"Biker gang shootout" in Texas

As reported by the Washington Post:

Police in Waco, Tex., announced Monday that they have arrested 192 people following a spasm of biker-gang violence that left nine people dead over the weekend...

The confrontation began about noon Sunday in the Twin Peaks restroom and quickly escalated from hands and feet to knives and chains and then gunfire as it spilled into the crowded parking lot...

Swanton called it “one of the worst gun fights we’ve ever had in the city limits. They started shooting at our officers.” The officers returned fire, Swanton said, and some armed bikers were shot by police. Swanton defended the officers’ actions and said they prevented more deaths...

Another witness, Michelle Logan, told the Tribune-Herald: “There were maybe 30 guns being fired in the parking lot, maybe 100 rounds...

Randy DeWitt, chief executive of Twin Peaks, described the restaurant on the show as “a high-energy mountain-themed sports bar.” “We have an expression at Twin Peaks,” he adds: “It’s a place where you can let your man out.”

Offered without comment, and I'll close reader comments for this post because I already know what they will be.

Twenty

Here's why I'm not getting any more work done today.  Darn you, Miss C.

The image is a screencap of my score of 15 17 20 (finally, but this was in the alternate mode).  The game is here.

There is an alternate mode, which may be easier to start with because it is untimed, but the new tiles appear from above rather than below.  I've scored a 18 in that mode:

I know there are some very skilled games-players on board the blog here.  Have a go, and please share your strategies in the comments.

New epidemic decimating Italian olive trees

Across the stony heel of Italy, a peninsula ringed by the blue-green waters of the Mediterranean, olive trees have existed for centuries, shaping the landscape and producing some of the nation’s finest olive oils. Except now many of the trees are dying.

Sprinkled among the healthy trees are clusters of sick ones, denuded of leaves and standing like skeletons, their desiccated branches bereft of olives. The trees are succumbing to a bacterial outbreak that is sweeping across one of Italy’s most famous olive regions, as families that have manufactured olive oil for generations now fear ruin, even as officials in the rest of Europe fear a broader outbreak.

“It is devastating,” said Enzo Manni, director of ACLI-Racale, an olive cooperative in the heart of the outbreak area. “It is apocalyptic. I compare it to an earthquake.”

Today, scientists estimate that 1 million olive trees in the peninsula, known as the Salento, are infected with the bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, a figure that could rise rapidly. The bacterium steadily restricts water flow from the roots of a tree to its branches and leaves.

More details at the StarTribune. The bacterium "is believed to have arrived with plants imported from Costa Rica and has destroyed citrus trees in Brazil and vineyards in California."

Photo credit: Davide Monteleone/The New York Times.

A mesmerizing cotton candy video

YouTube link.

Filmed in ChongQing, China.  I'll bet creations like this will start showing up at state fairs.

If you're like me, this video will have you start wondering about cotton candy and how it's made...

Cotton candy was first recorded in Europe in the 19th century. At that time, spun sugar was an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor and was not generally available to the average person. Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by the dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair as "Fairy Floss" with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at 25¢ per box (equivalent to $6 per box today). Joseph Lascaux, a dentist from New Orleans, Louisiana, invented a similar cotton candy machine in 1921. In fact, the Lascaux patent named the sweet confection “cotton candy” and the "fairy floss" name faded away, although it retains this name in Australia. In the 1970s an automatic cotton candy machine was created which made the product and packaged it.

I didn't find a short, simple video of how the machine works, though there probably is one out there.

p.s. - I had to laugh when I read that the cotton-candy machine was first developed by a dentist !

Surfing amidst garbage

Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya catches a wave in a remote but garbage-covered bay on Java, Indonesia, the world’s most populated island. Zak Noyle/A-Frame Media

Via WaPo, linking to a gallery of photos from the same book I featured in the last "divertimento."

The term "warm-blooded" is passe

Same with "cold-blooded," as per a comment quibbling with the title of a report on the discovery of the first warm-blooded fish:

"Just in case anybody doesn't know, warm-blooded and cold-blooded are now defunct terms in biology. This is because "cold-blooded" animals can actually have very hot blood e.g. lizards in the desert, and "warm-blooded" animals can actually have relatively cold blood e.g. bats during torpor. The terms I am aware of are homeotherm (maintains a steady body temperature e.g. humans) and poikilotherms (body temperature fluctuates with ambient temperature). It seems endotherm and ectotherm are two other terms that can be used, those being animals that generate their own internal heat and those that don't respectively. As far as I can tell endotherm, homeotherm and warm-blooded are synonymous, as are ectotherm, poikilotherm and cold-blooded. There may be subtleties that I am not aware of that distinguish endotherm from homeotherm etc."

