Maps of the world's forests

Found at EarthArtAustralia, which also has maps of waterways and other physical features.

Screencap from local news

Interesting juxtaposition of stories.  ("OWI" is "operating while intoxicated.")  Reports of people with 5 or 10 OWI offenses are not uncommon. 

Via the Madison, WI subreddit.

Bookmobile, Jefferson County Texas, 1935

From the Foodporn, historyporn, earthporn tumblr, via Ego is a rat on the sinking ship of being.

Unread books

"Knowing a book’s relationship to other books often means you know more about it than you do on actually reading it... we also forget a very large percentage of the books we have actually read, and indeed we build a sort of virtual picture of them that consists not so much of what they say but what they have conjured up in our mind. So that if someone who hasn’t read a book cites nonexistent passages or situations from it, we are ready to believe that they are in the book..."

Excerpted from an essay by Umberto Eco at The Paris Review (in turn excerpted from Chronicles of a Liquid Society).

Photo: The Oberlausitzische Library Of Science (Gorlitz, Germany).

Related:

"You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."

From Brain Pickings, again citing Umberto Eco.

 Image from Lost in Translation, via Brain Pickings.

4.5 megabytes of data

Stored on 62,500 punched cards (1955).

"War... what is it good for?"

"Ruins of the Benedictine monastery, during the Battle of Monte Cassino; Italian Campaign, May 1944"

From Historium.  Re the title of the post.

"We just wanna talk"

From Facebook, via Replaces and cancels the previous Johnnythehorse.

"Three Billboards"

YouTube link.

Trigger warning: violence, profanity.

Discussed at The Guardian.

"No way to prevent this"

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens 

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TX—In the hours following a violent rampage in Texas in which a lone attacker killed 27 individuals and seriously injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Sunday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place.

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Kansas resident Britt Mulvanos, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this individual from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.” 

Reposted in its entirety from The Onion, which has been reposting this same story repeatedly after mass killings since 2014, changing only names and dates.

Donald Trump's opinion:  "“We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries, but this isn’t a guns situation … we could go into it but it’s a little bit soon to go into it. Fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was, it would have been much worse.

I'll close the comments here.  If you have comments, please forward them to your congressman.

Related:

In February, just weeks into his presidency, Trump signed a bill eliminating an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun. The rule, which had been finalized in December 2016, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background gun-check database. Had the rule fully taken effect, the Obama administration predicted it would have added about 75,000 names to the database.

The National Rifle Association applauded Trump for signing the bill. Chris Cox, the group's chief lobbyist, said at the time that it marked "a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we now have a president who respects and supports our arms.”

The Adventures of Pinocchio

My only prior knowledge of Pinocchio came through the 1940 Disney movie.  The book on which that movie was based is The Adventures of Pinocchio, written in the 1880s by Italian author Carlo Collodi.

According to extensive research done by the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi in late 1990s and based on UNESCO sources, it has been adapted in over 260 languages worldwide. That makes it the most translated non-religious book in the world, and one of the best-selling books ever published. According to Francelia Butler, it remains "the most widely read book in the world after the Bible". 

I was delighted recently to locate a 2005 edition published by The Creative Company.  Nobody will be surprised to learn that the 19th century text differs from the Disney version.  Collodi's Pinocchio encounters assassins who hang him (top image) when they are unable to stab his wooden body with their "long, horrid" knives (he's rescued by a blue fairy who lives in the distant house).

And he does meet a talking cricket, but after being reprimanded for his behavior, he grabs a wooden mallet and squishes the cricket:

After one rebellious episode, Pinocchio returns home exhausted and rests his muddy feet on the cookstove. 

"Then he fell asleep.  And while he slept, his feet, which were wooden, caught fire, and little by little they burned away."

That's probably not in Disney, nor is the fact that Geppetto is hauled off to prison for child abuse for reprimanding Pinocchio.  And I don't remember in the Disney version Pinocchio biting off the hand of one of the assassins who attack him.

The book is an easy read for an adult - you can finish it in one sitting, but if you're going to read it to a child at bedtime or rainy-day storytime, it would need to be spread out over several sessions.

There are of course countless printings of this original story, many of which are available fulltext online.  The strength of this particular edition is the artwork of illustrator Roberto Innocenti.

I've embedded several sample images, but there are also multiple two-page spreads depicting Italian village scenes and the engulfment by the whale/shark.  This Creative Company version is a visual treat.  I'm now looking for several other publication of theirs featuring the same illustrator (Cinderella, Rose Blanche, and four others).

(And I've written to them to inquire about the unusual typography on the front cover)

Divertimento #138

Cleft lip dog ("Clefford") rescued and repaired.

Man arrested and put in jail for spending $2 bills.

"...giant salvinia, an aquatic fern capable of doubling its biomass in mere days. Scientists call it the world’s worst weed."

Scott Adams is reportedly a climate change skeptic.  This Dilbert cartoon expresses that view. 

"A Staffordshire bull terrier that killed its owner by crushing his larynx in its jaws in front of a BBC documentary crew had probably taken crack cocaine."

"...during the past 106 years, over 800 feature films received support from the Department of Defense."

"The study, published in JAMA Dermatology this week, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 3,316 women, 84 percent of whom reported engaging in some form of pubic hair removal by scissor, razor, wax, tweezer, depilatory cream, laser, or electrolysis."

The history of corduroy begins in Egypt with the creation of fustian.

Wired offers a requiem to the iPhone's home button.

