Why this bird is called a "turkey"

There are two theories for the derivation of the name "turkey" for this bird, according to Columbia University professor of Romance languages Mario Pei. One theory is that when Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl, which were already being imported into Europe by Turkey merchants via Constantinople and were therefore nicknamed Turkey coqs. The name of the North American bird thus became "turkey fowl" or "Indian turkeys," which was then shortened to just "turkeys".

The other theory arises from the fact that turkeys came to England from the Americas via merchant ships from the Middle East where they were domesticated successfully. Again the importers lent the name to the bird: because these merchants were called "Turkey merchants" as much of the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. Hence the name “Turkey birds” or, soon thereafter, “turkeys”.

In many countries, the names for turkeys have different derivations. Ironically, many of these names incorporate an assumed Indian origin, such as diiq Hindi ("Indian rooster") in Arabian countries, dinde ("from India") in French, Indjushka ("bird of India") in Russia, indyk in Poland, and Hindi ("India") in Turkey. These are thought to arise from the thought that Christopher Columbus had originally believed that he had reached India rather than the Americas on his voyage. In Portuguese a turkey is a peru; the name is thought to derive from the eponymous country Perú.

Several other birds that are sometimes called turkeys are not particularly closely related: the brushturkeys are megapodes, and the bird sometimes known as the "Australian turkey" is the Australian bustard (Ardeotis australis). The anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) is sometimes called a water turkey, from the shape of its tail when the feathers are fully spread for drying.

Image credit: By John James Audubon - University of Pittsburgh, Public Domain.

Rare gold coin found in child's toy box

One of Britain's rarest coins will go under the hammer at an Essex auction house next month after being discovered in a little boy's toy box...

The coin is one of only twenty made from the 7.5lbs of gold seized from Spanish treasure ships by the British in Vigo Bay, northern Spain, on October 23, 1702...

"My grandad had travelled all over the world during his working life and had collected many coins from the various countries he had been," the vendor said. "He gave me bags of coins to play with throughout my early years because I was into pirate treasure. "I looked back through the coins, remembering the stories I made up about them when I was small, and then gave them to my own son to play with and put into his own treasure box. "My little boy has been playing with this coin as I did all those years ago."..

 The coin, only the sixth example of its type to be offered for sale in the last 50 years, is expected to break Boningtons' record of £200,000, set by the sale of a painting by Sir Winston Churchill earlier this year. 

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Harper's Weekly "Notes"

November 17, 2016

By Joe Kloc

   

Donald Trump, a real-estate developer endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, was elected president of the United States. Following the election, the Canadian government's immigration website crashed, the Dow Jones temporarily plummeted, two LGBT suicide hotlines reported a spike in call volume, and more than 4.3 million Americans signed a petition asking state electors to pick as president former candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by a margin of at least a million but failed to win a majority in the Electoral College. "The Electoral College is a disaster for democracy," Trump tweeted in 2012. Trump appointed the editor of an alt-right news site as his chief strategist, and more than 400 hate crimes were reported across the country. The mayor of Clay, West Virginia, resigned after commenting favorably on a Facebook post that compared First Lady Michelle Obama to an "Ape in heels"; the deputy director of a corrections center in Memphis, Tennessee, resigned after writing on Facebook that "the KKK is more American" than Barack Obama; a school-board member in Little Rock, Arkansas, was investigated by the superintendent for wearing blackface; students in Indiana, Michigan, and Texas chanted variations of "Build a wall!" during their lunch periods; middle-schoolers in Oregon shouted "Go back to Mexico!" at an 11-year-old Colombian American; a banner that read "Death to Diversity" was hung in a Colorado library; a high-school student in Redding, California, handed out fake "deportation orders" to his minority classmates; a Maryland elementary-school bathroom was vandalized with the message "KILL KILL KILL BLACKS"; a Maryland Episcopal church sign advertising Spanish services was vandalized with the message "Trump Nation Whites Only"; an LGBT-friendly Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized with a swastika and the words "Heil Trump"; a note reading "You can all go home now" was posted on a Muslim family's front door in Iowa City; a Muslim teacher in Atlanta found a note in her classroom telling her to hang herself with her headscarf; Muslim girls in San Jose and Albuquerque reported having their hijabs forcibly removed from their heads; a Muslim student at the University of Michigan was threatened with immolation; swastikas were drawn on the dorm-room doors of Jewish students at the New School in New York City; "Trump!" was written on the door of a Muslim prayer room at New York University; a college student in Oklahoma threatened in a group messaging app to lynch black students at the University of Pennsylvania; a boy in Pennsylvania carried a Trump sign through the halls of his high school shouting "White power!"; signs advising white women not to date black men appeared on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas; a teacher in a Tampa Bay high school was placed on leave for allegedly threatening to "call Donald Trump and get you sent back to Africa"; a neo-Nazi blogger declared New Balance the "official shoes of white people"; and a neo-Nazi leader of the alt-right movement enjoined his followers to make "brown people ... feel that everything around them is against them." In Orlando, a bald eagle flew into a sewer and died.

