te da gi po

Every year the Scrabble gods add new words to the 100,000+ already approved by the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.  This year dubstep, mixtape, hashtag, frenemy, sudoko, and chillax are representative of modern coinages now recognized for game use.  Quinzhee (a shelter hollowed out of a pile of snow) and qajaq are examples of more exotic fare. 

But the real excitement among players centers on the approval of te, da, gi, and po.  Such two-letter combinations can be the key to linking new words onto the board, especially for building high-scoring parallel arrangements.

Google Maps no longer offers "search nearby" function

I recently tried to find a certain type of business near a certain location and discovered that I could no longer use Google Maps for that purpose.  A quick search retrieved this confirmatory article:

Ironically, the [updated] maps appear to have become less customer friendly in one important regard: One of the features that Google maps took away on the left side was the "Search nearby" function. That has many users complaining.

The issue is that instead of showing users common places such as restaurants, cafes, pharmacies or post offices, the default Google Maps appears to be focused on people who are completely unfamiliar with the area. Google Maps now wants to show us photos of nearby tourist attractions...

Earlier today, I tried to find a coffee place to meet with a source. I typed in an address in the general area where I planned to go, figuring I'd hit the "search nearby" function afterward as I normally do. No such button was anywhere to be found. ..

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's frustrated with the "search nearby" function being taken away. SlashDot posted complaints about it about a month ago and more than 400 people posted comments on it in the Google Product Forum.

Google community manager Daniel posted a reply to those comments Feb. 20, saying there are two ways to do a nearby search now... [continued at the link]

Mayflies

A beautiful, delicate creature - and the epitome of "ephemera."

Mayflies spend the majority of their lives in an aquatic environment, emerging as a flying insect in the early summer:

The final moult of the naiad is not to the full adult form, but to a winged subimago that physically resembles the adult, but which is usually sexually immature. The subimagos are generally poor fliers, and typically lack the colouration patterns used to attract mates. The subimago eventually moults to the full adult, making mayflies the only insects where a winged form undergoes moulting.

They live for only a day or two. Some people are offended by the fact that when the mayflies emerge, they do so by the tens of millions, coating lakeside vegetation (and cabins and vehicles and anything in the riparian area), and offering game fish enough free nutrition from their dead bodies that fishing declines for a measureable period.

The photo enlarges to wallpaper with a click (photo credit me).

Addendum:  Reposted from 2009 to add this awesome radar image of a massive emergence of mayflies along the Mississippi River valley near La Crosse, Wisconsin:

Image from the NOAA website, where there are also a dozen or so still images of the effects of the massive swarm on ground structures (especially those lit at night like gas stations).  The Star Tribune and other local newspapers also documented the phenomenon and noted that the masses of mayflies were responsible for a three-car accident on a local highway bridge, but note that the emergence is a favorable sign of local water quality:

By the 1980s, mayflies, stoneflies, caddis flies and even some species of fish had disappeared from the Mississippi River from the Twin Cities area all the way to Lake Pepin. But modern sewage treatment facilities and regulations on disposal of toxic chemicals have brought mayflies, and a healthy food chain, back to most waterways.

How to speak (Doric) Scottish

YouTube link.

This is the first of four videos posted by Catherine The Brave.  It will teach you why you would not want to have a moofae of mayvees, and will come in handy if you ever need to converse with John Farrier's ancestors.

"Zoo jeans" explained

A New Yorker column explores "sartorial slumming" -

It now appears, according to an article on the British Web site The Conversation, that jeans savaged by wild animals are a trend in designer sportswear. A Japanese denim brand had the bright idea, at least for raising its profile, of sewing indigo-dyed cotton fabric around rimless tires, sausage-shaped bolsters, and fat rubber balls, and throwing the objects to the inmates of the Kamine Zoo... When the fabric has been properly “distressed”—i.e., mauled—it is retrieved from the enclosures and made into trousers that are sold under the label Zoo Jeans...

Three pairs of the jeans were auctioned, on July 7th, at a benefit for the zoo. The bidding on “T-1,” a model “designed” by the tigers, reached twelve hundred dollars... The destination of the other jeans seems to be upscale department stores, although a buyer at Selfridges, in London, complained that the rips were “too sporadic.” ..

A writer on Hypebeast suggests duct-taping new jeans to the tires of your car before driving around the block. “Do a couple [of] donuts, burnouts, etc. … then rotate and repeat.”

More at the link. 

Photo credit  Clint Brewer/Splash News/Corbis.

French hospital will incorporate a wine bar

A hospital in south-central France has come up with an unconventional, not to mention extremely French, idea to try to improve the lives of terminally ill patients. It is to open a wine bar that will offer "medically supervised" wine tasting. The bar, which will open in September, will be located at the palliative care centre at the CHU Clermont-Ferrand hospital in Puy-de-Dôme, will be open to patients, their friends and relatives. 

More information at The Local, via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

I remember forty years ago when I lived in Texas several local hospitals, including the VA, had "medicinal alcohol" (gin, vodka, etc) in their formularies.  Any physician could prescribe it for any patient, but it was primarily prescribed to prevent alcoholics from going into withdrawal during a hospitalization (it's surprising how many sweet elderly ladies start getting agitated after several days of forced abstinence during an unexpected hospitalization).  

