Every polluted river needs one of these

YouTube link.

"In an effort to battle the polluted water of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, Clearwater Mills' John Kellett and Daniel Chase helped design a solar-paneled, water-powered trash devourer that aims to make the harbor swimmable by 2020.

The Water Wheel works by funneling debris in, pushing the trash onto a conveyer belt and running the loaded conveyer belt into a dumpster. When the dumpster is full, the dock is released, hooked up to a boat and taken to a RESCO waste-to-energy plant, where it is converted to electrical energy."

A 9/11 Memorial bookmark

Offered for sale at the 9/11 Memorial Museum Store (along with a wide variety of other items).  Some people are questioning the appropriateness of such souvenirs.  An artile at The Guardian compares these to souvenirs that can also be purchased at the Auschwitz-Birkenau official online website, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and other similar locales.

Kuwaiti clown car

YouTube link.

There must be some kind of visual trickery here, but I don't know how it was done.  Was an image of the van digitally pasted over a bus? When the last man exits the van, his body size seems to change between the back of the vehicle and the doorstep. A trick of perspective, or a clue to the methodology?

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.  The watermark indicates another via here.

Trash or treasure?

 

Found in an accumulation of glassware at an auction several weekends ago.  I wanted to get a certain glass kitchen item, but the bidding was for the entire "flat" containing 6-7 pieces.  The other objects in the flat were ordinary juicers and bowls, but this one was unusual.  It appears to be some form of art glass.  The bottom shows no maker marks -


- so I presume this is some home-crafted hobby work in which the artist has painstakingly applied many hundreds of colored glass rectangles to a preformed vase.  The result is visually striking -

- but we have no use for it.  Before bundling it with the other glassware and taking it to Goodwill, I thought I'd show it to the more artistically-inclined readers here to ask if this item conforms to any particular style of American handcrafts.  I'm not under any illusions of it being a valuable piece of studio glass.

"Mind-reading" magic tricks explained

To an observer, it looks like this. The magician is blindfolded and faces a wall while his confederate goes around the audience, asking people to place on a tray any random items that they happen to be carrying with them. Coins, eyeglasses, wrist watches, credit cards--anything at all. Audience members also have the option to select playing cards from a deck.

The confederate then holds up each item silently. No apparent way exists for the confederate to communicate with the magician, but somehow, the magician knows all.

Further details and explanation at Boing Boing.

This isn't your grandfather's football stadium

YouTube link.

The video above was used by the management of the Minnesota Vikings in their (successful!) bid to host the 2018 Super Bowl.

As I watched the computer graphics of the pending new stadium, I couldn't help but wonder what the early titans of the game (Vince Lombardi, Bud Grant, George Halas) would have thought about how the NFL has morphed from a game to a business.

"Pay dirt" reconsidered

The term "pay dirt" is in common use and familiar to everyone as a reference to earth or gravel containing gold.  In my experience the idiom has conventionally been used to refer to the discovery of great riches.  But during a recent reading of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, I encountered several passages in which the term carried a more muted connotation:

Moody was not, truth be told, a terribly skilful prospector: he was hoping for nuggets rather than panning for dust.  Too often the ore-bearing gravel slipped through the netting at the bottom of the cradle, only to be washed away; sometimes he emptied his cradle twice over without finding any flakes at all.  He was making what the diggers called "pay dirt," meaning that the sum total of his weekly income was more or less equal to the sum total of his weekly expenditure, but it was a holding pattern he could not sustain. (p. 525)

And again:

"This claim," he said, gesturing.  "Pay dirt only.  Very small gold." (p.531)
We made only pay dirt during our first year in Otago. (p. 709)

As far as I can tell, "pay dirt" is an Americanism that emigrated to the Australian and NZ goldfields.  Whether the connotation changed from vast riches to a sustainable return, or whether the usage in this book simply reflects Catton's understanding of the idiom is unclear to me, but it certainly seems to be a different usage of the term.

Olympia Marble (Euchloe olympia)

I have been chasing this butterfly for about five years.  Yesterday I finally managed to capture one on film.

The Olympia Marble is not rare or endangered; it is found across the United States in scattered environments suitable for its host plants (rock cress), and it is more secure in Wisconsin than in any other state.  But it can be difficult to photograph.  It is univoltine (one generation a year), with a flight period restricted to a month or two in the spring.  It spends the rest of the summer in the larval stage, then pupates into a chrysalis for the fall and winter, rendering it susceptible to prescribed burns.