Mars has a Lake-Superior-size mass of water

It doesn't seem that long ago when reports about water being found in extraterrestrial sites was amazing news.  Now it's beginning to seem that water on other planetary bodies is not at all uncommon.  Here are some excerpts from NASA re their new find on Mars:

Frozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what's in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.


Scientists examined part of Mars' Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter's ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that's 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.


At the latitude of this deposit -- about halfway from the equator to the pole -- water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet's thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick...

"This deposit is probably more accessible than most water ice on Mars, because it is at a relatively low latitude and it lies in a flat, smooth area where landing a spacecraft would be easier than at some of the other areas with buried ice," said Jack Holt of the University of Texas, a co-author of the Utopia paper who is a SHARAD co-investigator and has previously used radar to study Martian ice in buried glaciers and the polar caps.


The Utopian water is all frozen now. If there were a melted layer -- which would be significant for the possibility of life on Mars -- it would have been evident in the radar scans. However, some melting can't be ruled out during different climate conditions when the planet's axis was more tilted. "Where water ice has been around for a long time, we just don't know whether there could have been enough liquid water at some point for supporting microbial life," Holt said.

And just to clarify the size of Lake Superior - In terms of volume, it is the third largest on earth (after Lake Baikal and Lake Tanganyika) and has enough water to cover the entire land mass of North and South America to a depth of 30 centimetres (12 in).

 And IIRC, Europa also contains a water volume greater than all the water on earth. 

Letchworth State Park, New York

Via the Earth Port subreddit.

Two-headed snake

Found in Croatia.  Photo credit Vedran Glavan/Barcroft, via The Telegraph.

Yemen in a nutshell

It’s not just Al-Qaeda. Water shortages, collapsing oil supplies, war, refugees, pirates, poverty—why Yemen is failing.

At the heart of all these problems is Yemen’s looming economic collapse. Already the poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen is rapidly depleting its oil reserves and lacks any options for creating a sustainable post-oil economy. Unemployment is estimated at 35 percent, higher than what the U.S. faced during the Great Depression.

Accelerating the economic decline is a protracted civil war in the north between Shia insurgents and the Sana’a-based government. The war has caused a refugee crisis and extensive damage to infrastructure...

The map/graphics embedded above is excellent - click for bigger to read the details.

No commentary from me; I'm just posting for future use/reference.

Reposted from 2010 to add the following from an article by Andrew Cockburn in the Sept 2016 issue of Harper's:

Just a few short years ago, Yemen was judged to be among the poorest countries in the world, ranking 154th out of the 187 nations on the U.N.’s Human Development Index. One in every five Yemenis went hungry. Almost one in three was unemployed. Every year, 40,000 children died before their fifth birthday, and experts predicted the country would soon run out of water.

Such was the dire condition of the country before Saudi Arabia unleashed a bombing campaign in March 2015, which has destroyed warehouses, factories, power plants, ports, hospitals, water tanks, gas stations, and bridges, along with miscellaneous targets ranging from donkey carts to wedding parties to archaeological monuments. Thousands of civilians — no one knows how many — have been killed or wounded. Along with the bombing, the Saudis have enforced a blockade, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine. A year and a half into the war, the health system has largely broken down, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation.

This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.) U.S. Navy ships aided the blockade. But no one that I talked to in Washington suggested that the war was in any way necessary to our national security. The best answer I got came from Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who has been one of the few public officials to speak out about the devastation we were enabling far away. “Honestly,” he told me, “I think it’s because Saudi Arabia asked.”

Much more at the link.

