Gummi Bear

This one is reacting with potassium chlorate, but approximately the same thing happens with your teeth...

Go to a museum this Saturday

This Saturday, Sept. 25, over 1,000 museums nationwide will offer free admission as part of Smithsonian Magazine’s annual Museum Day.  Participating museums are listed here; remember to click on the page to download your free ticket.

Neuschwanstein

Click picture for bigger, and again for biggerbigger; worth more than a thousand words.  Anyone been there?  Are visitors allowed to go up in the turrets?  If I ever have a vacation home, I want it to have a turret.

"Any stupid questions?"

CLASS RULES ON PUBLIC DISCUSSION:

Anybody gets to ask any question about any fiction-related issue she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

—Syllabus for David Foster Wallace’s class “English 102-Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ‘94”

Found at Whiskeyandwhimsey.

Whipholt beach, Leech Lake, Walker, Minnesota

Nothing special in this brief video; posted only because it brings back ~50 years of pleasant memories.

The map coordinates are: 47.0500,-94.35720.  Looking straight ahead (due north), it is over 13 miles to the opposite shore.  You definitely don't want to be on this part of the lake during a big storm.

Airport library - update

The photo above was taken in the Amsterdam airport.  "You can just grab any book you want and read. From what I can tell they work on the honor system..."

It's been a while since I've flown, so I don't know if this is feature is in other airports.  Do you read the book there, or can you take it on your flight?  I'm reminded of a curiosity I noticed at a medical clinic several weeks ago.  In the outpatient waiting room there were the usual variety of (uninteresting) magazines.  And a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.  I thought "this can't be a good sign..."

Found at Camille Reads, via Librarianista.

Addendum Sept 6:  Info supplied by one of our anonymous readers:

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport has partnered with the Dutch Public Libraries to open the world’s first airport library.  The library is just past passport control, on Holland Boulevard, and offers passengers waiting for a flight a place to read books in 29 different languages, listen to music, watch films and download material free of charge.

This from an airport that already offers travelers a great collection of art, a casino, a seafood bar, a chocolate bar, a fun forest for kids, a branch of the Rijksmuseum and lots more.

Update: Not wishing to fall behind TYWKIWDBI, the New York Times posted an article about the Schiphol airport library this week:

Opened with little fanfare over the summer, the library — the first ever at a major international airport — has 1,200 books in more than two dozen languages, all by Dutch authors or on subjects relating to the country’s history and culture...

There are 18 million passengers a year that only transfer through Schiphol... their layovers, he said, averaged somewhere between five and seven hours. “Most of these people never leave the airport, so they don’t see anything of Holland.”

The library also is equipped with nine Apple iPads loaded with multimedia content, including photos and videos, that is likewise devoted to the theme of Dutch culture... 

...a library that employs no permanent staff and whose only effort to discourage theft is a sticker on the cover of each book identifying it as part of the Airport Library collection.

"You have a right to remain silent..."

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins [560 U.S.____(2010) (docket 08-1470)] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent. The case originated when Van Chester Thompkins was being questioned about a shooting in which one person was killed. Instead of invoking his Miranda right to remain silent, Thompkins simply remained silent, which is what the warning seemed to be allowing him to do. In fact, he remained silent through two hours and forty-five minutes of questioning, at which point the detective asked him if he believed in God and prayed, to which Thompkins spoke for the first time, saying "yes." The detective then asked him, "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting the boy down?" Thompkins again answered "yes," but refused to produce a written statement...

In short, by being silent during the interrogation Thompkins did not invoke his right to remain silent, but he waived his right when he said "yes" to the detective's questions about religion. Kennedy added that the accused are required to talk in order to indicate their unwillingness to talk...

More at Language Log.

A hole in the moon

The photo (credit NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University) apparently shows a collapsed lava tube, but I think it looks cool (like an open mouth with the tongue at the bottom).

I remember decades ago going with frieneds to explore a lava tube somewhere in the desert outside Flagstaff.  You'd think they would be fascinating, but in the absence of any prior human activity, they are really quite boring geologically.  Or perhaps we picked a poor one.

This is one of about 30 photos in yet another magnificent assemblage at The Big Picture.

