4,500 year old dress unearthed at Giza

At the via there is an informed discussion as to whether linen slips were worn underneath.  Or not.

There is a subreddit called "insanepeopleFacebook"

That's where I found this.  I don't normally go there.  Visit at your own risk.

Rebuses

Many, many years ago I submitted a group of rebuses to a local Kentucky publication.  I encountered them again yesterday while using this quarantine time to weed through old memorabilia.

In retrospect two of them are totally unfair (#12 = "center of attention" and #10 = "Last of the Mohicans) and #9 ("prepared") is incorrect.  The others I think are still valid.  I'm particularly pleased with #4 and #13.

Readers are invited to post answers in the Comments.

Divertimento #177

These blocks of color are not alternating their movements
Tourist posing in perilous location.  Photographer inexplicably says "More, cmon."  WTF.
A woman handing out brochures
10-hour barn raising compressed to 20 seconds
These spinning circles are not changing size
Lady rescues a dog
Woman refuses traffic ticket

Nature and Science
Milky Way + Aurora Borealis
Chicken developing in an open egg
Using ice water to boil hot water
Coronavirus compared to SARS, Ebola, Swine flu (clipped from this video)

Animals
An acorn woodpecker filled this antenna unit with hundreds of pounds of acorns
Man removes bucket from a bear's head
Sheep cavorting on hay bales
A "roller pigeon"
Sea slug
How to summon emus
Parasites removed from a hornet 
Crinkly bags have different sounds
Beach towel removed from carpet python
Trail camera set up by log over a creek

Fails
Mountain bike fail
Mommy regrets wearing skirt on a slide

Impressive or clever
Tornado touching down in traffic
Sand art
Mime with a balloon
Using a drone to screw in a ceiling light bulb
How to moonwalk 
How to organize nails in a box

Sports and athleticism
Little girl gets long running start to kick a ball.
Rock climber using a "knee bar" to rest his arms
Toddlers display impressive balance
Railbiking (on abandoned railway)
Bowling trick shot

Humor or cheerful
Dog realizing he's being adopted
Dog working out on treadmill 
North Dakota girls shooting basketballs from half court (sound on for "no way")
Dog fails every test in service dog training
"You have to eat mommy's cooking"

 The images embedded in this gif-dump are selections from this year's competition for the European Tree of the Year.  The competition is not a beauty competition or really a photography competition - the winner is chosen in large part because there is an interesting story about the tree.  You can read those stories (and the identities/locations of the trees) at the link.

Squirrel feeding perch

Cropped for size from the original at the Aww subreddit.

Clever response

Background, for those who don't immediately get the subtlety of the reply.

Corinthian helmet that had the warrior's skull inside

From the battle of Marathon. Via Reddit.

Comfort food in a pandemic

Cookies and doughnuts honoring Dr. Fauci are now available.  The image is from a Wisconsin bake shop, but the products are being sold nationwide by various bakeries.

Owner Mike Vande Walle told WLUK he saw a New York bakery having success by putting Fauci’s face on doughnuts and thought it would be a huge hit in Northeast Wisconsin — a way of saying thank you for keeping Americans informed during this unprecedented time.

“I thought whoa, that’s a good idea because everyone can really connect with the guy, you know?” said Vande Walle. “He’s honest, straightforward — and so we started doing the cookies this morning, and we sold several hundred already today, and people are just swarming in, but I think everyone can connect with the guy, is why the cookies are popular,” Vande Walle said.

State-by-state coronavirus predictions

Projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.  You can use the pulldown menu here to check your state.  The curves are updated recurrently as new data becomes available.

That analysis found Wisconsin's peak resource use will come in 53 days, on May 22, as of Sunday. On Monday, the data changed, indicating the state would peak in 26 days, on April 26. There could be a shortage of 360 ICU beds, but not overall hospital bed space, according to the prediction.

That indicates social distancing measures could work as intended to flatten the curve, if they stay in place and people continue to stay at home, as the governor ordered.

"The models are only as good as the data that goes into it. And the best models learn from the previous day's data," said UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof. "They're immensely helpful if they're accurate, because it kind of helps us know what we're up against. But at the same time, there always has to be a bit of suspicion on whether or not it's accounted for all the variables, or if there's something that it's missing, that maybe we're doing."

