Teeth of a "vampire syndrome"

From Wikipedia:

Hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia is one of about 150 types of ectodermal dysplasia in humans. Before birth, these disorders result in the abnormal development of structures including the skin, hair, nails, teeth, and sweat glands... Hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia is the most common form of ectodermal dysplasia in humans. It is estimated to affect at least 1 in 17,000 people worldwide.

Because some readers of this blog are reluctant to view variants of human development, I'll put the image below the fold..

Why you should travel

From TheGoodVibe, via Palahniuk & Chocolate.

Observations on potential war with Syria

"The liberal elites are particularly amazing to behold. I watched Anderson Cooper tonight and I may have missed it, but I couldn’t find a single guest opposed to this war, even as most Americans emphatically oppose it. Even O’Reilly was more even-handed (I kept flicking back and forth). We got to listen to Ryan Crocker tell us that we have to intervene and at the same time that the potential replacement for Assad is probably just as foul as the dictator. And we got Fouad Ajami – another pro-Iraq war “expert” who was exposed as an eloquent bullshit artist during the Iraq fiasco – telling us – yes, he said this – to trust the “Syrian people”, as if they exist, as if the sectarian divides and hatreds are not re-fueling as we speak, as if he has no shame and no record. It really is as if Iraq never happened, as if the US still had the resources to fight another, brutal and scarring sectarian conflict in someone else’s country on someone else’s behalf who will eventually ally with our foes. It is as if the Bush-Cheney administration never happened. It is as if the “surge” worked...

So now we are treated to the argument from “credibility”. Enough with the arguments about credibility! The United States would benefit by nothing more than accepting the fact that we do not have the power to control that region and shouldn’t die trying. Our credibility is threatened not when we stay out of other people’s civil wars, but when we make threats we cannot enforce. I am emphatically not dismissing the Rubicon of chemical weapons, and am as appalled by their use as anyone. But if we cannot resolve the question without entering another full-scale, open-ended war on the basis of murky intelligence about WMDs, then we should resign ourselves to not resolving the question. Repeat after me: American power is much more limited than our elites still want to believe."

And this:

AIPAC’s all in on Syria.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s primary pro-Israel lobbying group, has broken its silence on Syria, calling for members of Congress to vote in favor of a resolution giving President Barack Obama express authority to launch strikes against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

“AIPAC urges Congress to grant the president the authority he has requested to protect America’s national security interests and dissuade the Syrian regime’s further use of unconventional weapons..."

The word “Israel” appears nowhere in the text of the statement, underscoring by omission the worry pro-Israel groups in the United States have about framing retaliatory strikes in a way that makes it look like Israel is pushing for an attack on Syria for its own interests.

How to cook a unicorn ("Taketh one unicorne...")

A long-lost medieval cookbook, containing recipes for hedgehogs, blackbirds and even unicorns, has been discovered at the British Library...

Experts believe that the cookbook was compiled by Geoffrey Fule, who worked in the kitchens of Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England (1328-1369)...

After recipes for herring, tripe and codswallop (fish stew, a popular dish in the Middle Ages) comes that beginning "Taketh one unicorne". The recipe calls for the beast to be marinaded in cloves and garlic, and then roasted on a griddle... 

Additional information and two more images at the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog, where it is also noted that -

The recipe for cooking blackbirds is believed to be the origin of the traditional English nursery rhyme "Sing a song of sixpence / A pocket full of rye / Four-and-twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie."

Via Curiosités de Titam. 

Addendum: After you enjoy reading this, be sure to read the relevant comments by Margaret and Shaun.

Half of the people in the United States...

... live in the counties colored in blue.  Amazing.

I love maps.  They can convey information much more effectively than text and data.  Found this one at The Land of Maps.

Uneasy rider

From The New Yorker.

17th century Japanese gold lacquer chest, used as TV stand and bar

"Around 1640, chief of the mission of the Dutch East India Company François Caron commissioned a group of gold lacquer boxes from the Kaomi Nagashige of Kyoto, a master craftsman who was the official lacquer-maker to the Tokugawa rulers... Because he was in Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu’s good graces, Caron was able to secure the finest quality of lacquer, the kind of thing that would normally be seen in the palaces of the Shogun. The chests were decorated with gold, silver and copper foil, sheets and powder and mother of pearl. The painstaking process of creating these marvels took at least two years... "

...in 1643, the lacquer boxes left Japan for the Netherlands...the chests passed by descent through the family until they were purchased in a French Revolutionary fire sale by a haberdasher who sold them to the wealthy British writer and art collector William Beckford....

[A] Polish doctor named Zaniewski...bought it from the Cory auction for a pittance. In 1970, Dr. Zaniewski sold the chest for £100 to a tenant of his, a French engineer who worked for Shell Petroleum. The engineer used it as a TV stand in his South Kensington apartment for 16 years, then brought it with him when he retired to the Loire Valley in 1986. There he used it as a bar...

At the June 9th auction held at the Château de Cheverny in the Loire Valley, the Mazarin Chest sold for 7.3 million euros ($9,544,000)...

Further detaiils at The History Blog.

There will be no more fireplaces in Montreal

"Citing concerns for air quality and the health of its citizens, the largest city in the province of Quebec is poised to adopt a ban on fireplaces, effective at the end of 2020.

"Wood burning is a major source of fine particulate air pollution, meaning particles that penetrate into the lungs," Norman King, an epidemiologist at the Montreal Public Health Board told the CBC...

