Divertimento #121

Security cam documents the incredible reflexes of a father saving two children.  Note how he runs toward the danger.

"Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life... touches on some still-relevant financial topics, including the nature of banking, the philosophical calculus behind issuing loans, and the way American families’ financial fates are intertwined..."

There are hate crimes and there are hate crime hoaxes.

"A racehorse called Party Till Dawn has returned a positive drug test for methamphetamine."

Toddler unhappy that a book is finished (gif).

Restoring a 50-year-old hammer (note especially now the leather grip is crafted).

"Escape rooms, as they are known, are opening at a giddying rate everywhere from America to the Philippines. They have been described as the “fastest growing entertainment trend since the cinema” and are quickly becoming a staple of stag and hen parties, corporate team-building exercises and friends’ nights out. "

"Dominoes" using the capstones on a wall.  Don't quit early - wait for the unexpected ending.

A 12-minute-long video shows how Christmas hard ribbon candy is made (mostly by hand).

"A multiperson con that happens all the time in Southeast Asia. A female on a scooter pulls up to the male victim..." (gif at the link)

Solar and wind power are now cheaper than fossil fuels in 30 countries. "As prices for solar and wind power continue their precipitous fall, two-thirds of all nations will reach the point known as “grid parity” within a few years, even without subsidies."  Another article notes that “solar, battery storage, electrical and hydrogen vehicles, and connected devices are in a ‘J’ curve (of upward growth potential).” One consequence of this new energy economy is that, “the price (of oil) could drop to $10 if markets anticipate a significant fall in demand.” “The promise of quasi-infinite and free energy is here.”  These changes have a relevance to Donald Trump's proposed economic policy.

"Robert the Bruce really did suffer from leprosy, scientists have concluded after reconstructing his face from his skull."

You can now find out whether your ancestor fought at Agincourt.  "The French fighting men are now part of a database which lists more than 250,000 names of English soldiers who fought in campaigns between 1369 and 1453, including Agincourt. All together, the database is the largest list of medieval people ever assembled."

The thinnest wood shavings ever.  Looks to me like a medical microtome applied to wood.

You think your dog is housebroken.  This dog is housebroken.

If a website won't let you view an article because you have an ad blocker installed, there is a way you can override that impediment.

"Welders exposed to airborne manganese at estimated levels below federal occupational safety standards exhibit neurological problems similar to Parkinson’s disease."

High-school basketball player vs. Michael Jordan (photo).

Last year Warren Buffett made $32,000,000.  Per day.

"China promised Friday to halt its domestic ivory trade completely by the end of 2017, a decision greeted by environmentalists as offering real hope for an end to a poaching crisis that is wiping out tens of thousands of elephants across Africa. “China’s announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation.”

Donald Trump described as the "substitute teacher" of American presidents.  (While he's there "chaos reigns and nothing of any substance gets done.")

Another video of the red crab migration at Christmas Island.

A rant about the definition of a "grilled cheese sandwich," insisting that it's not the same as a "melt."

The Shaker sect is on the verge of extinction.

Star jelly (also called astromyxin, astral jelly, star rot, star shot or moon poo) is a gelatinous substance sometimes found on grass or even on branches of trees. According to folklore, it is deposited on the earth during meteor showers. Star jelly is described as a translucent or grayish-white gelatin that tends to evaporate shortly after having “fallen.” Explanations have ranged from the materials being the remains of frogs, toads, or worms, to the byproducts of cyanobacteria, to the paranormal. Reports of the substance date back to the 14th century and have continued to the present day.



"Dabbing" explained.

A glitch in a videotape spoils a report on a woman struck by lightning.

Accommodations in northern Norway.

"Two staff at East Lake library have been suspended for allegedly creating bogus borrowers, in order to outwit automated book-culling software designed to ditch titles that are not being read. The accused have alleged that the practice is widespread among librarians fighting to protect book budgets from unnecessary purchases."

You can now buy anti-surveillance clothing.

Norway is the first country in the world to drop its FM radio network. "FM will be replaced by digital audio broadcasting (DAB), which is said to have clearer sound and signal, and is already being broadcast in Norway. DAB also allows for eight times as many stations as FM for the same cost. The problem is that more than 2 million cars in Norway don’t have DAB receivers, nor do many homes."  Switzerland, Britain, and Denmark plan to do the same thing.

