Snowman

I'd like to make one of these for the front yard this winter.

Found at imgur.

Why a husband and wife chose euthanasia

Excerpts from a poignant essay at the Washington Post:

I was living in comfortable retirement with my wife, Mathilde, when, at the age of 71, she received a diagnosis of Waldenstrom’s disease... Then, after seven years, the cancer suddenly turned aggressive and the treatment no longer worked...

But we live in the Netherlands, and here is where our story becomes a little different. When people become as ill as my wife, with no prospect of cure and only pain and exhaustion in the offing, it is quite legal to end one’s life by voluntary euthanasia... We made sure all the doctors who joined our village medical practice knew our wishes, and we always asked whether they would administer euthanasia. As an added precaution, Mathilde continued to carry a thick wad of forms and declarations in her handbag wherever she went, in case of an accident...

All the doctors agreed to our request. They were from a younger generation; it is older doctors, mainly, who are reluctant to administer euthanasia. A few refuse on grounds of principle, others because they just do not wish to become involved. But more than 80 percent of all Dutch family doctors, according to a recent large study, report that they have performed euthanasia at least once, and among the willing doctors the average rate is once every two or three years...

Euthanasia is by now widely accepted here. It is supported by the vast majority of the population, of the medical profession and of the political parties. The costs for it are borne by our compulsory health insurance, and suicide clauses voiding life insurance policies have been set aside. Still, it is an onerous task for the attending physician, and it also demands paperwork and careful planning. Demands for euthanasia are not made lightly and are more often denied than granted, largely because of insufficient forethought...

The law lists four major conditions for euthanasia. It must be administered by a doctor; the patient must earnestly desire it, a resolve taken after due deliberation, and freely; there must be no prospect of recovery and, in the words of the law, the patient must be suffering unbearably. The attending physician must confirm that these conditions are met and write a report to this effect...

To the nurse she said, “I am ready” and to me, “I am not afraid.” I sat on one side of the bed and took her hand, and the doctor, at the other side, gave her the first injection. She immediately fell asleep, snoring loudly. The doctor gave her a second injection, and the snoring stopped. She had died. It was all over in a couple of minutes...

If you wish to comment, please first view the blog post below this one...

When you're on your deathbed...

From The Chalkboard Manifesto, via Neatorama.

This is "contact juggling"

YouTube link. 

Some details from the comment thread at Reddit:

Professional contact juggler here. Just coming in to say that we are all immensely proud of Yanazo... we've all been passing around this video for weeks. This performance apparently won him 1st place at the Japanese Juggling Festival, an event populated almost entirely by Asian jugglers (so you know the kind of caliber he was up against).

It's not very often that contact jugglers win these sorts of things - for instance, the last time it happened in the States it was Tony Duncan winning a gold medal in solo competition with one ball in 1994.

Also, to make this thread more efficient: yes, we have heard of the Fushigi ball; yes, it is a scam (brought to you by a former Wal-Mart PR exec); no, those are not Fushigi balls in the video; yes, it is still a huge sore point with contact jugglers; no, we don't talk to the guy who did their marketing any more.

EDIT: If you're really really interested in this, especially how to do it, go join the www.contactjuggling.org forums!..

For stage performance I use a 100m "stage ball," just like Yanazo uses in this video. They're a soft plastic ball weighing about 200g, usually a little grippy and yes, perfectly round and balanced. They run about $15 and they're also the "industry standard" practice ball since you can abuse them pretty mercilessly (I have one that was thrown into, and rescued from, a campfire - it's ugly now, but rolls fine).

For close-up performance (street shows and walkaround performance) I use a 90mm acrylic (the see-through ball) because they have to be totally seamless if your audience members come within about 2 meters. I downsize my acrylics a little because they're really heavy, and with some of the really delicate manipulations a 100mm acrylic is just a little unwieldy. Acrylics are dangerous (because they're heavy - I've nearly killed a laptop with one) and fragile (you're out $40 if you drop it on the street).

You can get them from any shop that sells juggling gear - domestically I like jugglingstore.com, neonhusky.com, and renegadejuggling.com. If you're in the UK, oddballs.co.uk and if you're elsewhere, homeofpoi.com is good too.

This video will probably be taken down soon.

Make it stop !!!

For those (like me) absolutely tired of endless campaigning and politics, there is a discouraging article in Salon today suggesting that there's no way it will stop on November 6.

No matter the results of the election, I can guarantee one thing: The winner will be widely considered to be completely illegitimate by the losing side.