For years I have driven a couple hours north of Madison to participate in the early-spring field trip by members of the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association to the Bauer-Brockway Barrens State Natural Area to view the sometimes-abundant Olympia Marbles and a variety of elfins and Karner Blues.  Yesterday morning I tracked several dozen Marbles but was - as in previous years - repeatedly frustrated by my inability to get close enough to this butterfly.  In the field, on the wing, the Olympia Marble looks like an all-white butterfly, a vigorous flyer that nectars only briefly.  When it settles, the topside spots (and the wing shape) distinguish it from the common Cabbage White.  But you need to get up close and personal to appreciate the real beauty of this creature on the underside of the forewing, where there is a delicate green marbling pattern.

Yesterday, after two hours of walking through the jack pine woods and sand prairies, I found the fellow at top, who responded to my request that he hold still while I got down on my belly and crept toward him.  With the lens about six inches away from the rock cress blossom that was blowing around on a windy day, I fired off 25-30 pix before I finally got the autofocus to center of the marble's wings rather than the background vegetation.

One more item from my bucket list finished.

"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the passion of a beast in a trap..."

Google Street View continues to expand its offerings.  You can now virtually explore national parks in the United States and Canada.

The website of Minnesota's DNR links to an EagleCam, where you can monitor the progress of a newly-hatched eaglet.  With an overabundance of caution, they warn that "content may not be suitable for younger viewers."

Daylight savings time introduces a glitch into the birth of twins:  "Allison's time of birth was 1:06 a.m., which makes her 26 minutes older than her brother even though he was born first."

Beware of spam on Google Maps.

Had a rough day?  Compare your life to that of a Romanian living during the Ceausescu regime.  "Part of the sentence was a five-month period of torture by solitary confinement and starvation while wearing 45kg of chains day and night..."

A full-bush Brazilian is "the exact opposite of non-Brazilian bikini waxes, which shape the hair on the pubic mound but leave the undercarriage untouched."

A Salon article describes Shenna Bellows of Maine as "America’s most progressive Senate nominee."

The state of Tennessee will use lottery proceeds to provide free community college education to all high school graduates.

Keyboard tricks for Mac users.

Everyone who has played D&D is familiar with 4-sided dies and 20-sided dies.  Meet the 1-sided die.  (Try to figure out how to make one before you access the link).

"Numbers stations" are shortwave radio stations that are "probably remain the best option for transmitting information to agents in the field, some espionage experts suggest... It is easy. You just send the spies to a country and get them to buy a radio."

A belated happy fifth blogiversary to Rob's Webstek.

If you dislike the Koch brothers, here is more fuel for your fire.

Wikipedia has a page on the history of the two-cent coin.  I have a couple that I acquired as a child, and they have always fascinated me.

A Saudi Arabian prince went on a hunting spree, killing 1,977 rare houbara bustards.  The bird is considered to be at risk of extinction by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

An interesting map shows almost 5 million U.S. Census tracts that have no people living in them (though that doesn't imply they are wastelands or wilderness; some are urban warehouse districts).

Speculation that limitation of lifespan might be in part related to loss of stem cells (and therefore that banking of one's own stem cells might be used to prolong life).

"Normcore" is "the trend among the privileged toward anti-fashion clothes of the kind available at Wal-Mart" (also discussed in this NYT article)

"...kids would rather wear the blah average than try to keep up with an impossibly fragmented youth scene.The subject here is not the youth of America generally, but a very specific subset—the clued-in “über-elites,” the “truly cool,” the jeunesse dorée who are the marketing world’s No. 1 target."

If you are a film buff who has always heard about the Bunuel and Dali's 1929 film "Un Chien Andalou," but have only seen still images of the razor blade slashing the eyeball or the ants emerging from the severed hand, you can now view the movie in its entirety here.

The sentences used for the title of this post are the opening words from one of my favorite sci-fi books, Alfred Bester's acclaimed novel "The Stars My Destination," which continues...

He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. Then he lifted his mute face to Eternity and muttered: "What's a matter, me? Help, you goddamn gods! Help, is all."

Blasphemy came easily to him: it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the gutter school of the twenty-fifth century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue. Of all brutes in the world he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive. So he struggled and prayed in blasphemy; but occasionally his raveling mind leaped backward thirty years to his childhood and remembered a nursery jingle:

"Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place
And death's my destination."

If you are fascinated by the concept of teleportation, check out this book.