Medicinal alcohol was also an effective reward that might convince a patient wanting to leave against medical advice to stay another day or two.  The French venture seems to offer the alcohol in the social setting of a bar, which would confer additional advantages, especially to the terminally ill.  One wonders whether eventually medicinal marijuana will be similarly mainstreamed in hospital settings.

Actias luna

I found this big fellow hustling across the grass under a walnut tree.  He had apparently fallen or been dislodged from the foliage above.  He would have made a tasty meal for a bird, so I brought him home and placed him in a terrarium with some walnut leaves.

That same night he spun a cocoon.  This late in the summer I wondered if he was going to enter diapause until next spring, but the transformation to a moth required only about ten days, and one morning I walked out to our screen porch to find this handsome Actias luna (Luna moth) drying his new wings.  That evening he flew away over the treetops.

The complex structure of the antennae identified him as a male, superbly adapted to detect minute quantities of pheromones in the air and track them along their gradient to a female.

Sadly, this beautiful and magnificent creature will live only about one week.  It has no mouth parts and thus cannot feed, surviving only on energy stored during the caterpillar stage.  The moth is really just nature's way of making more caterpillars.

The most-viewed posts in the history of TYWKIWDBI

I was browsing TYWKIWDBI's metrics this morning and was surprised that the most most-viewed item I've ever posted was 2011's "How to tease your dog" - a brief, humorous video that has garnered 134,000 pageviews in just over three years.

Not far behind is the New Yorker cartoon "Watch out if your daddy likes physics," with 112,000 pageviews.

The third most popular had a link to a video explaining how to create this waterfall braid:

I'd like to find out which post has been "most commented on," but Blogger doesn't seem to offer a way to sort the 12,000 posts in that manner.

Self-explanatory

YouTube link.

The original technical description of the "turbo-encabulator" was written by British graduate student John Hellins Quick (1923-1991). It was published in 1944 by the British Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal in an article titled "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" by "J.H. Quick, Student."

More details at Wikipedia. Posted for old friend George Anderson and other classmates who became engineers.

Via Neatorama.

An argument supporting "man eating dog"

The fact that people are eating dog meat? That shouldn't [shock and sadden you]. Unless you're vegetarian or vegan -- I'm not, by the way, although I do try to eat relatively little meat -- you don't have any moral high ground to stand on. Here in the United States... eating dog could be seen as a reasonable alternative to pig, which is another highly intelligent animal....

The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year, according to the ASPCA. Would eating them be so different?

It actually could be seen as helpful...

Euthanizing pets, he says, "amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too."

But wait: Dogs are companions, right? Pigs (mostly) are not.  True, in America.

In parts of Vietnam, not so much.

In India, remember, cows are sacred.

And eating pig is off limits for many Muslim and Jewish people.

... if you refuse to eat only the meat of 'companion' animals -- chewing bacon, for example, while telling Koreans that they can't stew Dalmatians -- you're saying that the morality of killing depends on habit or even whim."

From an op-ed piece at CNN.

FFS

South Africa's animal rights body is probing the death of a giraffe that was reportedly injured as it was being transported on a motorway.

Eyewitnesses say the giraffe, one of two on a truck, hit its head on a bridge on Johannesburg's N1 motorway.

(For those unfamiliar with the term, FFS is defined at the Urban Dictionary.  Warning - profanity).

The opposite of "hoarding" is...

..."minimalism," promoted by a new Apple advertising campaign.

It proposes a lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where people — unburdened by the “fuzz” of possessions — are free to chase down every desire. Like a nomad on the Steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern.

The room of the modern person is stark, but in its simplicity it exudes wealth and sophistication. There is just an iPad and a simple bed or futon. None of the old-time accouterments [sic], which signified intelligence, artistic interest, or a curiosity about the world, are evident. There are no magazines, books, or records anywhere. Just perhaps some high priced toiletries in the bathroom. Everything she needs is on the iCloud...

We’re encouraged to lose our possessions. Music? Store it on the iCloud. Books? Store it on the iCloud. Movies, magazines, newspapers, TV — all are safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.

Meanwhile, those who have hung onto possessions are castigated, jeered at, and painted as fools.

More commentary and polemic at Jacobin.

Sexy peaches

The panty peaches were first developed by a fruit vender in Nanjing, with each pair of underwear slipped on each sexy butt by hand. As SDChina reports, the peaches are from Yangshan, in Wuxi, an area that's also famous for its lingerie and garment industry.

Via Neatorama.

Interspecies empathy? or just curiosity?

YouTube link.

Found at Nothing to do with Arbroath.

"Canadian tuxedo" explained

"As August is just around the corner, now seems like an appropriate time to let you know that both Glamour and Marie Claire... are advocating for the Canadian Tuxedo as The Look for the rest of summer... Marie Claire and Glamour's August issues are devoted to
DENIM..."

More pix and opinions at Jezebel.  With apologies to the many Canadian readers of this blog (who may or may not be offended by the terminology).

A hat tip to reader MathDad for finding a link to a commercial site extolling the Canadian tuxedo (denim ties and bowties available to complete the outfit).