Very impressive vocal control. When I saw the title, I was expecting something on the order of the more familiar Tuvan throat singing, an example of which is embedded at Grit in the Gears.
08 October 2014
Polyphonic overtone singing
Very impressive vocal control. When I saw the title, I was expecting something on the order of the more familiar Tuvan throat singing, an example of which is embedded at Grit in the Gears.
"Doubly-landlocked"
There are two nations in the world that are "doubly-landlocked," meaning that they have no seacoast and all the countries that surround them have no seacoast.
One of these two countries is Uzbekistan, for whom the United States has purchased an armored patrol boat for it to use to patrol its rivers.
The other doubly-landlocked country is identified at the Neatorama source (hint: it's not in Asia). Can you identify it wihout looking?
06 October 2014
04 October 2014
"I've had a wonderful time - but this wasn't it"
For an in-depth history and investigation of the paraprosdokian in the title, see the other QI - Quote Investigator
In conclusion, the earliest evidence points to the comic actor Hugh Herbert as crafter of this joke by 1936. But the attribution was made by Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, and he switched the credit to actor Walter Catlett in 1940. Hence, Skolsky’s credibility, and the credibility of the attribution are reduced. Groucho was first connected to the quip in 1941 several years after it was already in circulation. He may have said it in a comedy routine, but QI believes Groucho’s assertion that he did not say it after attending an actual party.The Tallest Man presents an extensive study of that topic, including a clickable list of hundreds of seven-footers.
A good summary of the fascinating Kennewick Man, who is be the subject of a forthcoming book.
Recreational pheasant hunting has markedly diminished, at least in Minnesota: "the fewest hunters and lowest harvest in 27 years... Hunters likely were responding to a huge loss of habitat, poor nesting weather and a corresponding large drop in the ringneck population in recent years. Last year, the pheasant population dropped 29 percent, and the state has recently lost more than 100 square miles of grassland habitat in the pheasant range."
It is now possible to 3-D print "bump keys" - "Haven't heard of bump keys before? Long story short, they're specially filed keys that you slip into a keyhole and hit with a mallet. Why? The energy from that thump is transferred up from the key's grooves and into the two layers of pins that normally keep the lock from rotating -- if you strike the bump key just right while trying to turn it, that top layer of pins will leap out of the way long enough for you to unlock the whole shebang."
"Keira Knightley's topless pictures are a victory for small breasted women."
ISBN numbers explained. Useful information for anyone planning to self-publish a book. Also, The Guardian offers a guide to self-publishing.
The image embedded at the top shows re relative size of the moon and the United States by superimposing the two.
Discover Magazine presents an introduction to Medieval portolan charts -
In Gaza, the "ice bucket challenge" has morphed into the dumping of a bucket of rubble on one's head."That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his method: no rough drafts, no sketches, nodescriptions of his work. “Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.
But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves."
If you are a Democrat fed up with President Obama, you might want to read Salon's interview with Cornel West - “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency.”
Video of a blue heron catching and eating a gopher.
How nursing homes can "game" the Medicare rating system.
Xylophonist can be pronounced either xyLOPHonist or XYLOphonist.
For the die-hard football fan, a thorough explication of the history and use of the back-shoulder pass.
"Once a corn field is planted and herbicide applied, many farmers don’t return to a given field until harvest time. The biotechnological and labor-saving innovations that have reduced costs for corn farmers mean that literally no one walks into the average corn field during the growing season. Which presents a major opportunity for marijuana growers."
What can only be termed "concussive fishing" is demonstrated by the homeless man in this gif, who catches fish in a stormwater drainage facility by throwing bricks at them. (note the gif autostarts, so don't open in another tab unless you know how to restart gifs).
The Smithsonian is in the process of digitizing over a hundred million documents. "Right now, Victoria is working on a catalog of bumblebee specimens collected by scientists in the 1800s and 1900s. On the site, each bee is shown pinned to a board next to a tiny label listing its scientific name and location at the time it was collected."
A history of variolation (smallpox inoculation). "In China, powdered smallpox scabs were blown up the noses of the healthy."
The element europium is used in the manufacture of the Euro.
"A Different Lens" is a video mashup of eyes in the movies. I have difficulty embedding Vimeo videos, so you'll need to watch it at Kuriositas.
03 October 2014
Thai body modification
"A devotee of the Ban Tha Rua Chinese shrine with needles pierced through
her arm takes a part in a procession celebrating the annual vegetarian
festival in Phuket."
Photo credit: REUTERS/Damir Sagolj, via The Telegraph.
There is a gallery of photos of this festival of "self-mutilation and vegetarianism" (!!) in The Independent. The photo below the fold [warning - grotesque and guns] was posted in The Straits Times/SE Asia.
Immense trichobezoar
As reported by The Telegraph:
See also Hairball Awareness Day, where I posted a photo of a Rapunzel syndrome bezoar.Doctors treating a teenage girl who had become unable to drink water without being sick were shocked to excavate a gigantic nine-pound hairball from inside her stomach. Ayperi Alekseeva, 18, from Kyrgyzstan, suffered months of dehydration and malnourishment because she couldn’t eat or drink, and came close to death...
Five years earlier, the New England Journal of Medicine used its Thanksgiving issue to highlight the jolly case of a “large bezoar” – weighing 10lbs (4.5 kilos) and 15 inches long – “occluding nearly the entire stomach” of an 18-year-old American woman.
The compulsive eating of hair is called trichophagia, and if left unchecked it can even develop into Rapunzel Syndrome, in which a hairball develops a ‘tail’ which trails down into the lower intestine.
