Money and politics. And money.

Did I mention money?  Here are some excerpts from a new book, Nation on the Take:

Not too far from the Capitol Hill townhouses are the call centers that both Democrats and Republicans use to dial for dollars. Endlessly.

This is how Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, described it: “We sit at these desks with stacks of names in front of us and short bios and histories of giving . . . and we make calls to our faithful friends and ask them to give money or host a fundraiser.”..

How much time do our elected representatives spend trying to collect money from wealthy people? Roughly 50 percent. One former congressman, Tom Perriello (D-VA), told reporter Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post that even that may be “low-balling the figure so as not to scare the new members too much.”

This feverish fundraising begins even before a freshman gets sworn in. After former representative Walt Minnick, a conservative Democrat from Iowa, won his first election to Congress in 2008, he took just five days off before heading back to the phones...

The sad truth is that given the frenetic search for money in federal congressional elections,

there simply isn’t enough time in the day to stay competitive in campaign finance and do the actual job of policy making . . . I remember when I was first elected to Congress, I and many other House members would often go down to the floor of the House of Representatives and just listen to the debate. I may not have had an amendment to the bill or a particular interest in the issue but I always felt that watching policy discussions and witnessing the crafting of laws was an important part of my day. It gave me the chance to educate myself and interact with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Today most lawmakers would tell you that any free moment not used raising dollars is time wasted.

This theme of members of Congress not being able to commit time to doing the increasingly complicated job of examining and deeply understanding legislation comes up over and over again. It’s not just driving them nuts, it’s also driving many of them out of office, and it’s deterring good people from even thinking about running...

Of course, not all the fundraising occurs in dreary call center cubicles and trade-association-owned townhouses in D.C. As the New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton chronicled in 2014, “destination events” have become all the rage. Republicans join lobbyists and business executives for spa weekends in Las Vegas and ski trips at the Four Seasons resort in Vail. Democrats join lobbyists and business executives on the Ritz-Carlton’s private beach in Puerto Rico and on quail hunts in Georgia...

President Obama hasn’t exactly been a champion of reform, either. Despite some of his strong rhetoric—for instance, his statement at a White House press conference in 2013 that “There aren’t a lot of functioning democracies around the world that work this way, where you can basically have millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever they want, however they want, in some cases undisclosed”—he has failed to champion the cause. For instance, despite repeated requests from Common Cause and more than fifty other organizations, President Obama (as of the writing of this book) has been unwilling to sign an executive order requiring that all companies receiving federal contracts disclose their political spending...

We wish we could claim that coin-operated government exists only at the national level. Sadly, that’s not the case. Just as the influence industry has mushroomed in Washington in the last two decades, influence peddlers and political operatives have sought new ways to accomplish their agendas at the state and local levels...

An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that just fifty individuals and organizations—from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to the Democratic Governors Association—steered $440 million to state candidates and parties in 2014. Eighty-five percent of candidates who got donations from one of those fifty donors won.

Giving directly to state candidates, who raked in $1.2 billion in 2011– 2012, is often easier than giving to federal candidates, who can face tougher donation limits. Six states allow limitless giving directly to candidates, and another six have only slight restrictions. Data show that in states like California, Georgia, and South Carolina, all of which have high contribution limits, elections are less competitive. By contrast, elections in Maine, Arizona, and Minnesota, all of which have some form of public financing, are typically much more competitive...

Super PACs are also getting involved in city council and even school board elections across the country. A super PAC called the Committee for Economic Growth and Social Justice filed papers in Washington and promptly sent more than $150,000, funded largely by the bail bond industry, to unseat several members of a school board in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

There's much more at Salon.  I'm not sure I have the willpower to approach the book.

Pinhole camera six-month exposure

The University of Wisconsin-Madison holds an annual Cool Science Images contest, inviting campus researchers to submit interesting photos and videos.

"Using a pinhole camera made of an aluminum can, duct tape and photosensitive paper and positioning the device atop Sterling Hall from winter solstice to summer solstice, yields a symmetric chart of the sun's path across the sky. The lowest arc was the sun's winter solstice trajectory and the highest arc was the sun's path at summer solstice. Gaps between the arcs are days of overcast weather.

I'm amazed that the paper isn't totally bleached-out during a six-month exposure.  The sensitivity of the paper must be extremely low.  Very cool.

Details about "The Great Escape"

A couple brief excerpts from a detailed account in The Telegraph:

The subsequent events, thanks to numerous books and the 1963 Hollywood epic The Great Escape, have become the stuff of legend. However the real story had nothing to do with Steve McQueen on a motorbike and over the top derring-do by a few men – in reality some 600 were involved.