Transparent bridal gowns

As noted in The Atlantic:

The recent Bridal Fashion Week in New York, which previewed wedding gowns for the Spring 2016 season, featured all the things you'd expect: lace, crystals, tulle. (So much tulle!) It also featured, however, something you wouldn't, necessarily, expect: skin. (So much skin!) Skin not just of traditionally exposed bridal body parts—arms and shoulders and calves—but also of stomachs and sides and backs...

But the most revealing pieces in the latest bridal lines—revealing, in every sense of the word—were Vera Wang's mermaid-cut sheaths, staunchly traditional in their ribbons and lace, but innovative in their most striking features: The gowns are almost fully translucent, from their necklines to their hems. The lingerie their models wore, dainty and daring at the same time, was on full display under the fishnet and lace bodices of the gowns. The lingerie was, in fact, an elemental part of the dresses.

You could also read it, of course, as an overt rejection of the sexual mores at play in the traditional wedding dress. Wedding dresses have always been, on some level, about sex: the white as a sign (and a reassurance) of the bride's virginity; the expanse of fabric as a tacit promise that, while sex will be had, it will be had in the proper way. Women are getting married at older ages than they used to. Which means, among so much else, that they're less inclined to opt for princess-driven designs—and also that they're less inclined to designs that emphasize the virginal.

1% growth is not sustainable long-term

I was recently startled to read this assertion*:

If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and increased by 1 percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light." - Gabor Zovanyi

That didn't seem possible - until I did a rough approximation.  An increase of 1% per year, according to the rule of 72 (which may be accurate for such a small number), would mean a doubling every 72 years.  Lets be conservative and translate 1% annual growth to the population doubling every 100 years [and thus avoid the nitpicking argument that two people can't increase by 1%].

10,000 years would allow for 100 doublings, which according to a QI comment... "You should end up with a figure of roughly 3.27 x 10^43. Which is quite a lot."  It is, of course, another variant of the ancient puzzle of placing doubling grains of rice on a chessboard.

I often weary of every politician, businessman, sports coach, guidance counselor etc. mindlessly repeating a mantra that something has to get bigger to be better. Buildings have to taller, cars faster, bandwidth wider, budgets increased, growth is inevitable and necessary to progress.  

There are limits to growth.

*One of the forums at QI led me to the source of the quote: "his quote comes from the book The No-Growth Imperative by Gabor Zovanyi. In which he cites (141, p198) this example as taken from a calculation done by P C Putman taken from The Economic History of World Population by Carlo M. Cipolla."

The poaching of European songbirds for food

YouTube link.

Discussed at length by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

Migratory birds were an important seasonal source of protein in the countryside, and older Cypriots today remember being told by their mothers to go out to the garden and catch some dinner. In more recent decades, ambelopoulia became popular with affluent, urbanized Cypriots as a kind of nostalgic treat—you might bring a friend a jar of pickled birds as a house gift, or you might order a platter of them fried in a restaurant for a special occasion. By the mid-nineties, two decades after the country had outlawed all forms of bird trapping, as many as ten million songbirds a year were being killed...

The Republic of Malta, which consists of several densely populated chunks of limestone with collectively less than twice the area of the District of Columbia, is the most savagely bird-hostile place in Europe. There are twelve thousand registered hunters (about three per cent of the country’s population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird’s protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the side of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; non-rarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, so as not to incriminate their shooters. When bird-watchers in Italy see a migrant that’s missing a chunk of its wing or its tail, they call it “Maltese plumage.”..

Canale discovered his predatory instinct as a child, while hunting indiscriminately with his grandfather, and he feels fortunate to have met people who taught him a better way. “I don’t mind not killing something on any given day,” he said, “but killing is the goal, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t."

Via Salon.

Larval food stress affects butterflies

Inadquate food supply for a caterpillar has a measureable effect on the morphology of the wings of adult butterflies:

We conducted an experiment to test the effects of food deprivation in the larval stage on multiple measures of adult wing morphology and coloration of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), a species in which long-distance migration makes flight efficiency critical. In a captive setting, we restricted food (milkweed) from late-stage larvae for either 24 hrs or 48 hrs, then after metamorphosis we used image analysis methods to measure forewing surface area and elongation (length/width), which are both important for migration... The clearest effect of food restriction was a reduction in adult wing size in the high stress group (by approximately 2%)... Although some patterns obtained in this study were unclear, our results concerning wing size have direct bearing on the monarch migration. We show that if milkweed is limited for monarch larvae, their wings become stunted, which could ultimately result in lower migration success.

The data and an extended discussion are at PLOS One.