"Steve Wilhite created the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, while working for Compuserve in 1987. On Tuesday, he received a Webby Award for it and delivered his five-word acceptance speech... "It's pronounced JIF, not GIF.""

Things you didn't know about papercuts.

The CEO of Dunkin' Donuts says a $15 minimum wage is "outrageous."  He makes $4,889 per hour.

"In the depths of the ocean, life can extend far beyond its usual limits. Take the tube worm Escarpia laminata: living in an environment with a year-round abundance of food and no predators, individuals seem to live for over 300 years. And some may be 1000 years old or more – meaning they would have been around when William the Conqueror invaded England..."

California has reinstituted a ban on foie gras.

Photograph an "empty" city (or tourist destination) by stacking and compositing multiple images.

"The men are among the thousands of detectorists across eastern Europe hunting for relics of the Red Army, the Third Reich and Imperial Russia. Beneath ploughed field and remote woodland is buried treasure from a turbulent, vanishing past. Even today, the war dead lie in these lands. Sometimes bodies are found."

Common mistakes people make when charging their iPhones.

Carcass of an elk pinned to a tree by an avalanche (a discussion thread suggested that the skull was replaced manually or digitally for the photo, but still impressive).

The second Blade Runner 2048 prequel short.

A man caught on video (and subsequently jailed) for dumping his dog.  Here's the rescue video.

A functional fishwheel on the Yukon river.

Railroad worker does not get squished.

Bounty hunters captured the wrong woman.  A jury awarded her $950,000.

Whether or not modern teenagers are having less sex depends on how you phrase the question.

T shirt demonstrates that "intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

Amazing carved hobo nickel.

Brian Dozier of the Minnesota Twins bunted, resulting in a "Little League Home Run."

The difference between a "Broadway show" and an "off-Broadway show" does not depend on the location where it is performed.

"Octlantis" is an octopus "city" - never before documented.

Consumer Reports advice re the Equifax breach.  Also here.

Fake demonizing of liberals documented.

"Protesters banned at Jeff Sessions' lecture on free speech."

Showerthought:  "Charging $99 for a $15 case of water is considered price gauging, but charging $800 for an $8 bag of saline is considered “Healthcare.”"

Today's embedded photos depict child labor in the U.S. at the turn of the last century.  From a gallery of over 30 images by Lewis Hine, assembled at Flashbak, where captions explain the content.

Northern pike encounters plastic pollution

An image reminiscent of ones of sea turtles in the oceans, but this pike was caught in a river in Canada.

Via The Telegraph.

Social unrest November 4 ???

From a report in The Guardian:

If you are inside the “alt-right” information bubble, you might be preparing yourself for a civil war to commence this Saturday.

Since late September, the idea has been circulating on Facebook groups, subreddit message boards, Twitter, and leading conspiracy media outlets that on 4 November, anti-fascist groups will begin a violent insurrection.

Some websites are telling their readers that antifa groups are “planning to kill every single Trump voter, Conservative and gun owner” this weekend. Hundreds of Facebook posts show how seriously consumers of such media are taking the news, and comments like “One more threat against white people and I swear to God I’m going to take a goddamn car and run over every fucking one of them” are not unrepresentative of the response.

But antifa groups have no plans to protest that day, and the small leftist groups who are planning protests have only dubious connections to the antifa movement. So what gives?

It always amazes me how social media and internet sites serve as accelerants for social unrest.  There must be people who benefit from these conditions.

Comments for this post are closed.  I want to move on to other things and not curate possible replies.  Just FYI.

Why the "Cc" ?

I have just begun reading The Creative Company's 2005 publication of the original "Adventures of Pinocchio," but before I could get started, my attention was drawn to the unusual typography on the cover (cropped screencap above).  In the word "Pinocchio," the double-c is presented as cap-C/lower case c, and the final "chio" letters are in a different color.

The book cover flap describes the author Carlo Collodi (pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini (1826-1890)) and "an accomplished Italian journalist" and the illustrator was born in Florence, so the "cc" could be a convention of the Italian language.

IIRC, I have seen this same Cc construction on old Italian stamps, but I might be wrong.  Why not write it as "cc" ?  Mr. Google might yield an answer, but I thought it might be more informative to appeal to the immense knowledge base of the readership of the blog.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

The best lecture I've heard in many years

YouTube link.

Absolutely the best.

I stumbled across this at 0600 this morning when I couldn't sleep and was surfing randomly, watched for a couple minutes, and then was hooked for the entire 40-minute presentation.

This is the video equivalent of a "longread."  Forty minutes is a significant chunk of your time, but I think this is worth viewing for any reader of TYWKIWDBI who shares my general worldview.

The topic is the future of global energy - basically the rise of solar and wind and the imminent plunge of coal and oil.  The numbers are staggering (and largely unappreciated by the general public).  The implications are for major disruptions in energy markets - and the geopolitical balance - within our lifetimes (within yours moreso than for old guys like me).  The presentation is at a South African symposium, so some of the focus is there, but the implications are worldwide - especially for the Middle East and for Russia.

And best of all this is a first-class presentation.  I spent the best hours of my professional life on stages and behind podiums giving lectures.  This guy - Ramez Naam - is superb as a speaker.  Pacing, diction, gestures, and the composition of his visual aids are all outstanding.  And I drool with envy looking at the setup in this auditorium with huge screens that I would have killed to have when I was lecturing.

Give it a try for at least 5 minutes to let him get past the introductory remarks; I think you'll want to hear it all.  Awesome.