"A mysterious disease has been killing ducks and eagles in Florida’s wetlands, and endangered snail kites may be its next victims."

How some silent film special effects were created.

Clever woodworking: a drawer hidden within a drawer (gif). Via.

"A piece of fabric described as the Holy Grail of fashion history will become one of the star attractions at Hampton Court Palace after it was identified as the only surviving piece of clothing worn by Elizabeth I. The country’s leading experts on royal garments have spent the past year piecing together clues about the provenance of the beautifully embroidered textile, which had been cut up and used for hundreds of years as an altar cloth in a Herefordshire parish church."

A video for those who like snooker.

A useful sign in a ladies' restroom at a bar.

If someone is allergic to quinine, a gin and tonic can be lethal.

A remarkable badminton rally (gif).

Props to this bodybuilder with cerebral palsy.  Discussed here.

This is a bunraku puppet.

The images embedded in this divertimento come from the 2016 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar.  Descriptions, credits (and more photos) at the link.

That's not what I meant...

From the archives of The New Yorker.

Siblicide as a survival strategy

I examined the growth of surviving nestlings in broods of the cooperatively breeding laughing kookaburra Dacelo novaeguineae, which has complex patterns of brood reduction. Laughing kookaburras usually lay three eggs that hatch asynchronously. Brood reduction occurs in nearly half of all broods and always affects the youngest nestling. In most cases, the youngest nestling is killed within a few days of hatching by aggressive attacks from its older siblings. In a smaller proportion of nests, the youngest nestling dies from starvation, rather than physical attack, much later in the nestling period when nestling growth rates and adult feeding rates peak (about 20 days post-hatching). These mechanistically and temporally distinct episodes of brood reduction were associated with very different patterns of growth in the senior nestlings. Seniors that killed their youngest sibling reached higher asymptotic weights than seniors that did not commit siblicide. In contrast, if the youngest nestling was not killed by its older siblings, but later starved to death, the surviving seniors were skeletally smaller and had retarded feather development compared to seniors from other broods. These differences in nestling growth may have longer-term fitness consequences, because kookaburra fledging weight is positively associated with both juvenile survival and successful recruitment into the breeding population. Therefore, although parents of broods without mortality produce the highest number of fledglings and also the highest number of independent juveniles, if parents are unable to raise a full brood, early siblicide may represent the best brood reduction option. Early siblicide is at least associated with high quality young that have enhanced survival and recruitment prospects. In contrast, the poor growth of seniors in broods where the youngest nestling starved suggests that parents overestimated the size of the brood they could provision.

The abstract of Legge, Sarah. “Siblicide, Starvation and Nestling Growth in the Laughing Kookaburra.” Journal of Avian Biology, vol. 33, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–166.

See also fratricide and sororicide.  There are about 20 other "cides."  You can look them up.

Not on my bucket list - updated

YouTube link.

"See firsthand what it's like to rip down one of the heaviest downhill mountain bike tracks ever created, through he GoPro view of the creator himself, Dan Atherton. It's why Red Bull Hardline is an event like no other. The long and technical course plays on a variety of disciplines, where incredibly steep and rocky technical sections were combined with a motocross run in and 50-foot [15.24 meters] gap jump to create one of the most progressive downhill courses on the planet."

Reposted to add watching sharks from a shark cage (details here):

YouTube link.

Also free climbing without a rope (filmed 275' up a cliff):

YouTube link. 

And finally (for now) a related Real Life cartoon:

The rise and fall of the penis bone

From cats and dogs to primates and rodents, the males of many mammal species have a special genital bone called the baculum... Females often possess a bone analogous to the baculum called the baubellum or os clitoris...

After looking across 954 mammal species to check for the presence or absence of a baculum, Dean and his colleagues determined that the enigmatic bone independently evolved nine times and was subsequently lost in 10 different lineages. This means that the baculum is not an ancestral trait, but something that has popped up over and over again in mammalian history...

“There is nothing in common among species with a baculum versus species without,” Dean says. And solving the mystery “is not some weird niche of science.” The rapid and repeated evolution of bacula, Dean says, “is an absolutely fundamental pattern of evolution in almost all sexually reproducing organisms.