 The curves become scarier when you realize where March 31 is on the x-axis.

Humor scrapbook, part VII

This is the seventh of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially the case with humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Social distancing during the polio epidemics

Lots of comparisons being drawn recently between the coronavirus pandemic and the influenza pandemic of 1918.  In the weeks ahead I'll plan to present some information about the more recent polio epidemics, starting with an article by a professor of history at NYU published in The Atlantic today:

Within days [in the spring of 1949] the hospital’s ICU was overflowing with children, most in critical condition, and mild concern turned to panic. “Polio Takes Seventh Life,” screamed the banner headline. “San Angelo Pastors Appeal for Divine Help in Plague.”

Prayer proved insufficient. For the first time in anyone’s memory, social distancing took hold. The city council voted to close theaters, bars, bowling alleys, and the municipal swimming pool. Tanker trucks sprayed DDT, singling out the open pit toilets on the “Negro” and “Mexican” side of town. Tourist traffic disappeared. The locals stopped handling money, and some refused to speak on the telephone, believing that germs traveled through the transmission lines. Known for its neighborliness, San Angelo quickly ditched the niceties that it once took for granted. “We got to the point that nobody could comprehend,” a pediatrician recalled, “when people would not even shake hands.”...

Both the poliovirus and the coronavirus rely on “silent carriers”—those showing no immediate symptoms—to spread the disease, inciting a fearful sense of uncertainty. Both target specific, if dramatically different, age groups: COVID-19 seems especially lethal for the elderly, polio for the young...

Why did most of its victims appear to come from middle-class surroundings? And why was epidemic polio primarily a disease of the 20th century that struck the world’s more developed nations, especially the United States?...

Others see polio’s dramatic spread in the 1940s and ’50s in terms of cleanliness. As Americans grew more germ-conscious and sanitary-minded, there was less chance that they would encounter poliovirus very early in life, when the disease is milder and maternal antibodies provide temporary protection...

The great polio epidemic struck at a time when the federal government wasn’t much involved in the medical problems of the citizenry... Virtually all of the research, publicity, and patient support surrounding polio was accomplished by a single private charity, the March of Dimes, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

More at The Atlantic.

Photo credit Corbis, via NPR.

An experiment in tree planting

Can you figure out the hypothesis being tested?  And see the result?  Answer below the fold.

Have you heard about the war between Russia and Saudi Arabia ? Updated

It's an oil war, not a shooting war, but it has worldwide implications.  It was explained at Vox on March 9:

A long-standing deal between Saudi Arabia and Russia — two of the world’s oil-producing powerhouses — fell through over the weekend, sending global markets into a spiral and dashing future economic prospects in the US...

At last week’s meeting, Saudi Arabia, the cartel’s leader, suggested the participants collectively cut their oil production by about 1 million barrels per day, with Russia making the most dramatic cut of around 500,000 barrels a day. Doing so would keep oil prices higher, which would bring in more revenue for nations in the bloc whose economies are heavily dependent on crude exports...

The Russians, wary of such a move for weeks, opted against the plan. It’s still unclear exactly why that’s the case. Some say Russia wants prices to stay low to hurt the American shale oil industry or is gearing up to seize a bigger sliver of Asian and global oil demand for itself...

Saudi Arabia didn’t take too kindly to the Kremlin’s decision and responded by slashing its export prices over the weekend to start a price war with Russia. That brought the price per barrel down by about $11 to $35 a barrel — the biggest one-day drop since 1991...

That was last week.   The war is continuing, and the consequences are global and dramatic.  The world is experiencing an unprecedented drop in oil demand (car travel, airline travel, factory usage) at the same time that Saudi production is ramping upward.  This morning on the Bloomberg channel they announced that WTI has been trading as low as $21 per barrel - a price not seen for about twenty years.

I was amazed to hear one knowledgeable commentator opine that the price of oil could drop to negative levels - i.e. that instead of buying oil, someone would pay someone to take the oil.  This presumably would occur at the producer/refiner level, not at the consumer level - but still...

With prices this low, the U.S. is adding to the strategic petroleum reserve, in part in case of (theoretical) future oil shortages but also to provide a market that U.S. companies can sell their oil to.

