When the teeth treat your thigh like a big pizza pie, that a-moray...

YouTube link.

Moray eels have a second (pharyngeal) jaw.

How dry I am - updated

This is likely to have some effect on food prices in the United States.

Nearly the entire Golden State – 99.81 percent to be exact — is in the grip of drought, according to the latest update from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Nearly 70 percent of the state is suffering from an “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the two highest categories on the Monitor’s rating scale. The snowpack across the entire state is at a measly 35 percent of its normal level...

At this point last year, only a quarter of the state was in drought conditions; now, that much of the state is in exceptional drought alone — marking the first time the Monitor has used that rating in California since its inception in 1999...

I believe much of southern California was traditionally desert, before it was artificially watered by river diversion projects.  Those rivers and reservoirs are severely diminished.  Look for a variety of regional water wars to erupt.

I suspect a variety of already-stressed butterfly populations will also be threatened.

Addendum:  I posted the above in April of 2014.  Now (August) the Washington Post has some updated information:

Now, across California’s vital agricultural belt, nervousness over the state’s epic drought has given way to alarm. Streams and lakes have long since shriveled up in many parts of the state, and now the aquifers — always a backup source during the region’s periodic droughts — are being pumped away at rates that scientists say are both historic and unsustainable.

One state-owned well near Sacramento registered an astonishing 100-foot drop in three months as the water table, strained by new demand from farmers, homeowners and municipalities, sank to a record low. Other wells have simply dried up, in such numbers that local drilling companies are reporting backlogs of six to eight months to dig a new one.

In still other areas, aquifers are emptying so quickly that the land itself is subsiding, like cereal in a bowl after the milk has drained out...

Damage to aquifers is viewed as more serious because, once depleted, an aquifer takes far longer to replenish — often decades or more...

Why Medicare advantage plans want to send a doctor to your house

I recently received a phone message from someone calling "on behalf of my Medicare advantage plan provider," offering to have a medical person visit me in my home.  I knew the plan had offered such, but wasn't clear why.  Is their intention for our mutual benefit (to keep me healthy and lower their costs) or is it something more sinister?  A web search yielded all sorts of speculation on message boards ("they'll find something wrong and cut you off" "they'll spy on your home for excuses to discontinue your coverage" etc).

Today I found at The Center for Public Integrity what seems to be the most logical explanation:

Home visits have risen sharply at many private Medicare health plans, which treat close to 16 million elderly and disabled people under contracts with the federal government.

The health plans tout the voluntary, free annual physicals as a major new benefit that can help selected members stay fit and in their homes as long as possible. While the doctors and nurses don’t offer any treatment during their visit, they report their exam findings to the patient’s primary care physician.

Yet there’s more to this spurt in home visits than the appearance of enhanced elder care. The house calls can be money makers for health plans when they help document medical problems — from complications of diabetes to a history of heart trouble that’s flared up.

Health plans can profit because Medicare pays them higher rates for sicker patients using a billing formula known as a “risk score.” So when a home visit unearths a medical condition, as it often does, health plans may be able to raise a person’s risk score and collect thousands of dollars in added Medicare revenue over a year — even if they don’t incur any added expenses caring for that person...

The cottage industry is flourishing as federal officials struggle to prevent Medicare Advantage plans from overcharging the government by billions of dollars every year...

Lots more at the link.

The giraffe licked her and then kicked her in the face

This week at the Madison zoo, a woman from California was kicked in the face by a giraffe.

Amanda Hall, 24, of San Luis Obispo, climbed over one fence and was almost over the second fence encircling the giraffe enclosure when Wally, a 2-year-old, 12-foot-tall giraffe, licked her before turning and kicking her in the face, according to a Madison Police Department report...

She suffered injuries that were not life-threatening from the kick. Zoo staff told police Hall was lucky to not have been more seriously injured, as giraffes are capable of killing lions...

Hall was cited for harassment of zoo animals, which includes a $686 fine.

"Legs modified for chewing"

It's called Hallucigenia because researchers have scratched their heads over where it fits among life forms since its fossil was discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada's Rocky Mountains in the early 1970s...

A new study of the claws at the end of all those legs revealed... an oddity observed in at least one other place, the weird jaws of velvet worms, which, in the university's synopsis of the report, "are no more than legs modified for chewing."..

The finding is a big deal, said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, a co-author of the study, because it turns what is known about the evolutionary tree of arthropods -- spiders, crustaceans and insects -- on its head. "Most gene-based studies suggest that arthropods and velvet worms are closely related," Ortega-Hernandez said. But "our results indicate that arthropods are actually closer to water bears," he said.

More at the Washington Post.  The full manuscript was published in Nature.

