A "History of Christmas Lights"

My mother remembers having lighted candles on the tree. I remember the "bubble lights" shown above. Those and other lights are discussed in a five part series at JimOnLight.com.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5 is apparently pending.

"Nail art" at a Tokyo expo

"Nail art is a huge business in Japan, with more than A$2 million reportedly being spent on the industry last year.' More pix at the link.

A wax cannon creates art

"Artist Anish Kapoor’s “Shooting into the Corner” was photographed at the Royal Academy of Arts in London Thursday. The exhibit is created by firing red wax at a wall every 20 minutes."

I'm not mocking it. Res ipse loquitur.

Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

"The trolley was undamaged"

Two Germans were hospitalized after a battle in which the weapons were salamis and Parmesan cheese.

He clubbed the younger man with a salami as his mother tried to fend him off with a sharp 4lbs piece of Parmesan.

The pensioner then pushed the woman down on to a glass countertop on which she cracked her head.

Police arrived to break up the melee. Two of those involved were treated in hospital for minor injuries.

The trolley was undamaged.

Details at the Telegraph. Photo: Getty Images.

Christmas lights

41,300 lights, on an oak tree in Bloomington, Minnesota. Story at the Star Tribune.

Photo credit: Marlin Levison.

Can a nursery-age child be brainwashed?

Counter-terrorist police in the UK are now visiting nursery schools. A police memo emailed to community groups in the West Midlands asks

"“I do hope that you will tell me about persons, of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation ... Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of 4.”

This has prompted some backlash and controversy.

"...He said the indicators were they [children] might draw pictures of bombs and say things like ‘all Christians are bad’ or that they believe in an Islamic state. It seems that nursery teachers in the West Midlands area are being asked to look out for radicalisation. He also said that targeting young children was important because they would be left aware of what was inappropriate to say at school. He felt that it was necessary to cover nurseries as well as primary and secondary schools. He said it was a precaution and that he wasn’t expecting to come back with a list.”

More details (and photo credit) at the Times Online.

Consider wrapping your evergreens in burlap

Those of us who live "up north" often assume that trees are metabolically dormant in the winter, but under certain conditions they can become active - to their ultimate detriment.

In the tree care industry this browning, called "winter burn" or "winter scorch," occurs when evergreens start to photosynthesize on warm, sunny days, but then lose too much moisture and dry out.

On warm, sunny days, when light is reflecting off snow and light-colored buildings, a shielding of burlap can keep wimpy evergreens from photosynthesizing, said Jeff Gillman, associate professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota. "Burlap essentially acts as a sun umbrella, because once your tree heats up, its pores will begin to lose moisture, and then you're on your way to winter scorch."

More details about whether to wrap your trees at the Star Tribune, whence the photo (credit Tom Sweeney).

Christmas music from a "beer bottle band"

Skillfully performed. Notes from the band's website:

But I see people playing multiple beer bottles…is that right?

Yes, everyone was in charge of two different notes (with the exception of our fine musician on the floor, who was in charge of three!). While this definitely made things more difficult, it was the only way to have a full-sounding arrangement with the limited head-count.

How did people know when to play?

Each person was handed personalized sheet music to learn their part. Once we practiced enough, we were able to put the sheet music away. For the performance, there were large color-coded pages of sheet music on the wall behind the camera for reference…and when we say large, we mean 5′ x 3′ pages (you can periodically see people peeking up there) See our photos section for a visual.

More at the link.

Via Neatorama.

Praying mantis on 17th-century Japanese helmet

I thought the "Mr. Magoo" helmet was unusual, but this one with a golden praying mantis is extraordinary. It's part of a new acquisition by the museum at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The armor came from a Japanese museum that acquired it in 1927 from a treasury that was part of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the family of warlords who ruled Japan from 1600 until 1868. It was made in the early 1600s in Kii Province, south of Kyoto, which was then headed by Tokugawa Yorinobu (1602-71), the 10th son of the dynasty's founder.

The intricate acorn-shaped helmet confirms the owner's wealth and status; it is made of 124 lance-shaped panels, where 28 to 62 panels were typical. A carved praying mantis covered in gold leaf rears above the wearer's forehead, adding a fierce but whimsical touch.

The suit of armor was auctioned by Christie's and purchased by the museum for a record-setting $602,500. Further details at the Star Tribune.

Photo credit: By Tom Sweeney, Star Tribune

How bees kill hornets

I had always thought that honeybees killed giant hornets by overheating them inside the "bee ball," but a new study reported in Science News suggests that the hornets may suffocate as well as overheating:

The researchers taped anesthetized giant hornets to gas detectors and thermometer probes to measure carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures inside bee balls. When the probes touched open bee nests, the bees formed balls around the hornets. All 24 test hornets died within 10 minutes of bee ball formation, the team reports. Hornets bore no sign of stings, pointing to smothering as the cause of death.

