"My wife asked me why I spoke so softly in our house..."

I told her I was concerned that someone might be listening.

She laughed.

I laughed.

Siri laughed.

Alexa laughed.

Reposted from 2022 to add the following from Ars Technica:

"In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Details at the link.

Sonic weapon used on peaceful protestors

As reported by AP News:

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbian officials denied Sunday that the country’s security forces used a military-grade sonic weapon to disperse and scare protesters at a huge anti-government rally in the capital.

Opposition officials and Serbian rights groups claimed that the widely banned acoustic weapon that emits a targeted beam to temporarily incapacitate people was used during the protest Saturday. They say they will file charges with the European Court of Human Rights and domestic courts against those who ordered the attack.

Serbia has not denied that it has the acoustic device in its arsenal.

At least 100,000 people descended on Belgrade on Saturday for a mass rally seen as a culmination of months-long protests against Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic and his government.

The rally was part of a nationwide anti-corruption movement that erupted after a concrete canopy collapsed at a train station in Serbia’s north in November, killing 15 people...

Footage from the rally show people standing during 15 minutes of silence for the rail station disaster while suddenly experiencing a whooshing sound that immediately triggered panic and a brief stampede.

An Associated Press photographer at the scene said people started scrambling for cover, leaving the middle of the downtown street almost empty as they started falling over each other.

Those exposed to the weapon experience sharp ear pain, disorientation and panic, military experts say. Prolonged exposure can cause eardrum ruptures and irreversible hearing damage. 

The "sonic cannon" is an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device).  Discussion at the woahdude subreddit included a link to this video on how to defend oneself against acoustic weapons:

I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that the U.S. and other Western regimes have these weapons as well.

Addendum:  this from The Guardian:

"Vučić has cultivated Donald Trump, approving the construction of a Trump hotel in Belgrade, and on Thursday gave an interview to the US president’s son Don Jr, who echoed the Serbian government’s unsubstantiated claims that the protest movement was fuelled by foreign funding.

The younger Trump suggested the protests had been “weaponised … to incite, potentially, a revolution”, airing conspiracy theories about how the protests were organised and paid for."

Divertimento #197

An analysis of 50,000 punts in the NFL (2000-2018).  Begins with the Bears punting 10 times in one game (every time they had the ball).

Kratom is either a performance-enhancing herbal supplement or a lethal opioid.

"John Wayne’s racist comments, lack of World War II service resurface in heated Twitter debate."

A photo of a rhino with an "oxpecker Mohawk"

There is a beach in Thailand that nobody is allowed to touch.

Aerial photos from around the world show the sharp demarcation between the homes of rich and poor people.

The important distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.

The history and usage of the phrase "enemy of the people.' "The expression enemy of the people dates to Imperial Rome. The Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus in 68 CE. Its direct translation is "public enemy"... The words ennemi du peuple were used extensively during the French Revolution. On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated: "The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death".... Soviet Union... Cambodia... Albania... Nazi Germany... England... and Donald Trump.  "From his inauguration in January 2017 through October 15, 2019, Trump called the news media the "enemy of the people" 36 times on Twitter."

In major league there are now (1919) more foul balls than balls hit in play.

There is a subreddit devoted to insanepeopleFacebook entries.

A brief explanation of intermittent fasting.

Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum: "Over two decades of marriage, author Charles Dickens grew more popular and powerful, while his wife Catherine bore ten children. Charles apparently grew tired of Catherine, and blamed her for having ten children and also accused her of not taking good care of them. The couple separated after Dickens' affair with 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan was revealed. Catherine was compelled to leave the family home with only one of her children. More details of the breakup were revealed when a caches of letters was discovered at Harvard University. The stories she told her neighbors portray Dickens as cruel as one of his literary villains."

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century."

An anti-vaxxer Texas legislator says he is not concerned about the rise of measles and other viral diseases because we no have antibiotics.

"Toledo voters passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, a unique charter amendment that establishes the huge lake as a person and grants it the legal rights that a human being or corporation would have.  The final results weren’t even close, as it passed by a 61% to 39% margin."

A new and unusual disease in Africa is afflicting children.

"An ‘emotional support’ pit bull mauled a 5-year-old girl in an airport terminal."