De-feeted shoe

Long-time readers of TYWKIWDBI know that this blog has a separate category for severed feet posts.  This was stimulated by an "epidemic" of severed feet washing ashore in the Washington/Puget Sound area about five years ago.  Now another foot has appeared in the same area:

The discovery of a human foot in a running shoe on the Seattle waterfront this week is at least the 15th such appendage found along the Pacific Northwest coastline since 2007.

The human foot in a white New Balance tennis shoe was found Tuesday morning on the shore at Centennial Park, just north of downtown, by volunteers cleaning the park, Port of Seattle spokesman Peter McGraw told NBC News. The foot was turned over to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office for further investigation. 

The King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday released a photo of the shoe – a New Balance athletic sneaker, men’s size 10-1/2, white with blue trim – in hopes the public could help identify its wearer. It said the foot also was clad in a black, cotton Hanes brand sock. 

More details at the link.  If the embedded photo looks like your shoe, check your feet.  If one of them is missing, please contact Seattle authorities.

Earliest First American found in underwater cave - updated

As blogged in March, 2011:

Explorers cave-diving in the Yucatan have found a human skull and the remains of a mastodon.  Excerpts from the National Geographic report:

Hoyo Negro was reached by the PET team after the divers travelled more than 4,000 feet [1,200 meters] through underwater passages using underwater propulsion vehicles, or scooters, which enabled them to cover long distances in the flooded cave system...

While the team of explorers conducted various dives for the purpose of mapping and surveying of this newly discovered pit, they noticed some peculiar bones sitting on the bottom. They first came across several megafauna remains and what was clearly a mastodon bone, while subsequent dives proved even more exciting when they spotted a human skull resting upside down with other nearby remains at about 140 feet [43 meters] depth...

Approximately 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, Earth experienced great climatic changes. The melting of the ice caps caused a dramatic rise in global sea levels, which flooded low lying coastal landscapes and cave systems. Many of the subterranean spaces that once provided people and animals with water and shelter became inundated and lost until the advent of cave diving...

Radiometric dating of the human bones from Hoyo Negro will have to wait for now, but its location within the cave, and its position relative to the mastodon remains, are suggestive of its antiquity.

The results of this finding should definitively establish the existence of pre-Clovix humans in the New World.  I have always felt that Tom Dillehay's excavations at Monte Verde (Chile) had established a pre-Clovis timeline, but others have questioned his data.  The fact that Hoyo Negro has a skull - not just artifacts - should be definitive.

Update, May 2014:

A flurry of articles appeared this morning, all reporting on the announcement of the results of extensive testing on the skull from the Mexican cave.  This from Discover:

Researchers announced today that Naia’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) shares a genetic lineage with Native Americans. The lineage, known as haplogroup D1, derived from the northwest Asian haplogroup D and is unique to the Americas. Just as importantly, researchers found no genetic evidence suggesting Naia had ancestors from elsewhere. The Hoyo Negro find proves at least some ancestors of modern Native Americans had Paleoamerican features, effectively shutting down the theories that contended it was not possible. Speaking to reporters about the Hoyo Negro results on Wednesday, researchers involved with the study suggested that the craniofacial features specific to modern Native Americans could easily have evolved in a few thousand years, well after the first Americans were established here...

The divers also found [in the same cave] the remains of at least 26 animals, including sabertooth cats (Smilodon fatalis) and the elephant-like gomphothere (Cuvieronius cf. tropicus), both now extinct. At the time Naia lived, the enormous cavern — about 170 feet deep and 200 feet in diameter — was about five miles inland from the Caribbean and not submerged...

Because the underwater environment was poor for preserving bone collagen, researchers were unsuccessful in their attempts to date the bones of both human and animal remains using radiocarbon dating. Instead, the team relied on three separate methods. First, they aggregated data about sea levels in the area over the past several thousand years and determined when Hoyo Negro filled with water, concluding that the bones found there must have been deposited before then. The team also took note of the approximate extinction dates of the animal species found in the same area as Naia.

Finally, researchers conducted isotopic analysis of crystals growing on both human and animal bones found in the caves. They were able to determine when the crystals began growing and whether they were exposed to air or were underwater, allowing them to narrow down the age of the skeleton from 12,000-13,000 years old.

Other researchers on the international team sequenced the mtDNA extracted from one of the skeleton’s teeth; two additional labs independently performed the same sequencing to verify the results...

