Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" played on 167 Matryomins

The Matryomin is a theremin lodged inside a matryoshka.  More information at Open Culture.

See also Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold played on a theremin (skip to the middle).

And this detailed video explanation of theremins.

Live-caption glasses for the hearing-impaired

 

Via the nextfuckinglevel subreddit where one salient comment is "Combine this with translation software to suddenly understand any language" and some observations re "subtitle glasses" made by Google two years ago.

And this: "Oh man, she is gonna sneaky wear those and find out who’s been talking shit about her literally right behind her back."

I don't have an overall review link on this topic; perhaps some reader knows of one.

M*A*S*H 2022

"A Ukrainian soldier, wounded in the conflict, receives treatment at a hospital"

Photograph: Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.  Via The Guardian.

More than a dozen bald eagles accidentally poisoned

More than a dozen dead or dying bald eagles were found near a landfill in Inver Grove Heights, suspected victims of poisoning by eating carcasses of animals that were chemically euthanized [with pentobarbital] and dumped at the landfill, according to wildlife officials.

Hall was unable to say what kind of carcasses were brought to the landfill. But she said animals that have been chemically euthanized are supposed to be disposed of in a manner so that other animals can't scavenge on them.

This serves as a reminder that our national symbol is in fact a large-bodied scavenger that often resorts to feeding on garbage.  What surprises me is that the concentration of pentobarbital in the animal carcass was high enough to be lethal to a scavenger.  Those must be massive doses that are injected - or perhaps eagles seek out bloodier organs like spleens (?).

Sort of related: Loon-on-eagle haliacide.

All South Koreans will become younger next year

South Korea is to scrap its traditional method of counting ages and adopt the international standard – a change that that will knock one or two years off people’s ages on official documents but could take time to seep into daily life.

South Koreans are deemed to be a year old when they are born, and a year is added every 1 January. The unusual – and increasingly unpopular – custom means a baby born on New Year’s Eve becomes two years old as soon as the clock strikes midnight.

The complications do not end there: a separate system exists for calculating the age of men entering national service and the legal age to drink alcohol and smoke. In those cases, a person’s age is calculated from zero at birth and a year is added on New Year’s Day...

Jeong Da-eun, a 29-year-old office worker, said she welcomed the change, since she always had to think twice when asked her age when overseas. “I remember foreigners looking at me with puzzlement because it took me so long to come back with an answer,” she said.

The system’s origins are unclear. One theory is that turning one year old at birth takes into account time spent in the womb – with nine months rounded up to 12. Others link it to an ancient Asian numerical system that did not have the concept of zero.

More details at The Guardian.

Roadkill - it's what's for dinner

From a story in the StarTribune: 

About this time last year, Alan Bergo, the forager and onetime chef of Minneapolis' late, lamented Lucia's, was driving near his home in Menomonie, Wis., when a yearling buck bounded in front of his car. Bergo hit the brakes — and the deer, which bounced off his bumper.

Roadkill often ends up eaten by scavengers or disposed of by maintenance crews. But for people like Bergo, the silver lining of animals killed by cars is their no-cost, free-range meat. Heaven's manna, for the modern era.

When Bergo got out of his vehicle, he saw the deer he'd hit was still alive, but couldn't walk. After surmising its pelvis was shattered, Bergo dispatched the buck... Bergo called the local DNR conservation officer, then took the animal home and butchered it. "I probably got a good 70 pounds of meat," he said. "It was the perfect revenge for totaling the first car I'd ever bought myself."..

But as long as an animal had died recently, wasn't sick (chronic wasting disease can be a concern), and bruising or ruptured internal organs hadn't spoiled the prime cuts, Bergo realized its meat wasn't so different than what he'd plated on $30 entrees. And certainly fresher than what you'd buy in the supermarket...

Some states have banned roadkill possession due to concerns of drivers purposefully weaponizing their cars. But roughly half of the United States, including ours, allow the public to take roadkill. In Minnesota, a wildlife-possession permit, acquired through the DNR or other law-enforcement agency, is required. (Removing the animal would otherwise be considered an offense similar to having illegally hunted it.)

More information at the link.  The embedded photo is a venison shank glazed with birch syrup.   Re the birch syrup, see my 2020 post "An encounter with birch water."

