A sweet potato is not a yam

YouTube link.

Don't leave your office computer on and unattended

As reported by Vice's Motherboard column:

Next time you go out for lunch and leave your computer unattended at the office, be careful. A new tool makes it almost trivial for criminals to log onto websites as if they were you... the new $5 tool called PoisonTap... can even break into password-protected computers, as long as there’s a browser open in the background...

“It’s entirely automated. You plug it in, you leave it there for a minute, then you pull it out and you walk away,” Kamkar told Motherboard in a phone call. “You don’t even need to know how to do anything.” 

Not all hope is lost though. To prevent someone from hijacking your accounts with PoisonTap, the best solution is to “fill your USB ports with cement,” Kamkar says laughing. 

Details at the link.

"The Man Who Knew Infinity"

YouTube link.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a 2015 British biographical drama film based on the 1991 book of the same name by Robert Kanigel. The film stars Dev Patel as Srinivasa Ramanujan, a real-life mathematician who after growing up poor in Madras, India, earns admittance to Cambridge University during World War I, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G. H. Hardy, portrayed by Jeremy Irons.

A very good movie.

Related: List of films about mathematicians

Divertimento #119

"A survey of 29 wind farms showed that 194 bats a month were killed, although the figure is likely to be higher because many of the dead creatures would have fallen prey to scavengers... If the figure was extrapolated to all of Britain’s onshore wind farms it could mean that around 80,000 bats are being killed each year by turbines."

gif: giving homeless people simple gifts.  Notice the response of the man at 0:30 to getting a jacket.

Showerthought: "When people think about travelling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future."

"The decomposing corpses are strewn among 7,000 pounds of propane tanks, tarps, car batteries, fertilizers, pesticides, banned rodenticides from Mexico, and other trash, plus 4,000 pounds of irrigation line blanketing an abandoned 20,000 plant illegal marijuana grow site in northeastern California’s Lassen National Forest. What was once unspoiled landscape is now a pockmarked 12-acre slagheap reminiscent of no man’s land." 

Is hunting a Constitutional right?

gif:  Why fishermen don't like seals.

"No One Dies Alone is a simple and economical plan. It is basically a voluntary, unpaid phone-tree program in which volunteers sign up on an Internet site for a week, during which time they pledge to be available to stay with a dying patient. At PeaceHealth, a two-hour minimum bedside vigil assignment is preferred. The volunteers are comprised of hospital employees as well as existing unpaid volunteer staff."

A list of U.S. Marine Corps acronyms and expressions.

"Earlier this year, experts began noticing that cybercriminals were using ransomware to target hospitals — organizations that are heavily reliant on instant access to patient records. In March 2016, Henderson, Ky.-based Methodist Hospital shut down its computer systems after an infection from the Locky strain of ransomware. Just weeks before that attack, a California hospital that was similarly besieged with ransomware paid a $17,000 ransom to get its files back."

How to make a floor out of pennies.

Showerthought:  "You know you're old when you fall down and no one laughs."

"Ms Carr-Gomm was taking part in a week-long self-healing workshop run by Chinese healer Hongchi Xiao where participants paid up to £750 to have toxins removed from the body through hard, repeated slapping." 

gif: Panda enjoying a bath.

They are extremely expensive ($480), but you can now purchase a Halloween mask that looks like a vagina (NSFW/NSFL).

GMO crops don’t actually reduce pesticide use or produce more food.  "In fact, herbicide use, says the Times, has increased in the US by 21 percent since the introduction of GMO crops in the mid-1990s. In Europe, over the same time period, herbicide use has declined by 36 percent."

NASA photograph of the surface of Pluto (click for bigger).

"A factoid is not a small fact. It's a mistaken assumption repeated so often that it is believed to be true. At least, that was the meaning ascribed to the word by Norman Mailer, who is widely credited with coining it, in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer said factoids were "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"."

gif: Raccoon tries to wash his cotton-candy treat.

