Hate map

The embed is a screencap; the one at the Southern Poverty Law Center webpage is interactive.

Charlie Brooker criticizes media coverage of mass shootings

YouTube link.  

Originally posted in 2009.  Relevant again this morning.

Eye

A "cleaner fish" on the eye of a green sea turtle off the coast of Ecuador.

Credit per the watermark, via Scuba Diving Magazine's annual photo competition (gallery at the link).

Whistling caterpillars

 
YouTube link.

North American walnut sphinx moth caterpillars (Amorpha juglandis) look like easy meals for birds, but they have a trick up their sleeves—they produce whistles that sound like bird alarm calls, scaring potential predators away.

When pecked by a bird, the caterpillars whistle by compressing their bodies like an accordion and forcing air out through specialized holes in their sides. The whistles are impressively loud, considering they are made by a two-inch long insect. They have been measured at over 80 dB from 5 cm away from the caterpillar, similar to the loudness of a garbage disposal.

Further details at The Scientist, with a hat tip to Kevin Thies.

Cringeworthy

Via the Crappy Design subreddit.

"Muck farm" explained

During a picnic lunch at a friend's farm, mention was made of a neighbor of theirs who operated a "muck farm."  I had previously only heard the term used with regard to cleaning out a stable, so I had to learn more about muck:

In the terminology of North American agriculture, muck is a soil made up primarily of humus from drained swampland. It is known as black soil in The Fens of eastern England, where it was originally mainly fen and bog. It is used there, as in the United States, for growing specialty crops such as onions, carrots, celery, and potatoes...

Muck farming on drained bogs is an important part of agriculture in New York, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, where mostly vegetables are grown. American "muckers" often have roots from the Netherlands or Eastern Europe, where their ancestors practiced a similar type of farming. The soils are deep, dark colored, and friable, often underlain by marl, or marly clay...

Muck farming is controversial, because the drainage of wetlands destroys wildlife habitats and results in a variety of environmental problems. It is unlikely that any more will be created in the United States, because of environmental regulations. It is prone to problems, such as being very light and usually windbreaks must be provided to keep it from blowing away when dry. It also can catch fire and burn underground for months. Oxidation also removes a portion of the soil each year, so it becomes progressively shallower. Some muck land has been reclaimed for wildlife preserves.

And here's the etymology:

From Middle English mok, muk, from Old Norse myki, mykr (“dung”) (compare Icelandic mykja), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)meug (“slick, slippery”), *meuk (compare Welsh mign (“swamp”), Latin mūcus (“snot”), mucere (“to be moldy or musty”), Latvian mukls (“swampy”), Albanian myk (“mould”), Ancient Greek mýxa 'mucus, lamp wick', mýkes 'fungus'), from *(s)meug, meuk 'to slip'. More at meek.

Apparently the distinction from peat is based on the level of decomposition: peat = slightly decomposed organic material, vs. muck = highly decomposed.

Reposted from 2015 to insert the photo from this year's National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition (via a gallery in The Atlantic).  Credit: Joost Boerman.  

The power of hurricane-force winds

Although, to be honest, that's probably a palm tree and palms have wood that has evolved to be soft and flexible rather than sturdy.  Still it's a reminder of why weathermen shouldn't stand outdoors for their photo-op reports.

via imgur

"The Tillman Story" - official trailer

YouTube link. 

"They lied to the wrong family."

In spite of the best efforts of the White House and the Pentagon, the world would come to know he had been killed in an act of fratricide that was then covered up in favor of a horrible series of official lies.

But that we know the truth at all is owed to the extraordinary determination of Tillman's family, a foulmouthed and eclectic bunch of square-jawed hippies from San Jose, California, and in particular his mother, Mary. A more compliant family, more easily bamboozled by the institutions of American power at the highest levels, might have meekly, or readily, accepted the government's vigorous effort to turn Pat Tillman into a Sergeant York fantasy that it could then exploit relentlessly for propaganda purposes. 

Comments excerpted from a review at Esquire.  Those not familiar with the Pat Tillman saga can review the basics of it at Wikipedia.  My understanding is that the outrage by the family and by knowledgeable members of the public is not directed at the friendly-fire death per se, but on the extensive coverup that ensued.