"It's interesting growing up and learning that most adults are not smart."

A striking visual display showing the effect of mussels on cleaning the water in a stream.

A long longread about the history of arsenic poisoning.

Cows are fed magnets to collect metal particles they might ingest.  Cows also tend to face north...

An askscience subreddit thread discusses coronal mass ejections.

In defense of the funds expended on space exploration.

"At the height of the Empire, a select band of British people renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. These are the stories of three such pioneers, who defied Victorian norms at a time when Christianity was the bedrock of British identity."

The discovery of a human footprint in Chile from 15,600 yeas ago indicates settlement in Patagonia long before Clovis.

A graphic illustration of the popular perception of the ethnicity of Jesus Christ.

"Bill-wiping is not the hottest topic in ornithology, but curiosity has drawn the occasional researcher to the behavior over the years. Although they haven’t arrived at a definite, universal explanation, we can summarize their reports on the role of bill-wiping this way: It definitely acts like a napkin, probably as a file, and maybe even as a cologne spritzer."

"Should 11-year-old girls have to bear their rapists’ babies?" (2019 article)

A history of cannabis cuisine in British colonial India.

A poster from the BasketballsAreFlat society.

A history of contaminated water at the White House, and its possible role in the deaths of three American presidents.

"Public enemy No. 1 for corn and soybean farmers, the Palmer amaranth weed, has made new incursions into Minnesota by way of livestock feed. .. This is bad news for corn and soybean farmers, both because the weed grows and proliferates quickly and because it is resistant to multiple herbicides. It can grow up to 8 feet tall with a woody stem thick enough to damage farm equipment that tries to mow it down... The weed, which grows up to 3 inches a day and can produce a half-million seeds per plant..." (photo at the link)

"Last month, the Swiss unveiled a smart new banknote to stash in their wallets. The purple 1,000 franc bill was the latest in the Swiss National Bank (SNB) series to undergo a revamp. And this is no ordinary note, it’s one of the world’s most valuable banknotes, worth around 880 euros ($1,007, £764)... In Switzerland, cash remains the dominant payment method. Here, there’s an assumption everyone carries cash, even in an increasingly digital economy. Most don’t get caught out buying a sandwich or paying for a haircut when the card payment machine is out of order."

"The archive [of Gabriel Garcia Marquez] includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. It was bought by the University of Texas for US$2.2 million.  The searchable, online archive features almost 30,000 items, so it’s easy to get lost in there."  And its free to use.

"Combining both brains and brawn, orcas have been known to kill sharks in surprisingly complicated ways. Some will drive their prey to the surface and then karate chop them with overhead tail swipes. Others seem to have worked out that they can hold sharks upside-down to induce a paralytic state called tonic immobility. Orcas can kill the fastest species (makos) and the largest (whale sharks). And when they encounter great whites, a few recorded cases suggest that these encounters end very badly for the sharks."

A Reddit thread discusses education in India following a report that 19 teenagers in India committed suicide after a softwar error botched their exam results.

Photos and videos of Freddie Mercury and his cats.

A story about Walt Disney's housekeeper.

"I dug through the privacy settings for the five biggest consumer tech companies and picked a few of the most egregious defaults you should consider changing. These links will take you directly to what to tap, click and toggle for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple."

"Italian police have arrested 34 people allegedly involved in a "bone-breaking" medical insurance scam in Palermo, Sicily.  The perpetrators allegedly broke people's limbs and staged road accidents in exchange for part of their insurance payout... The victims were anaesthetised with drugs and had their limbs held on blocks of stone or cement, which were hit with bags of weights or large rocks... Among those arrested are doctors and physiotherapists who allegedly filed false medical reports, and a lawyer who filed the insurance claims."

Don't wear mirrored glasses when you play poker.

"TIL light bulbs in the New York City subway system screw in "backwards" (i.e. with left-handed threads) so people won't steal them to use at home."

A list of works of fiction involving time travel.

"Cleopatra was born ~2,500 years after the Great Pyramid at Giza was built, and ~2,000 years before the first lunar landing. That fact means that Cleopatra is closer to our present time than to the times of Ancient Egypt's early dynastic past."