"A man with an air horn that sounds like a train has allegedly been terrorising the residents of El Segundo, California, for weeks, and police have just made an arrest after finding the man accused of the noise with air horn equipment inside his car."  (awesome mugshot)

How to get your amaryllis to rebloom.

NFL games contain 15 minutes of action in a 60-minute clock time that requires over three hours to broadcast.

"English" words of Indian language origin. (juggernaut, nirvana, pundit, swastika, cashmere, khaki, pajamas, shampoo etc. etc. etc.)

A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second.

"An Oregon man who died in June after falling into a boiling hot spring at Yellowstone National Park was looking for a place to “hot pot,” or soak in warm water... By the time they returned the next day, the body had dissolved in the boiling waters, according to the report. The only traces were Scott’s wallet and melted flip-flops."

gif:  when your soccer team is so bad the fans help the team try to find the net.  chuckleworthy.

Showerthought:  "The abbreviation for down (dn) is just "up" upside-down."

How Wisconsin's prairies are evolving: "Some sites, the research team found, had fewer than 18 percent of the species documented in the 1950s survey, and some were now made up of more than 60 percent non-native species."

"Important news for anyone interested in researching their Irish ancestors. From today millions of historic personal records will be available on-line, free of charge. The records of births, marriages and deaths are being released by the General Register Office..."

LifeProTip: Always take a quick photo of your luggage before handing it over when boarding a plane. In the event that your luggage gets lost it will help immensely when filling out the paperwork.

"It is a problem faced across the United States, and the next victim could be Dallas. The city’s mayor said it appeared to be “walking into the fan blades” of municipal bankruptcy."

"Independent experts" bullshit:  "On its website, Kellogg touted a "Breakfast Council" of "independent experts" who helped guide the company's nutritional efforts. Nowhere did it say this: The maker of Froot Loops paid the council members and fed them talking points, according to a copy of a contract and emails obtained by The Associated Press."

Aloe vera bullshit:  "The aloe vera gel many Americans buy to soothe damaged skin contains no evidence of aloe vera at all. Samples of store-brand aloe gel purchased at national retailers Wal-Mart, Target and CVS showed no indication of the plant in various lab tests. The products all listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera — as either the No. 1 ingredient or No. 2 after water. There’s no watchdog assuring that aloe products are what they say they are..."

Parmesan cheese bullshit: "... Castle Cheese Inc. was doctoring its 100 percent real parmesan with cut-rate substitutes and such fillers as wood pulp and distributing it to some of the country’s biggest grocery chains."

Access the riches of the British Library online.

"An Irish waiter working in an American restaurant got an early Christmas gift when a customer tipped him $750 to bring his new family home for the holidays."

Showerthought: "When you consider the size of the universe, or even the size of our galaxy, "the speed of light" is actually painfully slow."

I really, really don't like to laugh at "fails," but this young girl tries to make a selfie of herself doing a disappearing trick.

How to set up Google 2-step verification.

For butterfly enthusiasts:  homepage for the Monarch Joint Venture.  "Recognizing that North American monarch (Danaus plexippus) conservation is a responsibility of Mexico, Canada and the United States, as identified in the North American Monarch Conservation Plan, this Joint Venture will work throughout the U.S. to conserve and protect monarch populations and their migratory phenomena by implementing science-based habitat conservation and restoration measures in collaboration with multiple stakeholders."

Test the water before you go swimming in Zimbabwe.

btw - I've decided I ought to begin numbering my linkdumps so that I can reference them more precisely.  Only about the last quarter of them have been entitled "divertimento"; before that they were "smorgasbords" or had a wide range of other titles.  They are all collected here.

Embedded images: "Two centuries ago, John Thomas Smith set out to record the last vestiges of ancient London that survived from before the Great Fire of 1666 but which were vanishing in his lifetime."  Details about these images, and more images at Spitalfields Life, where they are clickable to wallpaper size.

Timelapse of Google Earth images

YouTube link.