Why is this bad?  Lower oil prices = lower gas prices, lower heating oil prices, cheaper travel when it resumes.  Few people will feel sorry for "big oil."  But what happens is that the price shock ripples through and beyond the industry.  There is an old saying that if you can't pay your $10,000 loan from the bank, you're in trouble - but if you can't pay your $10,000,000 loan from the bank it's the bank that's in trouble.  Most U.S. businesses run on credit in expectation of good times ahead.  When oil companies fail, and drilling companies, and equipment manufacturers etc etc, the prospect arises of insolvency not just of the manufacturers, but of the banks they owe money to.

Addendum:  Found an more current report (dated yesterday) in The Financial Times.

Caught in the maelstrom is Donald Trump, who ignored critics to stand by Prince Mohammed after the Khashoggi murder and has confounded many with his repeated praise of Mr Putin’s leadership. Just as the US president is gearing up for an election battle under the cloud of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Russian-Saudi crude war threatens America’s growing shale industry, hurts debt-burdened US oil majors and exacerbates the pressure on collapsing stock markets.

 “We’re in a three-way Mexican stand-off with three big players in the room all saying, ‘if you screw that guy over there, you are screwing me over, so I’m going to screw you over,’” said Michael Stephens, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “It’s a strange triangular discussion from which no side wants to back down and all are going to feel the pain.” 

More at the link, which I encourage everyone to read.

Wow.

Addendum:  Just found this two-day-old article at CNBC citing the CFO of BP stating that oil demand could be negative in 2020.

And this article discussing negative oil prices (depends on the type of oil).

Update:  Ten days later, the carnage in the oil industry continues, as noted in this Bloomberg Opinion piece:

At the point we’re now at, postponing the oil-price war won’t make a lot of difference for an industry that’s already breaking down under the weight of demand destruction. With prices hitting a 17-year low on Monday, it’s too late to use diplomacy and artful negotiations to share the burden of output cuts that are now inevitable.

The pumping free-for-all unleashed by Saudi Arabia and Russia is important for the long-term shape of the oil industry, but, as my colleague Javier Blas  pointed out here, it’s a sideshow to the havoc being wrought by the lockdowns crippling economies worldwide in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Forecasts of a catastrophic drop in oil demand abound, with estimates of a whopping 20% year-on-year reduction in global consumption in April becoming more common. That’s 20 million barrels a day, equivalent to the entire consumption of the United States. And even those gloomy views may be too optimistic, according to Goldman Sachs.

It would be impossible for any small group of producers to mitigate that kind of impact by reducing output, unless Saudi Arabia and Russia were both to slash their production to almost zero. And that’s not going to happen...

The U.S. is now the world’s biggest crude producer, pumping 13 million barrels a day — more even than Saudi Arabia can supply if it opens its taps fully...

As it stands at the moment, OPEC is not due to meet until early June, and whether the cartel’s external allies including Russia join them in an enlarged OPEC+ shindig remains to be seen. No matter, any action agreed then wouldn’t have an impact until July, at the earliest. Even an agreement reached tomorrow would have little impact until May, with April crude sales now largely completed.

By then storage tanks around the globe will be close to capacity; ships full of unwanted oil will be floating in safe anchorages; and producers will be forced to shut wells because they have simply run out places to put any crude they pump out of the ground.

The economic pain is going to be felt in the oilfields from North Dakota to Texas and in the offshore facilities.  But consumers may see gasoline prices below $1.00 per gallon. 

Addendum #3: (April 2)

Even if the quarrel between Saudi Arabia and Russia gets resolved, at this point, demand for oil has collapsed and will not soon recover. An industry insider told me his firm is forecasting that oil will likely drop to $10 per barrel and stay there. Consider what this means for countries such as Libya, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq or Venezuela, where oil revenue makes up the vast majority of government revenue (often of the entire economy) — but they make a profit on oil sales only at prices of more than $60 a barrel. Expect political turmoil, refugees, even revolutions, on a scale we have not seen for decades — not since the last phase of $10 oil, when the Soviet Union collapsed...

This is the worst time to suddenly lose your healthcare benefits

A different type of puzzle

I couldn't solve any of these until I saw the 20th one.  With that enlightenment I immediately figured out #19 - but I couldn't solve the others.

The answer is in a link at Miss Cellania.