08 January 2018

"Side effects include euphoria, increased appetite..."


An interesting article in Politico this past week suggests that Jeff Sessions' to reimpose federal restrictions on state cannabis policies may lead to a backlash that may eventually favor nationwide legalization.
Business leaders in an industry that was worth $7.9 billion in 2017, called Sessions’ action revoking “outrageous” and “economically stupid.”

Capitol Hill screamed just as loudly. And it wasn’t just the Democratic members of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus. It was Republican senators, too...

Thursday may well turn out to be a pivotal moment in the marijuana industry’s evolution as a political force. Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in some form of legalized marijuana, but does the nascent industry have the sway to rewrite nearly 50 years of federal drug policy?..

“There’s a lot of [legislators] trying to have it both ways who are now going to have to make up their mind,” said Tick Segerblom, the Nevada state senator who is considered the father of the state’s legalization movement. “Are they going to go with what the voters of their state support, or are they going to join Sessions and crack down and try to re-instate prohibition?”  Right now, the answer seems to be the former...

The fact that marijuana has now risen to the height of top-tier budget negotiations is a sign that the pro-marijuana coalition is no longer merely a menagerie of loud-mouth hippies, stoners, and felons, as the pro-pot crowd has been characterized in the past. The community of Americans who now rely on legal medical marijuana, estimated to be 2.6 million people in 2016, includes a variety of mainstream constituency groups like veterans, senior citizens, cancer survivors, and parents of epileptic children...

As of late Friday, POLITICO Magazine could not find a single member of Congress who had issued a statement in support of Sessions’ actions. 

When bearskin was better than bare skin

Petr Hlavacek, a Czech academic and calceology expert from the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, eastern Czech Republic, has taken his research into prehistoric footwear to another level by re-creating  Ötzi ‘s boots. Hlavacek’s expertise in calceology (from “calcei” meaning shoes in Latin) studies the archaeological and historical aspects of footwear.
Further details at The Vintage News, via Neatorama.

Also - analysis of the grasses used by Otzi is at Researchgate.

Nativity scene


At the top, a traditional nativity scene, photographed in Boston and emailed to me during the Christmas season by an old friend.  At the bottom one example of a modern version (variously termed "minimalist" or "Bauhaus."

06 January 2018

For puzzle enthusiasts - updated with answers


Each year the Royal Statistical Society posts a "Christmas Quiz."  The 2017 Christmas Quiz is here.

The embed above is a convenient image, but is not representative of the quiz as a whole, much of which is not "mathematical."

I've got questions 1b and 12 mostly done, and may work on some more as time permits, but I'm saving most of my energy for the pending release of the King William's College General Knowledge Quiz, which should be out any day now.  Great fun and an immense challenge.

Related: Here's a good puzzle for you (with links to the 2016 RSS quiz - and answers).

Addendum:  Answers to the 2017 RSS Christmas Quiz now in the Comments.

Unconventional domino tricks


Via BoingBoing.

How Americans voted (or not) in the last election



Via Scatterplot, where the data are discussed.

Child's raingear


Via Reddit.

How to make a wooden cow - updated


This craftsman has created an entire herd by turning a piece of wood and then slicing it.  The object comes from the collections of the Hornihan Museum; it is described as "German," but they offer no data re its age.

Via A London Salmagundi.

Addendum #1:  Reader mim found a video of how these are made in a modern family craft shop:

 

Addendum #2:  This relevant report found by an anonymous reader in Lost Art Press -


... In the Tyrol, for example, there is a valley called the Grödnerthal, about twenty miles long, in which the rough climate and barren soil will not suffice to grow corn for the inhabitants, who are rather numerous. Shut out from the agricultural labour customary in other districts, the people earn their bread chiefly by wood carving.

They make toys of numberless kinds (in which Noah’s Ark animals are very predominant) of the soft wood of the Siberian pine—known to the Germans as ziebel-nusskiefer. The tree is of slow growth, found on the higher slopes of the valley, but now becoming scarce, owing to the improvidence of the peasants in cutting down the forests without saving or planting others to succeed them.

... Many of the specimens shown at the Kew museums are more elaborate than those which could be produced wholly by hand. A turning-lathe of some power must have been needed. Indeed, the manner in which these zoological productions are fabricated is exceedingly curious, and is little likely to be anticipated by ordinary observers.

Who, for instance, would imagine for a moment that a wooden horse, elephant, or tiger, or any other member of the Noah’s Ark family, could be turned in a lathe, like a ball, bowl, or bedpost?
 
No English carver would dream of such a thing at such a price. However, these are not the most important of the productions of the peasant carvers, commercially speaking; like as our Mintons and Copelands make more money by every-day crockery than by beautiful Parian statuettes, so do the German toymakers look to the Noah’s Ark class of productions as their main stay in the market, rather than to more elegant and artistic works.

Charles Dickens (Editor)

All the Year Round – April 8, 1865
Yes - THAT Charles Dickens.

03 January 2018

Divertimento #142


An old-fashioned ice hockey brawl.  The announcer just loves it.

"More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one curious developer to accidentally take control of and then lock up the funds, according to reports. Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn’t deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident."

I was going to say this lady is pigeon-toed, but that's not quite accurate.

Does this custom from the Byzantine civilization sound familiar? (hat tip NSTAAF):
Court officials touring the provinces in search of suitable brides for the imperial prince were apparently given a painting of what a perfect or ideal match should look like, and they tried to match it to the candidates they met. They also carried an impe­rial shoe of the right length for the ideal bride and tested it on their feet.
"Farmers urged to bury their underpants to improve quality of their beef."

Cryptic message on a deli order.

