusion of usage simply continues the long tradition of women’s titles indicating, masking, or ignoring age or marital status, providing proof that while language planners can consciously put a logical, “preferred,” or politically-motivated form into play, language users will either adopt or ignore those recommendations, or adjust them in unforeseen ways. Instead of following prescriptions, we twist them, invent our own expressions, or reshape existing ones, all to fit our ever-changing contexts and needs."

Oxford University Press blog, via The New Shelton wet/dry.