Driftwood

Photo via the Pics subreddit, where the discussion thread notes the potential lethality of beach logs.

Drone footage of 800 Beluga whales

Filmed in Lancaster Sound.

Trump clump #2

(For a background on this type of linkdump, see my introductory paragraphs on Trump clump #1 back in August.  Here's some of what I've bookmarked since then...

“I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump, 69, tells ITK. "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.” (quotation from June 2015)

Counterpoint (from back in August) to the statement that "I'll choose the best people for my administration."

Repositioning on "the wall."

An editorial from Der Spiegel about Trump after the Charlottesville incident: "Trump is a racist. He is a preacher of hate. Those who pretend he is not, those who portray him as merely being an unpolished, somewhat chaotic old man, as a person who explicitly sought to avoid becoming a slick politician, are merely enabling him... When the president of the United States says that the victim is just as responsible as the murderer, or that the counterdemonstrator is just as guilty as the Nazi waving the swastika flag and shouting, "Jews will not replace us," and when Trump's own party doesn't drop him even now, then Duke and Trump have already achieved a key goal. Tolerance, empathy, kindness and diversity of opinion are all disparaged as political correctness. It becomes OK to say anything else, and if you can say it, it becomes easier to justify violence. The wheel of civilization has made a turn in reverse."

Trump's command of the English language is not good: “We have a lot to discuss, including the fact that there is a new and seems to be record-breaking hurricane heading right toward Florida and Puerto Rico and other places,” he told reporters. “We’ll see what happens. We’ll know in a very short period of time. But it looks like it could be something that will be not good. Believe me, not good.” Here’s a list of other things Trump has said were “not good.” [list follows]

In a September interview, John le Carré drew parallels between Donald Trump and the rise of fascism in the 1930s.  “These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake news, everything becomes fake news. “I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.” Even today, Le Carré said, Ang Sang Suu Kyi is speaking of “fake news” in Burma. “These are infectious forms of demagogic behaviour and they are toxic.”

A Harvard psychiatrist rejects the "Goldwater Rule" (that health professionals should not publicly discuss public figures) and labels Donald Trump a sociopath: "Everybody lies some of the time, but in this instance we mean people who lie as a way of being in the world, to manage relationships and also to manage your feelings about yourself. People who cheat and steal from others. People who lack empathy . . . the lack of empathy is a critical aspect of it. People who are narcissistic... It is not just bad behavior that people have to lie and cheat the way he does, it is an incapacity to treat other people as full human beings. That is why his focus is on humiliating others to aggrandize himself... Lying and cheating and humiliating others and grinding them into dust in order to triumph is not just bad behavior. It is a serious mental illness."

Donald Trump on Twitter June 2014: "Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?"

"On a weekend in early March, during one of seven trips by Trump and his White House entourage to the posh Palm Beach property since the inauguration, the government paid the Trump-owned club to reserve at least one bedroom for two nights. The charge, according to a newly disclosed receipt reviewed by The Washington Post, was $1,092... “The choice to stay there and have the government pay the $546-a-night rate seems imprudent,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who specializes in ethics issues. “If it were not owned by the president, it would still seem problematic. The fact that it’s owned by the president makes it doubly problematic.”

"President Trump delivered a brief speech to African leaders Wednesday at the United Nations, and in the span of about 800 words, he twice conjoined the names of two countries, Namibia and Zambia, creating the nonexistent nation of “Nambia,” and told the leaders that many of his friends go to Africa to “get rich.”"

George Clooney takes umbrage at Trump's disparaging of the "Hollywood elite": Here’s the thing: I grew up in Kentucky. I sold insurance door-to-door. I sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store. I would buy suits that were too big and too long and cut the bottom of the pants off to make ties so I’d have a tie to go on job interviews. I grew up understanding what it was like to not have health insurance for eight years. So this idea that I’m somehow the “Hollywood elite” and this guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable... "I just look at it and I laugh when I see him say 'Hollywood elite,'" he said. "Hollywood elite? I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Donald Trump has a star on Hollywood Boulevard! Fuck you!""

September: "President Donald Trump will kowtow to New York's elites at a private dinner Tuesday, with donors willing to shell out up to $250,000 for an opportunity to sit next to the commander in chief. Some of the most prominent names in finance and real estate are set to attend the event at Manhattan's Le Cirque restaurant to raise money for the Republican National Committee... Now the president seems eager to accept the money of coastal elites, even though he has masqueraded as a populist looking out for the common man..."

On the same topic: "The rich and clueless spent $35,000 per couple to eat some of the priciest food in the world with the most unhinged President of the century. This as hundreds of thousands of American children and babies were crying and begging their helpless parents for something — anything — to eat in the Apocalypse that is Puerto Rico. The rich and clueless paid an unimaginable $250,000 per couple last night to sip $10 bottles of water in a city with perfect tap water at that dinner's even more exclusive round table with the commander-in-chief as millions in Puerto Rico remained without safe drinking water for five days."