Montreal already had a ban on installing fireplaces in new construction, dating back to 2009, but about 50,000 homes in Montreal are still using wood-burning appliances. A provincial government program called "Feu vert" has offered $900 (Canadian) to replace them with natural gas or propane appliances, but the program ends this year, unless city officials get their way and it is extended. "

This is a "hachure map"

Somewhere this weekend I ran across a reference to a "hachure" on a map, and had to look it up.  I assumed it had something to do with "cross-hatching" for shading.  Not quite.

Hachures are an older mode of representing relief. They show orientation of slope, and by their thickness and overall density they provide a general sense of steepness. Being non-numeric, they are less useful to a scientific survey than contours, but can successfully communicate quite specific shapes of terrain. They are a form of shading, although different from the one used in shaded maps...

Hachures are strokes (short line segments or curves) drawn in the direction of the steepest slope (the aspect direction). Steeper slopes are represented by thicker, shorter strokes, while gentler slopes are represented by thinner, longer and farther apart strokes. A very gentle slope or a flat area, like the top of a hill, are usually left blank. The hachures are traditionally monocolour, usually black, gray or brown; using two complementary colours for the hachures on a neutral background colour (e.g. black and white lines on gray map colour) would give a shading effect as if the relief were illuminated.

In representing relief with hachures on a map, six rules are to be followed, according to G.R.P. Lawrence (1979):

The hachures are drawn in the direction of the steepest gradient.

The hachures are arranged in rows perpendicular to their direction.

The length and thickness of each stroke represents the drop in height along its direction: a short and thick stroke represents a short and steep slope, while a long and thin stroke represents a long and gentle slope.

The strokes are spaced at an equal distance inside a row.

The strokes have the same thickness inside a row.

If the map is illuminated, strokes are thinner and farther apart on the illuminated side.

You learn something every day.

"Progressives" can become "left-wing Puritans"

Especially in matters relating to their children:

Today, of course, while the right still dabbles eagerly in the anti-fluoride, anti-vaccination, and other anti-science pathologies, the left may be the even greater culprit. Certainly the anti-fluoride coalition in Portland depended more on self-identified liberal voters than on conservatives. But there are key differences in how liberals and conservatives come by their fears. On the right, these mental illnesses stem from fear of government. On the left... they stem from an old mix of righteousness and the fear of contamination—from what we might recognize as Puritanism.

Let me give another example of left-wing Puritanism in action, one less glaring than the Portland referendum but which will be recognizable to many of you. Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me...

I was surrounded by the new Puritans: self-righteous, aspiring toward a utopian perfectionism, therefore condemned to perpetual anxiety—and in their anxiety, a threat to me and my children.

More at the New Republic essay, via The Dish.

Duluth's original "transporter bridge"

One of the landmarks of the harbor at Duluth, Minnesota is its aerial lift bridge (see photo at right).  Before the lift bridge was created, the canal was traversed via the "transporter bridge" (shown in the top photo) - the first of only two such bridges ever constructed in the United States (there are only twelve transporter bridges in the world).

When it was completed in 1905, the Aerial Bridge's gondola had a capacity of 60 short tons (54 tonne) and could carry 350 people plus wagons, streetcars, or automobiles. A trip across the canal took about one minute, and the ferry car moved across once every five minutes during busy times of the day.

Posted for reader Sarah, who lives in Duluth and who will probably be interested in this 1905 photo showing Duluth with no trees on the hill (?presumably as the result of prior logging?).

Top photo from Shorpy, and like all Shorpy images is best appreciated in the larger-than-wallpaper size at the original link.

Petri dish photography

In his lab at MIT, biological engineer Christopher Voigt has modified bacteria in agar to act like the light-sensitive silver halide crystals in gelatin emulsion on photographic film. He has hacked a harmless strain of Escherichia coli so that it produces black pigment when left in darkness or remains transparent when exposed to red light. He and his team modified the E. coli by adding 2 proteins from blue-green algae that recognize the red light and turn off the gene that makes the black color. The image is obtained by shining the red light through a printed transparency taped to the bottom of the petri dish. The process takes a few days, but the photo will last up to 3 years in a refrigerator.

Image and text found in Quigley's Cabinet.

A digital sundial

Like a digital clock, the digital sundial displays the current time using digits. In the true tradition of all sundials, the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day. The sundial is available in two versions, for use in either hemisphere. Placed on the inside of a south-facing window (north-facing in the southern hemisphere), the sundial can be read through the horizontal mirror. The display updates every 10 minutes, and gives a remarkably accurate record of the time during the daylight hours. 

More info at Digital Sundials International.

Changing household demographics

A graph of 40 years of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that fewer American households are comprised of married couples with children.  Now there are more men and women living alone, and other "nontraditional" arrangements.

 

But the disconnect between those two trends may be felt the most strongly by people who live alone, whether they're 22-year-old women who aren't yet married, or 70-year-old retired widows. As more Americans are opting to live alone than ever before, that now seems like an entirely unremarkable choice. But for years we've been building houses for that big nuclear family that's now less common. And housing data released earlier this summer by the Census Bureau, illustrated at right, suggests that the U.S. is now a country where many people live alone in a land of 3-bedroom houses.

From The Atlantic and The Dish.

Plankton bloom

From NASA's Earth Observatory:

This photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station highlights a late summer plankton bloom across much of Lake Ontario, one of North America’s Great Lakes. Microscopic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can reach such large concentrations and color the water to such an extent that the change is visible from orbit.