17 January 2016
Water ice confirmed on the surface of a comet
This apparently isn't unexpected, as this Reddit thread discusses. But it still boggles my own mind, since I spent the first half-dozen decades of my life believing that water in any form would sublimate instantly and could therefore not exist in an object traveling through a vacuum.
And it is water ice, btw, not frozen methane of ammonia.
How to bet on a spinning penny
Bet on tails. On a fresh, unworn, clean penny the odds may be 80:20 in your favor. This doesn't apply to a coin flip, however.
An article at Smithsonian explains why.
14 January 2016
Wrestling class
In the sport of wrestling, "class" typically refers to a level of high-school competition or a weight category. The Sioux City Journal documents another instance of "class" -
With the wrestling dual between Spencer and Estherville-Lincoln Central still in its early stages at Spencer Field House, Castro-Chavez stood behind Dan Hewitt, the Midgets' coach. The two of them suspected Spencer might not have a 220-pound wrestler for this match, as Roberts so solidly filled that spot in the lineup before his death on Dec. 19.
Roberts had won 14 matches to start his senior campaign, one that ended when he collapsed during the championship bout in the Spencer Tiger Invitational. He died a couple of hours later at Spencer Hospital.
Castro-Chavez was wrestling on the mat adjacent to Roberts' match that awful day. Castro-Chavez had lost to Roberts earlier in the season.
Still, he could have picked up a forfeit on Thursday, and put 6 points on the scoreboard for his team, which trailed Spencer, 22-3, at the time. Instead, he left his warm-ups on and his headgear tied to his waist. Rather than walk to the center of the mat to have his hand raised in victory by referee Bob Baxter, Castro-Chavez chose to [forfeit the match and] walk to the front row of the bleachers, where he hugged Austin Roberts' mother, Lori Roberts.
"I wanted to show Austin's family respect, because they are grieving," Castro-Chavez said. "I told Austin's mom that I wished I could wrestle Austin again, because he was such a good wrestler."For those unfamiliar with the sport, this comment from the Reddit thread will help explain:
I think only people who wrestled in high school will understand the significance of this. For those that don't know, the rivalries in high school wrestling can be crazy intense. The good wrestlers are gonna be facing each other for 4 years at the sectional, regional, semi state, and state levels. I remember some of the best guys on the team going like 40-2 on the season and their only losses were to the same guys every single year. It says a lot about this kid to honor his rival like that.Photo credit: Nate Shaughnessy.
British class system, 1937
"Toffs and Toughs is a 1937 photograph of five English boys: two dressed in the Harrow School uniform including waistcoat, top hat, boutonnière, and cane; and three nearby wearing the plain clothes of pre-war working class youths. The picture was taken by Jimmy Sime on 9 July 1937 outside the Grace Gates at Lord's Cricket Ground during the Eton v Harrow cricket match."
Using the periodic table to play "Battleship"
Karen Tripp modified the classic "Battleship" game for homeschooling purposes.
She created the game using four laminated copies of the Periodic Table which were labeled alphabetically by row and column, then inserted into two file folders [sheet protectors?] with jumbo paper clips.Sadly, after coming up with this innovative idea, she then dumbed it down by labeling the rows A through H and the columns 1 through 18, so the children instead of calling out "phosphorus" or "cadmium" or "oxygen" just call out "D-11" or "F-4" or whatever. An opportunity missed there, I think.
“The kids can then mark where they want to place their ships by circling rows of 2, 3, 4, and 5 elements on the lower table.. They play by calling out coordinates. If they miss they put an X on the spot they chose on the upper table. If they get a hit, they circle it.”
Blind librarians
"In my life I have received many unmerited honors, but there is one which has made me happier than all the others: the directorship of the [Argentinian] National Library...
I received the nomination at the end of 1955. I was in charge of, I was told, a million books. Later I found out it was nine hundred thousand - a number that's more than enough...
Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines...
(re Groussac, another blind library director) But I knew that there had certainly been moments when our lives had coincided, since we both had become blind and we both loved books. He honored literature with books far superior to mine. But we were both men of letters, and we both passed through the library of forbidden books - one might say, for our darkened eyes, of blank books, books without letters. I wrote of the irony of God...
At the time I did not know that there had been another director of the library who was blind, Jose Marmol. Here appears the number three, which seals everything. Two is a mere coincidence; three a confirmation. A confirmation of a ternary order, a divine or theological confirmation...
---Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "Blindness," in Seven Nights.
When I read these comments I couldn't help but be reminded of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last."
"Christian atheism" explained
Excerpts from a religion page archived in 2006 by the BBC:
Worship is a beneficial activity. Worship in a group is good way for a community to:
There are several more bullet points under these headings at the BBC.
Essentials of non-realistic Christianity
- Religion is about internal spiritual experiences, and that is all.
- There is no world other than the material world around us.
- There are no beings other than the living organisms on this planet or elsewhere in the universe.
- There is no objective being or thing called God that exists separately from the person believing in him.
- There is no 'ultimate reality' outside human minds either.
- We give our own lives meaning and purpose; there is nothing outside us that does it for us.
- God is a projection of the human mind.