Analysis and discussion of "millennials"

From an article in the New York Times:

Suddenly, as you may have noticed, millennials are everywhere. Not that this group of people born after 1980 and before 2000 — a giant cohort now estimated to number at least 80 million Americans, more than the baby boom generation — was ever invisible. What’s changed is their status. Coddled and helicoptered, catered to by 24-hour TV cable networks, fussed over by marketers and college recruiters, dissected by psychologists, demographers and trend-spotters, the millennial generation has come fully into its own. The word “millennial,” whether as noun or adjective, has monopolized the nonstop cultural conversation, invariably freighted with zeitgeisty import...

What Pew found was not an entitled generation but a complex and introspective one — with a far higher proportion of nonwhites than its predecessors as well as a greater number of people raised by a single parent.

The Pew study is here.  And this is interesting:

“And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time”

"Net neutrality" explained in a cartoon.

An op-ed piece in Time reports that the Iranian sanctions have cost the U.S. "between $134.7 and 175 billion in potential export revenue since 1995."

Here's what happens when you duct tape a GoPro camera to the hubcap of your car.

The Svakom Gaga sex toy vibrator that incorporates a GoPro-type camera; it has a light on the end to allow endoscopic function.  Instructional videos at the link are SFW.

About 5 million Lego pieces fell off a container ship off the coast of Cornwall in 1997.  Ever since then they have been washing up on the beach.

"A tree planted to honor of the memory of the Beatles songwriter George Harrison has been killed by actual beetles."

A boy had 232 teeth removed from his mouth (from an odontoma deep in his lower jaw).

Click here to see an awesome location for a park bench, situated in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia.  (And click again to embiggify).

Kuriositas has assembled a collection of a dozen photos of Skull Rock - a small island with a massive cave - off the coast of Victoria (sample at right).  Way cool.

Footgolf joins "big-hole golf" as another attempt to save the declining fortunes of the sport of golf.  Video at the link explains that you kick a soccer ball around the golf course to a 21-inch hole.  A round can be played in about an hour, which makes it more attractive to the public than the more prolonged time required for conventional golf.  It also allows golf courses to leverage their acreage into an additional revenue generating sport.

Here's the video showing that ice cream from Walmart doesn't melt in the sun.  It's true. And this article explains why - and why it's not intrinsically bad.

Colorado is tightening the rules on edible marijuana (requiring standardized and better labeled doses) to prevent the accidental overconsumption that has generated some bad press.

A 15-minute video explains how to cut an immense wheel of cheese.

Despite the Ebola crisis, illegal bush meat continues to stream into Europe.  "Researchers discovered 11 different types of bush meat from African forests, including whole sheep and calves that were wrapped in plastic and kept in holdalls during flights."  How does someone carry an entire sheep onto an aircraft in their carryon baggage??

If you have any doubts about how corporations own, read about how Nike reprimanded a college coach because his son wore a sweatshirt made by a different company.  " Can we please ask Jimbo to eliminate that from the son's wardrobe in the future! Let me know if I can help w anything. Thx guys."

Prisoners are asked what view they would like to have from their cell.  Volunteers then photograph that view and create wallpaper-size prints for the prisoners' walls.

If you are like me and enjoy going to estate auctions looking for bargains, you should read about "uranium glass" ("Vaseline glass') and why it is so popular.

A group of photographs stuck together can be separated using a mixture of glycerine and water.

If your name is Collier, here is a detailed explanation of some of your remote ancestors' occupations.

An interview with a man alleged to have the "world's largest penis."  He doesn't do porn; his day job is data entry.  Photo at the link (of his face).

A Reddit thread assembled "the worst jokes ever." ("Two peanuts walk into a bar, and one was a salted." - that kind of joke).

Top photo credit Ross Hamilton of Peebles, Ohio with a hat tip to Ted Sokja for sending it along.  The Great Serpent Mound is one of the wonders of the North American continent, a massive logistical and awesome artistic achievement that has graced our landscape for about three millennia.

Hyperlapse video

YouTube link.

Discussed at Reddit.

I have made my own hyperlapse videos using Google Street View images at this link, but haven't figured out how to slow down the replay (other than pausing with a spacebar).  Any ideas?

Millenials are abandoning political parties

From the Pew Research Center:

The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 33, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion... Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues...

Using pine sap for indoor lighting

Indoors, pine sap was seldom made into candles.  It was unnecessary.  A piece of sap cut or pulled from a tree—about the size of a little finger from the tip of it to the knuckle—would burn for longer than an hour.  It was laid on something flat that was heatproof, like a carefully chosen rock with a depression in the top of it.  A lamp in a seashell would not drip tar on a table or cause the shell to break from the heat.  A wick of twisted thread or string was pressed into the sap and lit.  The flame would char the wick until it reached the sap and then set it on fire.  

