The Onion reminds us

42 mass shootings so far this year.  And January isn't even over yet.

Large snowman in Minnesota

The image is not Photoshopped; the snowman is 30 feet tall and 20 feet wide. 

"It took forty hours and the entire weekend, with temporary stairs up the backside to help get the 75-pound hat on top of Frosty's head." 

More details and a brief video at the local news station's website.

Postulated explanation for Namibian "fairy circles"

They are not the same as the fungal "fairy rings."

Satellite imagery shows there could be millions of these “fairy circles” in the area, but scientists have debated what could explain the existence of even one, which can span up to 20 meters in diameter. Perhaps termites are chomping at the plant roots? Maybe the grasses are somehow creating the patterns? Or a toxin has decimated the soil?...

“There must be very strongly ordering forces behind the creation of these pattern because otherwise it would be much more noisy, much less order,” said Stephan Getzin, who is a desert ecologist at the University of Göttingen and has published numerous papers on these circles. “That’s the fascination about the fairy circles.”

Now, Getzin and his colleagues have acquired new compelling evidence to explain the mysterious circles in the region. They point to a fierce competition among plants for water on the arid terrain. Researchers say periodic vegetation patterns like fairy circles could also increasingly pop up around the world under a warming climate. Simply put, plants may be battling one another to survive the dry conditions, stealing water away from their neighbors, which leaves a bare circle.

That explanation is debated, as per the discussion at the link.

Be wary if your company wants to make you a manager

Companies avoid paying about $4 billion in overtime wages by inventing dubious titles for US employees such as “director of first impressions” and “lead shower door installer,” according to new research on a common practice that skirts federal labor law.

The practice, often deployed by retail and restaurant companies, takes advantage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which exempts firms  from paying overtime wages if the employee is a manager and gets paid a salary above a certain threshold. From 2010 to 2018, the researchers found a 485% increase in job postings for salaried employees in dodgy managerial roles where duties rarely included any actual management. Companies avoided paying overtime on more than 151 million work hours via this practice, the study found, costing workers an estimated $4 billion in pay.

Other suspect job titles identified by researchers included carpet shampoo manager, price scanning coordinator and guest experience leader...

The threshold for overtime pay used in the research was $455 a week, or $23,660 a year, which was increased to $684 a week in 2020.

“The findings are the tip of the iceberg,” the researchers said. “Overtime avoidance can occur at other salary levels too and in different ways.”

More at the Bloomberg link.

The rescue of a baby squirrel

A tip of the blogging cap to reader KenGilberg, who found this equally-delightful and more professionally-crafted video on the same subject:

My Duduś from The New York Times on Vimeo.

I should wait to post this on Mother's Day

Via Bored Panda.

Apple bonsai. With apple.

Some relevant discussion at Reddit.

Guess who the artist was (1913)

Answer at this Reddit discussion thread.

An interesting demographic trend

China’s population started shrinking in 2022 for the first time in six decades, the latest milestone in a worsening demographic crisis for the world’s second-largest economy.

The country had 1.41 billion people at the end of last year, 850,000 fewer than the end of 2021, according to data released by the National Statistics Bureau on Tuesday. That marks the first drop since 1961, the final year of the Great Famine under former leader Mao Zedong, and coincided with figures showing China’s economy expanded last year at the second-slowest pace since the 1970s...

A total of 10.41 million people died, a slight increase from around 10 million recorded in recent years. China suffered a surge in Covid-related deaths starting last month after abruptly dropping its zero-tolerance approach to the virus in early December. More Covid-related deaths will likely come this year as fatalities usually lag infections by weeks and infections are still spreading across the country. That outbreak could further push up the number of deaths this year. ..

The decline in newborns was the main cause of the population contraction, according to Kang Yi, head of the National Statistics Bureau. “That’s mainly a result of drop in people’s willingness to have babies, the delay in marriage and pregnancy, as well as a fall in number of women of child-bearing age,” Kang told reporters after a press briefing Tuesday...

Due to the decline, the Chinese economy may struggle to overtake the US in size and the nation could lose its status as the world’s most populous country to India this year.

As recently as 2019, the United Nations was forecasting that China’s population would peak in 2031 and then decline, but last year the UN had revised that estimate to see a peak at the start of 2022. The labor force is already shrinking, long-term demand for houses will fall likely further, and the government may also struggle to pay for its underfunded national pension system.

China's population trend may or may not reflect global ones, but the effect on their economy will ripple through to other economies, including especially the U.S., which is why this data was posted at Bloomberg.

I felt a little bad laughing at these...

The same compendium of pictures included this one:

Speaking as a former Texas resident, this was chuckleworthy.

Blogcation

Some readers will be surprised that I take time off from blogging in January.  Bleak, cold winter days would seem to be ideal for sitting at a desk and blogging.  The problem is that bleak cold winter days are the perfect time to do all the things that have been postponed from the other three seasons.  I need to explore some family genealogy, sell stuff on eBay, give old books a final read, explore some new streaming sites (BritBox, Criterion) - projects that were deferred when good weather allowed me to be outdoors.

So if you haven't already cut back on TYWKIWDBI visits to a once/week schedule, now is the time to do so.  I'll still pop up with an occasional post - perhaps some linkdumps to clean out bookmark folders - but a weekly visit will certainly be enough to keep you au courant with the contents of the blog.  TTYL.

Photo credit of the raccoon on a Florida beach to Miroslav Srb, via the Comedy Wildlife photo competition for 2022.

One last Booth cartoon

I know I've posted this before, but it's so good that it's worth a repost.

Sleepy Skunk mashup of the movies of 2022

Similar mashups from 2021, 2020, and earlier.

Here's a list of the movies and their times in the video (appears to be a working list still in progress currently up to 2:06).

A library is a space ship (and more...)

Via Open Culture, which provides context and additional links.

An amazing prediction from 1953

When I first encountered a version of this image on the internet I assumed it was photoshopped.  But Snopes confirms that this was an actual blurb in the Boston Globe in 1953.

"...the person making these claims was the president of a phone company and was likely privy to latest developments in the field. For instance, while it wouldn't be until the 1960s for the first cordless phone to be invented, and the 1980s for true mobile phones to hit the market, the foundations for these products were being laid prior to 1953... Sullivan wasn't the first to envision a smartwatch. While this product wasn't in development in the 1950s (as far as we can tell), smartwatches had popped up a few times in fictional content. Detective Dick Tracy's two-way watch radio made its debut in 1946."

Addendum: this comic strip from the 1920s:

Via Laughing Squid -

A rather prescient comic strip by W.K. Haselden released in either a 1919 or 1923 issue of the Daily Mirror predicted the existence of “pocket telephones” and the inconvenient times in which they would ring... As it turns out, rumors of a “pocket phone” had been ringing around the world since 1906.

More at the link.  With a hat tip to reader Joe in Aurora.