A fox hunting in winter

Everyone has probably seen still photos of this phenomenon, but the video is stunning. To see the vertical descent achieved by the leaping fox is truly jaw-dropping.

Via Presurfer.  Reposted from 2009 because it's still awesome.

Congratulations, Pensioner

Today I'm going to take a few moments to recognize a remarkable achievement by a member of my extended family.

In early April of this year Pensioner (his "trail name") arrived at the California/Mexico border to begin a hike northbound on the Pacific Crest Trail.

The Pacific Crest Trail... is a long-distance hiking and equestrian trail closely aligned with the highest portion of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges... The trail's southern terminus is on the U.S. border with Mexico, just south of Campo, California and its northern terminus on the U.S.–Canada border on the edge of Manning Park in British Columbia; its corridor through the U.S. is in the states of California, Oregon, and Washington.

The Pacific Crest Trail is 2,663 mi (4,286 km) long and ranges in elevation from just above sea level at the Oregon–Washington border to 13,153 feet (4,009 m) at Forester Pass in the Sierra Nevada. The route passes through 25 national forests and 7 national parks.

Pensioner was celebrating his retirement as a Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the University of California system.  But his decision to hike the trail was not a spontaneous whim (as suggested for Reese Witherspoon in "Wild"); he had planned this venture for about ten years, learning about equipment and food and techniques and training on shorter segments of the trail:

"I decided to follow the very specific training advice of Ray Jardine (a founding father of the ultralightweight backpacking movement and author of Beyond Backpacking and the PCT Hiker's Handbook). In January, February and March I've hiked a total of about 450 miles, with mileage and percentage of hikes with a pack both increasing each month. Pack weights have ranged from 18 to 28 pounds, and this last month 90% of my hikes were with a pack..."

Pensioner departed from the southern terminus on April 3:

"For those attempting a NOBO thru-hike there is a fairly narrow range of times for starting at the southern terminus. Getting to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountains (about mile 700 on the PCT) in mid-June is the goal in a typical snow year. Arriving earlier usually means hiking in heavy snow and arriving much later risks not getting through the Cascade Mountains in Northern Washington before Winter sets in."

The above excerpts are from Pensioner's daily journal at Postholer.  He was fortunate in selecting a year when the snowpack in the Sierras was at record lows, and doubly fortunate in not encountering any of the forest fires which plagued the California, Oregon, and Washington mountain ranges this summer.

The sequence of icons on the map at the top of this post represent the points at which he triggered his SPOT 3 device to generate a signal that could be picked up by satellite to denote his location (for security as well as for documentary purposes).

A successful venture of this magnitude requires enormous amounts of planning, especially in terms of restocking food and water.  Pensioner was hiking alone and had to carry extra water for the traverses of the Southern California desert segments.  For shelter he got by mostly with a simple tarp, often "cowboy camping" in the open.

Through-hiking the trail (i.e. completing the distance in one summer) represents a remarkable feat of endurance, both physical and mental.  Fewer than 4000 people have successfully through-hiked the PCT (compared to 7,000 who have summited Everest).

On September 21 Pensioner reported that he had succesfully reached the northern terminus at the Washington/Canadian border, giving the "thumbs up" gesture in this photo -

He briefly celebrated with some of the good friends he had acquired during the hike, and then perhaps channelling a bit of Forrest Gump, continued on northward in a "contemplative mood and at a leisurely pace" another 8.8 miles to Manning Provincial Park in British Columbia.

Sincere congratulations.  I look forward to hearing more details and seeing more photos at some future family reunion.

"Lolita fashion" explained

YouTube link.

 It can be "sweet," "classic," "old school," or Goth - and it's not about underage sex.

The video presents a very positive affirmation of the subculture, and there is additional information at the Wikipedia entry.

Via Madame Jujujive's always-interesting Everlasting Blort.

Divertimento

A gif of a remarkable jump by a dog.

For Blade Runner fans - an interesting article with still photos and brief videos.

If you've never listened to Radiolab, try opening this podcast in another window and playing it while you continue browsing.

A critique of collegiate football.  "When we cheer for our schools and our teams, we’re also supporting a powerful and autonomous entertainment business that monetizes every aspect of the game, an operation that is not only divorced from the mission of higher education but that often undermines it."

