"She flung her anus high up in the air..."

A passage from the book Matisse on the Loose, as translated by an optical character reader:

"When she spotted me, she flung her anus high in the air and kept them up until she reached me. 'Matisse. Oh boy!' she said. She grabbed my anus and positioned my body in the direction of the east gallery and we started walking."

It's all explained Sarah Wendell, editor of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books:

"So if the text is old, and it says 'arms', the OCR [optical character recognition] scanner will see it as 'anus.' OMG," Wendell tweeted. (She was referring to optical character recognition, the process by which printed texts can be scanned and converted into ebooks.)

Via The Guardian and Melville House, where there are additional examples of the error.

The world's rarest postage stamp is up for sale

It's the British Guiana 1c magenta:

It is imperforate, printed in black on magenta paper, and it features a sailing ship along with the colony's Latin motto "Damus Petimus Que Vicissim" (We give and expect in return) in the middle. Four thin lines frame the ship. The stamp's country of issue and value in small black upper case lettering in turn surround the frame.

The 1c magenta was part of a series of three definitive stamps issued in 1856 and was intended for use on local newspapers. The other two stamps, a 4c magenta and 4c blue, were intended for letter postage.

The issue came about through mischance. An anticipated delivery of stamps by ship did not arrive so the local postmaster, E.T.E. Dalton, authorised printers Joseph Baum and William Dallas, who were the publishers of the Official Gazette newspaper in Georgetown, to print an emergency issue of three stamps. Dalton gave some specifications about the design, but the printer chose to add a ship image of their own design to stamps. Dalton was not pleased with the end result, and as a safeguard against forgery ordered that all correspondence bearing the stamps be autographed by a post office clerk. This particular stamp was initialled E.D.W. by the clerk E.D. Wight.

It was discovered in 1873 by a 12-year-old Scottish schoolboy, L. Vernon Vaughan, in the Guyanese town of Demerara (whose postmark the stamp bears), amongst his uncle's letters. There was no record of it in his stamp catalogue, so he sold it some weeks later for six shillings to a local collector, N.R. McKinnon. In 1878 McKinnon's collection was sold to a Liverpool stamp dealer, Thomas Ridpath, for £120. Shortly afterwards, the same year, Thomas Ridpath sold the 1c to Philipp von Ferrary for about £150. His massive stamp collection was willed to a Berlin museum. Following Ferrary's death in 1917, the entire collection was taken by France as war reparations following the end of World War I. Arthur Hind bought it during a series of fourteen auctions in 1922 for over US$36,000 (reportedly outbidding three kings, including King George V)...

More at Wikipedia, for those interested.  The Telegraph reports that the sale price at Sotheby's is "expected to reach between $10 million (£5.9 million) and $20 million."

Update:  It sold for $9.5 million.

Atmospheric CO2 going off the scale

Data from the Scripps Institute at UC-San Diego as reported in an article at Future Tense. 

Every single daily carbon dioxide measurement in April 2014 was above 400 parts per million. That hasn’t happened in nearly a million years, and perhaps much longer. 

You are quite welcome to argue about why this is happening and what implications it has (or doesn't have), but please refrain for claiming that it is not happening.

And for those who feel this is "just part of normal long-term cyclic variation," this chart:

Controversy about the 9/11 Memorial Museum inscription

First, this note from the Oxford University Press blog:

The National September 11 Memorial Museum will be opened in a few weeks. On the otherwise starkly bare wall at the entrance is a 60-foot-long inscription in 15-inch letters made from steel salvaged from the twin towers: NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME. This noble sentiment is a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, one of mankind’s highest literary achievements, but its appropriateness has been questioned. In the context of the Aeneid, Virgil is commemorating a homosexual pair of warriors killed while making a bloody surprise attack on their sleeping enemies’ camp.

And these additional details and commentary from a 2011 op-ed piece in the New York Times:

Anyone troubling to take even a cursory glance at the quotation’s context will find the choice offers neither instruction nor solace... Falling on the sleeping enemy, the two hack away with their swords, until the ground reeks with “warm black gore.” Stripping the murdered soldiers of their armor, the two are in turn ambushed by a returning Rutulian cavalry troop. As each Trojan tries to save his companion, both are killed, brutally and graphically... At dawn’s light, the severed heads of the two Trojans are paraded by the enemy on spears.

The central sentiment that the young men were fortunate to die together could, perhaps, at one time have been defended as a suitable commemoration of military dead who fell with their companions. To apply the same sentiment to civilians killed indiscriminately in an act of terrorism, however, is grotesque. 

