The "Mary Rose" has a new museum

YouTube link.

I remember visiting her 25 years ago; the new museum must be absolutely fabulous.  Some tidbits from the Telegraph -

The half of the ship that survives sits on a frame in a dry dock. Around this, a modern museum has been built. Inside, the visitor stands on a central suspended walkway. To the right, behind windows, is the wreck, as if cut down the middle. To the left, architects have constructed a mirror image, on the decks of which objects can be examined in situ. There are central walkways at three levels...

I have not been so elated by a museum since I first looked into the Pitt-Rivers collection’s wild eccentricities in Oxford. Here at Portsmouth, the beauty of ordinary items impresses: the whole wooden world of a Tudor warship. Here, three feet away, is the 90-gallon cauldron for boiling 500 men’s beef, and the brick casing that held it over the fire, and the very half-burnt logs, caught just as they were extinguished by that inrush of water 468 years ago...

And more details here -

Wildfire. That’s what would have blazed onto enemy decks from the masts of the Mary Rose, the great warship commissioned by King Henry VIII when he came to the throne. It was flung, or possibly shot, using ‘fire arrows’: spears wrapped with a collar of gunpowder and oil that would fuse, burn and explode. We know this because they have one – or three, actually – on display on one of the ‘decks’ of the new £27 million Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth... ‘They were thrown from the fighting tops, or crows’ nests, like this one – we found two of those.’

...the Mary Rose came out of the sea over 30 years ago and ever since has been sprayed, first with fresh water, later with a water soluble polymer... When they switched off the sprays on April 29 this year, ready for the opening, the great vessel was sitting in a discreet, doughnut-shaped building that takes its place in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard alongside other famous British vessels such as HMS Victory and the 19th century HMS Warrior... The museum claims she is the only 16th century warship on display anywhere in the world...

The 16th-century layer contained so many artefacts perfectly preserved in the airless, silky seabed that the museum now holds the largest collection of Tudor objects in the world.

"Crab" - a 15-second animated short

YouTube link.

You certainly have time to check this one out.  *chuckle*

From Birdbox Studio, which has other offerings on YouTube.

Morsi's ouster

Live streaming coverage on Al Jazeera (English) TV (click for fullscreen video).

 Not anymore. The offices were stormed.

"La Madona Rosa"

A very unusual crystal specimen (avra Berilo Branco, Sapucaia do Norte, Galiléia, Doce Valley, Minas Gerais, Brazil) sold by Heritage Auctions in June of 2013:

La Madona Rosa (the Pink Madonna) is an exceptionally large and beautiful specimen of Rose and Smoky Quartz bearing a strong resemblance to traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary...

In late 1950s, miners working this small mine in Brazil, found a miraculous pocket of Rose Quartz: although only six inches (10-16 cm) wide and 12 inches (32 cm) high, the pocket extended for an amazing 16 feet (5 meters). It was filled with deep pink Quartz crystals draped sinuously over golden Smoky Quartz. The miners at Sapucaia (the mine's informal name because of its proximity to that town) had hit pay dirt: Rose Quartz crystals had never been seen before this discovery. Subsequent finds in Brazil also yielded Rose Quartz specimens (notably Lavra da Ilha and Alto da Pitora) but none approached the sheer size and beauty of the specimens from Lavra Berilo Branco - they are the "gold standard" for Rose Quartz. The most famous specimen from this historic find is The Van Allen Belt which currently resides in the Smithsonian.

Take a wild guess what this 15-inch high specimen sold for at auction.  No, higher... Answer below the fold...

Color movies of London in 1927

YouTube link.

From the archives of the British Film Institute:

Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Frisse-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving.

The resolution is good enough for full-screen enjoyment. Makes me wish I had a WABAC machine for day trips.

Global fertility decline

From Carpe Diem, a public policy blog at the American Enterprise Institute:

The chart above shows the significant, downward trend in the world’s Total Fertility Rate (births per woman) over the last half century, which has fallen in half, from almost 5 births per woman in 1960 to only 2.45 births per woman in 2010... The decline in fertility rates is also happening for reasons never predicted or advocated by Ehrlich, who proposed government solutions like population controls and sterilization. Rather, the decline has been facilitated by market-based forces like modernization, mass electrification, economic development, and television.

More info (and a vociferous comment thread) at the link.   Via The Dish.

A very expensive linarite crystal

From a report at Live Science:

Linarite, which also contains lead, typically shows up in the form of microcrystals... As part of a public minerals auction scheduled for June 2, Heritage is offering a specimen containing a 1-inch-long (2.5 centimeters) crystal. This blue behemoth, found in a New Mexico mine in 1979, is the largest crystal ever offered for sale publicly...The opening bid is set at $15,000...

The specimen sold for $158,000.

The medical histories of America's presidents

A hat tip to the crazy cat lady for sending me the link to a website devoted to collecting the details of the health of American presidents.

Some entries are extensive - Franklin Delano Roosevelt's includes information on his polio (though no mention of the alternative possibility of Guillain-Barre), his hypetensive cardiomyopathy, and his atherosclerosis ("arteries so atherosclerotic that embalmers could not get a needle into them.")

