Stone mask

"With their vacant eyes and enigmatic, toothy expressions, the 9,000-year-old stone masks from the area around the southern Judean desert are among the region’s most compelling and distinctive artefacts. Adding to that is their rarity: only 15 examples are known to exist. So, when the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) recently announced the discovery of a 16th stone mask, it grabbed the attention of archaeologists and the public alike—but also revived a simmering discussion on the authenticity of these unique objects.

The newly discovered mask shares many characteristics of the others found to date. These include a human-size face of soft, carved limestone with large openings for eyes, a defined mouth, and holes drilled around its circumference. The holes lead some researchers to suggest that the masks were designed to be tied to a face or an object."

From National Geographic, via Reddit.

Awesome mudslide in Switzerland

Interesting that it looks like pretty darn good topsoil.  But note the power of the mudslide.

Related:  massive avalanche from the face of Annapurna.

Where some people get their information

Christ Church wants to create a theocracy in America

As reported in The Guardian:

A Guardian investigation has revealed that a controversial church whose leader has openly expressed the ambition of creating a “theocracy” in America has accumulated significant influence in the city of Moscow, Idaho.

Christ Church has a stated goal to “make Moscow a Christian town” and public records, interviews, and open source materials online show how its leadership has extended its power and activities in the town.

Church figures have browbeaten elected officials over Covid restrictions, built powerful institutions in parallel to secular government, harassed perceived opponents, and accumulated land and businesses in pursuit of a long-term goal of transforming America into a nation ruled according to its own, ultra-conservative moral precepts...

Wilson further claimed that “we are not yet in a hot civil war, with shooting and all, but we are in a cold war/civil war” and urged readers to “resist openly, in concert with any others in your same position”, claiming that this would not be “rebellion against lawful authority” but “an example of a free people refusing to go along with their own enslavement”...

Christ Church was founded in Moscow in the 1990s, and experts who have studied the church estimate the size of the congregation and its offshoot churches at about 2,000, or 10% of the city’s total population.

But they also say that the church is increasingly drawing people to the area who are attracted to the idea of northern Idaho as a conservative “redoubt” against American modernity, and by the church’s “reconstructionist” position, which holds that the world will need to be governed according to their interpretation of biblical morality before Christ returns to earth...

In the early 2000s, Wilson received criticism over a book, Southern Slavery as it Was, which he had co-written... the book depicted slavery in the antebellum southern United States as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”, and argued that the enslaved enjoyed “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care”...

Christ Church itself is an unincorporated nonprofit, which means that it is not obliged to provide details of its finances to government authorities... But insiders who spoke on condition of anonymity said that all members tithe 10% of their household income, and wealthier members are expected to make an even larger contribution.

More at The Guardian.  This is the kind of crap that is proliferating in the United States, encouraged by self-serving politicians, guided by profit-driven evangelists, supported by Russian professionals, and ramped up by the technology of social media.  

When midwives carve pumpkins

Originally posted at The Sun, via Neatorama's Pictojam.

Take a break from the internet's "gloom and doom"...

Via Neatorama's Pictojam (check it out - but remember to come back here)

So you'd like to buy a cryptocurrency...

"Squid Game, or SQUID, [is] the latest memecoin sensation, inspired by the Netflix hit. It surged more than 230,000% in the past week to $2,861.80, according to CoinMarketCap pricing -- only to plunge 100% to less than half a cent as of Monday in New York... 

Squid Game’s boom and bust reveals another side of the crypto frenzy: The potential for demand to suddenly dry up, or worse, for developers to abandon a project and abscond with the funds in a scam known as a rug pull. Whether that’s what happened with Squid Game is still unclear, but even before the drop, there were inconsistencies around trading. CoinMarketCap posted a warning that it had received “multiple reports” that users weren’t able to sell the token on PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange.:

Photo credit Noh Juhan/Netflix.

When a cat plays"Dungeons and Dragons"

 

DM: ‘You come to large wooden door.’

Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’ 

DM: ‘An orc opens it and asks you to come in.’

Cat: ‘I do nothing.’

DM ‘He asks you to come inside again.’

Cat: ‘I do nothing.’

DM: ‘Eventually the orc tires and closes the door.’

Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’

 Reposted from 2019.  Photo and text from DungeonMaster Ewington, via Neatorama.

Blue Jay halfway through puberty

via

A vampire overslept on this bench this morning

Image cropped for size from the original here.  Reposted from 2018 for Halloween 2021.

That's not dew on the leaf. It's guttation.

Guttation is the exudation of drops of xylem sap on the tips or edges of leaves of some vascular plants, such as grasses, and a number of fungi. Guttation (from Latin gutta drop) is not to be confused with dew, which condenses from the atmosphere onto the plant surface. Guttation generally happens during the night time.