The Republicans have now convinced themselves of Romney’s inevitable victory...  If Barack Obama wins reelection, it will almost certainly be by a slim margin, and I imagine conservatives have already convinced themselves that that margin will consist entirely of fraudulent votes...

On the other hand, liberals see, basically, a race in which Obama has never really trailed, and in which he has a decided Electoral College advantage. If Romney wins, the massive and growing crusade against “voter fraud” will certainly receive some of the blame...

Meanwhile, we’re having another of our regular cycle of stories about how horrible electronic voting is. The machines are easily hacked, many still provide no paper trail, and all the companies that make them always seem to be invested in and owned by Republicans for some reason. If, in other words, Romney manages to make his difficult electoral math work out, and he wins in Ohio, I guarantee we’ll be hearing horror stories about suppression and “lost” votes for the next year.

There will be one winner.  The comedy gods are smiling on Jon Stewart...

Tennis-ball-sized hail

YouTube link. 

Filmed at Dowerglen Edenvale in South Africa.  "Incoming" starts at about 0:40...

My horoscope today

CANCER (June 22 - July 22):  They say animals can often sense an earthquake moments before it strikes, which explains why so many of them are smiling at you right now.

- and this bit of tragic news:

"Leukemia sufferer Taylor Harris passed away Sunday afternoon, mere seconds after the Minnesota Vikings and the Make-A-Wish Foundation fulfilled the 9-year-old's dream of fielding an NFL kickoff."

Both gleaned from a copy of the Onion read at my local neighborhool coffee shop this morning.

Aircraft carrier balance of power

The graphic is entitled "All the world's aircraft carriers" (although technically, as noted in the Reddit thread, the left column are "amphibious assault ships" for helicopters and vertical-takeoff aircraft.

Further details at the Wikipedia entry.

Minimum-security Federal prisons

"...the most interesting part to me was hearing Conte talk about his four-month prison sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution (near Bakersfield, CA). It's a privately-run minimum security federal prison with 1,700 inmates, and Conte's account of the goings on there is astounding:

Sports complex "The first morning, when I woke up it was a kind of university-campus like setting. I walked out and in the middle of the courtyard was a huge sign that said 'Sports Complex.' Basketball, football, baseball, soccer, bocce ball, volleyball, handball...

Rec center ... there were six pool tables, six foosball tables, six ping-pong tables."

Music department "... this huge music department... We have a routine on Friday nights and the bands play concerts outside.'"

Drugs This is my first 10 minutes -- I was on the compound I started walking with some guys around the walking track and I went [sniff] -- 'Are they smoking weed around here?' And they said, 'Yeah! You want some weed?'... But yeah, anything that you wanted -- alcohol -- any and every type was $25 for 8 ounces. They had meth, they had steroids, they had cocaine."

No fences "...That Christmas, about 25 guys just walked out on the freeway and they had their families pick them up and they left. So it's kind of an honor system."

Female prison guards as hookers "... they had several really nice-looking female correctional officers there... And they said 'Listen, you want some action?' I'm telling you the straight scoop. My understanding is on average they were making about $30,000 a month."

Further details (and a video of the interview), and a comment thread at BoingBoing.  This is the type of for-profit prison facility where white-collar criminals (bankers, lawyers, politicians) would be imprisoned.

Blue Highways. A Journey Into America.

When William Least Heat Moon wrote about his travels across 38 states of the United States on secondary roads in 1981, he was documenting aspects of American life that were already disappearing.  Now, thirty years later, even more is gone.  This book was a pleasant read that took me months to finish because of competing interests, but its episodic structure made it easy to put down and pick up again weeks later.

I previously wrote a post about "playing the bones" inspired by a chapter in this book.  Today I won't present a thorough review - just these excerpts of interesting tidbits.

"The saguaro is ninety percent water, and a big, two-hundred-year-old cactus may hold a ton of it—a two-year supply. With this weight, a plant that begins to lean is soon on the ground; one theory now says that the arms, which begin sprouting only after forty or fifty years when the cactus has some height, are counterweights to keep the plant erect."

"It's a peculiarity of history that the milder tasting grades [of maple syrup] are the most expensive: in the early days when the primay purpose for maple syrup was to furnish sugar, women didn't want all their baked good tasting like maple."

"telescope house" - (eastern shore of Maryland) - "the name derived from the linking of three houses, each successively larger... for economic reasons..." (as a family grows).  [Pic here].

re Battle of the Wilderness :  "On that single day of May 12, nearly thirtteen thousand men died fighting over one square mile of ground abandoned by both sides several days later."