Beheadings, classism, and religious intolerance

Forgotten aspects of the United States' colonial heritage:

Just as the Indians in Virginia were seen "defacing... and mangling [the colonists'] dead carcasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision," so the Virginians "ransaked their Temples, Tooke downe the Corpes of their deade kings from of[f] their Toambes," engaged freely in scalping, and did not hesitate to decapitate their enemies in campaigns of terror.  (Percy, casually: "I cawsed the Indians heade to be Cutt of[f]"; Kiefft, coolly: ten fathoms of wampum for a Raritan's head, twenty for a suspected murderer's.)

An excerpt (p. 502) from Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years; The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675.

This practice was a carryover from the mayhem known to the colonists from their European forefathers' genocidal wars (p. 498):

The retaliatory executions in the conquered city of Mons, in Hainault, proceeded at a leisurely pace: for a full year "ten, twelve, twenty persons were often hanged, burned, or beheaded in a single day.  The experience and knowledge of such extreme but not uncommon events were carried to North America by the many veterans of the Dutch rebellion and the Thirty Years War who were sent to the colonies...

So closely linked were the incidences of racial conflict, so extended their dedly aftermaths, that one can conceive of a single, continuous Euro-Indian war - precisely the Virginia Company's hoped-for 'perpetuall Warr without peace or truce" - that lasted from 1607 to 1664 and beyond...

From this book I also learned about the extreme classism towards the poor practiced by the colonists:

They therefore prohibited anyone "whose visible estates, reall and personall, shall not exceed the true and indifferent valew of two hundred pounds, shall weare any gold or silver lace, or gold and silver buttons, or any bone lace above two shillings per yard, or silk hoods or scarfes, uppon the poenaltie of tenn shillings for every such offence."  Those who defied this ruling would be taxed at the level of wealth they pretended to - provided, they added in an elegiac conclusion that went to the heart of their discontents, that the law would not aply to anyone "whose education and imployments have binn above the ordinary degree, or whose estates have binn considerable, though now decaied." (p. 469)

It was interesting to learn that the colonists and the Native Americans freely exchanged children for prolonged periods of time in order to develop bilingual translators (p. 304).  There was also a lot of religious intolerance -

[The Jews] were, Stuyvesant wrote his superiors in Amsterdam, "a deceitful race," blasphemers who would infect the entire colony with their elemental corruption.  He appealed to the West India Company for permission to expel them forthwith... The colony had trouble enough, [Megapolensis] pointed out, with "Papists, Mennonites, and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents and many atheists and varioius other servants of Baal among the English under this government, who conceal themselves under the name of Christians; it would create a still greater confusion if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here." (p. 252-4)

There's lots more in this comprehensive book about the often-suppressed "dark side" of the colonial existence in North America.

Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. It was a brutal encounter—brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples, despite occasional efforts at accommodation, and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves...

"Competitive vaping"

Welcome to the newest entrant in the extreme sports category: “cloud chasing.” Competitors play it... with electronic cigarettes. They are called cloud chasers, and their devoted fans are cloud gazers. Competitions like this have been heating up world-wide...

Competitions are straightforward. Cloud chasers inhale on the devices, which convert e-cigarette “juice” into vapor. They then toast the competition by blowing the biggest, densest vapor cloud possible. In less than two years, the sport has adopted all the trappings of professional athletics. It not only has fans but teams, sponsors and cash prizes...

The origins of this sport are somewhat foggy. E-cigarettes first arrived in the U.S. about eight years ago, but it wasn’t until two years ago, when vape shops took off, that shopkeepers started hosting contests to attract customers. Now, there are an estimated 8,500 vape shops in the U.S., doing $1.2 billion in sales, and the number of contests has exploded...

More information at the Wall Street Journal.

Liquid mercury under a Mexican pyramid

As reported in The Guardian:

An archaeologist has discovered liquid mercury at the end of a tunnel beneath a Mexican pyramid, a finding that could suggest the existence of a king’s tomb or a ritual chamber far below one of the most ancient cities of the Americas...

Rosemary Joyce, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, said that archaeologists have found mercury at three other sites around Central America... Joyce said the ancient Mesoamericans could produce liquid mercury by heating mercury ore, known as cinnabar, which they also used for its blood-red pigment. The Maya used cinnabar to decorate jade objects.

I was fascinated by this report because it reminded me of the reports that the first Chinese emporer's tomb contains lakes and rivers of liquid mercury.    There is an extended discussion of this at ChemistryWorld.

Most enticing of all is a detail relayed by Qian: ‘Mercury was used to fashion the hundred rivers, the Yellow river and the Yangtze river, and the seas in such a way that they flowed’. This idea that the main chamber contains a kind of microcosm of all of China (as it was then recognised) with rivers, lakes and seas of shimmering mercury had long seemed too fantastic for modern historians to grant it credence...

