Extinction of the Great Auk

The Little Ice Age may have reduced the population of the Great Auk by exposing more of their breeding islands to predation by Polar Bears, but massive exploitation for their down drastically reduced the population. By the mid-16th century, the nesting colonies along the European side of the Atlantic were nearly all eliminated by humans killing this bird for its down, which was used to make pillows.

In 1553, the auk received its first official protection, and in 1794 Great Britain banned the killing of this species for its feathers. In St. John's, individuals violating a 1775 law banning hunting the Great Auk for its feathers or eggs were publicly flogged, though hunting for use as fishing bait was still permitted...

If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize. While you abide on this island you are in the constant practize of horrid cruelties for you not only skin them Alive, but you burn them Alive also to cook their Bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodys being oily soon produce a Flame; there is no wood on the island.

It was on the islet of Stac an Armin, St Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, that the last Great Auk seen in the British Isles was caught and killed. Three men from St Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the auk was a witch and the cause of the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick.

Text and image from the Wikipedia entry, where there is much more information.

Facilitating recycling

Presumably a walk-out from the basement to the garage.  Note he/she also uses the clear plastic bag that recycle centers prefer.

Via Reddit and imgur.

Two videos of dock-diving dogs

YouTube link. 

  YouTube link.

The top one is rather repetitive (except for the unusual "dive" at 2:20). The second is more informative. There are many others at YouTube.  Miscellaneous details at Wikipedia.

This post inspired by an article in the StarTribune:

Two years ago, Remi, a lab-shepherd mutt, was a dog without a home, facing an uncertain future. Then Tom Dropik of New Prague took the rescue dog no one wanted and turned him into a two-time dock-jumping world champion who appears in competitions around the nation and will be on TV this winter...

Dogs compete in four events: "big air,'' a distance-leap into the pool of water; "extreme vertical,'' an event to see how high a dog can jump; and "speed retrieve'' to measure how fast a dog can cover 20 feet of dock and 40 feet of water to get a retrieving dummy. A fourth event, called the Iron Dog, is a combination of those three events.  Last fall, at the World Championships in Canton, Ohio, Remi won the ''speed retrieve'' event...

"My dog, Tucker, used to jump up and pick apples off the tree to eat,'' Dropik said.

Addendum:  A hat tip to Mel V. for the link to this relevant post at Team Unruly.

The "easiest foreign languages to learn"

Based on data from the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute language rankings, the following are judged to be the ten easiest foreign languages for a native-English speaking person to learn:

1) Afrikaans

Like English, Afrikaans is in the West Germanic language family. Unlike English, its structure won’t make your head spin. A great feature of Afrikaans, especially for grammar-phobes, is its logical and non-inflective structure. Unlike English, there is no verb conjugation (swim, swam, swum). Unlike Romance languages, there is no gender (un homme, une femme in French).

Another feature of Afrikaans is its vocabulary, which shares many Germanic-derived root words that are familiar to English speakers. Vocabulary-building is as easy as pointing to an object and asking, “Wat is dit in Afrikaans?”

2) French

Linguists estimate that French has influenced up to a third of the modern English language, from the language of the courts in the 11th century to modern terms like je ne sais quoi, après-ski, and bourgeois.

For language learners, English has more in common lexically with French than any other Romance language. This means that French vocabulary is more familiar, recognisable, and easy to comprehend. Advanced French learners may struggle with its gendered nouns and 17 verb forms, but for conversational learning, it’s relatively facile.  

3) Spanish

For language learners, a great feature of Spanish is its shallow orthographic depth – that is, in most cases, words are written as pronounced. This means that reading and writing in Spanish is a straightforward task.
Pronunciation is also fairly easy for native English speakers, with only ten vowel and diphthong sounds (English has 20), and no unfamiliar phonemes except for the fun-to-pronounce letter ñ. Grammatically speaking, Spanish has fewer irregularities that other Romance languages. 

4)  Dutch

Dutch is both structurally and syntactically familiar for English speakers. In terms of pronunciation and vocabulary, it parallels English in many ways, such as groen (green) or de oude man (the old man). In addition to familiar Germanic root words, the Dutch language adopted many loan words from French, with familiar words like drogeren (drug) and blok (block).