Addendum:  Those interested in this subject should read Andred O-Hehir's analysis at Salon:

The film is also meant, to some extent, as an antidote to journalist Jon Krakauer's 2009 book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," which the family strongly disliked...

He was a football star and avid outdoorsman who read Emerson; an agnostic or atheist who read the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon out of intellectual curiosity; a man who relished the high-testosterone simulated combat of sports, and excelled at it, while also maintaining an introspective personal journal he allowed no one to read. As a friend of mine recently observed, many of Tillman's characteristics would seem completely normal among the metropolitan educated classes: He never went anywhere without a book, and typically rode his bike rather than driving a car. But Tillman wasn't a bearded, chai-drinking grad student riding that bike to yoga class in Brooklyn or Silverlake or Ann Arbor. He was the starting strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals, and parked his bike next to his teammates' Porsches and tricked-out Escalades...

I'm only guessing here, but one of the things the Tillman family hated about Jon Krakauer's book was probably the author's tendency to view Pat Tillman's death as a case study in the evils of war and the limits of idealism. I might incline toward that view myself, but the Tillmans don't. Right-wing propagandists quickly learned that the Tillman family wasn't going to stick to the pious, patriotic script. (Pat's drunken younger brother, Rich, at the nationally televised funeral: "Pat isn't with God. He's fucking dead.") But the Tillmans aren't interested in starring in an antiwar morality play either. As they see it, Pat Tillman died as he lived, as an American who thought for himself, hewed to his own course and kept his word. It's the rest of us who have betrayed him.

More at the link.

Reposted in 2011 because I just this week finally got an opportunity to view the film. It is excellent (confirmed by a 93% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes).

Reposted in 2017 because Donald Trump, for whatever reason, chose to retweet Pat Tillman in support of his criticism of professional football players.  Pat Tillman's widow is justifiably pushing back:

"The very action of self-expression and the freedom to speak from one's heart — no matter those views — is what Pat and so many other Americans have given their lives for," Marie Tillman said. "Even if they didn't always agree with those views."

Meiofauna

"Among the grains of sand in the surf zone you will in time find... entoprocts, gastrotrichs, gnathostomulids, kinorhynchs, nematodes, nemerteans, priapulids, sipunculans, and tardigrades."

Encountered in Chapter 13 of E.O. Wilson's newest book, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life.  It's a plea for habitat conservation and the preservation of our planet's biodiversity.  Most of the information is familiar, but for the TL;DR crowd I can highly recommend Chapter 15 ("The Best Places in the Biosphere"), for which Wilson polled "eighteen of the world's senior naturalists, each with international experience and expertise in biodiversity and ecology, and asked their opinion on the best reserves, those sheltering assemblages of notably unique and valuable species of plants, animals, and microorganisms."  The resulting compilation of about 35 locations is a joy to read.

Including this about the scrubland of southwestern Australia:

"Possessing a mild, Mediterranean-type climate and molybdenum-deficient soil that excludes species other than those adapted to the deficiency, the scrublands have evolved much like the flora of an oceanic island."

You learn something every day.

CCC spillway at Pope Farm Conservancy (Wisconsin)

The first seventeen entries in my ongoing series of posts about the stonework of the Civilian Conservation Corps featured structures situated in state and national parks - bridges, ramparts, towers, stairways and other substantial achievements.  Stonework of that type has been well preserved because of the locations and ongoing usefulness of the structures.

But the boys in the CCC also did an immense amount of work in fire prevention (fire breaks, lookout towers), reforestation, water control (dams, reservoirs) and soil conservation.   The structure in the photo above is one of probably thousands of such water/soil conservation measures that have been generally forgotten (and in most cases left to fall into disrepair).

I encountered this stonework while hiking at the Pope Farm Conservancy, a working farm with restored natural areas located in the western suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin.  I had visited there last year to photograph and blog the remarkable display of sunflowers.

On my recent visit I explored a different part of the property, where hiking trails had been carved out of restored short-grass prairie:

Without a panorama image it's hard to depict the rolling contour in this area created by deposition of sand during the terminal phase of the last glaciation.  The hill in front of me (above) is a recessional moraine.  To the right of the photo the land slopes downward, then back up again to a broad "bowl" currently covered by cropland and native prairie.