A headdress made from the hair of one's ancestors

A tradition among the Chinese Long-horn Miao minority:

Instead of throwing away their hair when they comb it, women who are part of China's Long-horn Miao minority instead save the strands and add them to their collection of hair that allows them to create spectacular headdresses. The hairpieces are brought out for special occasions and carefully woven around horn-shaped headdresses fitted to the heads of the young women and girls... Every wig is passed down from mother to daughter and includes not just yarn and twine but also the hair from a line of female ancestors which the owners of the headdresses claim go back hundreds of years.

Via Curiosités de Titam.

Beware of deputies with schizophrenia

There's a term for this type of grammatical awkwardness, but I can't think of it.  Not an eggcorn.  Someone may know.

Addendum: Someone always does, at this blog.  A hat tip to Dumpsterkitty for identifying it as a "crash blossom" - which I have blogged before.  Not once (LOL example).  Not twice.  But three times (a huge list of examples).

Someday I'll learn the term.  Until then I'll rely on my readers...

This is a living creature

I find this photo to be endlessly fascinating.  The creature is a single-cell organism (Nassula).

And it has all that is needed for life.  What is it that converts this combination of membranes and complex molecules into a "living" organism capable of eating and reproducing.  It staggers my mind to think about it.

Photo credit: Mr. Riccardo Taiariol, La Spezia, Italy, using differential interference contrast at 25x, from an Olympus Bioscapes gallery.

Coathangers recycled into birds' nests

This is done by the birds, typically crows in Japanese cities where sticks for constructing nests are difficult to come by.

Details (and additional photos) at Amusing Planet, via Neatorama.

Columbine-style school massacre narrowly averted

As reported in today's StarTribune, a "nice kid" in Minnesota had accumulated a storehouse of weapons in preparation for a widespread massacre.

WASECA, MINN. – John David LaDue had it all figured out. He would kill his mother, father and sister and then create a diversion to keep first responders busy while he went to Waseca Junior/Senior High School to wreak havoc.

There, the 17-year-old planned to set off pressure-cooker bombs full of nails and metal ball bearings in the cafeteria. Students who weren’t maimed or killed would be gunned down in the halls, he told police...

LaDue had planned and practiced for 10 months, refining the chemicals in his bombs to try to find a more lethal combination. He set off “practice bombs” on the playground at Hartley Elementary School, Faith United Methodist Church, Oak Park and high school softball fields. Some of those bombs were found in March, raising concerns.

The criminal complaint said LaDue told police that he originally planned the attack for April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre that killed 13 people in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. That was thwarted because that day was Easter Sunday and there was no school...

LaDue said he had an SKS assault rifle with 400 rounds of ammunition, a 9mm handgun with ammo and a gun safe with more firearms, all in his bedroom at home. He gave an officer the key to the gun safe and the key to his guitar case, where he said they’d find his notebook.

He told police that he planned to kill his parents and sister with a .22-caliber rifle because it would make less noise than some of his other firearms. Then, he said, he planned to go to the surrounding countryside and start a fire. While police and firefighters were busy, he would go back to the school with bombs, firearms and ammunition. He planned to set off pressure cooker bombs in recycling boxes near the water fountains in the cafeteria and would shoot school liaison officer Jared Chrz “so that he did not stop him from his plans for killing more students,” the document said.

LaDue told police that “if he had brought a gun with him to the storage unit … he would have shot the responding officers,” the complaint said.

Seven firearms and three completed bombs were found in LaDue’s bedroom, the complaint said. Another three bombs, along with chemicals and other materials, were found in the storage unit. LaDue also had 60 pounds of metal ball bearings...

There were no clues evident from the student's personality:

LaDue was described by Waseca schools Superintendent Tom Lee as a “good kid,” who was quiet and a B student who made the honor roll. He was never in trouble at school and never had any dealings with Chrz, Lee said...

“This little boy was shy, he never talked, always followed the leader,” she said. “I’m absolutely amazed...

Lee said there hadn’t been any reports in junior or senior high school that LaDue had been bullied...

“John was normal in every aspect. He was courteous. … He asked questions and followed instructions very well. He loved music and his guitar and did really well. He was polite and said thank you after every lesson.”

The only reason he was caught was that a lady looked out her window at the right time:

Chelsie Schellhas was washing dishes Tuesday night when she noticed a boy with a backpack and a fast-food bag walking through her back yard toward the nearby MiniMax Storage Units. “He walked through the puddles when there was a perfectly good road he could have walked on,” she said. “It just didn’t seem right to me..."

I'm going to close Comments for this post.  You can read more details at the StarTribune, where there is a news video.