Temari
Temari balls are a folk art form that originated in China and was introduced to Japan around the 7th century A.D. "Temari" means "hand ball" in Japanese.Instructable on how to make a temari ball. Photo via Reddit.
Historically, temari were constructed from the remnants of old kimonos. Pieces of silk fabric would be wadded up to form a ball, and then the wad would be wrapped with strips of fabric. As time passed, traditional temari became an art, with the functional stitching becoming more decorative and detailed, until the balls displayed intricate embroidery.
Temari are highly valued and cherished gifts, symbolizing deep friendship and loyalty. Also, the brilliant colors and threads used are symbolic of wishing the recipient a brilliant and happy life.
Four HOURS of classic cartoons
The names and years of the 30+ episodes are listed at the video link, or can be viewed at Miss Cellania.
Related: "Saturday morning cartoons are no more."
(This is called a "Looney Tunes" compilation, but it includes a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, which was Walter Lantz/Universal, rather than Warner Brothers.)
Awesome
That's a humpback whale breaching completely out of the water.
Credit Steven Benjamin via a story in The Guardian (where there are sequential photos).
A reminder that digital photos contain private information
Excerpts from a Reddit thread:
Your photo contains EXIF data, which contains phone brand & model, camera serial number for some models, GPS coordinates if enabled, whether flash was used or not, focal length, etc. Some websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Imgur remove EXIF before making your photos public, but for other websites (such as Flickr, Picassa, Google+), you need to remove your EXIF by yourself before uploading. This way, the info won't be publicized along with the image.
A brother of a friend of mine was selling some kind of high end mountain bike, and took a picture of it with his iPhone. Not sure what site it was put on, but, someone got the GPS data from the photo and stole the bike a day or two later.
[T]he concern is that most people take tons of pictures in their homes, and don't realize random strangers can find their home address from the photos. The GPS doesn't narrow down to a city, it narrows down to a few feet. That's how 4chan often tracks people down on the internet, check their blogs, look up exif from photos, order pizzas to those houses or report a shooting to get the swat team to show up or whatever.
I'm on the other side of it. I'm a professional photographer. I know how to remove and manipulate EXIF, but I usually actively add my email or other contact info to my photos so that if something gets out there and someone wants to use it for an Ad, they can get in touch with me to pay me instead of saying "I found it on the web with no info, it was orphaned so I figured I didn't have to pay anyone."
29 September 2014
Milkweed's spectacular autumn podcast
The final stage in milkweed's life cycle is a magnificent aerial dispersal of its seeds. The dried pods, remants of those huge blossoms, crack open and several hundred aerodynamic seeds are exposed to the wind; this happens gradually, over a period of days rather than all at once, presumably to maximize the range of distribution of their landing sites.
I hope that every child (and the inner child of every adult) has had or will have the opportunity to hold a dried stem aloft and shake it gently on an autumn day. One can't help but marvel at how this immensely effective dispersal mechanism has evolved over the millennia.
Those who raise milkweed in butterfly gardens need to be aware that neighbors may not share their enthusiasm for the plant. We cut down the stems of all our plants just before the pods open. The seeds are then available for "stealth gardening" along roadsides or in wastelands.
For those who want to distribute the seeds by hand in a more controlled fashion, the seeds can be separated from the fluff (the coma), or even more simply just digitally removed from a mature but unopened pod (instructive video here).
(and yes, I know it's actually a "seedcast," not a podcast, but I couldn't resist using the word)
"Shellshock" - a scary new computer bug
From the BBC:
The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple's Mac operating system. The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said...More at the link. I would welcome comments from some of the informed readers of this blog.
"Whereas something like Heartbleed was all about sniffing what was going on, this was about giving you direct access to the system," Prof Alan Woodward, a security researcher from the University of Surrey, told the BBC.
"The door's wide open."
Some 500,000 machines worldwide were thought to have been vulnerable to Heartbleed. But early estimates, which experts said were conservative, suggest that Shellshock could hit at least 500 million machines...
"Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera," said Tod Beardsley, a Rapid7 engineer...
For general home users worried about security, Prof Woodward suggested simply keeping an eye on manufacturer websites for updates - particularly for hardware such as broadband routers.
Censorship of books in U.S. prisons
From a story in The Guardian:
There is “widespread censorship” of books in US prisons, according to a report submitted to a UN human rights review, which details the banning of works about artists from Botticelli to Van Gogh from Texan state prisons for containing “sexually explicit images”.
The report from two free-speech organisations, the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship and the Copenhagen-based Freemuse, to the United Nation’s (UN) Universal Periodic Review states that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) lists 11,851 titles banned from its facilities. These range from the “ostensibly reasonable”, such as How to Create a New Identity, Essential Throwing and Grappling Techniques, and Art & Design of Custom Fixed Blades, to what it describes as “the telling”, including Write it in Arabic, and the “bizarre” (Arrival of the Gods: Revealing the Alien Landing Sites at Nazca was banned for reasons of “homosexuality”)...More at the link. The eagerness to ban pornography puzzles me. These prisoners are capable of hiding razor blades in their mouths and knives in their rectums, and the authorities are worried that the images might corrupt their minds or they might waste their time masturbating??
“Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the report, naming artists including Caravaggio, Cézanne, DallÃ, Picasso, Raphael, Rembrandt and Renoir among those whose works have been kept out of Texas state prisons.
“Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for artists,” states the submission, with prohibited literary works by Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice Walker also on the banned list.
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