Image cropped for size from the one at the via.
10 July 2021
Bilateral ocular dermoids
The report came in from Farragut, a suburb of Knoxville in east Tennessee, in late August 2020. “The individual stated the deer was circling, had visible bleeding, lacked awareness of the people around it, and had something on its eyes,” said wildlife biologist Sterling Daniels of TWRA.The deer was circling in a street, so local police and animal control officers were also alerted, responded first and dispatched the deer, saving the head at Sterling’s request, which he picked up later from a freezer. He shipped it to the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study unit (SCWDS) of the University of Georgia vet school... As you can see in these photos, instead of a normal cornea (the clear circle that includes the pupil and eye color), the buck had a disk of skin and dense hair completely covering the cornea of each eye. Microscopic examination at SCWDS determined the hairy growths were “corneal dermoids.”“Dermoids are a type of choristoma, which is defined as normal tissue in an abnormal location. Accordingly, dermoids are characterized by skinlike tissue occurring on the body in a location other than on the skin. Corneal dermoids, as in the case of this deer, often contain elements of normal skin, including hair follicles, sweat glands, collagen, and fat. The masses generally are benign (noninvasive) and are congenital, likely resulting from an embryonal developmental defect.”
More information at the website of the National Deer Association. Ocular dermoids have also been reported in dogs, and in humans - including on the cornea.
09 July 2021
Micrographic labyrinth (17th c.)
"Micrographic design in the shape of a labyrinth. The text of the micrographic design is written in cursive French and starts with the words 'L'homme prudent (...)'. The initial L is written in gold, while the rest of the text is executed in brown ink. Part of an album of 26 examples of calligraphy and micrography, thought to have been produced in France or possibly Antwerp at the beginning of the seventeenth century."
The text follows a path from the LL quadrant to the UL, then the UR and LR, finishing at the center of the spiral.
Image from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, via the literature blog Worlds Imagined.
07 July 2021
"There are two types of people..." - updated
I recently discovered another tribe of which I apparently am a member. I was invited to someone's home for dinner and was asked "are you a short-fork person or a long-fork person?" As it turns out, I like to eat with a short fork, while my wife favors the long forks. I didn't realize this distinction extended to other families, and have no idea how common or rare it is.
[forks in photo are not dirty - just reflecting the amateur photographer]
Addendum: Found some interesting info on the history of the fork:
The word fork comes from the Latin 'furca' for "pitch fork." The two-prong twig was perhaps the first fork. In Egyptian antiquity, large forks made of bronze were used at religious ceremonies to lift sacrificial offerings. One of the earliest dinner forks is attributed to Constantinople in 400 A.D.; it can be seen in the Dumbarton Oaks collection in Washington, D.C. By the seventh century, small forks were used at Middle Eastern courts; one such fork, a small, gold, two-pronged tool, came to Italy in the eleventh century in the dowry of a Byzantine princess who married Domenico Selvo, a Venetian doge. After witnessing the princess use the fork, the church severely censured her, stating that the utensil was an affront to God's intentions for fingers. Thereafter the fork disappeared from the table for nearly 300 years...The fork began to gain acceptance in Italy by the late sixteenth century, a period when upper-class Italians expressed renewed interest in cleanliness. However, the French court considered the fork an awkward, even dangerous, utensil, and the nobility did not accept it until the seventeenth century when protocol deemed it uncivilized to eat meat with both hands. The way to use the fork remained a mystery, and many sophisticates, notably King Louis XIV, continued to eat with fingers or a knife...The modern table setting is attributed to Charles I of England who in 1633 declared, "It is decent to use a fork," a statement that heralded the beginning of civilized table manners. But it wasn't until almost a century later that the fork gained acceptance among the lower class... Because the average family owned a limited number of forks, historians suggest that the service of sherbet midway through a meal gave the servants time to wash the forks used earlier on...In the seventeenth century, fork tines were made of case-hardened steel and were fast to wear down. To promote utensils with longevity, early fork tines were extra long in length and made with sharp pointed tips...... three- and four-prong forks were slow to reach North America, where people continued to eat from a knife blade food that was difficult to spear with a two-prong fork, such as mashed potatoes and gravy.,,, the collector may amass specialized forks—for eating lobster, fruit, dessert, ice cream, pastry, strawberries, snails, and oysters—from antique shops and specialty stores...Forks with a wide left tine and an optional notch, such as a salad fork, fish fork, dessert fork, and pastry fork, provide extra leverage when cutting food that normally does not require a knife.