October:
"Trump's Fascistic, un-American rantings about NFL players kneeling in protest during the playing of the National Anthem are offensive and repugnant. But they're also probably illegal, carrying a possible penalty to Trump of disqualification from public office, fines, and up to 15 years in prison. "(explanation of the legalities at Boing Boing: There's a specific statute at play, and it's 18 U.S.C. sec. 227....)

"Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quietly voted along party lines to eliminate its “main studio rule,” which mandated that local news stations maintain offices within the communities they serve. Without the main studio rule, Sinclair is free to consolidate and centralize local news resources in its roughly 190 stations across the country, eliminating the “local” element of local news as much as possible. This move is just the latest in a thriving symbiotic relationship between the openly conservative Sinclair and the Trump FCC, a relationship that seems to benefit all parties but the American public. And there’s more to come.

"Carrier Corp., the HVAC manufacturer that had planned to move its operations to Mexico before President Trump staged a much-heralded intervention, is gearing up for a final round of layoffs.

Less than four months after it laid off nearly 340 employees at its Indianapolis factory, Carrier said Tuesday that 215 employees will be terminated on Jan. 11."

[Trump] put his ignorance on display for the Japanese people, when he made the following statement while visiting their country:

"Try building your cars in the United States instead of shipping them over. Is that possible to ask? That's not rude. Is that rude? I don't think so."

That statement had to be puzzling for the Japanese carmakers, because they have been making many of their cars in the United States for years now. Nissan makes 9 of their autos here, Toyota makes 9 of their autos here, and Honda makes 11 of their autos here. These Japanese auto makers have created thousands of jobs in the United States. If there were any Japanese who didn't realize we elected a moron with massive ignorance to be our president, then this has probably removed any doubt. 

"Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club has received permission to hire 70 foreign workers to fill out its staff during its upcoming busy season, after managers attested there aren't enough Americans qualified and willing to do the work."

There is now a plug-in you can use to display Trump's tweets in a font resembling a child's handwriting:

Note that is his actual text; only the font has been changed.

After Trump attacked Marshawn Lynch's behavior at an NFL game and then opined that he should have left the UCLA shoplifters in a Chinese jail, Snoop Dog didn't pull any punches.  Text at the link is abundantly Bowlderized with asterisks.

The man who tripled the price of insulin has been nominated by Trump to be in charge of regulating the price of insulin.

After the mass shooting in California, Trump tweeted this:

Trump's criticism of Obama for blocking the Keystone pipeline ("good for the environment, no downside!") paired with the CNN headline about the Keystone pipeline leaking 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota.

In a ceremony honoring Native American codetalkers from WWII, Trump disparaged Elizabeth Warren by calling her Pocohantas.

Via for mass shooting cartoon.  Via for golf photoshop.  Via for paper towel photo.  Via for the mass shooting tweet.  Via for cycling cartoon.

I'm glad to get this done.  I'll try to ignore Trump in the blog for the next three months or so, and then regurgitate the news equivalent of another hairball.

Oh, and the comments are closed for this post.  Lets all move on to other matters. 

Metrics of TYWKIWDBI readers

For many years I've followed this blog's traffic and metrics using Blogger and Google, but this fall I also signed the blog up for monitoring by Quantcast.  They have now compiled a couple months of data, some of which I'll display here FYI.

Of particular interest to me is that 84% of visitors have education levels at college or above.  This summer Boing Boing reported that their readership was among the web's most educated -

- at 81.1%.  Our 84% would place us at #4... BUT the data above probably applies only to blogs with large audiences.  There must be an abundance of blogs about string theory or pancreatic enzymes or whatever that would be even higher.  

Here is what Quantcast considers to be your top interests:

And in pursuit of those interests, here are your favorite other websites:

The "linkwithin" association comes because those small pix at the bottom of each post that show "related" material elsewhere in the blog are generated by LinkWithin.  The others are probably generated by an analysis of who links to me and where my links send readers.

And finally, here are your political leanings:

These data are intended to be used to allow the blogger to make decisions re advertising and marketing his/her blog.  Since I don't do either one of those, for me it's just a mass of interesting numbers.  Thought you guys might want to see it to know what your fellow readers are like.

Bicycle graveyard

Wow. (person at far right edge for scale)

Explained at The Guardian.

Fred Astaire's famous dance from Royal Wedding (1951)

Demystified:

And explained:

But the more you think about it, the more amazing an accomplishment this number seems. The cage must have had a diameter of something like 20 feet, and the light fixtures had to stay powered throughout. The whole thing must have weighed a ton or two. Building this set was an enormous feat of engineering. What would it look like to a bystander as this amazing scene was shot?

Movie buffs will want to continue reading the explanation here.

