This apparently is referred to as an "air tie"

With the maddening economy of expression that denotes so much American-issue savoir faire, the curious "statelessness" of a shirt worn buttoned to the top, but sans any form of neckwear, has finally been christened – in tribute to that curious act of self-expression represented by the playing of an invisible guitar – the "air tie"...

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne famously went large with the look (going larger still with the Japanese No-style big suit) while director David Lynch [above] has arguably made it his own; an iconoclast without equal, he’s become, albeit without the accompanying pyrotechnics, a veritable Hendrix of the air tie...

But if you’re planning on joining the trend, you’re going to need a snug-fitting (but not to the point of strangulation) semi-spread collar and a little more interest in the suit jacket than might otherwise be deemed necessary in its more traditional guise as a simple framing device for the chest and head. Certainly, a peaked lapel would work well, as would a pocket square. After all, if you’re heading out tie-less and buttoned-up, you’re going to need something else on which the eye can fall, to add detail, and create a distraction from that bald, gleaming button fastened just below your Adam’s apple...

Further discussion at The Telegraph (when the image, cropped for size).

The slowly-evolving crisis of small towns in America

The StarTribune op-ed piece refers to small towns in Minnesota, which is largely agricultural in rural areas, so these comments may apply to many other states, though perhaps not all of them:

A recent presentation by Brad Finseth, executive director of the Center for Rural Policy and Development, shed light on the magnitude of the crisis with data that focused on Minnesota’s most rural areas...

In fact, what you may notice first in these communities is the number of empty storefronts and blank spaces on Main Street. The hardware store is gone. Maybe one cafe and one bar will still be open. The grocery store is out on the highway now and sells gas. In the smallest cities and towns, don’t expect to find a medical clinic or a dentist’s or a lawyer’s office...

Movie theater? Not a chance. Thrift and secondhand stores are fairly common, and many of the smaller towns have nursing homes and assisted-living facilities that look new or have recent additions spreading from an original building. Housing throughout the city looks a little ragged, and you’ll see empty lots where a house used to stand. Other houses are abandoned and are close to falling down. On the edge of town, a newer home may have been built, but you won’t see a subdivision...

In the last 25 years, the population of Minnesota’s 25 smallest counties has shrunk by nearly 13 percent... If you look deeper into the census data, you will see that the median age of the population in these rural counties is 44 to 49 years old, whereas counties like Hennepin [Mpls] and Ramsey [St. Paul] have median ages of 35...

What you won’t see on your drive, or in the data, are the crumbling water and wastewater systems in most of these cities, all the roads in need of asphalt, or the lists of seniors waiting to move into assisted living and long-term-care facilities. You won’t see the number of miles that children are being bused as school district after school district attempts to assemble the critical mass of pupils necessary to keep the schools functioning. You won’t see the high school graduates who are leaving for new lives in the big city. You won’t be able to attend a Lions Club or Jaycees meeting, as there are just too few people to keep such clubs going. The American Legion halls and VFWs are located in the larger towns, and the Red Cross seldom does a blood drive, since the donor pool has aged too much.

I think it is true that most Americans (and major media sources) tend to equate the U.S. economy with the situation in large urban areas, because that's where most people live.  But many small towns and cities are hurting.

Graphic comparison of eleven U.S. recessions

I've shown previous versions of this graph before.  (The x-axis reads from -25 months to +58 months).

Via The Dish.

Xylem from plants can be used to filter water

Here's the abstract from PLOS One:

Effective point-of-use devices for providing safe drinking water are urgently needed to reduce the global burden of waterborne disease. Here we show that plant xylem from the sapwood of coniferous trees – a readily available, inexpensive, biodegradable, and disposable material – can remove bacteria from water by simple pressure-driven filtration. Approximately 3 cm³ of sapwood can filter water at the rate of several liters per day, sufficient to meet the clean drinking water needs of one person.

And some relevant results and discussion:

As a model bacterium, we used fluorescently labeled and inactivated Escherichia coli bacteria that are cylindrical in shape with a diameter of ~1 µm. Use of fluorescently labeled bacteria enabled easy enumeration of their concentrations, and also allowed us to track the location in the xylem filter where they were trapped. Since filtration is dominated by size-exclusion at this length scale, we do not expect modification with the dye to significantly affect filtration characteristics. Filtration using three different xylem filters showed nearly complete rejection of the bacteria. Using a hemacytometer to count the bacteria, we estimate that the rejection was at least 99.9%...