More at the Washington Post.  Embed: A collection of penis bones from brown bears. (Muséum de Toulouse)

A revised "Girl's Life" cover

Putting her graphic skills to work, in just a few minutes, Katherine [Young] swapped out the cover girl for Olivia Hallisey, the 2015 Google Science Fair Grand Prize winner, and photoshopped in some new, inspired and empowering headlines. The result? A magazine cover that offers girls better alternatives to tips on how to “Wake up Pretty.”

Background and more commentary (and a larger view of the revised cover) at Women You Should Know.

The U.S. dropped over 26,000 bombs last year

An average of 3 per hour, 24 hours/day, every day during the final year of the Obama administration.

President Obama did reduce the number of US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he dramatically expanded the air wars and the use of special operations forces around the globe. In 2016, US special operators could be found in 70% of the world’s nations, 138 countries – a staggering jump of 130% since the days of the Bush administration.

Looking back at President Obama’s legacy, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko added up the defense department’s data on airstrikes and made a startling revelation: in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.

While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries...

The twisted legal architecture the Obama administration has constructed to justify its interventions, especially extrajudicial drone killings with no geographic restrictions, will now be transferred into the erratic hands of Donald Trump.

"I Will Always Love You"

YouTube link.

YouTube link. 

 
One of my favorite pieces of music, sung by the incomparable Dolly Parton. She wrote this way back in 1973 when she was breaking up with her long-time partner Porter Waggoner. She recut it again in 1982 for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (here is the YouTube video of the movie version.)

The song became even more famous in the 1990s when Whitney Houston covered it for her film debut in The Bodyguard. Her version was ranked #1 in VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Love Songs.

I have embedded two versions: the upper one features Dolly in a solo concert performance; the video is grainy, especially at fullscreen, but the power of her voice comes through well. The lower one is her duet with Vince Gill, which was rated by Country Music Television as #1 in their 100 Greatest Country Love Songs.

Both are worth listening to.

Originally posted in 2008.  Reposted to update one of the videos that had died.

A truly shocking video of "defensive electrocution"

YouTube link.

A corny title, yes.  But this really is an amazing video.  It shows electric eels coming out of the water to attack prey (or potential predators).  Read on for a more detailed explanation, but if you just watch the video, don't stop with the slo-mo.  Continue on to see the attack in real time.  Awesome.

Smithsonian and Nature report on this study conducted by Kenneth Catania, a professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

...when Catania dangled conductive materials into his eel tank in the shape of things like human arms or crocodile heads, the knifefish [eels] jumped partly out of the shallow water and attacked, rubbing their heads against the invading object for several seconds.

Meanwhile microphones the biologist had placed inside the tank confirmed the attacks were coordinated with a high voltage volley. "Importantly, they're not just leaping randomly. They're really following the conductor out of the water,” he says. "It's fascinating to me because it's clearly a very impressive and very useful defense mechanism."

He has found that the eels can deliver a more concentrated shock by projecting out of the water and pressing their chins against animals. "The eels may not be very good at shocking something that's not fully in the water so this behavior is the solution,” he says. "The higher [the eel] gets, the more of that power goes through what it's touching and the less goes back through the water from its tail. These eels have evolved to have remarkable output, and it turns out they have evolved pretty remarkable behavior to go along with that."

...his discovery supports a widely disbelieved observation made more than 200 years ago by the Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. In a paper published in 1807, von Humboldt recounted that he had seen South American native fishermen herding horses into a pool of electric eels; the eels would discharge themselves against the horses and could be fished safely when they were exhausted.

More at both links.

Leather grades explained

There are different grades of leather.  "Genuine" is near the bottom.

Starting at the top of the chain, we have full-grain leather. The term full-grain refers to leather that hasn’t been sanded or buffed out to remove marks or imperfections, so it includes the entire thickness of the skin...

Second on the list, and the second-highest quality, top-grain leather has the split layer with imperfections taken away, making it thinner and more workable for the manufacturer. This is the most common type of leather used in high-end products (think handbags), you’ve likely seen it everywhere...

