Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957, and in 2010

Twenty-two years old in the video.  Those interested in his current activities can read about his upcoming tour in this Wall Street Journal article.

A media tour began Tuesday with the release of his new album, "Mean Old Man"—featuring duets with Mick Jagger, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow and other headliners. On Friday, Mr. Lewis will jam on stage with the cast of "Million Dollar Quartet," the Broadway musical. On the 13th, he will perform at New York's B.B. King Blues Club.  Then on Sept. 29, Mr. Lewis will be in Los Angeles, celebrating his 75th birthday.

From his earliest rock 'n' roll hits in the late 1950s, Mr. Lewis's wild streak and piano-pounding performances quickly came to define rock's unhinged image. John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Elton John and virtually every major rock act since has borrowed from Mr. Lewis's spring-loaded style. An original Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee in 1986, the high-strung, hell-raising boogie-woogie country shouter also is the father of rebel-rock and country-R&B...

Mr. Lewis has also had a fair share of personal heartache and trouble. His older brother was killed as a child by a truck. Mr. Lewis's son with wife Myra drowned in a swimming-pool accident in 1962. Then, in the '70s, his son with his second wife died in an auto accident at age 19. Mr. Lewis accidentally shot his bassist and ran afoul of the IRS. His fourth wife drowned in their swimming pool and fifth wife died in the early '80s of a methadone overdose. He also was hospitalized in 1981 for three months with a ruptured stomach, and he is now divorced from his sixth wife.

What's the proper disposal method for holy books?

Every major news site I visited today had a story about.. you know what.  And I'm not going to give that cretin any additional publicity, but it started me thinking.

How does one properly dispose of a Bible? Qur'an? Talmud?

I suppose the initial response is that when the owner of a religious text dies, the item passes to relatives, who then cherish and preserve it.  Or they are donated to libraries, missionary services and suh.  But all things must end, and books wear out or become damaged beyond use.  I think in antiquity some holy texts were recycled as palimpsests, but what happens nowadays?

Are they burned?  That's the fate of tattered American flags, when it's done in a dignified way by respectful persons.  But I wonder what a book publisher does when its run isn't sold, or what a store does when it is hopelessly overstocked.  Are the holy books pulped?  Shredded?

I'm not trying to start a controversy or offer any justification for disrespecting religions.  Just curious.  Anyone out there in the book business with an answer?  Or any clergy with relevant experience?

Earbud packaging

Credit, and here.

Martian lake has water-ice

"This is a giant patch of frozen water inside an unnamed impact crater on Mars. The existence of this water-ice patch on Mars makes life a more likely possibility and raises the prospect that past or present life will one day be detected.

The crater with ice disc is on the Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars’s far northern latitudes. The crater is 35 km wide, with a maximum depth of about 2 km. The image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.

Scientists believe the water-ice is present all year round because the temperature and pressure are not sufficient to allow it to change states and vaporise into the atmosphere. It is not frozen carbon dioxide, because this type of ice had already disappeared from the north polar cap by the time this image was taken.'

From 2005, so I must have missed it when it was first reported. I don't understand why this doesn't sublimate, like the frozen CO2 did.  If the crater is 35 km wide, then the ice is about 12 km (7.5 miles) across.  Fascinating.

Text and photo from the Flickr photostream of the European Space Agency. More information at the ESA website.

War trophies

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies...

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians...

The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies...

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

Soldiers have collected war trophies from the battlefield since time immemorial, but typically from enemy combatants, not from civilians.

Army Times stories here (6/17) and here (8/27).

Baobab

The intricate pattern on the bark is said by the photographer to be a natural phenomenon attributed to fungal growth.

Photo credit.

Tooth transplantation... in the 18th century

YouTube link.

I didn't know it had been done back then.  Apparently healthy teeth were purchased from impoverished people in Britain and transplanted into the jaws of the wealthy.

Addendum:  Reader Caitlin Rhodes remembered this passage from Les Miserables:

 ... you girl there, who are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a gold napoleon apiece for them." "What are my palettes?" asked Fantine. "The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the two upper ones.

“How horrible!” exclaimed Fantine. “Two napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old woman who was present.  Here's a lucky girl ! "

Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse voice of the man shouting to her : " Reflect, my beauty ! two napoleons... 