Text and image from an article about colonial indoor lighting at Colonial American Digressions.

Why you might want to have an eel in your well

A 155-year-old eel living in a Swedish well has died.

"My family bought the cottage in 1962, and we always knew the housepet was included," Mr Kjellman said.

Before public water systems were developed in the 1960s, it was common practice to drop eels in to household wells to get rid of flies and bugs.

"Eels normally only live to be seven years old, they usually get so fat and their intestinal canals stop working. But this one just lived and lived and lived,” said Mr Kjellman...

Åle became something of a celebrity during his decades at the bottom of the well, featuring in numerous Swedish books and TV programmes. 

For some of my years in Kentucky I lived in a semi-rural location with the home's water provided by a cistern rather than a well.  The cistern was recharged by runoff from the roof of an outbuilding.  Because I was not meticulous in cleaning the gutters of leaves and other organic debris, various insect larvae would get washed down the downspout into the cistern and eventually appear in my tapwater.

I should have kept an eel in the cistern.

This bridge is supposed to look like this

It's a stressed ribbon bridge.

George Washington's infertility discussed

Excerpts from an interesting article at the website of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine:

Discussion of George and Martha Washington’s infertility begins with an examination of Washington’s marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (1731–1802) in 1759. At the time of their marriage, Martha was a widow. She had married Daniel Custis at age 17 and had four children by him in 8 years...

These facts make it seem unlikely that George and Martha’s infertility was attributable to Martha: her considerable fecundity is evidenced by the birth of four children in 8 years of marriage to Daniel Custis. Furthermore, no evidence exists that her last pregnancy was complicated by postpartum infection or hemorrhage leading to uterine fibrosis or Asherman’s syndrome, which might have made additional pregnancies impossible...

From his writings, it is clear that Washington desired a child an heir. This, in combination with his intimate relationship with a fertile partner, makes it likely that Washington suffered from male infertility...

The differential diagnosis in the table above is discussed at the link; the article then goes on to discuss the implications of his infertility:

One wonders about the impact of Washington’s infertility on the course of history. Most tempting is to speculate as to whether his lack of an heir impacted on his willingness to return power to the relatively weak Congress at the end of the Revolutionary War. At the war’s conclusion he easily could have contemplated becoming a military dictator or even installing himself as king. Indeed, many on his own general staff urged him to do so (9, p. 403). To his credit, however, Washington resigned his commission and returned to his Virginia farm. This act, wherein the leader of a successful military revolution voluntarily returns power to a civil authority is almost unique in history and is one of the reasons Washington was so revered by his contemporaries and eventually unanimously selected to become the nation’s first president 5 years later in 1788.

A more likely effect of Washington’s infertility was that he tended to nurture promising young men to whom he was not related. Most prominent of these was his favorite, the Marquis de Lafayette...

 More at the link - an interesting read.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid

A tourist seeking to take pictures of Yellowstone National Park crashed a camera-equipped drone into its largest hot spring, possibly damaging the prized geothermal feature, a park official said on Wednesday...

It was not clear if the drone that crashed Grand Prismatic Spring on Saturday and sank into its depths would damage the geothermal feature, park spokesman Al Nash said, and officials were still trying to decide whether to remove it.

More at The Raw Story, including this interesting tidbit:

Fishing Cone Geyser on the edge of Yellowstone Lake was a popular catch-and-cook site for anglers.  “People would... catch a fish and then drop that fish into the thermal feature where it would cook,” said Nash.

He added: “Once it was determined there was arsenic in the geyser water, that practice stopped."

Restaurant adds "minimum wage fee" to its bills

A small cafe in Stillwater has thrown itself into the big battle over Minnesota’s minimum wage increases, inundating the cafe with dozens of phone calls and online comments this week after it tacked on a 35-cent fee to meal tabs.

Oasis Cafe owner Craig Beemer said the fee is needed to offset the 75-cent wage hike that took effect Aug. 1, the first time Minnesota’s minimum wage has increased in a decade. Even with only half a dozen servers, Beemer says it will cost him $10,000 more a year to pay servers $8 an hour instead of the federal rate of $7.25 an hour. Instead of adding it on to food prices, he added the “minimum wage fee” — the only restaurant known to do so in Minnesota so far.

The rest of the story is in the StarTribune.   Photo credit Kelly Smith.

Addendum:  A followup story, also in the StarTribune, on August 20:

Since then, over two weeks ago, Beemer says he has been flooded with criticism and support, and he's even appeared on national television political talk shows. ..

However, Beemer says his business the past two weeks is the best his restaurant has ever experienced. Beemer says every one of his employees supported the surcharge idea before he implemented it.