At night, transpiration usually does not occur, because most plants have their stomata closed. When there is a high soil moisture level, water will enter plant roots, because the water potential of the roots is lower than in the soil solution. The water will accumulate in the plant, creating a slight root pressure. The root pressure forces some water to exude through special leaf tip or edge structures, hydathodes or water glands, forming drops. Root pressure provides the impetus for this flow, rather than transpirational pull. Guttation is most noticeable when transpiration is suppressed and the relative humidity is high, such as during the night.

You learn something every day.  Photo via.

A one-hour helicopter flight over Antarctica

Awesome.  Perhaps better viewed on a wide-screen television rather than a computer monitor.

Here is her video about recovering extremophiles from the Antarctic dry valleys.

The 2-million-year evolution of the genus Homo

This simplified schema was created to accompany an article in Evolutionary Anthropology which suggests designating Homo bodoensis as a new taxon.

Recent developments in the field of palaeoanthropology necessitate the suppression of two hominin taxa and the introduction of a new species of hominins to help resolve the current nebulous state of Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) hominin taxonomy. In particular, the poorly defined and variably understood hominin taxa Homo heidelbergensis (both sensu stricto and sensu lato) and Homo rhodesiensis need to be abandoned as they fail to reflect the full range of hominin variability in the Middle Pleistocene. Instead, we propose: (1) introduction of a new taxon, Homo bodoensis sp. nov., as an early Middle Pleistocene ancestor of the Homo sapiens lineage, with a pan-African distribution that extends into the eastern Mediterranean (Southeast Europe and the Levant); (2) that many of the fossils from Western Europe (e.g. Sima de los Huesos) currently assigned to H. heidelbergensis s.s. be reassigned to Homo neanderthalensis to reflect the early appearance of Neanderthal derived traits in the Middle Pleistocene in the region; and (3) that the Middle Pleistocene Asian fossils, particularly from China, likely represent a different lineage altogether.

Via Gizmodo.

Ötzi's clothing

A study newly published in Nature's Scientific Reports uses mitochondrial DNA analysis to determine the animal sources of the various leathers in Otzi's clothing.

Results indicate that the majority of the samples originate from domestic ungulate species (cattle, sheep and goat), whose recovered haplogroups are now at high frequency in today’s domestic populations. Intriguingly, the hat and quiver samples were produced from wild species, brown bear and roe deer respectively...

The Iceman’s garments and quiver are from an assemblage of at least five different species of animal. The coat alone was a combination of at least four hides and two species: goat and sheep. This result may indicate a haphazard stitching together of clothing based upon materials that were available to the Iceman, as ancient rudimentary leather is posited to rapidly deteriorate after manufacture. However, the leggings were composed of goat leather, which was also used in the manufacture of a 4,500-year-old leggings from Schnidejoch, Switzerland. This result lends support to the idea that Copper Age individuals in the Alpine region selected species for specific attributes when manufacturing clothing. This may also indicate a functional choice of material based on flexibility or insulating potential.

Photo credit South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/A. Ochsenreiter, via the Washington Post.

Reposted from 2016 because I just found this photo (via) taken at the time of the discovery of Ötzi's body:

See also The face of Ötzi the Iceman.

A "2X4" is not 2" x 4" in size

How did I get to my age without knowing this?

In the Americas, two-bys (2×4s, 2×6s, 2×8s, 2×10s, and 2×12s), named for traditional board thickness in inches, along with the 4×4 (89 mm × 89 mm), are common lumber sizes used in modern construction. They are the basic building blocks for such common structures as balloon-frame or platform-frame housing. Dimensional lumber made from softwood is typically used for construction, while hardwood boards are more commonly used for making cabinets or furniture.

Lumber's nominal dimensions are larger than the actual standard dimensions of finished lumber. Historically, the nominal dimensions were the size of the green (not dried), rough (unfinished) boards that eventually became smaller finished lumber through drying and planing (to smooth the wood). Today, the standards specify the final finished dimensions and the mill cuts the logs to whatever size it needs to achieve those final dimensions. Typically, that rough cut is smaller than the nominal dimensions because modern technology makes it possible to use the logs more efficiently. For example, a "2×4" board historically started out as a green, rough board actually 2 by 4 inches (51 mm × 102 mm). After drying and planing, it would be smaller by a nonstandard amount. Today, a "2×4" board starts out as something smaller than 2 inches by 4 inches and not specified by standards, and after drying and planing is minimally 1+1⁄2 by 3+1⁄2 inches (38 mm × 89 mm).

You learn something every day.  Photo via Reddit.