Rebuilding America's infrastructure

From an op-ed piece in the New York Times:

To understand what’s going on, it may be helpful to start with what we should be doing. The federal government can indeed borrow very cheaply; meanwhile, we really need to spend money on everything from sewage treatment to transit. The indicated course of action, then, is simple: borrow at those low, low rates, and use the funds raised to fix what needs fixing.

But that’s not what the Trump team is proposing. Instead, it’s calling for huge tax credits: billions of dollars in checks written to private companies that invest in approved projects, which they would end up owning. For example, imagine a private consortium building a toll road for $1 billion. Under the Trump plan, the consortium might borrow $800 million while putting up $200 million in equity — but it would get a tax credit of 82 percent of that sum, so that its actual outlays would only be $36 million. And any future revenue from tolls would go to the people who put up that $36 million...

More at the link.

A modern wise man bearing... myrrhijuana ?

Image cropped for size from the original posted at the Funny subreddit.

"Take the head of a black crow and scoop out its brain..."

"Take the head of a black crow and scoop out its brain. In place of the brain, put some dirt taken from the spot where the woman whom you seek sits, and also a little detritus from the bath, along with seven grains of barley. Bury the crow’s head in the ground, in a moist place. Once the barley grows to the height of four fingers, take some of it and rub it on your hand, wipe it on your face and forearms, and then approach the woman without speaking to her. She will chase after you and will not be able to live without you."

From The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a fourteenth-century encyclopedia by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, an Egyptian scholar, via Harper's, where additional excerpts are available.

Bangles

Bangles are circular in shape, and, unlike bracelets, are not flexible. The word is derived from Hindi bungri (glass). They are made of numerous precious as well as non-precious materials such as gold, silver, platinum, glass, wood, ferrous metals, plastic, etc. Bangles made from sea shell, which are white colour, are worn by married Bengali and Oriya Hindu women...

Bangles are part of traditional Indian jewellery. They are usually worn in pairs by women, one or more on each arm. Most Indian women prefer wearing either gold or glass bangles or combination of both. Inexpensive bangles made from plastic are slowly replacing those made by glass, but the ones made of glass are still preferred at traditional occasions such as marriages and on festivals.

The value of your email account to hackers

Excerpts from Krebs on Security:

"... many people do not fully realize how much they have invested in their email accounts until those accounts are in the hands of cyber thieves...

Sign up with any service online, and it will almost certainly require you to supply an email address. In nearly all cases, the person who is in control of that address can reset the password of any associated services or accounts –merely by requesting a password reset email...

Even if your email isn’t tied to online merchants, it is probably connected to other accounts you care about. Hacked email accounts are not only used to blast junk messages: They are harvested for the email addresses of your contacts, who can then be inundated with malware spam and phishing attacks. Those same contacts may even receive a message claiming you are stranded, penniless in some foreign country and asking them to wire money somewhere...

If your inbox was held for ransom, would you pay to get it back? If your Webmail account gets hacked and was used as the backup account to receive password reset emails for another Webmail account, guess what? Attackers can now seize both accounts.

If you have corresponded with your financial institution via email, chances are decent that your account will eventually be used in an impersonation attempt to siphon funds from your bank account.

Scary.  And more at the link.

Hen's nest woven from straw

"Woven out of plaited straw, this hen’s nest represents an object that was once commonly seen on Irish farms. Typically oaten straw was used to weave the objects, but on occasion wheat or barley straw was also employed. The nests were normally placed in a dark room/space, often in an outhouse, where the hens were more likely to lay their eggs. This particular example comes from Drumcliffe in Co. Sligo and now resides at the Museum of Country Life, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo."

Impressive craftsmanship.  Via Irish Archaeology

Islamic silver coins found in Sweden

"An interesting find from Uppland in Sweden where archaeologist working for Arkeologikonsult have uncovered a hoard of 163 Islamic coins. Fashioned out of silver, the coins contain Arabic script and the majority were minted in Samarkand, an Islamic state which was located in modern day Uzbekistan and Iran. They date from the mid-10th century AD and were discovered in a much older, prehistoric mound that was erected during the Swedish Bronze Age. This is not overly surprising as such monuments were often reused during the Viking age for votive offerings."

More details at Irish Archaeology.

The geography of blue and red America

"...we took the election results and created two new imaginary nations by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas."

From the New York Times.  Interesting to see this done at a county or district level rather than at the state level.