Despite being meticulously planned by the committee known as the X Organisation, the escape was a far messier affair than we have previously been led to believe. Events unfolded in chaos with numerous hold-ups and tunnel collapses. Some pushed their way in line; others fled their post altogether.

Now, after corresponding with and interviewing survivors, and seven painstaking years of trawling through historical records in archives across Europe, prisoner-of-war historian Charles Rollings throws new light on the night of the ‘Great Escape’. 

TL:DR -

Two weeks later the remaining prisoners at Stalag Luft III receive news that 42 of the recaptured escapees had been shot “resisting arrest or making further escape attempts after arrest”. When the list of victims was posted it amounted to 47 names, and a few days later another three were added, bringing the total to 50. Among the dead were 25 Britons, six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman and a Greek. A further 23 were sent back to various other Nazi prison camps. Only three of the escapees - two Norwegians and a Dutchman - made it home.

Meet the Tully monster

It's real.  Or was, 300 million years ago, as Ed Yong explains:

A pipe-fitter by trade, Tully was just an amateur collector, but a skilled one. He knew that the coal miners of Mazon Creek had discarded vast piles of shale that contained fossils galore. And as he sifted through the fragments, he found two rocks that had cracked open and that held something incredible between them...

Fifty years after Tully’s discovery, he and Richardson have both passed away, and the Tully Monster is the official state fossil of Illinois. And finally, a team of scientists led by Victoria McCoy at Yale University have solved the mystery of the strange beast, and assigned it a spot on the tree of life. It turns out to be a close relative of modern lampreys... Its body is short and stout. Its eyes sit at the end of a rigid bar. And instead of the distinctive sucker, its mouth is a long, triple-jointed claw...

Why, for example, were Tullimonstrum’s eyes at the end of a rigid bar? “We think that the best comparison is to the hammerhead shark,” says McCoy. Their wide-set eyes give them exceptional binocular vision. “We think the eyebar allowed Tully monster to see the things it was grabbing with the mouth at the end of the proboscis.” Oh yes. There’s that. Other scientists had interpreted that weird mouth as a flexible trunk. But since it usually had sharp bends in the same three places, McCoy’s team think it was jointed. It ended in a claw-like mouth, which contained two rows of teeth and could probably open and close. The mouth also contains something that looks like a tongue. Perhaps the whole proboscis is an extremely extended version of the lamprey’s sucker. Lampreys stick to passing fish with their mouths and teeth, while rasping off bits of flesh with their tongues. Perhaps the Tully monster did the same, but at a distance. “It might have been a sort of protrusile, lamprey-like feeding apparatus, like the jawed tongue of the monster in Alien,” says Janvier. 

There's more at the Atlantic.

"Giant metaphor crashes through the ice"

Not "meteor."  Metaphor.

Cantech Letter explains:

An 80-thousand pound metaphor crashed through the ice in the Northwest Territories Saturday in the form of an off-white Western Star fuel tanker.

The CBC reports that the tanker was carrying heating fuel to Deline, a town of about 500 near the Great Bear Lake. The accident happened just three days after the territory’s transportation department raised the allowable weight on the Great Bear Ice Crossing from 10,000 kilograms to 40,000.

The truck is currently semi-submerged in the top portion of the ice, which one official estimates to be between 100 and 120 centimetres thick. No one was injured in the incident.

The symbolism of a fuel truck trapped in the ice in Canada’s north will not be lost on anyone who follows news from the scientific community about climate change...

Canada has 5400 kilometres of ice roads, and they have provided a vital link not only for the approximately 43,000 resident of the Northwest Territories, but also for the important diamond mining industry. But researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles say that just 13 per cent of these routes may be accessible by 2050.

Proper use of a drone for photography

YouTube link.

Filmed by Uheheu (more videos at the link).  Via Reddit.

Artistic floor pattern

Eye-catching and inventive, or unsettling and annoying?

Artist uncredited at the Reddit via.

This is the smile of a very happy girl

This is Nujood Ali.  She was celebrating because a court granted her a divorce from a husband who had been abusing her.

She was ten years old.

Photo credit Stephanie Sinclair/National Geographic.  Read more about child brides here.

Book (title) of the year - updated

I posted the results of the Diagram Prize in 2008 and 2009, but had forgotten about it for several years.  Here are this year's results, courtesy of The Bookseller:

Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has been named as the winner of Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The title won 38% of the public vote, fighting off competition from fellow contenders How Tea Cosies Changed the World and God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.

