"Mommy, what's an Icelandic incest-blocker?"

"Well, sweetheart, if you listened to QI podcast #25, you would know that there is an app that informs Icelanders how closely related they are to a new acquaintance.  Additional details are available at the Icelandic Grapevine."

...two random Icelanders have about as much in common as second cousins, once removed, according to Dr. Kári Stefansson, CEO and co-founder of deCODE Genetics...

In early 2013, deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland’s School of Engineering and Natural Sciences challenged the nation’s university students to design a smart phone app for the online genealogical database Íslendingabók for its 10th anniversary.

The Íslendingabók website takes its name from the Book of Icelanders, a 12th century historical text which details the Icelandic settlement. Currently, the database contains 810,000 genealogical records of “the inhabitants of Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back.”..

...one of the novelty features of the winning ÍslendingaApp: the Sifjaspellspillir or “Incest Spoiler” alarm which alerts a user if the person she plans on going home with is a near relation. Using the app’s “new bömp technology,” users can tap their phones together and see how closely they are related. If the alarm has been activated—it’s turned off in default settings—it will either erupt with a discouraging siren, or issue a gleeful “No relation: go for it!” message...

Quilling

I had never heard of this art form until I watched an enjoyable interview with this remarkable young artist at the Hong Kong Tatler:

YouTube link.

Here's more information from Wikipedia:

Quilling or paper filigree is an art form that involves the use of strips of paper that are rolled, shaped, and glued together to create decorative designs. The paper is rolled, looped, curled, twisted and otherwise manipulated to create shapes which make up designs to decorate greetings cards, pictures, boxes, eggs, and to make models, jewellery, mobiles etc. 

During the Renaissance, French and Italian nuns and monks used quilling to decorate book covers and religious items. The paper most commonly used was strips of paper trimmed from the gilded edges of books. These gilded paper strips were then rolled to create the quilled shapes...  In the 18th century, quilling became popular in Europe where gentle ladies of quality ("ladies of leisure") practiced the art.

The word "quill" as an avian appendage dates back to Middle English.  Presumably early artists used to wrap their paper strips around quills.

The top image is an example of the artist's work from her website.

Via The Dish and Neatorama.

Autism as "a disorder of prediction"

From MIT News:

The researchers suggest that autism may be rooted in an impaired ability to predict events and other people’s actions. From the perspective of the autistic child, the world appears to be a “magical” rather than an orderly place, because events seem to occur randomly and unpredictably. In this view, autism symptoms such as repetitive behavior, and an insistence on a highly structured environment, are coping strategies to help deal with this unpredictable world...

“At the moment, the treatments that have been developed are driven by the end symptoms. We’re suggesting that the deeper problem is a predictive impairment problem, so we should directly address that ability,” says Pawan Sinha, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the lead author of a paper describing the hypothesis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week...

This hypothesized deficit could produce several of the most common autism symptoms. For example, repetitive behaviors and insistence on rigid structure have been shown to soothe anxiety produced by unpredictability, even in individuals without autism. “These may be proactive attempts on the part of the person to try to impose some structure on an environment that otherwise seems chaotic,” Sinha says.

Impaired prediction skills would also help to explain why autistic children are often hypersensitive to sensory stimuli...

More at the link.  I don't have the PNAS link, but it's a high-quality journal.

A song about Ebola from 1998

YouTube link.

Obviously based on the old Kinks' song "Lola," with that famously ambiguous final verse:

Well, I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola
Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola

Video via Reddit.

"Sociolect" distinguished from "dialect"

From this month's Atlantic:

...sociolect: a language variety that’s spoken within a social group, like Valley Girl–influenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular English. (The word dialect, by contrast, commonly refers to a variety spoken by a geographic group—think Appalachian or Lumbee.) Over the past 20 years, online sociolects have been springing up around the world, from Jejenese in the Philippines to Ali G Language, a British lingo inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen character.