The author is adept at clever turns of phrase ("A road so crooked it could run for the legislature" "The Ponce de Leon Believe Anything Award") and employs a surprisingly broad vocabulary that added quite a few entries to my personal "interesting words" list:

bosky             woody; shady; covered with bushes
cardoon         a perennial plant, blanched and eaten like celery (< Ital. cardon = thistle) 
cockahoop     in a state of unrestrained joy or excitation
cubby             (? related to cubbyhole) (something for a napkin)
culch             the stones, shells, etc. forming an oyster bed; the spawn; Dial: rubbish, refuse
dingle             a deep dell or hollow, esp closely wooded; to ring as a bell
drupe             a fruit, as a peach, with skin, pulp, and hard inner shell (<Gk “olive”)

haut-boy         an oboe (<MF haut+bois = high wood)

kilderkin          a unit of capacity usually equal to half a barrel or two firkins

mochila          a flap of leather on a saddle for attachments (<Sp mochil = errand boy)

muntin             a bar for holding the edges of windowpanes within the sash (MF “mount”)

numen          divine power or spirit; a deity presiding locally (<L “to nod, command”)

pocosin         a swamp or marsh in an upland coastal region (<Algonquin “break open”)

pother             commotion, uproar; choking or suffocating cloud

scabble         to shape or dress (stone) roughly

scumble         to modify color by overlaying parts with opaque color (cf “scum”)

telson              the last segment of certain arthropods (lobster, crab) (<Gk “boundary”)

windflaw         a sudden, usually brief windstorm; a burst of feeling (<Scand flaga = “gust”)
wold(s)         upland plain

Beauty is in the eye of the "beer-holder"

 

Posted at UrlyBits, via 22 Words and Titam et le Sirop d'Érable.  Post title credit to William D. Richards.

"An unforgettable bike ride"

The Hiawatha Trail opened up in 2001 as part of the Rails to Trails initiative, which seeks to restore life to decommissioned train tracks across the country. The Milwaukee Road Railway Company had constructed these tracks between 1906 and 1909, recruiting laborers from around the world to work on an unprecedented line through the rough and largely unexplored Bitterroot Mountains...

The conversion of the train tracks to a bike route was an inspired idea. The Hiawatha is gorgeous, soaring atop pristine forests of white and lodgepole pine trees, with never-ending views of the Bitterroots. The path took us through nine tunnels, including the 1.66-mile St. Paul Tunnel...

And here's the best part.  The 15-mile trail can be ridden entirely downhill, with a shuttle bus returning you to your starting point.  Sign me up.

More pix and details at Idaho for 91 Days, via Neatorama.

Incarceration in America

YouTube link.

Civilian Conservation Corps stonework at Gooseberry Falls State Park - Part II

The last time I blogged about CCC stonework at Gooseberry Falls was in midsummer, when the falls themselves were spectacular and I only had time to document the massive stonework known as the "Castle."  During my October "blogcation" visit, the falls had dried to a trickle, so I was able to spend my time hiking to other locations.

Gooseberry Falls State Park is located on the North Shore of Lake Superior and because of the rugged scenery and spectacular falls became a major tourist attraction as early as the 1920s when automobile travel became increasingly available to the public. 

When the public works projects of the Civilian Conservation Corps were created, one major focus was creation and improvement of infrastructure at state and national parks.

The image above, from a page in the Gooseberry Falls CCC Legacy self-guided tour guide, documents how many CCC projects are incorporated within the state park.  Today's post features the "Falls View Shelter" located on the north side of the bridge crossing the river.

When the park was first created, visitors pulled off to the side of Highway 61 at the "Castle" retaining wall/lookout site that I blogged last time, and here at the Visitor Center.

It was constructed in 1938-39 as the last stone construction in the park, requiring 5,300 man-days of labor and over $4,000 in cost of materials; it served as the "Bridgehead Refectory" where visitors could purchase a chocolate malt, sandwiches and refreshments, shop in a "Nature Store," and view exhibits in the Interpretive Center.  It served as the primary visitor center until the mid-1990s, when a large new center was built capable of handing the increasing throngs of tourists.  When I visited this building, I was the only human being in sight.  It's well-preserved as a historical landmark (there may be some administrative or storage function inside).

My interest, of course, was in the stonework -

- which is magnificent in scale and craftsmanship, and to my eye beautiful in design.