The human brain is shrinking

"Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.  The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion... "This happened in China, Europe, Africa - everywhere we look."  If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago..."

An excerpt from "The Incredible Shrinking Brain," by Kathleen McAuliffe, in the September 2010 issue of Discover Magazine.

Public Library of Cincinnati, 1874

Interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, photographer unknown, 1874.

In 1874 the Public Library of Cincinnati took possession of a small building intended to be an opera house. According to John Fleishman, “the parcel at 629 Vine Street was transformed in two stages into a library building that startled America with its cutting edge design. Its vast Main Hall featured five tiers of cast-iron book alcoves that could house over 200,000 volumes.”

Breathtaking.  From Ohio Memory, via no.

I'm kind of blogged out right now...

Need to tend to some family things today and tomorrow, and tomorrow night the Vikings need my help to beat New Orleans.  Will plan to resume on Friday.

Chopine

The photo above is cropped from one I featured yesterday in the post about old photographs from Damascus.  The year is 1873, the lady is a "city woman" from Damascus, and she is wearing on her feet some remarkable lifts.

After some Googling, I've discovered that those platform shoes are called "chopine," and were designed to keep a woman's shoes (and dress) above the dirt of the street (or water, in the case of Venice).

Chopines were popularly worn in Venice by both courtesans and patrician women from ca. 1400-1700. Besides their practical uses, the height of the chopine became a symbolic reference to the cultural and social standing of the wearer; the higher the chopine, the higher the status of the wearer.  High chopines allowed a woman to literally and figuratively tower over others. During the Renaissance, chopines became an article of women's fashion and were made increasingly taller; some extant examples are over 20 inches (50 cm) high.

Shakespeare joked about the extreme height of the chopines in style in his day by using the word altitude (Hamlet 2.2, the prince greets one of the visiting lady players by noting how much "nearer to heaven" she had grown since he last saw her — "by the altitude of a chopine.")

In the 15th century, chopines were also the style in Spain. Their popularity in Spain was so great that the larger part of the nation's cork supplies went towards production of the shoes.

More at the link, and here, and here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has this etching ("Courtesan and Blind Cupid," ca 1588), by Pietro Bertelli (Italian, Paduan, active late 16th–early 17th century):

"Capitalizing on their titillating popularity, the enterprising Pietro Bertelli published a series of prints of courtesans, each with a flap that lifted to reveal, below a seemingly innocent exterior, a glimpse of the carnal pleasures for which Venice was famed by its admirers and reviled by its detractors. Here, the flap is the skirt, which can be raised to display the courtesan's undergarments and chopines..."

Voila !!

Photo via Poemas del reo Wang.

Contestant outsmarts a game show

This occurred in 1984 on a program entitled "Press Your Luck."  Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver, figured out how to beat the system: 

Watching the show at home and with the use of stop-motion on a VCR, Larson discovered that the presumed random patterns of the game board were not random and was able to memorize the sequences to help him stop the board where and when he wanted. On the single game in which he appeared, an initially tentative Larson spun a Whammy on his very first turn, but then played 45 consecutive spins without hitting a second one. He earned a total of $110,237 in cash and prizes, a record for the most money in cash and prizes won by a contestant in a single appearance on a daytime network game show...

Details of the event are explained in his biography, and time-compressed in the video above.

Found at The Daily Dish.

Holy cow!!

Closed circuit television footage taken inside a Pacific Sun Cruise liner while encountering heavy swells.

You reactions will probably vary from laughter at the absurdity, to cringing at the lady's face plant on the column, to shuddering at the dangers involved.

Found at Reddit, where there is a discussion thread.

Addendum:  This report describes the incident and the injuries incurred.

Stephen Hawking on God and the universe

Excerpts from a column at the Wall Street Journal, which is in turn an excerpt from "The Grand Design," by Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, to be published by Bantam Books today.

"...the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth's human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist...

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many..."

My ordinary mind has difficulty wrapping itself around the concept that a "universe" can be one of many.  I don't disagree with him, but I think I need to defer any ponderings about astrophysics and concentrate on the more prosaic aspects of life.

A geometric "magic square"

Complete "plates" can be assembled from the fragments in any horizontal row, any vertical column, and from either of the diagonals.

Fascinating.  I've not seen one like this before.

Original credit to Lee Sallows, via Futility Closet.