Music recorded on xrays

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock 'n' roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives...
 
"They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole," says author Anya von Bremzen. "You'd have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha's brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens."

You learn something every day.  Image and text from NPR.

Abraham Lincoln's swollen right hand

Chicago artist Leonard Volk produced... the casts of Lincoln’s hands on May 20, two days after the Republican Party nominated him for the presidency. Lincoln’s right hand was still swollen from shaking hands with supporters. To steady his hand in the mold, Lincoln went out to the woodshed and cut off a piece of broom handle. Volk later placed the piece of handle in the cast displayed here.

Further information at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Choctaw code talkers - from World War I

Most readers will already be familiar with the Navajo code talkers who served vital roles during the second World War.  I, for one, however, didn't realize that code talking was first made use of during the Great War.

In the autumn of 1918, US troops were involved in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive on the Western Front. It was one of the largest frontline commitments of American soldiers in WW1, but communications in the field were compromised. The Germans had successfully tapped telephone lines, were deciphering codes and repeatedly capturing runners sent out to deliver messages directly...

The solution was stumbled upon by chance, an overheard conversation between two Choctaw soldiers in the 142nd Infantry Regiment. The pair were chatting in camp when a captain walked by and asked what language they were speaking...

"Using the Choctaw language had huge advantages," says Dr William Meadows of Missouri State University, the only academic to have studied and written extensively on the Choctaw code talkers. "It was a largely unknown language. Only a few American Indian tribes had more than 20,000 people so their languages weren't widely spoken and most weren't written down...

Even if the Germans were listening, they couldn't understand. It was also the quickest way of coding and decoding information, faster than any machine, giving US troops a crucial edge over the enemy... It is believed none of the languages or codes used have ever been broken by an enemy.

Further details at the BBC, where note is made of this irony:

But at the same time,the Choctaw language was under pressure back in the US. It was a time of cultural assimilation. Government attempts to "civilise" American Indians involved putting their children in state-run boarding schools, where they were often severely punished for speaking in their native tongue.

Texas school forbids children taking sunscreen on field trips

After several decades of surfing the web it has become progressively more difficult to be shocked by reports of unusual behavior.  But every now and then one encounters an example of human stupidity so egregious, so far below two standard deviations of normal intellectual activity, that one can't help but wonder at the complexities of human psychology.  To wit...

Riggs said her 10-year-old daughter went on a school field trip recently and came back sun-burned. Riggs said district policy didn’t allow her daughter to bring sunscreen to reapply... Riggs said skin cancer runs in her family and her father recently passed away from it.

But, North East Independent School District spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said sunscreen is considered a medication, something children need a doctor’s note to have at school.

“Typically, sunscreen is a toxic substance, and we can’t allow toxic things in to be in our schools,” Chancellor said.
 
“We have to look at the safety of all of our students and we can’t allow children to share sunscreen,” she said. “They could possibly have an allergic reaction (or) they could ingest it. It’s really a dangerous situation.”

It's Texas.  It's institutional educational systems.  It's zero-tolerance policy running amok.  It's stupid.  It's irrational.  But it's real life.  God help us.

Preserved tapeworm necklace

Commercially available from MyParasites.

Quebec has passed a "death with dignity" bill

Congratulations to the enlightened legislators of Quebec.

Terminally ill patients in Quebec now have the right to choose to die. The non-partisan Bill 52, also known as an act respecting end-of-life care, passed Thursday afternoon in a free vote at the National Assembly in Quebec City.  The bill passed 94-22. There were no abstentions.

The main indicator for requesting medical aid in dying is "an incurable disease, an incurable illness, which is causing unbearable suffering."

Bunyip

"The bunyip, or kianpraty, is a large mythical creature from Aboriginal mythology, said to lurk in swamps, billabongs, creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes. The origin of the word bunyip has been traced to the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language of Aboriginal people of South-Eastern Australia...

 [One] suggestion is that the bunyip may be a cultural memory of extinct Australian marsupials such as the Diprotodon, Zygomaturus, Nototherium or Palorchestes. This connection was first formally made by Dr George Bennett of the Australian Museum in 1871, but in the early 1990s, palaeontologist Pat Vickers-Rich and geologist Neil Archbold also cautiously suggested that Aboriginal legends "perhaps had stemmed from an acquaintance with prehistoric bones or even living prehistoric animals themselves... When confronted with the remains of some of the now extinct Australian marsupials, Aborigines would often identify them as the bunyip.""

Why would a dog repeatedly bury live frogs?

The following story was published in Dog Stories From The Spectator : Being Anecdotes Of The Intelligence, Reasoning Power, Affection And Sympathy Of Dogs, Selected From The Correspondence Columns Of The Spectator by J St Loe Strachey (1895):

[Feb. 2, 1895.] I venture to send you the following story I have lately heard from an eye-witness, and to ask whether you or any of your readers can throw any light upon the dog’s probable object. The dog in question was a Scotch terrier. He was one day observed to appear from a corner of the garden carrying in his mouth, very gently and tenderly, a live frog. He proceeded to lay the frog down upon a flower-bed, and at once began to dig a hole in the earth, keeping one eye upon the frog to see that it did not escape. If it went more than a few feet from him, he fetched it back, and then continued his work. Having dug the hole a certain depth, he then laid the frog, still alive, at the bottom of it, and promptly scratched the loose earth back into the hole, and friend froggy was buried alive! The dog then went off to the corner of the garden, and returned with another frog, which he treated in the same way. This occurred on more than one occasion; in fact, as often as he could find frogs he occupied himself in burying them alive.