Further investigation by SEM clearly showed individual bacterial cells accumulated on the pit membranes over the porous margo. These results confirm the pit membranes as the functional units that provide the filtration effect in the xylem filter...

...the pressures of 1–5 psi used here are easily achievable using a gravitational pressure head of 0.7–3.5 m, implying that no pumps are necessary for filtration...

The simple construction of xylem filters, combined with their fabrication from an inexpensive, biodegradable, and disposable material suggests that further research and development of xylem filters could potentially lead to their widespread use and greatly reduce the incidence of waterborne infectious disease in the world.

How to create a "Mobius bagel"

Explanatory video posted in 2012 at Krulwich Wonders.

Credit card (in)security at hotels

Identity fraud is a perennial concern for travelers, and particularly for hotel guests whose cards are frequently used on the road. But the problem seems to be getting worse, and there’s no quick or easy fix...

“Hotels are a massive source of credit card fraud,” says John Sileo, a digital privacy expert who runs the Web site Sileo.com. “In fact, the travel industry in general is ripe for the picking because of a variety of factors, including the distraction of travelers, high usage of credit and debit cards, high turnover of employees, and failure to perform employee background checks.”..

Their cards may have been compromised while they checked in, with an employee swiping their cards and then feeding the information to someone else. Or someone else standing near the check-in area and using a smartphone could have recorded their card numbers and verbal data, leading to the compromise...

I checked in with a reader who works in the security department of a major chain hotel in New Orleans about the precautions hotels do and don’t take when it comes to their customers’ security. He said that guests might be shocked if they took a look at the computers being used to check them in. He recently inspected front-desk terminals at his hotels, even though information technology isn’t part of his job.  “They hadn’t been updated in years, with thousands of updates needed,” he says. “I discovered that one computer was filled with adware, which is bad enough, but the other had a full virus network, with keyloggers as well as worms. It had its own database and a way to send guests’ personal information off-site to its own servers.”

More details (but no solution) at the Washington Post. 

When I travel out of town I take extra cash to use in sleazy bars and other places where I don't want to flash a credit card.  But you can't even make a reservation at hotels without providing a credit card number.

These berries are not blue

They look blue, but they have no pigment.  The appearance of color is generated by iridescence, as explained at Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science:

These little orbs are iridescent – they use special layers of cells, arranged just so, to reflect colours with extraordinary intensity. This trick relies on the microscopic physical structures of the cells, rather than on any chemical pigments. Indeed, the fruits have no blue pigment at all.

In the animal kingdom, such tricks are commonplace – you can see them at work on the wings of a butterfly, the shells of jewel beetles, or the feathers of pigeons, starlings, birds or paradise and even some dinosaurs. But in the plant world, pigments dominate and structural colours
were thought to be non-existentare much rarer...

It was collected from Ghana in 1974 but it’s still as vivid as ever. (Unlike pigments, structural colours don’t degrade, so the fruits will retain their sheen for decades to come. Some fossils still keep their iridescence.)..

As light hits the top layer, some gets reflected and the rest passes through. The same thing happens at the next layer, and the next, and so on. Provided the layers are exactly the right distance apart, the reflected beams of light amplify each other to produce exceptionally strong colours. The technical term is “multilayer interference”. Or alternatively: “Ooh, shiny!”

More at the link about the evolutionary aspects of this adaptation.  Via Ephemeral Curios, a science- and nature-oriented blog by a TYWKIWDBI reader.

America's "Founding Fathers" thought they were affecting the climate

Whether climate change is occurring, and especially whether such changes are the result of human activities, are hot topics in the American political landscape.  Here's some fuel for the fire:

"...though it is a well-documented fact, it might surprise you to learn that, a far cry from the United States’ recent ambivalence with respect to the modern scientific theory of man-made climate change, the country’s founders were keen observers of climatic trends and might even be counted among the first climate change advocates...