In mammals high levels of environmental CO2 is an anaesthetic, as well as altering acid-base balance, so the lethal mechanism here may be quite complex. I'm just in awe of the fact that these small social insects have evolved such an effective defense mechanism.

Photo credit: M. Sugahara, F. Sakamoto

"Social media" explained

Alexis Ohanian was one of the founders of Reddit, which is one of my favorite websites. In the brief (4 minute) TED talk above, he talks not about Reddit per se, but how social media create memes and why the process is important.

UPS = U Pay Surcharge

TYWKIWDBI doesn't intend to become a consumer advice blog, but I would like to echo the sentiments of an article at the NYT this week.

Two weeks ago I went to our neighborhood UPS store to mail a package; the friendly clerk asked if I wanted it to go via UPS or USPS and I replied "whichever is cheapest." She quoted a price, I paid, and it wasn't until I was walking out that I decided it seemed to be too high, but I hadn't weighed the package and couldn't offer a protest.

So the last time I decided to use a Priority Mail Flat Rate package. When I was quoted a price WAY over the flat rate, I realized how much of a surcharge they add. I decided that based on the price of gas it was worthwhile to drive the extra 8 miles to the post office.

Here's an excerpt from the NYT article:

Posing as customers, reporters for The New York Times visited several U.P.S. stores last week looking to mail an item by Priority Mail — one of the postal service’s signature offerings. In nearly every instance, they were quoted prices well above the government postal rate, and only one of them was told they were paying a premium for the convenience of using a U.P.S. Store.

One store on the Upper East Side said it would cost $21 to send an eight-pound package by Priority Mail to Old Greenwich, Conn. The clerk suggested using U.P.S. Ground instead for $19.90. At the post office across the street, the same package cost $8.80 to ship. Each arrived in two days...

No rules govern how much a U.P.S. Store can charge for postal services, or mandate that it tell customers that it is adding a surcharge.

The only notice the reporters found was a notation on the receipt that reads “U.S. Postal Rates Are Subject to Surcharge,” though with no indication of what the markup is...

More details at the New York Times, whence the photo (credit Robert Stolarik).

Addendum: I should clarify that my comments and the NYT article apply to "UPS stores" which are franchised by UPS and may vary enormously around the country. By contrast, our family has been absolutely delighted with package delivery to our home by UPS itself, to the extent that we routinely give our local carrier a Christmas present.

Machinarium

A visually intriguing game. The video above is a promotional trailer.

You can play a free (but very brief) demo at the game's website. I had to track down a walkthrough to finish the room with the mining car coming out of the wall.

And Now We Are Two

Yesterday we celebrated TYWKIWDBI's two-year "blogiversary" with an appropriate libation.

As the photo above suggests, "blog years" are much longer than regular years - longer even than "dog years." And, as the years go by, blogs tend to evolve in unexpected ways. Here was my original post on 12/22/2007, entitled "The Journey of a Thousand Miles..."

... begins with one step (Lao Tzu, ~550 B.C.).

I should begin with a word of acknowledgement regarding the blog title. In the 1970s the president of Bluegrass Mensa, Jackson Lackey, published a newletter entitled TYWKIWDTY (Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Tell You); I've simply changed the last two words*, but the purpose remains the same - to compile for the amusement of my friends an eclectic collection of gleanings from the internet, from my readings, and from my files.

As with most blogs, the content will lean toward lighthearted humor, trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica - but I reserve the right to delve into sports, current events, social commentary, politics (especially presidential politics), and even conspiracy theory as the mood strikes me.

This is a pasttime, not an obsession, so there will not be new material daily. I may post a dozen items one day and nothing for two weeks thereafter. Friends and relatives who wish to monitor the contents would probably be best served by checking in here each week rather than on a daily basis. I welcome comments; I moderate them not for content, but to keep the site spam-free.

*and yes, I do know that it should be "blog them" to match "things", rather than "blog it", but for the sake of being able to pronounce the acronym, I'll leave it as is.

Update 2009: TYWKIWDBI was originally the acronym for "Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog It", but a visitor noted that the "it" could be changed to "incessantly" for better grammatical correspondence. By that time the blog had grown from an occasional task to a daily matter, so I made the change in the name.

I note with truly mixed feelings that my original intention of posting "a dozen items one day and nothing for two weeks thereafter" has changed to the extent that I find myself apologizing for taking a few days off for Christmas.

Anyway, things are now back to "normal." I hope nothing has gone on in the world these past several days that I need to catch up on...

I"m baaaaack....

Tune in tomorrow...