Although the winner receives no prize attention, the nominator of the title, Deep Books' marketing manager Alan Ritchie, will receive a bottle of wine.

Previous winners of the title have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Highlights in the History of Concrete, Bombproof Your Horse and Cooking with Poo.

Philip Stone, The Bookseller charts editor and Diagram Prize administrator, said: "People might think the Diagram Prize is just a bit of fun, but it spotlights an undervalued art that can make or break a work of literature. Books such as A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time all owe a sizeable part of their huge successes to their odd monikers."

Reposted from 2013 to add some information about the 2015 nominees:

The 2015 shortlisted titles are:

Nature's Nether Regions by Menno Schilthuizen (Viking), a history of the evolution of genitals

Advanced Pavement Research: Selected, Peer Reviewed Papers from the 3rd International Conference on Concrete Pavements Design, Construction, and Rehabilitation, December 2-3, 2013, Shanghai, China edited by Bo Tian (Trans Tech); academic papers from a two-day pavement symposium.

The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing-Loh (Norton), a memoir of the menopause

Where do Camels Belong? By Ken Thompson (Profile), an investigation into native and invasive species.

Divorcing a Real Witch: For Pagans and the People That Used to Love Them by Diana Rajchel (Moon Books), a practical guide for ending pagan relationships, an account of the author's experience of speaking to strangers.

The Ugly Wife is Treasured at Home by Melissa Margaret Schneider (Potomac), an expose of love and sex under Maoist rule in China.

Strangers Have the Best Candy by Margaret Meps Schulte (Choose Art)

Image via The Guardian, which has a gallery of covers.

Copperhead snakes

There are FOUR of them in this photo.  If you only see two or three, they win.

Via the Mildly-Interesting subreddit.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the laws of science

YouTube link.

I felt bad after laughing at this humorously-amended clip from Cosmos.

Want a "blueberry banana smoothie" ?

Here you go.  Just add blueberries and bananas.

Owls "nailed to the walls" of Breton farms

One more item gleaned from The Phantom of the Opera (a pretty good book, but not an addition to this blog's category of recommended books).

I was startled to encounter (on pg 144 of my paperback copy) this sentence:

"If we really saw Erik, what I ought to have done was to nail him to Apollo's lyre, just as we nail the owls to the walls of our Breton farms; and there would have been no more question of him."

The reference to Apollo's lyre is to an ornament on the roof of the opera house.  My puzzlement is to the indication that owls were once (19th century, apparently) nailed to farm walls.  I would think most farmers would consider owls to be beneficial in terms of rodent control, so that act would not be appropriate as a triumph over a pest.  Was it perhaps done on an outside wall rather than indoors, to frighten away other granivores (?birds)?

This blog has readers in Brittany.  Perhaps one of you could inquire of an elderly grandparent...

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader Abie, who has found what appears to be the explanation (Google-translated from Chouette effraie):

The Barn is the basis of many legends and ghost stories. Indeed, by its hiss, screeches, its ghostly flight and cavalcades in the attic which serves as a cottage, lent credence to a spectral presence. In the Middle Ages the owl was the symbol of heresy . It thus appears about 40 times in the works of Hieronymus Bosch which in Temptation of St. Anthony (it is painted on the character's head after St. Anthony). The bad reputation of the "white lady" has earned him nailed to the doors of the barns where she lived, a practice that was supposed to protect thunderstorms, chase disease, ward off bad luck and scare other owls. This bad reputation is evidenced by Buffon in 1780 who wrote about the Barn:

"It grows sour different sounds all so unpleasant that this, together with the idea of the vicinity of cemeteries and churches, and even in the dark of night, inspires horror and fear to children, women, and even men subject to the same prejudices and who believe in ghosts, sorcerers, soothsayers to: they look like the funeral frightens bird, the messenger of death; they believe that when it is attached to a house, and that she sounds a different voice of its common cry is to call someone at the cemetery " .

Mummified salamander necklace

Mummified salamanders and piglets, enhanced with crystals, are now available for purchase at DeviantArt as curiosities or fashion accessories.

When I was a child growing up in Minnesota, tiger salamanders by the dozens would accumulate at the base of our outside basement stairwell.  It was my not unpleasant chore to gather them up before they desiccated, and transfer them back to the nearby woods.  Little did I know that I was dealing with potential art.

Credit card skimmer installed in 3 seconds

YouTube link.

For more on the dangers of these devices, just type "skimmer" into the search box in the right sidebar; I must have written about a half-dozen posts on the subject over the years.