What I find most fascinating is not the spread of cities, the shrinking of glaciers, or the drying of lakes, but rather the braiding of rivers and the formation of oxbow lakes (in at least two different segments of the video, the first at about 1:03, the other at 1:23).  

Dates and information about locations in the UR corner.  I wish there were some way to play it at slow speed.

"The Lady in the Van"

YouTube link.

I watched this movie last night.  Absolutely delightful.  A tour de force by Maggie Smith.

The Lady in the Van is a 2015 British comedy-drama film directed by Nicholas Hytner, written by Alan Bennett, and starring Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings. It tells the true story of Mary Shepherd, an elderly woman who lived in a dilapidated van on Bennett's driveway in London for 15 years. Smith previously portrayed Shepherd twice: in the original 1999 theatrical production, which earned her a Best Actress nomination at the 2000 Olivier Awards; and in the 2009 BBC Radio 4 adaptation.

Jupiter's aurorae

"Jupiter has aurorae. Like Earth, the magnetic field of the gas giant funnels charged particles released from the Sun onto the poles. As these particles strike the atmosphere, electrons are temporarily knocked away from existing gas molecules. Electric force attracts these electrons back. As the electrons recombine to remake neutral molecules, auroral light is emitted. In the featured recently released composite image by the Hubble Space Telescope taken in ultraviolet light, the aurorae appear as annular sheets around the pole. Unlike Earth's aurorae, Jupiter's aurorae include several bright streaks and dots..."

We are entering the season when polar aurorae sometimes become visible at our latitude, so this seems an appropriate time to note that Jupiter also exhibits similar phenomena.  Text and image via NASA'a Astronomy Photo of the Day.

Gleanings from "The Road to Little Dribbling"

George Everest (for whom the mountain is named) didn't pronounce his name EV-erest, but as EVE-rest - just two syllables.

A listing of hikers and walkers killed by cows in Britain.

The first electric light put to use anywhere in the world was in a lighthouse in South Foreland, England.  This was in 1858, well before Edison developed the modern lightbulb.  It was an arc lamp too bright for domestic use, and for a decade that lighthouse was the only place in the world to see an electric light in operation.

London is one of the least crowded cities on earth, at about half the population density of NYC or Paris.

The Air Forces Memorial, at the top of Cooper's Hill in Runnymede, England, has inscribed in stone the names of 20,456 airmen who died in the Second World War but have no grave.

"One of the great pleasures of dotage is the realization that you have pretty much everything you will ever need. Apart from a few perishable essentials like light bulbs, batteries, and food, I require almost nothing. I don’t need any more furniture, decorative bowls, lap rugs, cushions with messages expressing my feelings about animals or housework, hot water bottle covers, paperclips, rubber bands, spare cans of paint, dried out paint brushes, miscellaneous lengths of electrical wire or any kind of metal objects that might one day theoretically come in handy for some as yet unimagined purpose...  I’m especially set for clothes. I have reached the time of life where all I want is to wear out the clothes I have and never get another thing.  I think many men of a certain age will nod in agreement when I say there is a real satisfaction when you wear something out and can finally discard it - a feeling of a job well done..."

The legendary King Arthur was a bastard, sired by Uther Pendragon on his enemy's wife.

In the early 20th century, the largest fishing port in the world was... Grimsby, England.  Not the largest in Britain or northern Europe, but the largest in the world.   In Grimsby, people used to bring their own fish and have the fish-and-chips shop fry it for a penny.

This was an enjoyable book.  It's perhaps the third or fourth of Bill Bryson's books that I've reviewed or excerpted for TYWKIWDBI.  Although styled as notes about a prolonged exploration of Great Britain, the book is not detailed enough to be a true travel guidebook, and Bryson's curmudgeonly complaints sometimes morph into surprisingly caustic criticism, but overall the tone is light and humorous, and it makes for a pleasant, easy read.

"There you have cricket"

Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to center field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt toward the pitcher's mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle forty feet with mattresses strapped to his legs, he is under no formal compunction to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and everyone retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.

An excerpt from Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, via Tom Hull.