Though some vowel sounds may be new for English speakers, Dutch pronunciation follows the English model of syllable stress, so pronouncing Dutch words is somewhat intuitive.

Dutch is similar to German, but because it has no cases and a less complicated grammatical system, many linguistic scholars consider Dutch to be the easiest language for English speakers. 

5) Norwegian

Norwegian and English have very similar syntax and word order. Verbs are an especially simple feature, with no conjugation according to number or person. The rules of conjugation are particularly straightforward, with a simple –e suffix for past tense, and –s for passive verbs.

Norwegian has the logical system of a tonal “pitch accent” to stress either the first or second syllable in matching words, as in English’s “desert” and “dessert”.

The one drawback to studying Norwegian is finding opportunities to use it. In Norway’s top-ranking education system, English is taught nationwide, starting at the primary school level, and most Norwegians are near-fluent.

6-10) Portugese, Swedish, Italian, Esperanto, Frisian - see the Telegraph photo gallery for commentary.

Fireworks

"A woman silhouetted against an erupting firework at the Loi Krathong festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand."

Credit: Luke Silcocks, via The Telegraph.

Convert your pet's cremains into jewelry

Before:

After:

Every time she looks into the ring on her finger, Ms. Pilon sees Meowy, her late beloved silver cat. Meowy really is there: The ring's two diamonds were made from her cremated remains.

"It's a little eccentric—not something everyone would do," says Ms. Pilon, a biotech sales representative in Boston, whose cat passed away last year. "It's a way for me to remember my cat, and have her with me all the time."..

Some gems start at about $250, while pet diamonds cost at least $1,400, with prices based on color and size. The diamonds have the same physical properties as mined diamonds, purveyors say.

LifeGem, an Elk Grove Village, Ill., company, says it has made more than 1,000 animal diamonds in the past decade, mostly from dogs and cats but also a few birds, rabbits, horses and one armadillo...

A spokesman for the Gemological Institute of America declined to comment on specific companies or processes, but said that synthetic diamonds, like naturally occurring ones, are made of carbon. "That carbon could come from the remains of a deceased pet," he said.

Producing a one-carat diamond requires less than a cup of ashes or unpacked hair. Sometimes, companies add outside carbon if there isn't enough.

Additional information and commentary at The Wall Streeet Journal.


Photo credits:  Natalie Pilon (top) and Brynmore Williams (below)

"Common Core" state education standards creating turmoil

I've already seen several articles this week on a new set of curriculum standards.  These excerpts from a column at Salon:

The Common Core State Standards, which will be implemented by more than 40 states by 2014, require that 50 percent of elementary school reading be nonfiction, climbing to 70 percent by 12th grade. Supporters, the Post says, believe American students have suffered from “a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents,” leaving them unprepared for higher education and the working world.

Schools face problems ranging from overcrowded classrooms to crumbling buildings to malnourished students. But the idea of rigorous common standards in general, if not these specific guidelines, has support from powerful interests including the Department of Education, the U.S. Army and numerous reformists. Some of the suggested ideas would be a notable change from what almost all Americans remember of high school.

Salon cites an article in The Washington Post, which notes that -

Among the suggested non­fiction pieces for high school juniors and seniors are Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration.

English teachers across the country are trying to figure out which poetry, short stories and novels might have to be sacrificed to make room for nonfiction... Jamie Highfill is mourning the six weeks’ worth of poetry she removed from her eighth-grade English class at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, Ark. She also dropped some short stories and a favorite unit on the legends of King Arthur to make room for essays by Malcolm Gladwell and a chapter from “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell’s book about social behavior...

Yes, the standards do require increasing amounts of nonfiction from kindergarten through grade 12, Coleman said. But that refers to reading across all subjects, not just in English class, he said. Teachers in social studies, science and math should require more reading, which would allow English teachers to continue to assign literature, he said...

In practice, the burden of teaching the nonfiction texts is falling to English teachers, said Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University: “You have chemistry teachers, history teachers saying, ‘We’re not going to teach reading and writing, we have to teach our subject matter. That’s what you English teachers do.’ ”

Sheridan Blau, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, said teachers across the country have told him their principals are insisting that English teachers make 70 percent of their readings nonfiction. “The effect of the new standards is to drive literature out of the English classroom,” he said.