A suprising lot of things happen when you check "I am not a robot."

Escalators can be designed to be curved.

How to evaluate and grade sea glass.

If you're wondering about the workload and pay for Pat Sajak and Vanna White...

The smearing of Ilhan Omar (2019 article but probably still relevant)

Some Antarctic icebergs are green because they are heavily laden with iron.  "Writing Jan. 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Ocean, Warren and his colleagues report that the marine ice at the bottom of the Amery Ice Shelf has 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above. This iron comes from the rocks under the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which are ground into a fine powder as glaciers move over them."  This iron gets delivered to phytoplankton in the ocean that need it for nutrition.

A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in China: "The creatures are so well preserved in the fossils that the soft tissues of their bodies, including the muscles, guts, eyes, gills, mouths and other openings are all still visible. The 4,351 separate fossils excavated so far represent 101 species, 53 of them new."

A longread about cast iron skilets and the misconceptions about them.

"Meaning ‘atlas’ or ‘sheet of the world’ in Latin, the Mappa Mundi is an incredibly detailed 1.59m-long by 1.34m-wide map depicting the history, geography and religious understanding of the known world from the point of view of 13th-Century European scholars."

“We can be proud to say that, for the first time in 400 years, Manneken Pis is not peeing out fresh drinking water. The municipality is now intent on inspecting all the centrally located fountains to avoid similar waste.”

A complete list of the winners of the Costa Book Award.

A photograph of scalping survivor Robert McGee.

How to make leech traps.

"Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed.  The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure to treat patients who need critical and timely care."

"Padding is the extra time airlines allow themselves to fly from A to B. Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays experienced for decades into their schedules instead of improving operations."

"When a young Taiwanese woman named He took herself to a hospital this week complaining of a swollen eye, she expected to be treated for a simple infection.  Instead, the 29-year-old and her doctor were horrified to discover four bees living under her eyelids, feasting on her tears."

What is Michael J. Fox's middle name?  (scroll down to "early life").

Three tips for making a better cake from a mix in a box.

Woman eats 86 ounces of mayonnaise in 3 minutes.

Butterflies puddling.

Embedded images from the The New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons (Knopf, 1992).

A shout-out to As It Happens

I've been listening to As It Happens much more frequently ever since Trump launched his trade war against Canada.  For readers unfamiliar with the program, here are excerpts from the Wikipedia entry:

As It Happens is a Canadian interview show that airs on CBC Radio One in Canada and various public radio stations in the United States through Public Radio Exchange. Its 50th anniversary was celebrated on-air on November 16, 2018. It has been one of the most popular and acclaimed shows on CBC Radio.

The bulk of the program consists of a CBC journalist, currently Nil Köksal since 2022, conducting telephone interviews with newsmakers and other persons of interest. The other co-host, Chris Howden as of January 6, 2020, introduces the interviews and other segments... 

The show is broadcast each weekday from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. (half an hour later in Newfoundland) throughout Canada. It used to be widely accessible to much of the northern United States, but as the CBC switched its CBC Radio One from powerful AM signals in Eastern Canadian urban centres to FM stations, it became harder to receive CBC content further away from the border.

I download the podcasts to my phone and listen to them while running errands.  My introduction to the program actually began way back in 1997, when I presented a research paper on the role of sleep paralysis in literature and folklore at a national meeting in San Francisco.  In that lecture I mentioed the "old hag" phenomenon in Newfoundland.  Two evening later I was in my hotel room when the phone rang, and moments later I was being interviewed by then-host Michael Enright.

American listeners to NPR's All Things Considered will find themselves right at home with As It Happens.  The whimsical humor nicely offsets the grimmer realities of world news.  I invite readers to leave their own reviews in the comments.

Addendum:  One interesting segment several days ago was a report that some Canadian professional hockey games will now be simulcast on the radio in the Cree and Inuktitut languages, as well as the traditional English and French.  What was most interesting to me was that instead of adopting English words for concepts like "icing" and "cross-checking," they are going to create new words in their own language - demonstrating an admirable respect for ancient languages.

Piano stairs

 

The World's Deepest Trash Bin is part of the same VW ad campaign. 