Oil on the floor of the Gulf

A core sample from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico shows a 2-inch layer of oily material. Researchers are finding oil on the seafloor miles away from the blown-out BP well.  Though researchers have yet to chemically link the oil deposits to the BP well, "the sheer coverage here is leading us all to come to the conclusion that it has to be sedimented oil from the oil spill because it's all over the place," says one scientist.

NPR has the rest of the story.  Photo credit Samantha Joyce.

The massive fish kill in Louisiana

It appears to have been secondary to an anaerobic "dead zone," similar to the famous "jubilees" in Mobile Bay, Alabama:

The large volume of crab and fish that a jubilee can produce is hard to overstate.... author Archie Carr comments that "at a good jubilee you can quickly fill a washtub with shrimp. You can gig a hundred flounders and fill the back of your pickup truck a foot deep in crabs."

The Tea Party as a "starfish"

A very interesting video by Jonathan Rauch, offering a view of the Tea Party that I think is well worth sharing. The video is brief and to the point; further explanation is offered in his National Journal Magazine column:

In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, "organized but not organized" (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party's most important legacy may be organizational, not political...

The spark came on February 19, 2009, when a CNBC journalist named Rick Santelli aired a diatribe against the bank bailout. "That," Meckler says, "was our source code." The next day, the networkers held a conference call and decided to stage protests in a few cities just a week later. No one was more astonished than the organizers when the network produced rallies in about 50 cities, organized virtually overnight by amateurs. Realizing that they had opened a vein, they launched a second round of rallies that April, this time turning out perhaps 600,000 people at more than 600 events.

Experienced political operatives were blown away. "It was inconceivable in the past" to stage so many rallies so quickly, in so many places, without big budgets...

Today, the Tea Party Patriots is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group. It has seven national coordinators, five or so of whom draw salaries, which they decline to disclose but say are modest. Three other people get paychecks, according to Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national coordinator.

The organization has no offices, dwelling instead in activists' homes and laptops. Martin says it has raised just over $1 million in the past year, a trivial amount by the standards of national political organizers. About 75 percent of the group's funding comes from small donations, $20 or less, she says....

There is no chain of command. No group or person is subordinate to any other. The tea parties are jealously independent and suspicious of any efforts at central control, which they see as a sure path to domination by outside interests...

As a result, the network is impervious to decapitation. "If you thump it on the head, it survives." No foolish or self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no boss. Fragmentation, the bane of traditional organizations, actually makes the network stronger. It is like a starfish: Cut off an arm, and it grows (in some species) into a new starfish. Result: two starfish, where before there was just one...

Much more at the link.  It's a fascinating analysis.

Via The Daily Dish.

The endcap on a highway guard rail

I never understood that they had any functional significance, until I read a thread at Reddit today.  The reason for the endcap is that when you hit it, it is supposed to peel the railing off the posts like a ribbon:

If the endcap is missing, or malfunctions, or something goes wrong, then the vehicle winds up looking like a giant shishkabob:

The bottom two photos come from this story:

I assisted at this accident yesterday north of Deer Lodge on I-90. The driver was appx 22 year old guy heading east to College. He had left central Washington early in the morning. He fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the shoulder hitting the end of the section of guard rail.

The guard rail came through the right headlight, engine compartment, firewall, glove box, passenger seat, rear seat and exited out the driver’s side rear window. That is 120 LF of guard rail that threaded through the Suburban.

[There were] no passengers and the driver was not injured.

More photos at the link.

I need some math help

Kev posted the photo above at Nothing To Do With Arbroath this morning.  It's obviously meant to be humorous, but it should be solvable.

To try to solve it, I assume that the first three - symbols are dashes, not subtraction signs, because she is trying to generate a telephone number.

The cube root of 54,872,000 is 380. 

That gives 1-650-380-....  

In the last figure, if the parenthesized number is 112, the result is of course negative (-12,535), and x7/10 comes to -8774.5.

Does she want it rounded off/up to yield 1-650-380-8775 ??   If so, why did she make it negative?  Or is the symbol before 7/10 actually a negative sign?

