Tetradrachm (four drachma) coin with the head of Arethusa, the patron nymph of Syracuse. Country of Origin: Italy. Period/ Date: 405 - 400 BC. Place of Origin: Syracuse. Material: Silver.I am impressed by the degree of relief on the coin. The edges almost look like the coin has been milled, but that technology didn't happen until the modern era, so those must be some kind of stress cracks from the stamping.
ajimezOut of curiosity, I looked up the winning words from previous competitions. From the 1980s and 90s:
luteovirescent
admittatur
guetapens
ericeticolous
porwigle
sylloge
tendenz
podilegous
antipyreticFrom the 1960s and 70s
xanthosis
sarcophagus
psoriasis
Purim
luge
milieu
staphylococci
sycophantAnd finally, from the 1920s and 1930s:
eczema
Chihuahua
abalone
croissant
vouchsafe
narcolepsy
gladiolusIt's apparent that ever-more obscure and difficult words are becoming necessary to determine the champion.
cerise
albumen
fracas
knack
torsion
intelligible
sanitarium
A team is composed of a minimum of six blind or visually impaired players and two to four sighted people: a pitcher, a catcher, and two defensive spotters.If you are interested for the sake of a family member, the organizations website is here.
There is no second base. First and third bases are four-foot padded cylinders with speakers that buzz when activated. The batter does not know which one will be turned on. When the ball is hit, the runner must identify the buzzing base and run to it before a defensive player fields the ball. If the runner is safe, a run is scored. There is no running from one base to another...
Playing defense is the most challenging aspect of beep ball. Generally teams will field three infielders and three outfielders. For defensive purposes the field is divided into six zones. Each team has two sighted spotters positioned in the outfield, one on either side of the field. When a ball is hit, a spotter will call out a number indicating the general zone toward which the ball is traveling. The players coordinate their defensive moves according to the number that is called. Spotters cannot pass on any further information. The players can verbally communicate with one another.
Outs are earned by fielding the ball before the runner reaches the base. The fielder must have the ball in hand and off the ground to constitute possession. Defensive players pick up the beeping sphere and display it for the umpire’s call. In the NBBA’s history, there have been only four documented cases of a hit ball being caught in the air.
Bronze statue of a boar in the La Tene style. In Celtic iconography the boar symbolised not only fertility and wealth but also masculine power, courage and strength in warriors. Country of Origin: Czech Republic. Culture: Celtic. Date/Period: 2nd-1st C AD.
The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger's forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment...
The code was only supposed to work within Iran's Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network...
That program, first authorized by George W. Bush, worked well enough to provide a digital map of Natanz and its industrial control hardware... When Barack Obama came to office, he continued the program—called "Olympic Games"—which unpredictably disabled bits of the Natanz plant even as it told controllers that everything was normal. But in 2010, Stuxnet escaped Natanz, probably on someone's laptop; once connected to the outside Internet, it did what it was designed not to do: spread in public...
As the International Strategy for Cyberspace notes, these sorts of electronic attacks are serious business. The US in fact reserves the right to use even military force to respond to similar attacks... Yet the US had just gone on the cyber-attack, and everyone knew it. Speculation has long swirled around government-backed hackers from nations like China and Russia, especially, who have been suspected of involvement in espionage, industrial trade secret theft, and much else. Would something like Stuxnet damage US credibility when it complained about such attacks? (China has long adopted the "you do it too!" defense on Internet issues, especially when it comes to censoring and filtering of Internet content.)
With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.But I didn't understand how the malefactors could successfully cash the returns without being detected and apprehended. The story at the New York Times explains how:
...the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card. The government-approved cards, intended to help people who have no bank accounts, are widely available in many places, including tax preparation companies. Some of them are mailed, and the swindlers often provide addresses for vacant houses, even buying mailboxes for them, and then collect the refunds there.
J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified before Congress this month that the I.R.S. detected 940,000 fake returns for 2010 in which identity thieves would have received $6.5 billion in refunds. But Mr. George said the agency missed an additional 1.5 million returns with possibly fraudulent refunds worth more than $5.2 billion.
Via BoingBoing.In South Florida and Tampa, the problem has gotten so bad that police officers conducting unrelated searches or simple traffic stops routinely stumble across ledgers with names and Social Security numbers, boxes of stolen medical records and envelopes with debit cards...Most vulnerable are records from health care facilities, assisted-living centers, schools, insurance companies, pension funds and large stores that issue credit cards. The police say employees steal the information and sell it, an increasingly common practice here...Career criminals know easy money when they see it. The police say they run across street corner drug dealers and robbers who have been in and out of prison for years now making lots of money by filing fraudulent returns. Some have been spotted driving Bentleys and Lamborghinis. “A gentleman, a former armed robber, said: ‘I’m not doing robberies anymore. This is much cleaner. I don’t even have to use a gun.’
The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act.From an interesting essay about Byzantium in this month's Harper's Magazine. Image from the Werner Forman Archive.
Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.”
In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days.
Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.
In the mid- to late 1990s, when online bookselling was in its infancy, Barnes & Noble and Borders were busy expanding their empires, often opening stores adjacent to long-established community bookstores... The death toll tells the tale. Two decades ago, there were about 4,000 independent bookstores in the United States; only about 1,900 remain. And now, even the victors are imperiled. The fate of the two largest US chain bookstores—themselves partly responsible for putting smaller stores to the sword—is instructive: Borders declared bankruptcy in 2011 and closed its several hundred stores across the country, its demise benefiting over the short term its rival Barnes & Noble, which is nonetheless desperately trying to figure out ways to pay the mortgage on the considerable real estate occupied by its 1,332 stores across the nation...Much more at the The Nation.