- "God" is the way human beings put 'spiritual' ideals into a poetic form that they are able to use and work with.
- "God" is simply a word that stands for our highest ideals.
Worship and prayer
If there's no God out there, it might seem pointless to go to church, or to pray. Christian Atheists would disagree:Worship is a beneficial activity. Worship in a group is good way for a community to:
- communicate with each other
- share ideals and ideas
- explore the meaning and purpose of their individual lives, and the life of their community
Benefits of this form of belief
Those who who believe like this claim many advantages for it:- Humanity is forced to take responsibility for everything.
- Human beings are seen as powerful and able to do things for themselves.
- Religion no longer has to try to explain many difficult issues that go with believing in supernatural things.
- Religion is no longer in opposition to scientific progress.
There are several more bullet points under these headings at the BBC.
Eight years
11 January 2016
Don't bother harvesting your grandfather's gold fillings
About 25 years ago, when my father was dying of metastatic prostatic cancinoma, he told me bluntly to make sure to ask the mortician to extract his teeth so that I could have the gold fillings. He had had a lot of reparative dental work done in the 1930s-40s and at about $400/oz didn't want to see the gold wasted.
When he did die, I was either too busy or too shy to bring the matter up to the mortician. For the next several decades I wondered in the back of my mind whether some mortuary assistant with a pair of pliers had enriched himself at our expense.
This year my question was answered. I had the opportunity to speak with a funeral director on an unrelated matter, and brought up the question that had been nagging at me for so long. He laughed and noted that he was uniquely qualified to address the question, not because of his mortuary experience, but because his father was a dentist.
During his father's dental career, it was common practice to extract teeth, many of which had metal fillings, including gold. Discarding the teeth into the environment was discouraged because of the heavy metals, so his father kept all the teeth he extracted in a large coffee can. Then one day the office building burned down. The family retrieved what they could from the office ruins, and in doing so found the coffee can with the organic material gone but the metal fillings fused into a solid mass. They took the block to a metalworking company and were rewarded with the princely sum of ... three dollars.
His explanation was that gold itself is too soft to be used as a filling on a grinding surface. "Gold" fillings are typically other amalgams colored with minuscule amounts of gold. They are offered to the public as a cosmetic enhancement, not as a financial investment.
I'm not sure whether the same applies to often rather striking "gold teeth" one can see on a Google image search.
A related post from last year: A concrete block filled with human teeth.
Photo credit: Myteethnvd's Weblog.
When he did die, I was either too busy or too shy to bring the matter up to the mortician. For the next several decades I wondered in the back of my mind whether some mortuary assistant with a pair of pliers had enriched himself at our expense.
This year my question was answered. I had the opportunity to speak with a funeral director on an unrelated matter, and brought up the question that had been nagging at me for so long. He laughed and noted that he was uniquely qualified to address the question, not because of his mortuary experience, but because his father was a dentist.
During his father's dental career, it was common practice to extract teeth, many of which had metal fillings, including gold. Discarding the teeth into the environment was discouraged because of the heavy metals, so his father kept all the teeth he extracted in a large coffee can. Then one day the office building burned down. The family retrieved what they could from the office ruins, and in doing so found the coffee can with the organic material gone but the metal fillings fused into a solid mass. They took the block to a metalworking company and were rewarded with the princely sum of ... three dollars.
His explanation was that gold itself is too soft to be used as a filling on a grinding surface. "Gold" fillings are typically other amalgams colored with minuscule amounts of gold. They are offered to the public as a cosmetic enhancement, not as a financial investment.
I'm not sure whether the same applies to often rather striking "gold teeth" one can see on a Google image search.
A related post from last year: A concrete block filled with human teeth.
Photo credit: Myteethnvd's Weblog.
Borges on blindness
"A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.
If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift. I have exhausted you with the gifts it has given me. It gave me Anglo-Saxon, it gave me some Scandinavian, it gave me a knowledge of a Medieval literature I had ignored, it gave me the writing of various books, good or bad, but which justified the moment in which they were written. Moreover, blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel goodwill toward the blind.
I want to end with a line of Goethe: "alles Nahe werde fern," everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.
Goethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude—except that the supreme solitude is death. And “everything near becomes far” also refers to the slow process of blindness, of which I hoped to show, speaking tonight, that it is not a complete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many—all of them so strange—that fate or chance provide.
--Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "Blindness," in Seven Nights.
"Gandhi opposed the building of hospitals"
"Deussen - a disciple of Schopenhauer, who loved Buddhism so much - tells how in India he met a blind beggar and became friends with him. The beggar told him: 'If I have been born blind, it is because of the sins committed in my previous life; it is just if I am blind.' The people accept suffering. Gandhi opposed the building of hospitals. He said that hospitals and charitable works simply delay the paying of a debt. One being cannot help another: if the others suffer, then they must suffer, to pay for a sin. If I help them, then I am putting off their payment of this debt."
--Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "Buddhism," in Seven Nights.
When I read this I was reminded of recent public controversy regarding the impending canonization of Mother Teresa. In this Penn and Teller video, she is roundly criticized for her "cruelty," as she is in this Christopher Hitchens presentation. Wikipedia devotes a page to these controversies. The countervailing opinion is that criticism to Mother Teresa comes from opposition to her views opposing abortion, rather than to her insistence that the sick accept suffering.