I think I need math help, and I don't want to call her.  So I'll blog it...

Addendum:  Reader Steve Blunk has already come up with an answer.  That took all of ?what - 20 minutes?  Here it is:

My take for the last grouping would be

7/10*(9-(11i)^2) =
7/10*(9-(11^2*i^2) =
And since i^2 = -1, the rest follows:
7/10*(9+11^2) =
7/10*130 = 91

but since four digits are required, I'd write it as 0091

So Paula's number is 1-650-380-0091

Saudis to buy $60 billion in armaments from the U.S.

Here's the announcement in the Washington Post:

The Obama administration is seeking to sell Saudi Arabia advanced aircraft worth up to $60 billion in what Pentagon officials say would be the largest-ever single foreign arms deal.  A senior Defense Department official said the administration is prepared to authorize the sale to the Saudis of as many as 84 new F-15 fighter jets and three types of helicopters: 70 upgraded F-15s, 70 Apaches, 72 Black Hawks and 36 Little Birds.

"This gives [the Saudis] a whole host of defense capabilities to defend the kingdom," said the official...

According to the military, Boeing - maker of the F-15, the Apaches and the Little Birds - has estimated that the purchase would involve 77,000 direct and indirect jobs in 44 states. Some of those would be jobs that would be kept, but an unspecified number of new jobs would also be generated, officials said...

Defense industry analysts said the sale of the aircraft is a key to U.S. efforts to boost support from Arab allies against Iran.

And here are excerpts from some insightful commentary at Al Jazeera:

Ignoring the fact that miltary aircraft (which form the bulk of the deal as we know it) are prettty much useless against a nuclear missile, especially one that does not exist, $60bn buys a mind boggling amount of firepower, so that must mean that Saudi Arabia's military capacity right now is woefully insufficent compared to Iran's, right?

Er, no.

Saudi military spending already dwarfs Iran's by a factor of six. Indeed, by head of population, Saudi is the world's biggest purchaser of military hardware.

Global Firepower has a direct comparison of the two nations' military strengths, and it turns out that Iran's military is only superior in terms of manpower numbers...

But when it comes to "air-based weapons", Global Firepower puts the relative numbers (before this deal) at Saudi 453, Iran 84. (Bear in mind also that Iran's aircraft are widely described as museum pieces by military analysts, because the sanctions mean that Iran has no access to spare parts or modern technology).


So why does Saudi need 84 new F-15 fighter jets, 70 upgraded F-15s, 70 Apaches, 72 Black Hawks and 36 "Little Birds", just to fight a land army?

And when you consider the reality that Saudi has the full support of all the US military bases in the region, the suggestion that Riyadh has something to fear from Tehran is laughable...

... then what is really going on?  Well, with America suffering it's worst recession in 60 years, the biggest arms contract ever signed would certainly be a welcome boost to earnings in the military industrial sector.

Then this, from The Guardian:

While Israel sees Saudi Arabia as a useful buttress against Iran, there is a fear in Tel Aviv that a rogue Saudi pilot might opt for a suicide mission against Israel. The Israeli air force want to maintain an advantage.

So I agree with the Al Jazeera columnist:

So Washington will probably be announcing another big arms sale soon, this time to Israel.

I am so f**king fed up with seeing the world economy running on the basis of arms sales.

Rare earths are becoming very expensive

An interesting article at The Economist highlights the role played by China in a recent spike in the prices of rare earth elements.

Rare earths have become increasingly important in manufacturing sophisticated products including flat-screen monitors, electric-car batteries, wind turbines and aerospace alloys. Over the summer prices for cerium (used in glass), lanthanum (petrol refining), yttrium (displays) and a bunch of other –iums have zoomed upward (see chart) as China, which accounts for almost all of the world’s production, squeezes supply. In July it announced the latest in a series of annual export reductions, this time by 40% to precisely 30,258 tonnes. That is 15,000-20,000 tonnes less than consumption by non-Chinese producers...

China has cited “environmental” concerns as the reason for the export quotas. That is less implausible than it sounds. Rare earths are dangerous and costly to extract responsibly... High prices have already begun to propel a supply response elsewhere in the world.