Reposted from 2012 because I've been reading a more recent Bill Bryson book.

Friendly fire deaths at Pearl Harbor

"Most of the civilians who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were killed by American antiaircraft shells. “There was so much excitement and confusion,” harbor worker John Garcia told Studs Turkel for The Good War, his oral history of World War II. “Some of our sailors were shooting five-inch guns at the Japanese planes. You just cannot down a plane with a five-inch shell. They were landing in Honolulu, the unexploded naval shells. They have a ten-mile range. They hurt and killed a lot of people in the city.”"

Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands

"To the north from here stretches a duney expanse called Slapton Sands, so similar to the beaches of Normandy that they used it for a dress rehearsal for D-Day in the spring of 1944. Amid great secrecy, thirty thousand American troops were loaded onto landing craft and taken out in the bay to practice coming ashore, but by chance nine German torpedo boats spotted the activity and cruised at will among then, blowing the landing craft out of the water with ease and causing all kinds of mayhem. No one from the Allied side, it appears, had thought to line up suitable protection for the exercise, so the U-boats [sic: E-boats] were able to move about unimpeded.

One of those watching the carnage was Eisenhower himself. Nobody seems to know how many people died. Numbers range from 650 to 950 or so. An information board at Torcross says 749 American soldiers and sailors died. Whatever the exact figure, far more Americans were killed that night than died in the actual landing at Utah beach just over a month later. (Casualties were much higher at Omaha beach.) It was the most lopsided rout America suffered during the war, yet nobody has ever heard of it because news of the disaster was withheld, partly for purposes of morale, partly because of the general secrecy surrounding the invasion preparations.  What is most extraordinary is that the Germans, having chanced upon a massive collection of boats and men engaged in training exercises just across the sea from the Cherbourg peninsula, failed to recognize that an invasion of northern France was imminent."

Text excerpted from Bill Bryson's The Road to Little Dribbling.  More information at Wikipedia.

One of Dogbert's better ideas

So sad

"Richard T. Ramsey and Sue Ramsey hold hands while looking at the skyline from the remains of their house of 41 years, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2016, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They safely evacuated from their home as wildfire approached Monday evening."

What a view they must have enjoyed for 41 years, only to lose that and everything they own.  This is one of 155 photos in a gallery at Weather.com.   Photo credit Andrew Nelles/The Tennessean via AP.

Kleptocracy and kakistocracy explained

Kleptocracy (from Greek: κλεπτοκρατία, klépto- thieves + -kratos rule, literally "rule by thieves") is a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service...

The effects of a kleptocratic regime or government on a nation are typically adverse in regards to the welfare of the state's economy, political affairs and civil rights. Kleptocratic governance typically ruins prospects of foreign investment and drastically weakens the domestic market and cross-border trade...

Kakistocracy (Greek: κακιστοκρατία; kækɪsˈtɑkɹəsi) is a term meaning a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens... The word comes from the Greek words kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), with a literal meaning of government by the worst people.

Posted for future reference, not because of anything that, you know, is actually going on.  Yet.

Did a Hugh Williams survive a wreck in Wales yesterday?

"On December 5, 1664, a ship sunk in the Menai Strait, a stretch of water with tremendous tidal swings off the coast of Wales. All 81 passengers died, except one. His name was Hugh Williams.

 On December 5, 1785, another ship sunk in the Menai Strait, with again everyone aboard dying except for one man…named Hugh Williams.

And then again, on December 5, 1820, yet another ship sunk in the Menai Strait. Only one man survived, and he was named Hugh Williams. This is an awesome legend, and the scope of the coincidence is staggering.

Another source actually references two other British shipwrecks with the lone survivors bearing the name Hugh Williams, except they weren’t on December 5. In one of those wrecks, there were actually two survivors, an uncle and nephew, and both were named Hugh Williams. And so despite having two survivors, you could still technically say of the wreck “the only man to survive was named Hugh Williams.”"

Via The Cuttlefish, which suggests that the explanation lies in... mathematics.