In the 1980s Chinese researchers found that the soil in the burial mound above the tomb contains mercury concentrations way above those elsewhere in the vicinity. Now some archaeologists working on the site believe that the body of the First Emperor may indeed lie amidst vast puddles of the liquid metal.

Trenchant observations on American foreign policy

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." -- Smedley Butler

1954 Guatemala - The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz is replaced with a series of facist dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years. Non of them are democratically elected.
1959 Haiti- The U.S. military helps "Papa Doc" Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. Not democratically elected
1961 Ecuador - The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man. (who is a rightwing nut and is not democratically elected)
1963 Dominican Republic - The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta. (not democratically elected)
1963 Ecuador - A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command. (not democratically elected)
1964 Brazil - A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. Puts a millitary junta in power (Not democratically elected) and later it is revealed that the CIA trains the death squads of General Castelo Branco (who is one of the facist dictators US puts in power).
1965 Dominican Republic- A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country's elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes. Openly protect facist dictator that they had put in power AGAINST the wishes of the people.
1971 Bolivia - After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. (The dictator is not democratically elected either)
1973 Chile - The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America's first democratically elected socialist leader. The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left. (not democratically elected)
Between 1973 and 1986 there are many different attempts to put facist dictators in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. But they mainly fail and just leads to civil war without US getting their facist puppet governments.
1986 Haiti- Rising popular revolt in Haiti means that "Baby Doc" Duvalier will remain "President for Life" only if he has a short one. The U.S., which hates instability in a puppet country, flies the despotic Duvalier to the South of France for a comfortable retirement. The CIA then rigs the upcoming elections in favor of another right-wing military strongman. However, violence keeps the country in political turmoil for another four years. The CIA tries to strengthen the military by creating the National Intelligence Service (SIN), which suppresses popular revolt through torture and assassination. (this does not happen by popular demand or democratic elections)
1989 Panama - The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega has been on the CIA's payroll since 1966, and has been transporting drugs with the CIA's knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega's growing independence and intransigence have angered Washington ... so out he goes. (Noriega was not democratically elected and his removal was not done by democratic means either, just US being US)
1990 Haiti - Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed military deposes him and put facist dictators to rule Haiti. (not democratically elected)
2002 Venezuela - The CIA attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela. America attempted to put Millitary dictators in power, however, the coup soon unravels when thousands of anti-coup protesters surround the presidential palace demanding Hugo Chavez's reinstatement.
And this is ONLY what the CIA admits to.  [note this list includes only actions in the Americas, not Asia or the Middle East]

Two extended excerpts from a Reddit thread discussing the Pope's recent comment that "many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war."

Posted for future reference.  Comments closed.

The Fritillary Project begins

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my hobbies is photographing butterflies.  My preference is not to get images just of the adult, but to document the entire life cycle which includes the eggs, larval caterpillar, and the chrysalis/eclosion.

I can find eggs and such in the "wild," but as a photographer it's a whole world better to have the cycle occurring in your own yard.  That's why our home is surrounded by butterfly-related plants.  Every midsummer I see fritillaries nectaring in our yard -

- and we have lots of violets, which are their "host" plants (the ones they lay eggs on and the cats feed on).  But our violets are in the woods behind the house -

- and the fritillaries are mostly open-field flyers who tend to avoid the shady woods.  Several months ago I discovered that fritillaries will also make use of Viola tricolor -

commonly known as "Johnny Jump-up."  That member of the violet family thrives in full sun and springs up spontaneously in our yard (but gets whacked by the mower).

So this past week I started planting some designated Viola patches, some in the ground -

The Viola seeds are now planted in the black area behind the patch of Pearly Everlasting, which is host to the American Lady butterflies, and also in some planters, where the new seedlings are trying to push past the petals falling from our crabapple.

The chicken wire is to deter rabbits, and also the chipmunks which vigorously dig and bury stuff in any cultivated ground they find.

I hope to have a bumper crop of Johnny Jump-ups by late June when the fritillaries arrive.  Then it will be a matter of finding the eggs and the caterpillars (which are awesome) so we can bring them in to feed them on the screen porch away from parasitic wasps.

Time will tell.  I'll post updates if we have any success.

Update:  It's been two months since I started this project, and so far the results are mixed.  The viola planted in the ground did not thrive (in all fairness, that dirt is of marginal quality and the sun exposure was probably inadequate).  Those seeded into the planters in commercial potting mix have grown -

- and now are in full bloom.  But no fritillaries have arrived (or at least none that I've noticed).  I have seen Great Spangled Fritillaries and Aphrodite Fritillaries on field trips, so they are flying.  Even though the number of violas is modest, there are plenty of other nectar plants to lure the frits to our garden.  It's not unlike going fishing - you put the bait out and wait.  We'll see...