"An image of two elephants fleeing a mob that set them on fire in eastern India highlights the ongoing human-elephant conflicts in the region... The image shows a calf on fire as it and an adult elephant run for their lives — as a crowd of "jeering" people throw "flaming tar balls" and firecrackers at the pair."

Video shows the devastation of a mudslide (in Switzerland).


"Given the ubiquity of the wheel in human technology, and the existence of biological analogues of many other technologies (such as wings and lenses), the lack of wheels in the natural world would seem to demand explanation..."

"Ore. teen was excited to join her high school dance team. Then she learned about the maple syrup wrestling."

Honda service manager wrote down customer's complaint word for word.

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brade claims that drinking lots of water protects him from sunburn.

Caution regarding high-priced liquor: "Researchers at the University of Oxford then performed carbon dating on the label and the cork, finding it was also probably from the 1970s. “The bottle, the label, the cork and the whisky were all counterfeit. There are three kinds of fakes we see — refills, replicas and relics — and this falls in the relics category of pretending to be an exceptionally old bottle,” Simpson told the Times of London. The bottle, which Bernasconi thought was worth around $350,000 turned out to be “almost worthless as a collector’s item.”"

Photo of two brothers who won two Powerball lottery prizes the same day, holding up their checks...

"Nearly four years ago, scientists in Vienna discovered that they could create organoids – lentil-sized blobs of human brain tissue – from stem cells. The revolutionary discovery has helped advance research on human brain development, Alzheimer’s, and Zika virus. These human brain organoids existed solely in test tubes, until this past weekend, when two teams of neuroscientists reported successfully implanting these cells into the brains of rats and mice."  Reported by Fox News as "Scientists implant tiny human brains in rats."

How to make flowers out of Jello-type gelatin (kind of cool).  10-minute video, but you can click to timeline to sample different stages.


More gelatin flowers - and spiders.

Movie theater popcorn butter "has no butter in it, but it does have partially hydrogenated soybean oil (a.k.a. trans fats), and... actually has 20 more calories per tablespoon than real butter."

A woman called a Louisiana sherrif's office regarding a neighbor who had harassed her family.  When the officer arrived, "he shot their rat terrier in the head in front of her children, then griped about the expense of the valuable hollow-point bullet he'd squandered on killing their beloved pet."

Video of a dog reunited with his owner after a 3-year separation.

For football fans only:  a high-school team trailed 27-10 with a minute to go in the game.  They then scored three touchdowns in that final minute to win 29-27.  News report with video here.

Video of the miniatures being crafted for the production of Blade Runner 2049.

The "border slash" between the United States and Canada. "Every year, the average American taxpayer pays half of a cent to the International Boundary Commission (IBC) for the sole purpose of deforesting every inch of the US-Canada border. With an annual budget of $1,400,000, the IBC ensures that the boundary will never be just an imaginary line." (photo gallery at the link)

A recent column in the most recent Harper's shows why "all politics is local."  The writer details some of her experiences serving on a county board.  "Most significantly, I am learning the limits of idealism, especially when it runs up against economic reality; the need to allow for conflicting interests, even when I think some of those interests are misguided, if not destructive; and the complexity of even the simplest problem..." It's an easy and informative read.

How to distinguish an alligator from a crocodile (humor).

Decision matrix on mass shootings (not humorous).

Stan Freberg's Little Blue Riding Hood parody (1953).

Chinese wedding party photo.


The images embedded in this linkdump are selections from a photoessay in The Atlantic about shepherds in Georgia’s Tusheti region in the northern Caucasus Mountains (transferring their flocks from alpine meadows to lower winter pastures). © Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The craft of rock music, exemplified by Fleetwood Mac


Many years ago I saw a televised program - probably VH1's "Behind the Music" - which included long interviews with the members of Pink Floyd explaining how they generated their music.   The method was an eye-opening contrast to the more prosaic production technique of recording a live performance.

The video above (via BoingBoing) takes the same approach with Fleetwood Mac.

Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac - Landslide


One of the early Fleetwood Mac classics, first recorded way back in 1975, written when Stevie Nicks was experiencing some major changes in her personal and professional life.

This recording is from two decades later, in 1997 in a live performance. Her introductory comment "This is for you, Daddy," refers to her father, who was in the audience that night.

Well, I've been afraid of changing,
'cause I've built my life around you.
But time makes you bolder -
Children get older -
I'm getting older too


Reposted in 2009 after discovering another version of "Landslide," this one performed by the students of PS22 in New York City. I still prefer the Stevie Nicks version, but this one has a certain charm...


Reposted again for 2018.

Bars per capita


"Wisconsin is third in the nation in both number of bars and bars per capita. At the county level, Wisconsin's Iron County, with one for every 240 residents, leads the nation in bars per capita."
Interactive graphic at The Cap Times.  Discussion thread at the TodayILearned subreddit.

Valet parking competition

Every two years, the American valet-parking industry sends its best parkers—optimistically described as athletes—to compete in a head-to-head battle known as the National Valet Olympics...

The first event, the Key Box Challenge, is a form of competitive OCD: Valets must sprint to a locked key box, match a dozen or so keys with their corresponding vehicle tags, hang them correctly on a metal door, then sprint back to the finish line...

Next up was Precision Parking, the photogenic centerpiece of the games. Valets must sprint to a car—in this case, a black Toyota Camry—leap inside, and roar out of the parking spot. There is no speed limit. Athletes then weave through 10 orange cones, park the car, put it in reverse, and do the whole thing all over again, backwards...
The rest of the story is at The Atlantic.

02 January 2018

One photo (not a composite)


Interesting composition.  Via the OddlySatisfying subreddit.

Medical students, 1885


Photo taken at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, now known as Drexel College of Medicine.

Photo via the OldSchoolCool subreddit (sepia removed and cropped for size).
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