I didn't realize that the little notch in the last tine of the salad fork is apparently there for a purpose. You learn something every day.
06 July 2021
Northern Minnesota decor
I recently visited family up in Longville, Minnesota, and was enthralled to find this unique bit of Americana art on the wall. It was created by a fellow who summered on Lake Winnibigoshish, which is classic "up north" fishing territory.
The underlying structure is a large piece of wonderfully distorted and wave/sand-polished driftwood, and attached to that is an array of bobbers and lures that the fellow found while beachwalking the shores of the lake.
Fishermen, click to embiggify to huge size, then see how many lures you can name.
Corrective surgery for a tibial deformity
It's really amazing how corrective surgery can transform people's lives. More information at Wikipedia about Blount's disease, and some informed commentary at the via.
We don't deserve dogs
From a story at War History Online:
The Battle of Darwin was the single largest attack on Australian soil during WWII. A group of 242 Japanese aircraft bombed the small town in which a strategically important Allied base and harbor were located... When he was found, after the attack, [Gunner, a six-month-old shepherd dog] had a broken leg...It only took a few weeks for him to demonstrate his skills. One day, while the airport at Darwin was being reconstructed, Gunner became agitated, jumping about, barking and whining. Soon after, the sound of aircraft engines was heard, while a Japanese attack formation once again flooded the sky above Darwin... The airmen of Darwin connected the dots and realized a pattern between Gunner’s shift of behavior and the bombing raid. The next time the Japanese decided to attack Darwin, their luck had run out. More than 20 minutes before their arrival, Gunner had already sounded the alarm. For the first time, the Australians were ready to repel the attack...He correctly distinguished the different sound of Allied aircraft and that of the Japanese, without ever making a single mistake. His trait was taken very seriously in a time of war. Wing Commander McFarlane even issued an order by which a portable air raid siren was to be activated whenever Gunner showed his well-known signs of alert...Whether he survived the war remains unclear, for apart from the legend which grew around him, Gunner’s existence was rarely mentioned in the official military documents of the time.
05 July 2021
Divertimento #187
[I have about a thousand links bookmarked for linkfests, but these giffests are easier to blog]
A valari appears to be an axe/boomerang
Interesting gate hinge
House Republicans vote against medals for Capitol police
Animals
Birds enter a home via the chimney
Drone footage of a fever of rays. And fisherman doesn't see rays
Schematic to show that an ant is a pair of walking tripods
Mother duck protects babies from a heron
Stork weeds its brood
Leopards can stand on hind legs
The Australian plague of mice
How cats use their needle-like claws to fish
American woodcock and her chicks
Stable neck of a flying kestrel
Alligator vs. truck. Alligator wins.
Nature and Science
Amazing amount of pollen in one tree
The moon has a tail
Green sea turtle hatchlings being released
National covid vaccination map is interactive to the county level
Iridescent "rainbow cloud"
I think mudslides are scarier than floods
Impressive or clever
Interesting game
Parking 18-wheelers on a cargo ship
Pig knows how to stop vacuum cleaner
How far a modern camera can zoom
Teenage girl vs. bear. Girl wins. An interview with the girl.
Eagle uses a tool
Painting a fake wood-grain finish
Wear brown pants for this thrill ride
Sports and athleticism
How lines are painted on a basketball court
Awesome parkour
Clever baserunning in baseball
For those who like tennis (or "tells" in general)
Fishing knot illustrated
Quarterback trick play
Long disc golf birdie on final hole of competition
Friction on a rope at a rodeo. Relevant discussion thread.
100-meter dash recorded by cameraman
Fails and wtf
11 foot 8 inch bridge vs. 11 foot 9 inch truck. Bridge wins.
Girl unknowingly handles lethal octopus (relevent commentary)
Stupid people get too close to a bison
Humorous or cheerful
Girl juggles six balls; brother appreciates the feat
Cat climbs stairs with its human (mute recommended)
"Beer snake" at a Cubs game
The embedded images are from an article at the Art Institute of Chicago about the Hartwell Window and Tiffany glass techniques.
04 July 2021
A traditional Fourth of July
Our neighborhood celebrates the Fourth of July in traditional fashion. First, you commission a local artist to decorate the street with fireworks and a starting line...