The bookstore wars are over. Independents are battered, Borders is dead, Barnes & Noble weakened but still standing and Amazon triumphant. Yet still there is no peace; a new war rages for the future of publishing. The recent Justice Department lawsuit accusing five of the country’s biggest publishers of illegally colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books is, arguably, publishing’s Alamo. What angered the government wasn’t the price, but the way the publishers seemed to have secretly arranged to raise it...
Amazon’s entry into publishing’s traditional casino is a sideshow. More worrisome, at least over the long term, is the success of Amazon’s Kindle Single program, an effort to encourage writers to make an end run around publishers, not only of books but of magazines as well... For me, the problems become worse as Amazon moves from ‘just’ being a big player in selling books to vertical control of entire sections of the industry. It all gets a bit Big Brother. It’s easy to imagine Amazon muscling existing publishers out of the picture altogether and inviting authors and agents to deal directly with them. What would that do for the richness and diversity of our culture?”
"I was really pissed because I should have been able to keep that money..."There are probably more, but I can't even keep watching.
"I feel bad it was a 9-year-old girl, but it was $150 in that envelope and I wanted that money. And it was mine..."
"It's not HER money..."
"Why did you do it? " "I mean, who doesn't like money..."
"I know it's a crime, but it's an easy crime..."
Readers told me that the Do Not Call Registry seemed to work just fine at blocking calls when it began in 2003 and for several years after that. But the number of unwanted calls has steadily increased... First of all, legitimate organizations, in general, seem to obey the Do Not Call Registry. It’s the fraudulent calls that are becoming more numerous lately....
“The technological advances in the past 18 months have allowed illegal dialers to increase the number of calls they can make..."
Robocalls from “Rachel at card member services” seem in particular to be driving readers crazy. She’s one busy lady, as Blacky Bokich, a reader from Los Angeles, attests, saying he had received Rachel calls from 10 different numbers. In fact, Rachel has been around a long time, Mr. Maxson said, and is really just a digital recording that was made years ago and is recycled by dozens and dozens of lead generators and telemarketers.
Political calls, especially as the presidential campaign heats up, can be the most annoying. A Robocall Privacy Act has been introduced in Congress by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Zoe Lofgren, both California Democrats. The legislation has gone nowhere.
Others have resorted to more unorthodox means. Mr. Bokich has a loud police whistle and sometimes will press the number for the operator and blow with all his might.
A 69-year-old man presented with a 25-year history of gradual, asymptomatic thickening and wrinkling of the skin on the left side of his face. The physical examination showed hyperkeratosis with accentuated ridging, multiple open comedones, and areas of nodular elastosis... The patient reported that he had driven a delivery truck for 28 years. Ultraviolet A (UVA) rays transmit through window glass, penetrating the epidermis and upper layers of dermis. Chronic UVA exposure can result in thickening of the epidermis and stratum corneum, as well as destruction of elastic fibers. This photoaging effect of UVA is contrasted with photocarcinogenesis.My father was a traveling salesman, selling transformers to electrical utilities. I don't remember any facial asymmetry, but I do recall that his left elbow was always a darker color than the rest of his skin.
Goody Two-Shoes is a variation of the Cinderella story. The fable tells of Goody Two-Shoes, the nickname of a poor orphan girl named Margery Meanwell, who goes through life with only one shoe. When she is given a complete pair by a rich gentleman, she is so happy that she tells everyone that she has "two shoes". Later, Margery becomes a teacher and marries a rich widower. This earning of wealth serves as proof that her virtuousness has been rewarded, a popular theme in children's literature of the era...Since I had never read the story, I went to the online version at Project Gutenberg, and was surprised to see the sophistication of the language and the complexity of the moral theme being expressed (boldface mine):
The story popularized the phrase "goody two-shoes", often used to describe an excessively virtuous person, a do-gooder.
Judge, oh kind, humane and courteous Reader, what a terrible Situation the Poor must be in, when this covetous Man was perpetual Overseer, and every Thing for their Maintenance was drawn from his hard Heart and cruel Hand. But he was not only perpetual Overseer, but perpetual Church-warden; and judge, oh ye Christians, what State the Church must be in, when supported by a Man without Religion or Virtue. He was also perpetual Surveyor of the Highways, and what Sort of Roads he kept up for the Convenience of Travellers, those best know who have had the Misfortune to be obliged to pass thro' that Parish.--Complaints indeed were made, but to what Purpose are Complaints, when brought against a Man, who can hunt, drink, and smoak with the Lord of the Manor, who is also the Justice of Peace?...There seems to be a distinct Dickensian tone to the content of the story. Clearly some"children's stories" of the eighteenth century were intended to be much more than pleasant diversions.
Ah, my dear Reader, we brag of Liberty, and boast of our Laws: but the Blessings of the one, and the Protection of the other, seldom fall to the Lot of the Poor; and especially when a rich Man is their Adversary. How, in the Name of Goodness, can a poor Wretch obtain Redress, when thirty Pounds are insufficient to try his Cause? Where is he to find Money to see Council, or how can he plead his Cause himself (even if he was permitted) when our Laws are so obscure, and so multiplied, that an Abridgment of them cannot be contained in fifty Volumes in Folio?