Found at a yard sale ($2.00)

Not found by me, unfortunately (although this is one reason I like to browse auctions).  It's a nice copy even without that scribbling inside the cover.

Posted at Reddit.

"Lordly indifference of Nature"

An excerpt from "The Golden Fly," a short story by Algernon Blackwood about a man with situational depression who finds solace in a natural setting:

He was a business man, honest, selfish, and ambitious; and the collapse of his worldly position was paramount to the collapse of the universe itself - his universe, at any rate. This "crumbling of the universe" was the thought he took out with him. He left the house by the path that led into solitude, and reached the heathery expanse that formed one of the breathing-places of the New Forest. There he flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down with him, for he could not escape it.

Taking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it hurt him, he lay upon his back and watched the clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared into the sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his eyes; he smelt the heather- honey; golden flies hung motionless in the air, like coloured pins fastening the sunshine against the blue curtain of the summer, while dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove across its pattern their threads of gleaming bronze. He heard the petulant crying of the peewits, and watched their tumbling flight. Below him tinkled a rivulet, its brown water rippling between banks of peaty earth. Everywhere was singing, peace, and careless unconcern.

And this lordly indifference of Nature calmed and soothed him. Neither human pain nor the injustice of man could shift the key of the water, alter the peewits' cry a single tone, nor influence one fraction of an inch those cloudy frigates of vapour that sailed the sky. The earth bulged sunwards as she had bulged for centuries. The power of her steady gait, superbly calm, breathed everywhere with grandeur undismayed, unhasting, and supremely confident.... And, like the flash of those golden flies, there leaped suddenly upon him this vivid thought: that his world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside himself it had no existence at all.

Not a hornet

The size and color pattern are hornet-like, but this Hornet Moth lacks the thread-like waist characteristic of true hornets.

Many more pix at Lepiforum.

How cherries are harvested. And walnuts.

YouTube link.

Addendum: Here's a walnut harvest, with a hat tip to reader Wales Larrison:

YouTube link.

Cable TV remote for an elderly parent with dementia

I have been recurrently frustrated by the inability of cable television and electronic device makers to offer a remote control suitable for use by people with impaired cognitive function.  My 95-year-old mother does not have a DVR, does not need a picture-in-picture function, and could never navigate through a scrolling channel-guide menu.  When I explained our situation to the staff at the local Charter office, what they offered me was a similar remote with bigger buttons ("for handicapped people.")

I finally had to modify the remote using duct tape.  It's not optimal, because some buttons get accidentally pressed through the tape, but it's way better than the original.

Addendum:   A tip of the blogging hat to the many readers who offered practical advice in the Comments section.  Also on further net searching I see a simiilar solution was devised by Marilyn at Nag on the Lake.

Addendum #2:  Reader Matthew notes that there is a commercial product on the market that effectively does what I was trying to achieve with tape:  Button Blocker.

What's another word for "drone" ?

The Wall Street Journal reports that some manufacturers of drones are uncomfortable using that word for marketing purposes and are seeking alternative terminology.

As the drone industry takes off, many people in it say it needs a different name. They say “drone” suggests the devices are dumb, it is technically inaccurate and now has a militaristic reputation. Unmanned-aircraft advocates scold reporters and even congressmen who use the term. But they have another problem: Few of them agree on what the devices should be called...

The alternatives are an alphabet soup. There is “UAV” (unmanned aerial vehicle), “RPA” (remotely piloted aircraft), and “UAS” (unmanned aircraft system). Some prefer the more digestible “unmanned aircraft,” or just “robot,” while European Union officials opt for the bulkier “RPAS,” or remotely piloted aircraft systems... the [FAA] and Congress have settled on a name: they use UAS in legislation and official documents...

But it isn’t hard to find advocates who drone on about why they don’t like the term UAS and its “unmanned” cousins. “I hate the word unmanned,” said Don Wirthlin, a drone-pilot instructor in Douglas, Ariz. “Last time I checked, I was a human flying a UAV.”...

