A compendium of sheet music

Cover Browser has thousands of these in all sorts of different art styles.

The man "alert while locked in" to a vegetative state appears to be a farce

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Many news sites have been carrying a story today about a man who allegedly for 23 years has been "locked in" to a paralyzed body while being "fully alert" but misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has published a rebuttal -

The "facilitated communication" process consists of the "facilitator" actually holding the hand of the subject over the keyboard, moving the hand to the key, then drawing the hand back from the keyboard! This very intimate participatory action lends itself very easily to transferring the intended information to the computer screen. In the video you have just viewed, it is very evident that (a) the "facilitator" is looking directly at the keyboard and the screen, and (b) is moving the subject's hand. The video editing is also biased, giving angles that line up the head of the subject with the screen, as if the subject were watching the screen...

Watch the first 30 seconds or so of the video embedded above to see what James Randi is talking about. He explains the "clever Hans" effect more at the link.

Via Reddit, where commenters are equally outraged at this travesty.

Yes, we know it's a "computer glitch"...

...but is there no human at Toys 'R Us who can spot these things before they are posted?

Found at Consumerist.

Free Online OCR

I have been a fan of optical character recognition since the early days of the technology. I remember about 15 years ago using a hand-held scanner to try to digitize my files of journal articles and magazine clipppings. The process required a lot of "cleanup" and ultimately proved to be not worth the time.

So it was with some interest that I saw a notice for "free online OCR" - Whether you have a scanned document or a photo, NewOCR.com can analyze the text in any image file that you upload, and then convert the text from the image into text that you can easily edit on your computer. I bookmarked the site and used it several days later when I encountered the story above in a pdf file. I took a screen shot of the page and uploaded the image to the free online OCR site. This was how the image was rendered...

Click to enlarge both for comparison, but the rendering needs work, shall we say. I suppose you get what you pay for.

In all fairness there are certain fonts that are intrinsically hard for OCR to interpret, and the test image had poor black/white contrast. It likely will do better with other challenges.

An Effective Journalistic Technique?

(The Onion Magazine is a parody of the New York Times Magazine)

Recreating the dynamics of traffic jams

Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic - typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.

The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now...

Pinpointing the causes of shockwave jams is an exercise in psychology more than anything else. "If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred. Human error is needed to cause the fluctuations in behaviour,"

More at the link.

"Your Majesty, could I just kiss your ring instead?"

"... in ancient Ireland a king's subjects ritually demonstrated their submission by sucking on the ruler's nipples..."

-- found in Tales from the Bog, in the Sept 2007 issue of National Geographic.

Another Thracian treasure found

Bulgarian archaeologists have presented their findings from the tomb of a Thracian aristocrat.

The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold, and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number of other ornate silver and bronze vessels.

The aristocrat belonged to a rich family descended from the ruling strata in the Odrysian Kingdom (5-3rd century BC).

Several other Thracian treasure troves have been found. What I find most incredible is the quality of the workmanship; many of the items are as skillfully created as anything produced in Renaissance Europe - but these come from 400 B.C.

Prostatic cellular font

Dr. Ma. Ivy Clemente,Pulilan,Philippines
Specimen: Glandular structures from Fibroadenoma and Nodular Prostatic Hyperplasia cases

From the superb gallery of the Olympus digital microimaging competition for 2009.

Via Neatorama.

Dutch set domino record

Video from Domino Day 2008. This is part 1 of seven parts.

Nice place to visit (but you wouldn't want to live here...)

"...asylums started out as philanthopic dreams, rather than psychiatric nightmares. The concept was born in the mid-1800s, when socially minded citizens, dismayed by the often dismal lot of the mentally unstable, paid for dozens of institutions to be constructed for their care. By 1880, 139 had been built in the US.

These were often palatial buildings, designed by prestigious architects, with vast landscaped grounds and impressive vistas. They were symbols of civic pride, just as museums and universities are today, and some became fixtures on the tourist trail. This vintage postcard shows part of the extensive gardens of Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.

From a photoessay on mental institutions at New Scientist.

Via Atlas Obscura. Image: Christopher Payne.

Adapting "The English Patient" to the screen

I had recently seen articles online about the possible discovery of the remains of Cambyses' lost army in the Sahara desert. While researching that for a blog post, I realized that this lost army had also been sought by Count László de Almásy, the burned man in The English Patient. I've seen the movie several times, but decided to read the book seeking references to Cambyses' army. There's very little - just some quotes from Herodotus re the "death of various armies."

But I did find an interesting discrepancy between the novel and the cinematic version. [Stop here if you don't want to encounter a "spoiler"] In the movie de Almásy/Fiennes returns to the Cave of Swimmers to find Katherine/Kristin Scott Thomas dead. How long she has been there is not clear (as best I can remember), but she looks quite lovely as he tearfully carries her to the plane. In the book her injury during the first plane crash occurs in 1939, but de Almásy's return is dealyed until 1942. One presumes that the director didn't want to depict Fiennes carrying a mummified corpse...

p.s. -for those interested, here is the Google Maps satellite view of the "Cave of Swimmers." Zoom out, and try to picture this cave being on the shore of a great lake or inland sea...

"In Tassili I have seen rock engravings from a time when the Sahara people hunted water horses from reed boats. In Wadi Sura I saw caves whose walls were coverd with paintings of swimmers. Here there had been a lake. I could draw its shape on a wall for them. I could lead them to its edge, six thousand yers ago.

Ask a mariner what is the oldest known sail, and he will describe a trapezoidal one hung from the mast of a reed boat that can be seen in rock drawings in Nubia. Pre-dynastic. Harpoons are still found in the desert..." (~p. 18-19)

It staggers the mind.

Climate change "stagnating"

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents...

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif... "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue...

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory...

"Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal," says Latif...

Much more at the Der Spiegel link, including suggestions regarding why the trend has levelled off.

Bugs on the windshield

Source.

Taxis

Taxis lined up to fill their gas tanks in Chongqing, China... (Reuters) Source.