Two Italian stone masons, John Berini and Joe Cattaneo, supervised the intricate stone work executed throughout the park using combinations of red, blue, brown and black granite. The red granite was quarried in Duluth near the College of St. Scholastica, while the darker variety was taken from an outcrop near East Beaver Bay, just north of the park. The sand for the mortar was brought from Flood Bay, south of the park, and logs were obtained at Cascade River State Park.

The professional stonemasons supervised a crew of about 20 boys and men brought from the soup kitchens of the Depression-era cities.  Some of them did the drilling and blasting of the rock at the quarries, others transported and hand-winched the rocks at the working sites, and the mason trainees cut the rocks to fit the needed spaces.

As with other CCC projects, local material was used, but the stones were transported a significant distance in order to take advantage of the varying colors and textures of the material.  A perfectly adequate building could have been constructed using just the black or blue stones, but the pride of a stonemason lies in creating beauty as well as functionality.

The masons liked to brag that the building would still stand even if all the mortar were gone.  I have no reason to doubt that - look at the thinness of the mortar separating the stones, which is even more evident in the next building.

The "Water Tower" is located about halfway between the park entrance and the shore of Lake Superior, near the campgrounds.  It's a considerable hike from the upper falls, and I couldn't spend any time there because black storm clouds were rolling in and I was on foot.

But look at this stonework:

Again, the mix of colors - the yellow added as a whimsical accent - and the tightness of fit.  These blocks were hand-hewn on six or eight or ten faces to fit into a particular site, and on the outside face you can see the the chipping and hacking marks.  This is seriously impressive skilled work.

I hope to get back next summer to document the remaining buildings at the park.

Wild links

Environmental Graffiti has assembled a nice gallery of twenty photos of migrating Monarch butterflies.

How to make "hard-boiled" (baked) eggs in the oven (its only practical when you need to make lots of them at one time).

Further evidence that dinosaurs were not ectothermic (cold-blooded).

A story at The Telegraph questions Mitt Romney's claims of personal experience with "austerity" during his missionary experience.

The apotheosis of internet culture: an assemblage of seventy-six cat videos (the ones used at the Walker Art Center's First Annual Cat Video Film Festival.)

The world's best (?only) museum devoted to amber - the Palanga Amber Museum - is located in Lithuania.  More re Palanga (and amber) here.

Wikipedia is losing administrators; there are fewer than a thousand of them left.

There is one country where 100% of first-grade students learn to write computer code.  It's obviously not the United States. 

One of the very first David Attenborough film clips (from the 1956 BBC program "Zoo Quest").

"Bad Lip Reading" presents Joe Biden.

Deadspin published the full text of Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe's response to the politician who suggested that NFL players should not speak out about gay marriage.

An op-ed at The Guardian discusses Alzheimer's disease as a metabolic disease possibly caused or aggravated by dietary indiscretions (junk food).

Hollywood's Islamophobia dates back to well before the recent brouhaha regarding "The Innocence of Muslims."

A column at Salon offers seven general rules for how to smoke marijuana without getting arrested.

"Rats once paralyzed from complete surgical cuts through their spinal cords can walk again after stem cells were transplanted into the site of the injury, report researchers today in the journal Cell. The results suggest that stem cells might work as a treatment for patients even if they have completely severed cords..."

A Redditor in Belgium offers observations about why Islam is different from other religions and the problems that result from cultural differences.

An extensive survey and discussion of voter ID laws at ProPublica.

"Fail" videos are a dime a dozen, but for those who enjoy schadenfreude, here's a failed cannonball dive into a (frozen) swimming pool.

I totally enjoyed the Sherlock series with Benedict Cumberbatch, and was looking forward to the next season series to find out how Sherlock faked his death in the final episode.  This video offers what I think is a perfectly valid explanation.

Clever ways to decorate pumpkins for Halloween.

Roger Ebert interviews director Michael Apted about the "Up" films (this is a half-hour video, but worthwhile for enthusiasts about the series).

In September The Presurfer celebrated its 12th blogiversary.

"Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam."

A Stone Age chalk geoform in the Southern Urals is two kilometers long and depicts a moose.

A set of 16 photos shows what goes on behind the back wall of a bowling alley.

A planet has been discovered that has four suns associated with it: "The distant world orbits one pair of stars which have a second stellar pair revolving around them."

The American Society of Magazine Editors presents what they consider to be "The Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Past 40 Years."

I have another 30 to add, but it's almost time for football games to start.  The images all come from the relevant Wikipedia page.  ("The name "lynx" originated in Middle English via Latin from Greek word "λύγξ", derived from the Indo-European root "*leuk-", meaning "light, brightness", in reference to the luminescence of its reflective eyes.")