The rest of the 1895 story, and one possible explanation, is at The Public Domain Review.

"Merveilleuses of 1908"

These fashionable ladies stepping out at Longchamp at the turn of the last century were described as the new Merveilleuses by April-Mo at Deviant Art.

The Incroyables ("incredibles") and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuses ("marvelous women", roughly equivalent to "fabulous divas"), were members of a fashionable aristocratic subculture in Paris during the French Directory (1795–1799). Whether as catharsis or in a need to reconnect with other survivors of the Reign of Terror, they greeted the new regime with an outbreak of luxury, decadence, and even silliness. They held hundreds of balls and started fashion trends in clothing and mannerisms that today seem exaggerated, affected, or even effete (decadent, self-indulgent).

Via Alabaster.

Vintage Bob Dylan (1964)

YouTube link.

Posted to commemorate last week's 73rd birthday of our generation's premier poet.

Literary critic Christopher Ricks suggests that the song transcends the political preoccupations of the time in which it was written. Ricks argues that Dylan is still performing the song, and when he sings "Your sons and your daughter/Are beyond your command", he sings inescapably with the accents not of a son, no longer perhaps primarily a parent, but with the attitude of a grandfather. Ricks concludes: "Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children look like becoming yuppies. And then Republicans..."

Via a little bit of this, a little bit oft hat, a little more of.

Untrimmed horse hooves

There may be more pathology at play here rather than just a simple lack of trimming.
Some horse owners/enthusiasts out there may be able to clarify.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader Mirar, who found one explanation offered in a Reddit thread:

[T]his is laminitis. Its caused from over eating and the rotation of the coffin bone in the hoof. It's this bad because the horse hasn't had hoof care in a while.

Second addendum:  And, as usual, a regular reader here (Mel V.) offers this more detailed analysis:

This is the result of years of neglect. Laminitis is quite possibly comorbid, but it doesn't cause hoof overgrowth.

Laminitis is a breakdown of the tissues (lamine) that connect the hoof wall to the bone. It is as excruciatingly painful as it sounds. It's most commonly caused by a too-rich diet, but it can also be caused by other problems, like severely neglected and distorted hooves. Diagnosis usually requires taking an x-ray and looking at the position of the bone in the hoof (looking for 'rotation of the coffin bone'). Hooves grow like our fingernails, so the hoof shape can be fixed eventually, but laminitis is much more difficult to repair and can be so painful that euthanization is the only humane option.

Additional details and links are in his comment.

Third addendum:  Found by reader Nolandda:

Google image search seems to indicate that this is a photo of the case of "Dusty the Pony".   This post at Strange Biology has a somewhat happy ending as Joel Hulst in Minnesota has apparently significantly improved the condition of the poor animal.

Photo found at imgur (via The Soul is Bone) without attribution to the original source; no comparable image found with a TinEye reverse image search.

"Eggcorn" explained

Last week the Columbia Journalism Review made note of The Eggcorn Database:

Eggcorns are not just misspellings, or things that make no sense, like malapropisms or crash blossoms. They do make sense...

Thus we have eggcorns like “he is at her beckon call,” instead of “beck and call.” The image is of a woman signaling to a man to move closer, “beckoning” him.”..

We also have a “bold-faced lie” instead of the original idiom, a “bald-faced lie.” When you are being particularly “bold” about a lie, or it is printed in “bold” or headline type, the eggcorn makes sense. “Bald-faced” traces to the meaning of “bald” as worthless or paltry; it has its own predecessor in the “bare-faced lie.”...

Eventually, many “eggcorns” may become standard English... One that is close is “hone in on,” which we have been railing against for years as an eggcorn of “home in on. 

More at both links. ("Eggcorn," btw, is an eggcorn for "acorn").

Bat scat is phat

It's not as colorful as, say, unicorn poop, but it does sparkle:

It’s a diet of insects that puts the shine in bat guano. Insects’ exoskeletons, or hard outer coverings, are made of chitin. Chitin is chemically a lot like plant cellulose; it’s difficult to digest, and passes through a gut relatively unchanged...

You learn something every day.

Photo credit: Grover Schrayer at Flickr.

"Phat" = (slang: excellent): cool (slang), excellent, fab (dated slang), rad (dated slang), super, wicked (slang)

Memento mori in graphic form

Found at Strategy and Analytics, where there is also a companion graph showing expected remaining years of life vs. current age.  Data from the U.S. Social Security Administration.

Why koalas are sometimes "treehuggers"

From an interesting report in Wired:

In a new paper in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, a team of Australian and American researchers report that as temperatures rise, koalas tend to put more of their bodies in contact with the trees they inhabit. The science behind this involves something called conductive heat transfer, wherein a warm object (say, a koala) transfers heat to a cooler one (like a tree) and both objects approach the same temperature. The trees stay cool by sucking up water hidden deep in the soil from the baking sun...

They found that as it got hotter outside, the koalas tended to sit lower in the trees, in a posture now formally described in the scientific literature as “tree-hugging.” In milder weather, the koalas sat higher, reclined back, or rolled themselves into balls.

“Koalas have a very limited diet and so will, when given the opportunity, choose food trees,” says Warren Porter, a co-author and professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. However, the koalas preferred acacia trees over eucalyptus in warmer weather. That makes sense: the acacias, which the koalas do not eat, tended to be 6.5 – 8.5°F cooler than the eucalyptus trees the koalas dine on.

Butterflies also take advantage of conductive heat transfer, but in their case it is used to warm their bodies on cool days.