Everyone who is a regular reader of TYWKIWDBI is invited to go to the widget at the top of the right sidebar and click on the name of the person you would prefer to see become POTUS next year. I've entered (alphabetically) the names of all of the declared candidates plus several expected entrants. The poll will allow only one selection, and will close after two weeks, because I figure regular readers visit within that time frame.
One reason I'm doing this is to help me decide how (and whether) to blog politics over the coming year. I
have so little enthusiasm for the current slate of candidates that I've
been tempted to declare this blog a politics-free zone and avoid all
posts on the subject.
Non-U.S. readers are welcome to vote, because you make up fully 1/3 of the visits to this blog. I set up a similar reader preference poll in 2008, with some interesting results. I hope the poll results will provide me with a sense of the current readership, which I know varies from deeply conservative to bleedingly liberal - but I don't know the proportions, because I can only "see" the ones who write comments and I suspect they are not typical.
If you don't care to vote (i.e. you're a typical American), you can just click on the "show results" button to see how other readers have responded.
Addendum: About 600 votes registered during the first day, with a markedly skewed distribution, which in itself is quite interesting. I'm also taking note of your comments re your preferences on the content of the blog this coming year.
23 June 2015
Exotic animal auctions
As reported in the Texas Observer:
The crowd, a couple hundred strong, oohs and ahhs as the wallaby hops from one side of the enclosure to the other. A woman asks her family, “Wouldn’t it be fun to have one of those?”...More at the link.
Kifaru is one of a handful of exotic animal auction houses in Texas, part of a robust billion-dollar U.S. trade in exotic animals... Saturdays are reserved for exotic hoofstock (blackbucks, fallow deer, zebras, giraffes, oryx, gazelles), domestic farm animals such as goats and alpacas, and primates and other unorthodox pets. Sundays are for birds—some exotic, some less so—and small animals including reptiles and rodents...
Exotic animals in Texas—including but not limited to monkeys and primates that don’t fall under the state’s dangerous wild animal laws—are in a sort of legal blind spot. Pet capuchin and macaque monkeys are often purchased as infants, but when the males reach sexual maturity and become aggressive, many are either handicapped (by removing their teeth and nails), chained or discarded. The lucky ones end up in animal sanctuaries. The Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary alone houses nearly 20 big cats, almost all of which came from private owners or facilities condemned by the USDA. According to Executive Director Patti Clark, the Austin Zoo receives lots of calls about exotic birds; she said buyers often don’t understand how long the birds live, how loud they can be and how messy they are...
Provost said that though he tries to weed out inexperienced or unqualified bidders, he can’t stop people from doing what they want with their money. “I would say there are probably some irresponsible purchases, but you can do that at Walmart. You can do that anywhere else, and I don’t know how to control or stop that other than what I do, which is to [warn people about special requirements]. However I can help the situation, I certainly do that verbally,” he said. “But if a 90-year-old grandma wants to come in and buy that big, bad water buffalo bull, it’s her money and this is America and she’s free to do that.”
Fake rhino horn
A San Francisco biotech startup has managed to 3D print fake rhino horns that carry the same genetic fingerprint as the actual horn. It plans to flood Chinese market with these cheap horns to curb poaching.More details at Digital Journal, discussed at Reddit.
Pembient, based in San Francisco uses keratin — a type of fibrous protein — and rhino DNA to produce a dried powder which is then 3D printed into synthetic rhino horns which is genetically and spectrographically similar to original rhino horns
21 June 2015
142857 is an interesting number
- 142857 × 2 = 285714
- 142857 × 3 = 428571
- 142857 × 4 = 571428
- 142857 × 5 = 714285
- 142857 × 6 = 857142
1|4|2|8|5|7|1|4|2|8|5|7|1|
| |2|8|5|7|1|4| | | | | |
| | | | | | |4|2|8|5|7|1|
| | | |5|7|1|4|2|8| | | |
| | | | |7|1|4|2|8|5| | |
| | |8|5|7|1|4|2| | | | |Discussed at Reddit.