The world's oldest "message in a bottle."   A recently-found one was thrown into the ocean over a hundred years ago as part of a research project.

A German man died after eating courgette stew.  "Cucurbitacins can be recognised by their bitter taste. Any courgette that has a strong unpleasant smell or tastes particularly bitter should be avoided.
Cucurbitacins are toxic at high levels, but they are so bitter that it is almost impossible for anyone to eat sufficient quantities of the toxins to cause significant harm."

Feelthebern.org is the official website detailing Bernie Sanders' stand on important issues.   And this site compares the stands of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

An English professor  writes about the "trigger warning myth."

Deadspin offers a scathing, acerbic commentary on the most recent Republican "debate" (trigger warning: political diatribe).

The oldest-known living orca is 103 years old.  "Granny doesn't simply represent an impressive feat of nature; she embodies what's wrong with SeaWorld by being a living example of what's right in the wild."

Thousands of Germans were massacred after WWII ended.

A recent figure shows 442 people running for President of the United States.

Selfies result in more teenagers with head lice.  “Teenagers don’t usually get lice because they’re not sharing hats and things like that. And lice can’t jump, so the only way they can transmit lice is touching their heads together, and that’s happening with all these photos.”

A National Geographic video explains how rats are able to get into your toilet from the sewer system.

A Presurfer post notes that a group of raccoons is called a "gaze of raccoons."  Here are some other collective nouns (I've heard them referred to as "venereal nouns", but I'm not sure that's correct).

Why state laws should penalize people for negligent storage of guns.

"There was outrage this month when some of the country’s best known restaurant chains including Pizza Express, Strada, Zizzi, Ask Italian and Giraffe were accused of keeping all or part of the service charges automatically added to bills rather than passing them on to staff... It emerged last week that high street restaurants were routinely holding back tips which customers had thought were heading straight into the pockets of waiters and waitresses..."

The Atlantic has an essay entitled "The Life and Death of the American Lawn."

Counterarguments, with Biblical citations, relevant to the Kentucky clerk/marriage license brouhaha.

Proof that a man can prepare a delicious meal even when his wife is out of town.

"...experts say most people engage in self-injury as a way to cope with their emotions, particularly negative ones. And most self-injurers report that it works – it calms them and brings a sense of relief.

These soothing feelings most likely result from the release of endorphins, brain chemicals that relieve pain and can produce euphoria."   Discussed here.

This article will be of interest to (and probably only to) anyone who has played video poker in a casino.  It's about beating the system.

The NFL's love affair with the military.

"A woman who tried to kill her husband by spiking his Christmas cherry Lambrini was caught after she misspelled a fake suicide note which claimed he wanted to "die with dignaty"."

Der Spiegel reports that young activists are disappearing in Egypt.

gif of a beluga intentionally spraying a child with water.

The danger of the use of liquid nitrogen in nightclubs.

"Hillary Clinton campaign puts the 'moron' into oxymoron."

The embedded photos for this linkdump depict the Governor's Mansions in the states of (top-to-bottom) Minnesota, South Dakota, Oregon, New York, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Iowa, harvested from a gallery of all the mansions at imgur, via Neatorama.

I wasn't hungry anyway...

Cropped for size from the via at Miss Cellania.

Monarch chrysalis

This has been described as the result of an "escaped classroom caterpillar."  I'm quite certain the situation was artificially created by placing the book over the caterpillar's enclosure, then returning it to the shelf - but it's still a clever result.

Via imgur.

40 brief essays about possible "afterlives"

"In the afterlife you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the yous that could have been. In an elevator you might meet more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the you who happened to board an airplane next to a company president who then hired you. As you meet these yous, you experience a pride of the sort you feel for a successful cousin: although the accomplishments don't directly belong to you, it somehow feels close.

But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These yous are not really you, they are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success cannot be explained away by a better genetic hand; instead, they played your cards better. In their parallel lives, they made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct t heir mistakes and apologized more often.

Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better yous. You discover you've never felt more competitive with anyone in your life.