Reposted from 2009.  I wonder how long these stairs remained in place and functional.  I found this brief history at ClassicFM.

"In 2009, creative advertising agency NORD DDB and car manufacturer Volkswagen noticed that the stairs at the Odenplan metro station in Stockholm, Sweden, were largely being ignored in favour of a neighbouring escalator.

Fuelled by the idea that having fun can “change behaviour for the better”, they set about finding ways to revolutionise the step experience, hoping to encourage more commuters to use the stairs by making it fun."

"Aibohphobia"

"The irrational fear of palindromes."

Via Language Log.  Reposted from 2010.

"Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology"

If someone had asked me a month ago to give an extemporaneous talk about the history of detective stories in the United States, I would have begun with Poe in the 1840s (Rue Morgue, Marie Roget, Purloined Letter), then switched to the other side of the pond for Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1860s) and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales (1880s), before returning to the United States in the 1920s for noir and pulp fiction.

What this book taught me is that there was an enormous production of mystery writing in the United States well before Sherlock Holmes became popular.  The reason we are unfamiliar with it is that most of these publications were in American newspapers and magazines, and thus not codified into novels.  The editors of this anthology have combed through archives of American periodicals to tabulate and organize a surprising trove of material.

The several dozen stories are each brief (about 5-8 pages), as befits their original publication formats, and the content is occasionally rudimentary because this was a newly-emerging genre.  Policemen and detectives apply amazing modern technology (fingerprints), but also nonsensical ones (retrieving the image of a murderer from the retina of the victim).  A mysterious locked-room mystery is solved when someone notices a skylight.  And the malefactors when confronted with the exposure of their crime typically confess, and sometimes commit suicide in remorse for their wicked deed.

The strength of the book is in the 20+ page introduction and in the intros to the various subsections.  I was surprised to learn how much I didn't know, and for that I am grateful.  For modern readers who want fascinating stories, I would suggest sticking with modern authors, but for the detective story enthusiast or scholar, this is a worthwhile read.

Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology (McFarland, 2008)

An entirely new genus, in the "daisy" family

This "wooly devil" is not just a new plant - it marks the discovery of an entire new genus of plants,  Quite a remarkable achievement.  Here are some excerpts from the PhytoKeys article:

"Here, we describe and illustrate a new monospecific genus of Compositae, Ovicula biradiata gen. et sp. nov., from the Chihuahuan Desert in Big Bend National Park, Texas. Ovicula biradiata is a very locally abundant, yet range-limited, spring annual herb found in coarse calcareous alluvium...

We also present detailed habitat information, high-resolution images captured using a dissecting microscope and scanning electron micrographs of vegetative and reproductive characters of Ovicula biradiata and related taxa...

The Chihuahuan Desert is the largest and most biologically diverse warm desert in North America... Eighty-nine plant species of conservation concern are found in the park...

These diminutive plants, observed during the peak of their growing season, were inconspicuous annuals, from less than one centimetre to 3–7 centimetres across, prostrate and densely white-woolly, matching the whitish colour of their calcareous gravel substrate... Here, we present morphological, micro-anatomical and molecular phylogenetic evidence that supports description of this plant as a new genus and species...

The generic name from Latin Ovis “sheep” and -cula (diminutive ending) references the dense woolly indumentum of this new plant. The name honours the desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsonii)... The specific epithet biradiata references the typically two conspicuous ray florets, occasionally three per head, positioned on opposing margins of the capitulum. A recommended common name for O. biradiata is “woolly devil”, in reference to the woolly indumentum, the proximity of populations to the locality known as Devil’s Den and the tendency for the ray florets to resemble horns."

Lots more details at the link, and a lay discussion at Smithsonian magazine, 

Find the invisible cow

The image is a screencap of a successful discovery of an invisible cow.

If you'd like to find one, you can search at this link.  Adjust your search according to the loudness of the "cow."  If you can find five cows you earn the ability to search for goats.

Provides minutes of fun.

Reposted from 2013.

"Parody inversion" explained

Via.  Reposted from 2019.

Canada goose fights off bald eagle

"Mervyn Sequeira, an Ontario photographer, was out with his family on a recent morning when they spotted a bald eagle descending towards a frozen lake.