... for a parade, which will be led by the town's fire truck.
The neighborhood children follow in a parade of decorated bicycles -
- their energy levels fueled by sugar bombs of creme-filled and glazed doughnuts -
- decorated in colors of which the Founding Fathers would have approved. The parade ends about a half-mile later at the local school, where the various sports and competitions are better suited to tweens than to an elderly photographer.
02 July 2021
"Retroactive malleability"
Readers of TYWKIWDBI sometimes write an email to gently reprimand me (or simply advise me) that a link in a post I wrote ten years ago is broken, or that a YouTube video has been taken down. Sometimes I find new replacement links or videos, but often I have to explain that because the internet is a continually morphing medium, it is inevitable that some older material will become unavailable (especially since this blog has 17,000 entries). The process is typically referred to as "link rot" (fortunately I think all the photos have remained intact because I have always copy-pasted them into TYWKIWDBI rather than hotlinking to the source).
This week The Atlantic reports that The Internet is Rotting, and introduces a term that is new (to me): "retroactive malleability."
Now, I just quoted from Google’s corporate website, and I used a hyperlink so you can see my source. Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together. It’s what allows you to learn more about what’s only briefly mentioned in an article like this one, and for others to double-check the facts as I represent them to be... Suppose Google were to change what’s on that page, or reorganize its website anytime between when I’m writing this article and when you’re reading it, eliminating it entirely. Changing what’s there would be an example of content drift; eliminating it entirely is known as link rot...With John Bowers and Clare Stanton, and the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted. (Deep links are links to specific content—think theatlantic.com/article, as opposed to just theatlantic.com.) The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.Deletion isn’t the only issue. Not only can information be removed, but it also can be changed... Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use...It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship.
"Retroactive malleability" sounds much sexier than "content drift." And it allows me to sometimes have fun with the blog - as for example predicting the outcome of a sporting event like the NCAA basketball tournament. If I'm wildly wrong, I can either eliminate the original post, or I can go back to it and change my prediction.
But it also means that one has to be increasing skeptical about the validity of anything one reads on the internet. And we can no longer trust that images have not been altered, that audio has not been faked, or even that an entire video is not "real." It's an interesting and rather unsettling world that the next generation is going to have to live in.
Mourning Cloak - guarding his garden
In the photo above, a Mourning Cloak rests on the top of a tomato stake in our garden. These are among the first butterflies to emerge in the spring because they overwinter as adults, unlike the Monarchs that have to fly up from Mexico and the others that overwinter as pupas and need to develop before emerging. The underside of the wings (not shown) is mottled like tree bark; that combined with the irregular edge of the wing helps camouflage them against tree bark. This photo was taken in early summer, but I've seen them as early as mid-April, a full month before the Monarchs arrive. One reason they can survive so early in the year is that they can feed on the sap of trees; maple tree sap, for example, has a high sugar content and begins "running" about the time these guys emerge.
The positioning shown above also reflects the surprising territoriality of butterflies. This one swooped at me when I walked nearby, clearly warning me that I was on his turf. It's now late summer, and today I saw a large male Monarch perched... on this same tomato stake. He was cruising from one end of the garden to the other, back and forth, pursuing females that entered the garden and chasing away other male Monarchs (and other butterflies, including swallowtails and little blues).
It's a curious (but not unpleasant) experience to be attacked by butterflies.
Reposted from 2009 to add this photo of a Mourning Cloak nectaring on milkweed in our garden.
More re this butterfly's coloration and biology at The Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa)
"Candystick"
Non-chlorophyll-based plants are fascinating. I remember the first time I found Indian Pipes growing in the woods in northern Minnesota. The one pictured to the right is new to me.
Candystick, like the coralroot, has no chlorophyll; it can't make food from sunlight like the green plants do. It is a mycoheterotroph. (Myco = fungus, hetero = other, different, troph = feeding.) It gets its food from an association with a mushroom that in turn, is attached to the root of a green plant.
Photo credit to Susannah Anderson ("Wandering Weeta"). See also her images of Pink Pinesap (lots of interesting posts about the natural world of the Pacific Northwest at her blog).
Remember paper caps on milk bottles?
They are now collectable and are sold on eBay, Etsy, etc. (Photo from the tumblr of the Hennepin County Library)
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