You try to mingle with the lesser yous, but it doesn't assuage the sting. In truth, you have little sympathy for these less significant yous and more than a little haughtiness about their indolence. "If you had quit watching TV and gotten off the couch you wouldn't be in this situation," you tell them, when you bother to interact with them at all.

But the better yous are always in your face in the afterlife. In the bookstore you'll see one of them arm in arm with the affectionate woman whom you let slip away. Another you is browsing the shelves, running his fingers over the book he actually finished writing. And look at this one jogging past outside: he's got a much better body than yours, thanks to a consistency at the gym that you never kept up.

Eventually you sink into a defensive posture, seeking reasons why you would not want to be so well behaved and virtuous in any case. You grudgingly befriend some of the lesser yous and go drinking with them. Even at the bar you see the better yous, buying rounds for their friends, celebrating their latest good choice.

And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with."

The above is "Subjunctive", one of the mutually-exclusive alternative afterlives postulated by David Eagleman in his book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

World record for skipping a stone over water

YouTube link.

The Wikipedia entry has a list of the terms for this pastime around the world:  "ducks and drakes" (Britain), "throwing a sandwich" (Finnish), "cutting water" (Japanese), "little fish" (Portuguese), and  especially "frogs" (many cultures).

An introduction to "ransomware"

Excerpts from an article at Wired:

Ransomware is malware that locks your keyboard or computer to prevent you from accessing your data until you pay a ransom, usually demanded in Bitcoin. The digital extortion racket is not new—it’s been around since about 2005, but attackers have greatly improved on the scheme with the development of ransom cryptware, which encrypts your files using a private key that only the attacker possesses, instead of simply locking your keyboard or computer. And these days ransomware doesn’t just affect desktop machines or laptops; it also targets mobile phones...

Symantec has estimated, conservatively, that at least $5 million is extorted from ransomware victims each year. But forking over funds to pay the ransom doesn’t guarantee attackers will be true to their word and victims will be able to access their data again. In many cases, Symantec notes, this doesn’t occur....

One ransomware attack known as Reveton that is directed at US victims produces a pop-up message saying your machine has been involved in child porn activity or some other crime and has been locked by the FBI or Justice Department. Unless you pay a fine—in Bitcoin, of course, and sent to an address the attackers control—the government won’t restore access to your system...

CryptoWall can not only encrypt files on the victim’s computer but also any external or shared drives that connect to the computer. And the shakedown demand can range anywhere from $200 to $5,000...

TorrentLocker harvests email addresses from a victim’s mail client to spam itself to other victims. Fox-IT calculated at one point that TorrentLocker had amassed some 2.6 million email addresses in this manner.

Protecting against ransomware can be difficult since attackers actively alter their programs to defeat anti-virus detection. However, antivirus is still one of the best methods to protect yourself against known ransomware in the wild. It might not be possible to completely eliminate your risk of becoming a victim of ransomware, but you can lessen the pain of being a victim by doing regular backups of your data and storing it on a device that isn’t online.

More at the link.  The TL;DR seems to be in the last sentence - it may be cheaper to throw out and replace your computer than to pay the ransom.

Teaser trailer for the new Jungle Book movie

YouTube link.

Hornussen ("Swiss golf")

YouTube link.

The earliest reference to Hornuss is found in the records of 1625 of the consistory of Lauperswil, canton Berne, in a complaint about the breaking of the Sabbath. Two men were fined the then princely sum of 20 francs for playing Hornussen on Sunday.

A "mixture of excrement, noxious gas and a decomposing donkey"

That's one description of Skunk:

Imagine being soaked, head to toe, in a frothy mix of pureed compost, gangrenous human flesh, and road kill, and you might get some idea of what it’s like to be sprayed with Skunk, according to those who’ve had the misfortune of being doused.

Police departments in the United States have reportedly begun purchasing the spray, a non-lethal riot-control weapon concocted by an Israeli firm for use against demonstrators in the occupied West Bank. The sticky fluid, which Palestinians say smells like a “mixture of excrement, noxious gas and a decomposing donkey,” is usually fired from armored vehicles equipped using high-pressure water cannons.

Mistral Security, a firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, markets Skunk to U.S. police and military as a crowd-control tool capable of “rapidly and effectively” dispersing unruly crowds. Recommended applications include “border crossings, correctional facilities, demonstrations and sit-ins.”