Building on the theories of John Evelyn, John Woodward, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and David Hume – who all believed that the clearing and cultivation of land in Europe accounted for the temperate climate that had enabled the Enlightenment – the colonists set about arguing that their settlement was causing a gradual increase in temperatures and improvement of the flora and fauna of North America. Hugh Williamson, American politician and a signatory of the Constitutional Convention, believed that “within the last forty or fifty years there has been a very great observable change of climate, that our winters are not so intensely cold, nor our summers so disagreeably warm as they have been,” a fact he attributed to the clearing of forests. “The change of climate which has taken place in North America, has been a matter of constant observation and experience,” wrote Harvard professor Samuel Williams. Benjamin Franklin wrote of the “common Opinion, that the Winters in America are grown milder.” Measurements were as yet inadequate to the task of proving this, he said, but he found the proposed mechanism (i.e. clearing and cultivation) sufficiently persuasive that, even if the winters were not milder already, he could not “but think that in time they may be so.”...

One need hardly belabor the point that the early climate change advocates were wrong [about the climate of that era becoming warmer]. Modern climate reconstructions show there was a brief warming period in New England during the late 1700s, but Jefferson’s and Williams’ measurements predate any actual man-made climate change. Their theories were pre-scientific in the specific sense that they predate a scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect. It is true that the French scientist Edme Mariotte had, as early as 1681, noticed the greenhouse effect, but it was not until the 1760s and 1770s that the first systematic measurements were made, and it would still be another century before anyone imagined that human activities might influence atmospheric composition to such an extent that the climate might be modified by this mechanism. Their pre-scientific theories also led them to believe that a changing climate would necessarily be beneficial, whereas today we are much more aware of the dangers of climate change... 

For an explication of why these views were important in European/American relations, see the original article at Public Domain Review.

Image (of Jefferson wearing warm furs) source.

Impressive trilobite fossil

It's amazing to me how much is known about the trilobites.  Even just reading the Wikipedia summary is a lengthy endeavor.  The one above is an example of the truly remarkable ones that have been recovered in Morocco (awesome specimens at this gallery).  And assuming this one is real (there are lots of fake fossils), imagine the hours that were spent with dental tools to free it from the matrix.

More information at the New York Times.

Embedded image cropped (without change of content) from the original, credited to Chip Clark/Smithsonian.

"You should be dancing, yeah"

YouTube link.

For those who like movies, a supercut of dancing in the cinema, created from 246 movies (listed at the link under About/show more).

Mostly safe for work, and in my view worthy of clicking the fullscreen icon in the lower right corner.  Enjoy.

Kudos to the "Menstrual Man"

As reported by the BBC:

A school dropout from a poor family in southern India has revolutionised menstrual health for rural women in developing countries by inventing a simple machine they can use to make cheap sanitary pads. Arunachalam Muruganantham's invention came at great personal cost - he nearly lost his family, his money and his place in society...

"It all started with my wife," he says. In 1998 he was newly married and his world revolved around his wife, Shanthi, and his widowed mother. One day he saw Shanthi was hiding something from him. He was shocked to discover what it was - rags, "nasty cloths" which she used during menstruation...

Wanting to impress his young wife, Muruganantham went into town to buy her a sanitary pad. It was handed to him hurriedly, as if it were contraband. He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price. He decided he could make them cheaper himself...

He was shocked to learn that women don't just use old rags, but other unhygienic substances such as sand, sawdust, leaves and even ash...

He created a "uterus" from a football bladder by punching a couple of holes in it, and filling it with goat's blood... He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his traditional clothes, constantly pumping blood out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates. Everyone thought he'd gone mad.

He used to wash his bloodied clothes at a public well and the whole village concluded he had a sexual disease. Friends crossed the road to avoid him. "I had become a pervert," he says. At the same time, his wife got fed up - and left. "So you see God's sense of humour," he says in the documentary Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani...

Worse was to come. The villagers became convinced he was possessed by evil spirits, and were about to chain him upside down to a tree to be "healed" by the local soothsayer. He only narrowly avoided this treatment by agreeing to leave the village...

Four-and-a-half years later, he succeeded in creating a low-cost method for the production of sanitary towels... It took Muruganantham 18 months to build 250 machines, which he took out to the poorest and most underdeveloped states in Northern India... A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more. Each machine converts 3,000 women to pad usage, and provides employment for 10. They can produce 200-250 pads a day which sell for an average of about 2.5 rupees (£0.025) each. Women choose their own brand-name for their range of sanitary pads, so there is no over-arching brand - it is "by the women, for the women, and to the women".