"Potentially" ? suggestive statue

You can't convince me that the artist who sculpted this depiction of St Martin de Porres "handing a loaf of bread to a young boy" did not have other ideas in mind.  The Guardian reports on the response at the priory school where the statue was installed.

Willie and the Wheel

Related: Willie in 1965.  In 1997.

The last survivors in iron lungs

A report at Gizmodo describes the current lives of the last three persons in the U.S. known to be living in iron lungs.

Her iron lung has portholes and windows on the side; a pressure gauge at the top. The machine is actually cobbled together from two iron lungs. One, the March of Dimes gave her when she was a child. The other, she bought from someone in Utah, after she haggled him down from $25,000 to $8,000. The body has also been modified over the years. Her grandfather invented a motorized pulley system that closes the bed tray into the tank after she climbs in. He also replaced the brushed aluminum mirror above the neck slot with a real mirror so that she could have a clear view to the rest of the room when she’s locked in the canister. A local engineer used a motor from an old voter registration device to build a mechanism that tightens the collar around her neck after she slips her head through the portal. The fan belts and half-horsepower motor have been replaced about ten times.

When Lillard was a child, polio was every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about 58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and 3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,” Bruno said. 

I was a participant in that polio epidemic of 1952, as were my mother and sister.  I woke up one morning and fell to the floor because my legs wouldn't hold me up, then spent months in Sheltering Arms, the Minneapolis Sister Kenny Institute before eventually returning home.  What separates me from the three adults in the story above is that the virus only reached my thoracolumbar spine, not the C-spine.

The fate of presidentially-pardoned turkeys

I'm sure most readers know this, but just for the record...

[I]t's kind of a hoax. I went to the farm where birds pardoned by presidents go, and I learned that this is not a story with a happy ending...

I visited Kidwell Farm to see how the turkeys pardoned in previous years were doing. I looked for some of the birds pardoned by Clinton, but couldn't find them. I couldn't find the Bush Sr. birds, or the Reagan turkeys, or Carter's, or any of the pardoned birds. 

There is a sign saying Turkey Pen, and farmer Marlo Acock took me to it. But the pen was empty. Why? Well, the birds do come here, explained Acock, but they don't last. 

"We usually just find 'em and they're dead," he said. 

Most of the pardoned turkeys only last a few months, Acock said. One died within days. 

For more details on why they die so quickly, PETA offers a less nuanced view.

Yellowjacket horrorshow

Etruscan statue

“Evening shadow”. Etruscan statue, 3rd c. BC, Volterra. The name is from Gabriele d’Annunzio

Via Poemas del rio Wang.

Alexa commands

Cnet has a (momentarily) complete list of Alexa commands.

The list of Alexa commands is expansive and grows with every new service or device it supports. Alexa isn't perfect, but it's pretty great at understanding natural language, so you don't always have to speak the commands exactly as you see them below. Many commands work when worded several different ways or even with words omitted.

I also discovered that there is a subreddit dedicated to Amazon Echo, wherein you can find a list of known Easter eggs, including...

• Alexa, I am your father.
• Alexa, who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
• Alexa, what is the loneliest number?
• Alexa, how many roads must a man walk down?
• Alexa, all your base are belong to us.
• Alexa, how much is that doggie in the window?
• Alexa, romeo, romeo wherefore art thou romeo?
• Alexa, define rock paper scissors lizard spock
• Alexa, beam me up.
• Alexa, how much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
• Alexa, define supercalifragilisticexpialodocious.
• Alexa, who’s your daddy?
• Alexa, Earl Grey. Hot. (or Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.)
• Alexa, what is the meaning of life?
• Alexa, what does the Earth weigh?
• Alexa, when is the end of the world?
• Alexa, is there a Santa?
• Alexa, make me a sandwich.
• Alexa, what is the best tablet?
• Alexa, what is your favorite color?
• Alexa, what is your quest?
• Alexa, who won best actor Oscar in 1973?
• Alexa, what is your quest?
• Alexa, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
• Alexa, where do babies come from?
• Alexa, do you have a boyfriend?
• Alexa, which comes first: the chicken or the egg?
• Alexa, may the force be with you.
• Alexa, do aliens exist?

(more at the link)

Posted for Suzanne up at the lake, with thanks for recommending this device to me.

'Tis the season

In the past we have generally gone out to get our Christmas tree in early December, but after realizing that the trees are cut much earlier than that, we decided this year to go out much sooner.

Yesterday was Monday, November 20.  Our local garden center told us that they had just received their shipment of trees on the weekend (we were their third customer), and that the trees had been harvested here in central Wisconsin three days earlier (Nov 17).

This batch of trees will sit outside for weeks now desiccating in the wind.  We won't put ours up inside the house until early December, but in the meantime it sits in a bucket in the garage soaking up water. 

And as a bonus the garage smells like pine.

Japanese game show

Posted as a reminder to those of us living in the Upper Midwest that winter is just around the corner.