Prior to the arrival of European immigrants, a basin like this would have been covered with either long grasses or short grasses -

Prairie grasses evolved immense root systems that enabled them to regrow after intensive grazing by massive herds of bison, or after wildfires or drought.  What they couldn't survive was the introduction of intensive farming, and especially the cutting power of steam- or gasoline-powered tractors.  I don't need to repeat here the familiar sequence of stripping vegetation to plant crops, followed by topsoil erosion by wind and water.

By the 1930s a basin such as the one above would have been deeply gullied by rainwater and snowmelt and the runoff would have been choking local streams with sediment.  Teams of CCC boys were mobilized to correct these problems on a farm-by-farm basis.

All you see now at the base of the "bowl" is this concrete structure:

This is a simple, but perfectly adequate spillway.

"This dam design, called a head flume, was suggested by UW-Madison soils and agriculture professor Otto Zeasman.  It was simple because the intent was merely to slow the flow of water during times of heavy rain and runoff."

To the left and right of the downsloping segment are short concrete walls and then earthen berns, which direct water to the center:

The chute prevents ground erosion as it conducts the water down the steepest part of the slope.  At the base of the chute (hard to see with summer vegetation overgrowth) is a triangular concrete "velocity check" structure, and behind that a pile of large boulders in the "stilling basin":

These components of the spillway absorb the kinetic energy of the falling water, which then proceeds down the ravine in the background with much less erosive force (cutting the velocity in half reduces erosion by a factor of 64 according to the information on a local informational placard).  Another placard notes:

"Construction of the dam began in late summer 1938.  A CCC crew of about a dozen young men needed about 2-3 weeks to finish the project.  Other "soil saving" dams of the Great Depression era are quietly deteriorating in farm fields all over Wisconsin.  Still others have been removed.  This structure on the Pope Farm Conservancy site is the only one in south-central Wisconsin (and perhaps the entire state) that is being protected as an historic landmark."

Kudos to the Pope Farm Conservancy for their stewardship of the land and the preservation of this example of a simple structure that helped rural farms recover from the devastating effects of the Great Depression and the Dustbowl.

Sixty years ago

It was September 1957, the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, and nine black pupils little guessed they were about to plant a milestone in the struggle for civil rights...

On the first day of term, the national guard were there to stop the nine entering Central High, where all 1,900 attendees were white. Three weeks later, on 25 September, the group braved a hostile white crowd, climbed the school steps and were escorted to class by US army troops. They became known and revered as the Little Rock Nine... 

On 23 September 1957, the group did get into the building with police protection. But an angry mob of more than a thousand white people had gathered in front of the school, chanting racist abuse such as “Go back to Africa”. “I really think that we were afraid to look at the mob; at least I was,” says Trickey. “So we just heard it and it was like a sports event, that sound, the roar, but it was a roar of hatred, and just thinking about it makes me shake.”...

The mob started a riot and police decided to remove the students for their own safety. “At about 10am they said: ‘You’ve got to come down to the office,’ and we went down into the basement. They put us in these cars and the cops driving the cars were shaking. They had the guns and sticks and they were scared. ‘Oh wow, this is scary.’ Some of us were told to keep our heads down...

The crisis was cause for Washington to intervene. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st airborne division. The soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US’s racial shame had been exposed, shown on TV and reported in newspapers around the world. 

More at The Guardian

One-eared

Another blog entry inspired by a crossword puzzle clue.  If I had spent all day pondering 8-letter words describing a praying mantis, I would never have some up with this one.  So I had to Ask An Entomologist:

Why do Mantids Only Have One Ear?

Mantids only have one ear, located in the middle of their [chest between the] middle and hind legs. It’s split in half, but both halves function as a single unit. There’s a single neuron which connects them, and it fires if either half ‘hears’ anything. In essence, they only have one ear. 

This is followed by speculation about why the structure evolved this way.  And one anecdote:

"Taylor Swift’s first job was picking mantis egg cases off Christmas trees to keep them from hatching in the houses of customers."

You learn something every day.

Gender

From a photoessay at Vantage:

The premise of Half Drag is simple. Photographer Leland Bobbé’s striking, gender-bending photo series captures New York City drag queens with half of their faces done up in full regalia, the other half au naturel. The result, achieved without any digital effects, is a collection of portraits that put the visual iconography of gender into striking juxtaposition...