More at that link.  The Washington Post offered this graphic of the layout of the cave and its water levels:

Note the scale of the divers in relation to the cave and the extraordinarily difficult access.

The divers found her on a ledge, her skull at rest on an arm bone. Ribs and a broken pelvis lay nearby. She was only 15 years old when she wandered into the cave on the Yucatan Peninsula, and in the darkness she must not have seen the enormous pit looming in front of her...

The distinct morphology of the Paleoamericans is most famously found in the “Kennewick Man,” a 9,000-year-old skeleton discovered two decades ago along the Columbia River in Washington state. Facial reconstruction resulted in someone who looked a bit like the actor Patrick Stewart... Scientists theorized that he could have been related to populations in East Asia that spread along the coast and eventually colonized Polynesia. Under that scenario, more recent Native Americans could be descended from a separate migratory population.

Chatters said in an interview, “For 20 years I’ve been trying to understand why the early people looked different. The morphology of the later people is so different from the early ones that they don’t appear to be part of the same population.” He went on: “Do they come from different parts of the world? This comes back with the answer, probably not.”

One of the co-authors of the paper, Deborah Bolnick, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said the new genetic tests support the hypothesis of a single ancestral population for Native Americans...

Why did Naia go into that cave and to her doom? Perhaps, Chatters said, she was in search of water in an era when the Yucatan was parched. Or perhaps she was following an animal. She would have been, under his scenario, a Wild Style person, a risk-taker. And so she went forward — into the cave, through the darkness, falling into the distant future.

I will certainly look forward to the upcoming televised National Geographic/Nova special on this discovery.

The Case of the Teeny-Tiny Book

The shortest Sherlock Holmes story is in a 1.5" book in the library of a dollhouse constructed for George V's wife, Queen Mary.  The story was written by Conan Doyle specifically for the dollhouse book:

Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table. Holmes happened to look up and catch his eye.

‘Well, Watson, what are you thinking about?’ he asked.

‘About you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, Holmes. I was thinking how superficial are these tricks of yours, and how wonderful it is that the public should continue to show interest in them.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Holmes. ‘In fact, I have a recollection that I have myself made a similar remark.’

‘Your methods,’ said Watson severely, ‘are really easily acquired.’

‘No doubt,’ Holmes answered with a smile. ‘Perhaps you will yourself give an example of this method of reasoning.’..

You can finish reading the 503-word story ("How Watson Learned the Trick") at Futility Closet, from whose podcast I first learned about the existence of the book.  More about their podcasts later, after I've finished auditing the series.

Photo [of a different book in the library] via Decor to Adore (scroll down to bottom), where there are many photos of this remarkable dollhouse.

Here is the controversial "I am a Ukranian" video

YouTube link.

"I Am a Ukrainian" is an Internet viral video, first posted on YouTube in 2014 featuring a young Ukrainian woman supporting the protestors in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. It was directed by documentary maker Ben Moses. By late March that year the video has been viewed about 8 million times...

The video has received a mostly positive reception, with the majority of the tens of thousands of comments in support. A February 21 count on YouTube gave the video about 70,000 "likes" and 4,000 "dislikes." A minority of voices, primarily those opposed to the revolution, argued that it is too one-sided. 

The professional production values have led some to suspect that the project is an outgrowth of an American think tank or the CIA.

I'll defer any commentary and hope for some comments from the Ukranian readers of this blog (139 visits in the past month, mostly from Kyiv city and from Ternopil's'ka, Lviv, and Odessa oblasts).

Word trivia: corgwn

"Corgi" is a Welsh word - a compound of cor (“dwarf”) and ci (“dog”).  The proper plural form is thus "Corgwn" -

"Oh, look, there go Daniel Craig, the Queen, and her two corgwn"

- which I believe would be pronounced something like "corgoon."

I list this as "trivia" because the word has been so Anglicized that "corgis" is in common usage, and your use of "corgwn" in a conversation will be seen as pompous intellectualism, unless perhaps you engage your audience by also sharing some of the other English words derived from Welsh (penguin?).

I learned about corgwn from a QI podcast - about which more later after I've finished listening to the lot.

Wind power in ancient Japan

The "fundamental" information:

"He-gassen is a Japanese art scroll from the Edo period featuring a number of people farting at each other, objects, and animals. The scroll was digitized by the Waseda University Library, and is available in full on the organization’s website." 

Several additional images are viewable at Laughing Squid.  Via an old blogging friend, Curiosités de Titam.