So it's interesting to me to see Borges express a similar viewpoint re Mahatma Gandhi's approach to sickness and suffering.
Bohemian Rhapsody reinterpreted
08 January 2016
Divertimento
Run your mouse over the dots. Keep going....
The Pissed Consumer website focuses on consumer complaints and reviews. You can enter a complaint, or search a company to see what negative experiences others have had.
"Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals [Ernest Hemingway] was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow." More on Hemingway as a spy here.
This gif concisely depicts 'murica's values.
"Archaeologists claim to have proved that Julius Caesar set foot on what is now Dutch soil, destroying two Germanic tribes in a battle that left about 150,000 people dead. The tribes were massacred in the fighting with the Roman general in 55BC, on a battle site now in Kessel, in the southern province of Brabant. Skeletons, spearheads, swords and a helmet have been unearthed at the site over the past three decades. But now carbon dating as well as other historical and geochemical analysis have proved the items dated to the 1st century BC, the VU University in Amsterdam said."
A detailed, line-by-line explication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
A 40th-anniversary reinterpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody "performed by a duet from the English National Ballet, a string quartet from the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity Boys Choir, cut with archive footage of Queen’s performance on Christmas Eve in 1975."
"A Modesto pastor is recovering after being shot during a gun safety class, CBS Sacramento reports.
Tom Smith, a family pastor who also helps with church security, was shot by his own gun safety instructor... The shooting incident comes at a time when church members in California are training to carry concealed weapons in response to recent mass shootings..."
A gif of peanuts being harvested.
A website that lets you look up how liberal or conservative an American town is.
A man displays the world's longest fingernails. He's been growing them for 60 years. "I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted."
"Former Oglala Sioux Tribe police officer Rebecca Sotherland was found not guilty of using unreasonable force by a federal jury last week. The indictment against her stemmed from an August 2014 incident where she used a Taser an estimated 28 times on an unresponsive man in Manderson, South Dakota." Video at the link.
gif of crowd control at a Tokyo event.
"ProPublica has identified 35 instances since 2012 in which workers at nursing homes and assisted-living centers have surreptitiously shared photos or videos of residents, some of whom were partially or completely naked... Abusive treatment is not new at nursing homes. Workers have been accused of sexually assaulting residents, sedating them with antipsychotic drugs and failing to change urine-soaked bed sheets. But the posting of explicit photos is a new type of mistreatment."
Here's what happens when you put powdered sugar on a birthday cake and then blow out the candles.
D magazine (from Dallas) offers a comprehensive backstory behind the "affluenza" teen, his parents, and the events that unfolded.
"The location of the oldest established European multi-year settlement in the United States is indeed in the heart of Pensacola. Discoveries by local historian Tom Garner in October and research afterward by University of West Florida archaeologists confirmed where Don Tristan de Luna established his Spanish colony in August 1559 – six years before the St. Augustine settlement and nearly 48 years before the English settled in Jamestown, Va."
The etymology of the word "biffy," referring to a toilet, is from "privy." It seems to be an outdated term now - one that I heard primarily from older generation residents of Minnesota. Not sure if it was commonly used elsewhere.
"One thing most people don't suspect is Rogue Access Points, for wifi you set up an access point using your own insecure protocols and you put it at a mall and call it "Free wifi" or "Starbucks" and people when connect you can steal session cookies, personal information etc. Most people just connect to any wifi point with the strongest signal or unprotected."
BBC One will be presenting a new movie version of Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None. Yay !!!
An informative discussion thread about the history of labor unions in the United States.
"An Arizona lawmaker who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old is the new chairwoman of the state Senate committee that oversees education-related legislation." In the video at the link she says at a committee meeting that "the Earth has been here for 6,000 years - long before there were environmental regulations - and somehow it hasn't been done away with..."
An incredible volleyball save.
How people make millions of dollars by buying the rights to structured settlements from uneducated injured people.
Video of a giant squid.
"Although it’s been nearly 50 years since the first color broadcast, more than 9,000 Britons are still using black-and-white TVs for watching Television and only 550 sets are registered in Scotland."
A new essay by Bill Moyers about plutocrats.
"... merely shopping at a gardening store could make you the target of a criminal drug investigation." With a raid by a SWAT team. More at the Washington Post.
Headline of the day: Fight breaks out at Newark anti-violence rally.
The embedded images today come from the Cabin Porn tumblr. Top to bottom:
1 - House in Hemsedal, Norway. Contributed by Turid Lismoen.
2 - Cabin on Tara Mountain, Serbia. Contributed by Dragan Drobac.
3 - Stone cabin in the village of Savogno in Val Bregaglia, Italy. Contributed by Maria Piccinini.
4 - A-frame in Landmannalaugar, Iceland. Contributed by Gaspard Sommer.
5 - Subterranean cabin in Palenzuela, Spain. Contributed by Edu Lartzanguren.6 - Stone huts in Geiranger, Norway. Contributed by Elwin Zuiderveld.
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