Others seem to amass trivia - William Taft had, in addition to his sleep apnea, a bad cold, an episode of motion sickness, constipation, and a sunburn on his bald spot.

An interesting resource.

A forerunner of worldwide "water wars" ?

Most people anticipate that within our children's lifetimes wars will be fought over access to water for drinking and agriculture.  A story at the Washington Post focuses on one current dispute, between Egypt and Ethiopia.

[T]race the Nile about 1,400 miles upstream and there’s a rising colossus that threatens to upset a millennia-old balance. There, in the Ethiopian highlands, one of the world’s largest dams is taking shape.

For Ethiopia, the dam promises abundant energy and an escape from a seemingly permanent spot in the lowest rungs of the world’s human development index. But for Egypt, the consequences could be dire: a nationwide water shortage in as little as two years that causes crop failures, power cuts and instability resonating far beyond even the extraordinary tumult of the recent past.

For a country facing daily domestic crises in the aftermath of its 2011 revolution, the dam is a foreign threat that Egypt can ill afford. And that may be the point. Analysts say Ethiopia is seizing on Egypt’s distraction and relative fragility to plunge ahead with plans that have long been on the drawing board but have always been thwarted by Egyptian resistance...

The country, [Morsi] told a crowd of cheering supporters, is ready to sacrifice blood to ensure that “not one drop” of the Nile is lost...

Egypt and Ethiopia each have more than 80 million people, double the population that existed just 30 years ago. By 2050, the combined population of the two countries is expected to rise by 100 million, even as climate change could reduce the supply of water...

Ethiopian officials say the dam will be used to generate electricity, not to irrigate fields, meaning that all the water will eventually make its way downstream to Egypt...

Egypt may be the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus once remarked, but the Nile is not Egypt’s alone. Eleven countries share the basin of the world’s longest river... Ethiopia has won the majority of those countries to its side with the promise of electricity exports for a region that desperately needs new sources of energy...

More at the link.

Wait for it...

YouTube link.

Video of the failed launch of a Russian Proton-M rocket carrying a spacecraft.  Posted not for the "fireworks" or the "fail" aspect, but for the delay (10 full seconds) between impact and the arrival of the sound wave.  The Reddit discussion thread notes the failure of most Hollywood movies to accurately depict this difference between light and sound.

Minnesota geology

Via Fuck Yeah Cartography! (The image there can be supersized).

"Toilet bowl love"

The prison equivalent of phone sex makes use of the pipes of the plumbing system, as explained at Truthdig:

Life behind bars in Union County jail and some other American penal institutions revolves around an improvised system of cell-to-cell communication through the plumbing. Known as the “bowl phone,” it crudely replicates the speaking tubes in ships that sailors once shouted through. Drained metal toilets are used as megaphones to build friendships, carry out courtship, fall in love—although the lovers may never meet—have
phone sex, pray and carry out religious conversion, pass news about court cases and families and exchange gossip...

“You take a piece of cloth,” says Blount, a small, wispy African-American in her 40s. “You take the water out [of the bowl]. You keep pumpin’ the water out until it get lower. Then you take the little cup or somethin’. You take a little sock or a little cloth or somethin’. You pump it out with the cloth, the water out. And as you’re doin’ that it’s the water’s going out. It’s goin’, it’s goin’. It don’t take but like about a minute.”...

To send or receive a call, a male prisoner one or two floors below must similarly prepare a bowl phone. It is difficult for the parties to hear each other if they are separated by more than two floors. To keep the lines of communication open, bowl phones are seldom used as toilets and rarely are flushed. Cells designated by prisoners become, in essence, public phone booths, known by their cell numbers...

I ask what most of the prisoners like to talk about. “Sex,” Pabey and Blount answer at once. 

More at the link, if you really need to know...

Illustration by Mr. Fish.

One way to smuggle booze

Pic found at imgur.

An aerial brush hog

YouTube link.

"Our pilots operate our helicopter mounted saw with pinpoint accuracy. The aerial saw is powered by a compact fuel injected engine, with low emission operations and is able to side-trim a 20' path of vegetation an average three miles per day (both sides)."

When someone says its "just metadata"...

Some discussions of Snowden's NSA revelations offer reassurance that the information collected is "only metadata," arguing that the data are only used to find patterns and trends and that personal details are not retrievable.

German Green Party politician Malte Spitz has reported in the New York Times his experience in retrieving his own metadata:

In May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records...

The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored... All of this data had to be kept so that law enforcement agencies could gain access to it. That meant that the metadata of 80 million Germans was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause...

Together with Zeit Online, the online edition of the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit, I published an infographic of six months of my life for all to see. With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can follow my travels across Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and woke up, a trail further enriched with public information from my social networking sites: six months of my life viewable for everybody to see what exactly is possible with “just metadata.” 

Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one another. You could identify any social group and determine its major actors. 

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a conversation, just technical information — the sender and recipient, the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data. 

I can't embed the infographic, which is here.