I can see where this will create some major arguments in faculty meetings.  I was an English major in college, so I'm sorry to hear about these changes, though I do understand the impetus driving the reform.  My high school had a rigorous reading program, but if I were to go back to it and remove some assigned reading, I know what my first choice would be - The Forsythe Saga.  I can't believe I slogged my way through that...

How birds may use cigarette butts

Stuffing cigarette butts into the lining of nests may seem unwholesome. But a team of ecologists says that far from being unnatural, the use of smoked cigarettes by city birds may be an urban variation of an ancient adaptation.

Birds have long been known to line their nests with vegetation rich in compounds that drive away parasites. Chemicals in tobacco leaves are known to repel arthropods such as parasitic mites, so Monserrat Suárez-Rodríguez, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and her colleagues wondered whether city birds were using cigarette butts in the same way.

In a study published today in Biology Letters, the researchers examined the nests of two bird species common on the North American continent. They measured the amount of cellulose acetate (a component of cigarette butts) in the nests, and found that the more there was, the fewer parasitic mites the nest contained.

Additional details at Nature.

Photo credit: Manfred Danegger/NHPA/Photoshot

A really sweet Christmas advertisement

YouTube link. 

With a pleasant surprise ending.

The demographics of personal spending

HS Dent, an economic forecasting firm, compiled Census data on spending behavior and presented them as a series of demand curves (see right). The curves measure average annual expenditure for a given product over the age of the consumer. 

Several dozen of these graphs are assembled at Business Insider, covering all sorts of different types of purchases:

Via The Dish.

Crash blossom of the day

This one via the ever-humorous Criggo.

See my post from two years ago for several dozen more.  If nothing there makes you laugh, you must be a crotchety old Scrooge.

p.s. - Dan Bloom, who coined the term "crash blossoms" (at a copy editors' forum) left a comment back then indicating that he was authoring a book on the subject, but I can't find anything listed at Amazon.  There is a relevant website.

Cryoconite in Birthday Canyon

Adam LeWinter on the rim of Birthday Canyon on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The black deposit in the bottom of channel is cryoconite. Birthday Canyon is approximately 150 feet deep.

The photo (credit James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey) comes from a small gallery at The Guardian depicting scenes of glacial melting in the Arctic.  Second gallery.

Blogged for the stark beauty, but it also prompted me to look up what "cryoconite" is.

Cryoconite is powdery windblown dust which is deposited and builds up on snow, glaciers, or icecaps. It contains small amounts of soot which absorbs solar radiation melting the snow or ice beneath the deposit sometimes creating a cryoconite hole. 

Cryoconite holes have been suggested to play important roles in the glacier ecosystems because many kinds of living organisms have been reported from this structure on the glaciers, for example, algae, rotifer, tardigrada, insects and ice worm.

Details about cryoconite granules. 

"Reversed" map of the world

An anonymous reader mentioned in a comment that he/she had seen a map of the world in which the oceans were depicted as land masses, and vice-versa.  The closest I could find to such a map with a quick web search was the one above (available commercially as a poster), via Big Think and 42 Concepts.

This one doesn't quite "work" for me because my mind still sees a conventional map (it worked a little better when I inverted it).  I would prefer for the artists to have extended the "reverse" effect by depicting the mid-Atlantic ridge as canyons and the Marianas Trench as a towering mountain.  And to have rendered the "oceans" in blue.

Still, it's a nice diversion to view such a map and wonder in a reversed world where I would like to live, which areas would be strategically important, how history might have evolved differently, and so on.

Addendum:  Reader Heather found the map I wanted to see, credited to mygrapefruit at DeviantArt, via P as in Pterodactyl:

Nicely done. (I think I would like to live in the "lakes" district around Indonesia or Papua New Guinea...)

Calvin and Hobbes search engine

There is now a Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine that will retrieve cartoons based on either text or description of the panels.

Via Boing Boing.

A thought-provoking view of life

YouTube link. 

Narration by Alan Watts.

Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism...

Watts' fascination with the Zen (or Chan) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East...

He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism...

As part of his growing popularity, Matt Stone and Trey Parker—creators of the animated series South Park—have also contributed a video tribute by animating some of his lectures. 

Via Boing Boing.