Unexpurgated fairy tales
Here is an example - "The Wolves"
A wealthy prince was married to a beautiful woman. The two had no children, and that was a source of great sorrow for the prince. As for the princess, she was consumed with envy whenever anyone in the kingdom gave birth to a child.
One day the prince and the princess were visiting a village, and they looked on as a festive group made its way into the local church. A farmer was having his triplets baptized, and everyone in the village had gathered to celebrate. The princess was planning to put a stop to the festivities, but the prince made fun of her, mocking the fact that she was aching to have something that a mere peasant possessed. It was her own fault that she had no children, he added. The princess flew into a rage right then and there and accused the farmer’s wife of infidelity, claiming that a woman could never have more than one child at a time with her husband. When the prince returned home, he held a mirror up to the princess’s face so that she could see how ugly she looked. To her horror, she saw in the mirror the head of a shaggy wolf, red-eyed, baring its teeth.
It turned out that the princess, without knowing it, was actually pregnant at the time. She gave birth to seven boys in seven days, one after another. She remembered what she had said earlier to the farmer’s wife. The prince was not at home, and she decided to send the midwife out to a wolf’s lair, with the seven boys wrapped up in an apron. It happened that the prince was hunting right in that area, and he ran into the midwife. “What are you doing here?” he asked. She immediately owned up to her evil intentions, and the prince rewarded her by running her through with a sword. He had the boys raised by a loyal subject.
Eighteen years went by, and the prince was planning a grand feast. Seven boys with long hair, all equally handsome and dressed alike, appeared at the feast. The princess could feel her heart pounding when she set eyes on the boys, and she began to tremble.
During the meal the prince jokingly asked how to punish a mother who throws her sons to the wolves. “She should dance to death in red-hot iron shoes,” was the answer. And so the princess condemned herself to that very punishment. The prince acknowledged the boys as his legitimate children, and they became known as “the wolves.As this excerpt demonstrates, the tales in this collection are often more graphic and violent than those popularized by the Brothers Grimm.
Image and text via Flavorwire.
20 June 2015
Featherbowling explained
"Featherbowling was born from that medieval family of games that endure, in no small part, because they can be played with a beverage in the shooter’s free hand. It’s Belgian shuffleboard. It’s horseshoes with a pigeon feather instead of an iron stake. It’s bocce, except you roll disks that have been weighted to roll unevenly across the earth, exposing the shooter’s secret divine grace for all to see. It’s pétanque, kubb, mölkky, curling, Cherokee marbles, Irish road bowls—the variations are endless—but none has the otherworldly mystery of this thing they’ve come to play on the east side of Detroit."
18 June 2015
Charleston newspaper the morning after the mass shooting
The sticky ad on the front of the Charleston Post and Courier promoted $30 shooting sessions at the ATP Gun Shop and Range in nearby Summerville.
The Post and Courier apologised on Facebook after images of the advert appeared on social media, explaining that it was a “regrettable coincidence”.
The oldest bald eagle in the United States has died
At age 38!
I see them quite routinely when I go up north to Leech Lake.A 38-year-old, Minnesota-born bald eagle — the oldest on record in the nation — has been killed by a vehicle in New York state.The male eagle was captured as a chick in 1977 at Puposky Lake near Bemidji and transplanted to New York with three other eagle chicks as part of a national restoration effort. The young eagles were banded, and officials found No. 03142 earlier this month alongside a road, killed by a vehicle. Records show it was the oldest banded bald eagle recovered in the nation — by five years.The eagle’s 38-year lifespan was remarkable, said Carrol Henderson, longtime head of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources nongame wildlife program. “I would never guess they would last that long,” he said. “Anything over 20 years would be considered old.”...Minnesota had perhaps 600 to 800 bald eagles in 1977, Henderson said, and officials believed then that they could spare five chicks a year to contribute to restoration efforts elsewhere. Today, Minnesota has more than 10,000 bald eagles, more than any other state in the Lower 48.