Mistral Security offers a number of delivery systems for Skunk, according to the company’s website, including 60 ounce canisters with a range of 40 feet; a “skid sprayer” equipped with a 50 gallon tank and a 5 hp motor that can shoot over 60 feet at up to 7 gallons per minute; and a 40mm grenade that can fired by a 12-gauge shotgun.

5 MB hard drive (1956)

Via the OldSchoolCool subreddit.

"Please use your considerable intelligence to review this material"

A letter from California governor Jerry Brown to presidential candidate Ben Carson.

Introducing Jeremy Corbyn - updated

Few American voters may yet have heard of Jeremy Corbyn, the previously obscure British parliamentarian who is poised to become leader of the official Labour opposition to David Cameron’s government. But if they have been following the US presidential race, they may already understand the general idea.

Slap a beard on leftwing Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and make him as casual as a Romantic poet and you have a good approximation of the elderly radical across the Atlantic who is shaking the fragile pillars of the British establishment and could (at least in theory) become Queen Elizabeth’s next prime minister of the not-so United Kingdom...

To the amazement of pundits and politicians alike, Corbyn’s campaign took off in July much as Sanders’s own has done for the Democratic nomination. Despite being unfashionable democratic socialists, both men tapped a deep well of resentment against the mainstream political elite by people who feel patronised, neglected and left behind. 

The article from The Guardian excerpted above goes on to mention populist uprisings in France and Greece. There is also an analysis of Corbyn's rise at Salon.

Britain’s Labour Party is going through its own Bernie Sanders moment – except that it’s more like a Bernie Sanders moment on steroids and set to warp drive...

A longtime member of Parliament from North London who appears not to own a tie, Corbyn has spent his entire political career as a rebellious Labour “backbencher” – that is, he has never been part of the party leadership, nor held a government post when Labour had a majority...

 Like Sanders, Corbyn has long advocated for a rejection of austerity politics and a return to seemingly outmoded policies of ambitious social spending, government activism and higher taxes on big business and the rich. He has proposed universal childcare and free higher education for all, wants to renationalize Britain’s railroads and utilities, and believes the country should withdraw from NATO, scrap its nuclear missiles and invest most of its military budget in job programs...

If no one finds Corbyn’s politics so amusing anymore, there is an element of comedy in the Armageddon that Labour’s centrist establishment may have called down upon itself. In the interest of greater transparency and democracy, the party opened this year’s leadership election to anyone who registered online as a party supporter and pay a minimal fee – and the apparent result is a whole lot more democracy than they wanted. Ballots started going out this weekend to 610,000 or so Labour members and supporters – more than half of whom signed up during the current campaign and are highly likely to be Corbyn voters. Labour’s leadership underestimated the public appetite for candidates and ideas that lie outside the safe zone of neoliberal consensus politics, and is now likely to reap the whirlwind. It’s a lesson that will not be lost on political leadership castes around the world.

And  here's a related op-ed piece in The Spectator.

I would welcome informed opinion from some of the many TYWKIWDBI readers in the UK and EU.

Updated September 11:  Corbyn elected in victory of landslide proportions -

More details at The Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC, The Observer, The Times, and other British and European publications.  It might even be mentioned briefly in some American ones.

Addendum:  The Guardian has a succinct summary of Corbyn's beliefs and policy proposals:

On the economy 

Corbyn is opposed to austerity and plans to bring down the deficit by growing the economy and taxing the wealthy instead.

He intends to introduce a “people’s quantitative easing”, which would allow the Bank of England to print money to invest in large-scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects, partly through a national investment bank.

 Corbyn says he will fund this by reducing the “tax gap” and ending corporate tax reliefs.

On tax 

Corbyn says there is £20bn in tax debt uncollected by HMRC every year and another £20bn in tax avoidance and a further £80bn in tax evasion that needs to be addressed.

On education

Corbyn has proposed a National Education Service, which he says would be “every bit as vital and as free at the point of use as our NHS”. The service would begin with universal childcare, give more power to local authorities, rethink the role of free schools and academies, introduce a minimum wage for apprentices and put more money into adult learning...

Continued at length at the link.