...suede has a signature napped surface from the underside of the skin. Technically suede is formed from split leather, which has had the top-grain rawhide removed... Although suede feels great, it’s less durable because its thinner and absorbs liquid easily due to its porous surface. Similar to suede but generally regarded as being more durable, nubuck is top-grain cattle hide leather that has been lightly sanded on the outside...

Simply put, corrected-grain or “genuine” leather has had an artificial grain applied to its surface. For those of you who are looking for high-quality leather goods, this would be a negative. The leather-like pattern is impressed into the surface and then sprayed with stain or dyes to give the fake grain a more natural appearance...

At the bottom of the pyramid, bonded leather uses leftover scrap pieces of leather that are shredded to a near-pulp. These shreds are then bonded together using polyurethane or latex on top of a fiber sheet.

Discussed in a post at the TIL Reddit.

Tarsus of a diving beetle

Photo credit Igor Siwanowicz/Nikon Small World 2016, via a gallery at Nature.

Retirement planning

Cartoon from the archives of The New Yorker.

Experimental glass penny from WWII era

"A rare experimental glass penny made during World War II has netted a pretty penny at auction — selling for $70,500.

Heritage Auctions announced Friday that the penny was sold during Thursday's auction based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to an American buyer who wishes to remain anonymous.

During the war, copper was needed for ammunition. The U.S. Mint authorized tests that included making uncirculated pennies from other metals, plastic and rubber. The Blue Ridge Glass Co. in Tennessee made experimental pennies using tempered glass...

The penny is likely unique since Burdette says only one other glass penny exists and it is broken."

Two "crash blossom" headlines

 

These examples via the Funny subreddit and The Express.

Previous examples here and here.

And a compilation here.

The term was originally created at Language Log.

Vädersoltavlan (1535)

Excerpts from the Wikipedia summary:

Vädersolstavlan (Swedish for "The Sun Dog Painting") is an oil-on-panel painting depicting a halo display, an atmospheric optical phenomenon, observed over Stockholm on April 20, 1535. It is named after the sun dogs (Swedish: Vädersol, "Weather sun") appearing on the upper right part of the painting. While chiefly noted for being the oldest depiction of Stockholm in colour, it is arguably also the oldest Swedish landscape painting and the oldest depiction of sun dogs...

The medieval urban conglomeration, today part of the old town Gamla stan, is rendered using a bird's-eye view. The stone and brick buildings are densely packed below the church and castle, which are rendered in a descriptive perspective (i.e., their size relates to their social status, rather than their actual dimensions). Scattered wooden structures appear on the surrounding rural ridges, today part of central Stockholm...

According to the passage in the Vasa Chronicle, however, both Petri and the master of the mint Anders Hansson were sincerely troubled by the appearance of these sun dogs. Petri interpreted the signs over Stockholm as a warning from God and had the Vädersolstavlan painting produced and hung in front of his congregation. Notwithstanding this devotion, he was far from certain on how to interpret these signs and in a sermon delivered in late summer 1535, he explained there are two kinds of omens: one produced by the Devil to allure mankind away from God, and another produced by God to attract mankind away from the Devil — one being hopelessly difficult to tell from the other. He therefore saw it as his duty to warn both his congregation, mostly composed of German burghers united by their conspiracy against the king, and the king himself...

 In the painting, the actual sun is the yellow ball in the upper-right corner surrounded by the second circle. The large circle taking up most of the sky is a parhelic circle, parallel to the horizon and located at the same altitude as the sun, as the painting renders it...

There's way more at the extensive Wikipedia page on old Stockholm and the science of the phenomenon.

Reposted from 2014 to add this photo of sun dogs I took just after dawn on this frosty Wisconsin morning:

My photo with a cellphone camera doesn't capture the intensity of brightness of the two sun dogs, or the subtle light pillar extending above the rising sun.

Note also:

The prelude to the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire, England in 1461 is supposed to have involved the appearance of a halo display with three "suns". The Yorkist commander, later Edward IV of England, convinced his initially frightened troops that it represented the three sons of the Duke of York, and Edward's troops won a decisive victory. The event was dramatized by William Shakespeare in King Henry VI, Part 3, and by Sharon Kay Penman in The Sunne In Splendour.