... Bobbé suggests holding up a card (or just your hand) to cover one side of each image at a time. The contrast is startling. “People have told me that the male sides in these photos seem vulnerable, the female side with the makeup and jewelry are so powerful,” he says...

The models he photographed came into the studio wearing regular clothes, with several days of facial growth. They then shaved half their faces, and prepared their own hair and makeup. The hair proved to be the hardest part of the process.

“One came in and cut the wig down the middle,” Bobbé says. “Stray hairs would get over to the male side, that’s why the images are all cropped into the forehead, on top of the head are a lot of pins holding everything in place.”

More discussion and portraits at the link.

Hoople

 

YouTube link.

I was reminded of this song when "Hoople" appeared as a crossword entry this past week.  And since I'd never been able to quite decipher all the words, I sought out this lyrics-annotated version.

"All the Young Dudes" is a song written by David Bowie, originally recorded and released as a single by Mott the Hoople in 1972. In 2004, Rolling Stone rated "All the Young Dudes" No. 253 in its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time... It is also one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

Bowie himself once claimed that the song was not intended to be an anthem for glam, that it actually carried a darker message of apocalypse. According to an interview Bowie gave to Rolling Stone magazine in 1973, the boys are carrying the same news that the newscaster was carrying in the song "Five Years" from Ziggy Stardust; the news being the fact that the Earth had only five years left to live. Bowie explains: "All the Young Dudes is a song about this news. It's no hymn to the youth, as people thought. It is completely the opposite."

The original Mott the Hoople release had to be changed lyrically in order that it might be played on UK radio and TV. The line in the second verse: "Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks" was a reference to UK retailer Marks & Spencer, also known by that colloquialism. As such, air play of the song in its original form would have breached broadcasting regulations relating to advertising in force at the time. The line was replaced with: "Wendy's stealing clothes from unlocked cars". Today, both versions are freely aired.

Divertimento #135

Horse plays with a woman's zipper.

Toddler scared of her shadow.

Labrador dog comforts a child.

Baseball trick.

Grebe courtship dance.

Geometry of bubbles.

"Horse fences tick so it isn't a constant stream of electricity, so that is why they didn't immediately get zapped and had to wait for the next tick to get shocked."

It's a trap!

Leopard frogs view worm video.

Car soccer.

Feeding frenzy on a chicken farm.

"Beast mode on" (soccer)

"When the food fights back"

How an eel's double jaw works.

Cats are capable of performing amazing jumps.

Traffic shockwave.

Ants spraying formic acid.

Application of piping.   And cake decorating.

Magnetic building blocks.

A tortoise races a hare.

I didn't know guinea pigs can jump.  You learn something every day.

Anna's hummingbird, up close and personal.

Described as the "headis world championship."

Machine separates red and green tomatoes.

Dog climbs vertical wall.

Watch a tire cross the road.  No - actually, don't watch...

Clever design for a corner cabinet.

Another clever design: a "tambour door" (I remember these from the 1950s)

A softshell turtle is fast in the water.  And on land.

Do NOT spray "silly slime" around open flames.  (trigger warning: child's hair in flames)

An "own goal" in ice hockey.

Bird has learned how to trigger a door's motion sensor.

Whale shark pup rescued and released.

How to get a balloon down from the ceiling.  First, find a little girl...

Eleven flips on an exercise ball (not a "fail video")

Juggling tables with your feet.

Why some spacecraft orbits look like sine waves.

Close call for a dog swimming in a Florida lagoon.

Can this man jump across a swimming pool from a standing start?

Girl standing and spinning on bicycle handlebars.

Squirrel escapes with a clever plan rather than blind panic.

"Underhanded"

Distract the dog with peanut butter.

A father built a "ninja warrior" course for his young daughter.  Impressive...

Baby spiny flower mantids.

Table becomes shelves.  Clever - but useful??

Wakeboarding with a beer.

Pickpocket caught red-handed.

You've heard of "instant karma."  THIS is instant karma.  Or perhaps "carma."

Lightning debarking a tree.  Wow.  Just wow.

btw, there is an entire subreddit devoted to Mechanical GIFs, if you want to waste the rest of your day...

Today's embedded photos are of barn quilts, from a gallery at Madison.com depicting some of the over 300 barn quilts in Shawano County, Wisconsin. (photo credits Jim Leuenberger; originals at Houzz).