The human tragedy of land mines
"Selected as Miss Landmine Cambodia 2009, Dos Sopheap tries on her prize, a titanium leg,
with pageant organizer Morten Traavik..."
As reported by National Geographic:
The American position is complicated. The United States has not used antipersonnel land mines since 1991, not exported them since 1992, and not produced them since 1997. But the nation has a stockpile of some 10 million land mines, and prior to the '90s, it exported 4.4 million antipersonnel land mines, an unknown number of which are still in the ground. Ian Kelly, a State Department spokesman, described the government's official position in 2009: "We would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention." Nonetheless, under pressure from the United States Campaign to Ban Landmines, the Obama Administration has been conducting a comprehensive review of its land mine policy.For fox ache. Just do it.
Photo cropped for size from the original. Credit: Lynn Johnson
Addendum: The above was from a 2012 National Geographic article. A report in 2014 by Reuters indicates that the U.S. still supplies land mines to South Korea and "will begin destroying stockpiles..."
17 June 2015
Did colonial Americans burn down old buildings to retrieve the nails?
On a recent podcast of No Such Thing As A Fish*, one of the elves asserted that nails were so valuable in colonial America that when a house was abandoned or otherwise unusable, it was burned down so that the nails used to build it could be harvested. I found some details about this practice at Colonial Williamsburg, offered by the master blacksmith there:
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nail-making had become a specialized industry in advanced economies...*my favorite podcasts - highly recommended for TYWKIWDBI-type content.
Throughout the colonial period, reasonably priced English nails were readily available in coastal cities, limiting the need to develop a substantial nail-making industry in the colonies. That is not to say that nails were not made in the colonies, but rather that nails were readily available and reasonably priced as imports... William Allason, merchant of Falmouth, Virginia recorded in one inventory that he had about 750,000 nails on hand. These were the product of workers back in England...
I often hear the statement that “Nails were so expensive that when moving, people would burn their houses down to save the nails.” This is partially based in fact. In the 1640’s, here in Virginia, the legislature passed an act that “…forbade the burning of buildings for the nails…”. Some historians jumped to the conclusion that buildings were burned to save nails, because nails were horribly expensive. This seems like a logical explanation for such a drastic act, until you consider the circumstances in which an entire building would be worth less than the nails used to build it...
The act went on to specify that if you had a building that you intended to burn for the nails, you could have two honest men estimate the number of nails in the structure, and petition the legislature. The legislature would give you the estimated number of nails in exchange for NOT burning the building. I suspect that this law may have been aimed at controlling wildfires more than at the cost of nails.
$76,000,000,000 in overseas tax havens
And that's just Walmart -
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. owns more than $76 billion of assets through a web of units in offshore tax havens around the world, though you wouldn’t know it from reading the giant retailer’s annual report.More details at Bloomberg Business.
A new study has found Wal-Mart has at least 78 offshore subsidiaries and branches, more than 30 created since 2009 and none mentioned in U.S. securities filings. Overseas operations have helped the company cut more than $3.5 billion off its income tax bills in the past six years, its annual reports show.
The study, researched by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union and published Wednesday in a report by Americans for Tax Fairness, found 90 percent of Wal-Mart’s overseas assets are owned by subsidiaries in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, two of the most popular corporate tax havens.
Units in Luxembourg -- where the company has no stores -- reported $1.3 billion in profits between 2010 and 2013 and paid tax at a rate of less than 1 percent, according to the report...
Randy Hargrove, a Wal-Mart spokesman, called the report incomplete and “designed to mislead” by its union authors...
Nearly a decade ago, Wal-Mart ran into trouble over strategies to avoid U.S. state income taxes. It used a real estate investment trust to effectively pay rent to itself, generating big tax deductions, even though the rent payments never left the company. At least six states changed their tax laws after publicity about the tactics.
Since then, Wal-Mart has stepped up its use of offshore tax havens. It has created 20 new subsidiaries in Luxembourg alone since 2009, according to the report.
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