Popular Science writer Kelsey Atherton, who writes weekly roundups of unmanned-aircraft news called “Keeping up with the droneses,” said opponents of the term should give up. “The battle is over and drone won,” he said.

President James Madison may have had epilepsy

I recently skimmed through Lynne Cheney's new biography of James Madison and was particularly interested in the evidence she presents of Madison's seizures, here summarized in her interview by the American Enterprise Institute:

He was not sickly, but he was sidelined from time to time. At the end of his presidency he drafted an autobiography explaining that he had a “constitutional liability to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions.” Madison’s principal biographer deduced from this that he suffered “epileptoid hysteria,” but it is much more likely that he suffered what physicians today call complex partial seizures, in which those afflicted can hear, but not understand, speak but not make sense. The seizures can be disabling. Madison apparently experienced one while in militia training, and it kept him from serving in the Revolutionary War.

That last-mentioned episode has been judged by other biographers as being evidence that Madison's "bilious episodes" were psychogenic or a conversion disorder.  From the evidence Cheney cites at numerous places in her book, I'm convinced that he did have an organic seizure disorder.

"Rookie cookies" for marijuana tourists

From the AP, via a Colorado news station:

Recreational marijuana sellers are reaching out to novice cannabis users with a raft of edible products that impart a milder buzz and make it easy for inexperienced customers to find a dose they won't regret taking...

There's a new marijuana-infused soda that's 15 times weaker than the company's best-known soda. Also new at the pot shop is a light-dose "Rookie Cookie" for people who aren't used to eating medical-grade pot.

Also discussed in a Reddit thread.

Codpieces and willy warmers

The Guardian has a collection of ten codpieces immortalized in fine art.

Additional details from Wikipedia:

A codpiece (from Middle English: cod, meaning "scrotum") is a covering flap or pouch that attaches to the front of the crotch of men's trousers and usually accentuates the genital area. It was held closed by string ties, buttons, or other methods. It was an important item of European clothing in the 15th and 16th centuries, and is still worn in the modern era in performance costumes for rock music and metal musicians and in the leather subculture while an Athletic cup protects in a similar fashion...

In the 14th century, men's hose were two separate legs worn over linen drawers, leaving a man's genitals covered only by a layer of linen. As the century wore on and men's hemlines rose, the hose became longer and joined at the centre back but remained open at the centre front. The shortening of the cote or doublet resulted in under-disguised genitals, so the codpiece began life as a triangular piece of fabric covering the gap.

Not to be confused with a willy warmer:

Such garments were also worn in Norway, where they were called forhyse, vænakot, or suspensorium. Several examples are preserved in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Sometimes in Norway they would be made from squirrel fur with the fur side inside, to be worn under leather trousers in the winter. On the Faroe Islands such garments are called “kallvøttur” (man mitten) or “purrivøttur” (testicles mitten). There was a tradition in Norway and Denmark, particularly on the Faroe Islands, where a girl would present her boyfriend with a forhyse to see how seriously he took their relationship. If the gift was rejected, this was seen as evidence that he was not yet ready for marriage.

It is possible TYWKIWDBI has been nominated for a Nobel Prize

Earlier his week I was listening to a recent podcast of QI's No Such Thing as a Fish, and learned something about the Nobel nomination process.

For example, it is not possible to nominate a deceased person for a prize ("From 1974, the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation have stipulated that a Prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless death has occurred after the announcement of the Nobel Prize.)  Thus, Mahatma Gandhi, who was never awarded a Peace Prize, cannot now be nominated.

Regarding the title of this post, there is never a public announcement of who has been nominated for any of the Nobel prizes.  And this silence is maintained after the awards ("Information about the nominations, investigations, and opinions concerning the award is kept secret for fifty years.")

Thus, you can tell your friends that you have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in (x), and nobody other than those on the committee can authoritatively contradict you, until 50 years from now.