Sensing a looming attack on unsuspecting prey, Sequeira scanned the landscape and saw a Canada goose, alone and vulnerable.

For the next 20 minutes, lens trained on the battle, Sequeira watched what he expected would be a lopsided fight with a grim coda.

Through bursts of his shutter, however, he captured a defiant goose fending off death.

“I’ve seen bald eagles take a lot of things, from ducks to muskrats. But this is the first time I’ve seen a bald eagle go in for something as big as a goose,” he said.

Despite multiple attacks by the eagle, the goose remained unbowed. The raptor, defeated, flew off."

Additional photos from the encounter are posted at The Guardian.

"Shut up !!"

An article in the New York Times * described "fans of good grammar" flocking to a showing of a movie on that topic.

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles...

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list, discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression...

What I took away from the article was a clever repartee to use when a prescriptivist insists that grammar rules are inflexible.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

I'll try that reply and see if anyone picks up on the intrinsic wry humor in it.

* note that in response to a reader complaint and a reader suggestion, I'm now trying to use "guest links" for articles I cite from the NYT.  Hope they work ok.  Max 10/month should not be a problem.  Not sure if such are available for other paywall sites I use

Signatures change

"I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.

However, some doubt arose concerning my identity. The nine-year-old signature on my passport did not match the one I had been putting everywhere, on everything. I had mistakenly assumed we accepted the way a signature degrades over time, how it grows hastier, less sure of itself. The authorities didn’t accept this degradation, no, and requested an in-person appearance to re-sign all the things.

Here you must choose a signature and commit. A señor hovered over me as I tried to perform my name the way I once had—upright, tense, and contained. (Lately it had gone soupy.) He examined my new effort, compared with my nearly expired passport.

He pointed to the t. The horizontal line needed to be longer, so I lengthened it, and was thus recognized, by Mexico, to be myself."

 -- from an essay in Untitled Thought Project, via Harper's magazine.

Colorful "polar stratospheric clouds"

As reported by Spaceweather.com:

For the third day in a row, Arctic sky watchers are reporting a widespread outbreak of polar stratospheric clouds. "The colors are spectacular," says Ramune Sapailaite, who photographed the display over Gran, Norway..."The clouds were visible in the sky all day, but the colors really exploded just before sunset," says Sapailaite. "I took these pictures using my cellphone."

Widely considered to be the most beautiful clouds on Earth, polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) are rare. Earth's stratosphere is very dry and, normally, it has no clouds at all. PSCs form when the temperature in the Arctic stratosphere drops to a staggeringly-low -85 C. Then, and only then, can widely-spaced water molecules begin to coalesce into tiny ice crystals. High-altitude sunlight shining through the crystals creates intense iridescent colors that rival auroras.

Related:  Fire rainbow and circumhorizotal arc.  There's probably additional information somewhere at Atmospheric Optics.

Some "15" puzzles are unsolvable

The example shown, posted on the puzzles subreddit, is on a watch.  What I remember are the old "analog" versions with small sliding wooden pieces in a frame.  I used to get great satisfaction as a child by solving scrambled puzzles.  What I learned this morning is that the puzzles date back way before my time:

The puzzle was "invented" by Noyes Palmer Chapman, a postmaster in Canastota, New York, who is said to have shown friends, as early as 1874, a precursor puzzle consisting of 16 numbered blocks that were to be put together in rows of four, each summing to 34 (see magic square)... The game became a craze in the U.S. in 1880...

Some later interest was fueled by [Sam] Loyd's offer of a $1,000 prize (equivalent to $34,996 in 2024) to anyone who could provide a solution for achieving a particular combination specified by Loyd, namely reversing the 14 and 15, which Loyd called the 14-15 puzzle. This is impossible, as had been shown over a decade earlier by Johnson & Story (1879), because it requires a transformation from an even to an odd permutation.

The Reddit thread confirms that the one illustrated is unsolvable, which is confirmed at the Wikipedia entry.  In fact, half of all initial states of the puzzle will be mathematically impossible to resolve.  To guarantee solvability, a puzzle would need to be manufactured with the pieces "solved" and then scrambled before distribution (or by asking the end-user to do so).  I'm glad all my childhood versions were solvable.