An elaborately painted morning star

This morning star was photographed in Luhansk, Ukraine and was one of the pictures of the day at The Telegraph.  I found more information on the history of the weapon at Wikipedia:

The spikes distinguish it from a mace, which can have, at most, flanges or small knobs... The morning star first came into widespread use around the beginning of the fourteenth century, particularly in Germany where it was known as Morgenstern... Although it is often assumed that the morning star was a crude peasant weapon, that is not entirely correct...

Photo credit: Vailey Fedosenko/Reuters.

Judging wine judges

As reported in The Telegraph:

A few years ago, a frustrated vintner named Robert Hodgson, who had a background in statistics, thought of a way of testing the testers. He wondered what would happen if he supplied 100 wines for consideration but, without the judges knowing, slipped each wine to them three different times...

Having sought the agreement of the chief judge, G M “Pooch” Pucilowski, Hodgson ran his study for four consecutive years. When the results were calculated, they staggered him, disappointed Pooch and infuriated others...

“We gave each judge a flight of 30 wines,” he says. “They’d all have three samples of the same wine, but they didn’t know it. These samples were arranged randomly. When I first saw the results I could hardly believe them. They scored the identical wines like they were different. It was staggering.” Out of a 20-point scale (scored, for esoteric reasons, between 80-100), an identical drink would typically vary by four points from one tasting to the next.

More at the link, including a discovery that judges who were excellent one year might not be able to repeat their performance on subsequent years.

Don't believe everything you "see"

To move the slider you need to visit the image source at eChalk, where there are two additional color illusions.  I tried to verify the illuson by taking screencaps of the two squares:

The differences are minimized but not eliminated.  Perhaps there is also a factor introduced by my monitor's color rendering and screen resolution.

Hayley, age 6, with her gun

A report at The Guardian features some of America's children with their guns.

What I found was that there are loads of children out there in America with their own guns, but not that many parents who are happy to have their kids' portraits taken with those guns."

"What I came away with was the sense that there was a lot of fear and paranoia among the adults, and that fear was handed down to the children along with the guns. The children have childlike imaginations and the usual childhood fears – zombies, monsters and wild beasts. They are not born with these adult fears; they are infected with them."..

On her journey, Kesteleyn encountered "mostly ordinary families who loved their kids and trained them to use the guns safely and responsibly". Nevertheless, she remained bemused and disturbed. "The adults talked about protection all the time. They believe that you have to have guns to protect yourself from the other bad people out there with guns who want to do you harm."

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre delineated (and stoked) those fears in his recent speech at the organization's annual convention:

"We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all."

Quod erat demonstrandum.  

Why did lighthouse keepers go mad?

It wasn't the solitude. The Old Salt Blog explains:

In the 19th century, lighthouse keepers had a high frequency of madness and suicide.  Many assumed that they went mad from solitude and the demands of the job. It turns out it was something simpler and more sinister.

Fresnel lenses were the great lighthouse innovation of the 19th century.  The lenses developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel greatly increased the intensity and range of the lighthouse beacon. For rotating lights, just as importance as the strength of the light, however, was maintaining a specific speed of rotation, so that if the chart said that the light flashed every twenty seconds, the light, in fact, rotated so that the light was visible every twenty seconds.  The best near zero-friction bearing of the day was created by floating the light and the lens on a circular track of liquid mercury.  When dust, dirt or other impurities built up in the mercury, part of the light house keeper’s job was to strain the mercury through a fine cloth.

For an exhaustive academic study of the subject, see Lighthouse Keeper's Madness: Folk Legend, or Something more Toxic? in the Proceedings of the 11th Annual History of Medicine Days at the University of Calgary.

The last operating lighthouse Fresnel lens in the United States is in the Split Rock Lighthouse near Two Harbors along Minnesota's famed North Shore of Lake Superior (top photo).

Their blog entry from 2009 describes the extreme precautions taken nowadays when the lens needs to be serviced:

Nearly two gallons of mercury was drained, and the mercury bowl and float cleaned, and the mercury replaced.  The very small surface area of mercury that is exposed to the air when the float is closed was covered with mineral oil to stop any mercury exposure to the air.

How to win the "Google Game"

Some years ago it was popular to challenge people to a "Google Game" in which participants would type a sequence of words (without quotation marks) into Google trying to come up with the fewest hits. 

The surprising result is that combinations like kangaroo holocaust or incandescent duodenum still generate hits by the tens of thousands.  Yesterday while searching for a poem I discovered that thpring kythia generates just a single hit to my old post.

This will continue to be an unbeatable combination unless and until someone else uses the words while linking to my entry.