Much more at the link.

"Burl poaching" threatens redwood trees

Many years ago one of my neighbors asked permission to cut a burl from a living tree in my woods.  I agreed, and learned at the time that burls are coveted by people with woodworking skills for their intricate grain patterns.  But some people don't ask permission...

The practice — known as burl poaching — has become so prevalent along the Northern California coast that Redwood National and State Parks on Saturday started closing the popular Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway at night in a desperate attempt to deter thieves.

Law enforcement Ranger Laura Denny said Tuesday that poachers have been stalking the remote reaches of the park with their chain saws and ATVs for decades, but lately the size and frequency of thefts have been on the rise.

"When I interview suspects, that is the (reason) they say: their addiction to drugs and they can't find jobs," she said. Her husband, park district interpretation supervisor Jeff Denny, said it is comparable to poor people poaching rare rhinos in Africa to sell their horns. Jobs are hard to come by since the timber and commercial fishing industries went into decline...

A redwood tree can survive the practice, but the legacy of the organism that could be 1,000 years old is threatened, because the burl is where it sprouts a clone before dying. Sprouting from burls is the prevalent method of redwood propagation, and the source of the Latin name for coast redwood, Sequoia semper vierens, or forever living, he added...

The good stuff with a lacey grain full of eyes will go for $2 to $3 a pound, unseasoned. Finished dining room tables are being offered for $13,000 on eBay...

Side effects of sword swallowing

A 2006 article in the BMJ enumerated the risks:

We excluded cases in which injury was related to swallowing items other than swords, such as glass, neon tubes, spear guns, or jack hammers...

Thirteen respondents did not volunteer any medical information, but 19 described sore throats, usually when they were learning to swallow, after performing too frequently, or when they were swallowing multiple or odd shaped swords. Lower chest pain, often lasting days, followed some performances and was usually treated by abstaining from practice. They rarely sought medical advice. Six suffered perforation of the pharynx or oesophagus. Three of these had surgery to the neck, one having a 1.5 cm laceration at the level of D2 and a pneumothorax, one a pinhole laceration at C6 and surgical emphysema, and the other having a pharyngeal tear. The perforations were treated conservatively in three patients, one of whom had a second perforation with aspiration of a neck abscess after further injury. Three others also had probable perforations, one of whom was told that a sword had “brushed” the heart, and one had pleurisy and another pericarditis after injury, suggesting extraoesophageal trauma. No one underwent thoracotomy, although one had a breadknife removed transabdominally. Sixteen mentioned intestinal bleeding, varying in quantity from melaena or finding some blood on a withdrawn sword to large haematemases necessitating transfusion.

More at the link, including observations re the technique:

The gag reflex is desensitised, sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper oesophageal sphincter with the neck hyper-extended. The next step requires relaxation of the pharynx and oesophagus and particularly the horizontal fibres of cricopharyngeus, which are not usually under voluntary control...

For those (few) interested, there is a Sword Swallowers Association International.

When there's no snow for the Iditarod

The Anchorage Daily News reports about the woes of traveling by dog sled without sufficient snow cover:

The problem with the poor trail, the mushers say, is they could not set brakes on the ice and frozen mud well enough to control their sleds as eager dogs pulled them over, through and into the hazards. When their sleds got caught on stumps and rocks, several of them broke their brake...

Many mushers carried wounds from the battle, having slammed their bodies on sleds and, in some cases, on trees and rocks. Some limped from one task to the next in Nikolai, feeding dogs and checking gear...

Veterinarians reported 11 dropped dogs in Nikolai late Tuesday after 40 teams had checked in. The only injuries were minor -- sore shoulders and wrists, the vets said. "It seems like the dogs fared better than the mushers," veterinarian Bruce Nwadike said...

Photo credit: Bob Hallinen

How dogs eat ice cream

YouTube link.

Some lick, lick, lick.  Lick, lick, lick. 

Others... not so much.

Note:  There are an abundance of comments at the YouTube link about why you shouldn't give dogs ice cream as a treat.  Let's not repeat them here.  Enjoy the moment.

Via The Dish.