"Bio mining"

"Cooch Behar, India, August 2022. The decomposition of waste in city landfills causes air pollution and creates a high risk of producing methane under high temperature, which can lead to fire. To avoid these unwanted environmental hazards, the Municipal Corporation of Cooch Behar installed Trommel machines to bio mine the solid waste. The machine removes plastics, sand and metals from the garbage, which is then recycled and used for tarring, construction, and other waste is converted into organic manure."

Credit:  Sujan Sarkar, from the Environmental Photographer of the Year competition, via The Guardian (more entries at the link).

"Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular"

"In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in The New Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”

There is certainly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soccer is also indicative of his well-known cultural elitism (despite his romanticizing of lower-class gaucho life and the once-demimonde tango). Outside of the hugely expensive World Cup, the class dynamics of soccer fandom in most every country but the U.S. are fairly uncomplicated. New Republic editor Foer summed it up succinctly in How Soccer Explains the World: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” (The inversion of this soccer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Americans’ disdain for the game in general and for elitist soccer dilettantes in particular, though those attitudes are rapidly changing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, American, I imagine he would have had similar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR."

More at Open Culture, including a link to a story written by Borges on this subject.

It could be a reptilian eye...

... but it's a small lake in the woods in Poland.  

Credit: Maciej Krzanowski, from the Environmental Photographer of the Year competition, via The Guardian (more entries at the link).

Uzhe? Yoozh? Usjhe?

You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!

Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.

Our confusion about how to spell uzh/yooje/ujhe reveals some of the breaking points between English spelling and pronunciation. Fluent speakers and writers of English normally take the connection between letters and sounds for granted, especially for a common word like usual. When we see this connection fall apart, it can be disorienting—a clear syrup transformed into a shattered toffee by the presence of one stray crystal. But in dissolving the links between spelling and pronunciation, we can learn about an eternal tension between the most elegant way of writing words down and the most elegant way of saying them.

In the puzzle of yuzh/uge/euge, there are two main pieces. The first is that the letter u has several pronunciations in English... The second puzzle of shortening usual is even more serious than the first: The sound represented by the letter s in this particular word isn’t pronounced like any of the s’s in Sesame Street. Rather, it’s influenced by the sound that comes after it...

Discussion continues at The Atlantic.

Blues played on a bagpipe

Sweden’s "Queen of Swing" Gunhild Carling -

"I grew up in the south of Sweden, outside of Malmo. Our house was full of variety – circus, acting, dance, vaudeville and novelty. I just picked up instruments from when I was very young and played them. I started with the drums, then the recorder, trombone and trumpet. Then I started tap dancing, and after that harmonica and bagpipe."

Several more videos at Open Culture.  Posted for my tenor sax cousin in Barcelona.

A glitch in the matrix?

I began my blogging routine this morning by checking for new comments and was gobsmacked when Blogspot asked me to screen these comments in the "spam" folder for inclusion or deletion.

All of them are from a couple weeks in the year 2014.  I have no idea where those comments have been stored - presumably on some immense server somewhere.  I have never seen any of them before.  I checked the posts - these comments were not there, so I approved them, and now they are on the posts.  Not that that will do any good.

But it makes me wonder how often this happens.  In particular, there are several regular (named) readers who have written me to report that their comments sometimes "disappear."  Perhaps they were sucked into the same wormhole from which these have now emerged.  It will be interesting to see if some server is now regurgitating old material, and whether other missing comments will now see the light of day.

Has any other Blogspot user (Miss C, Nag, Flippism, Woodsrunner, Bulletholes, Skeetmotis, Car Guy etc) experienced a similar phenomenon this week?

Addendum:  Today (Sunday, a day later) two more comments from 2014 showed up in my "spam" filter -  one from Drabkikker re a fake half-cat, and one from Jim re a New Zealand haka.

Monday: more late arriving comments, from Adrian Morgan, Maja, and some anons - again from 2014.  This reminds me of that science fiction trope of an airplane landing in modern Nebraska and an aircrew from WWII steps off, to everyone's puzzlement.

Peruvian politics - updated

I received this email December 7 from my cousin in Peru:

This morning I planned to tell you that the Peruvian Congress planned to impeach President Castillo, 

But before I could write you, President Castillo dissolved Congress, 

But before I could report that Castillo was taking action, his Cabinet ministers began to desert him, 

But before I could tell you that news, the Congress met and impeached Castillo,

Then Castillo, still defiant, called on the Armed Forces for support,

But the Armed Forces took a hard look at where they could conduct more graft,

And The Armed Forces told Castillo that he was on his own, 

And Castillo told his family to start packing,

But the family could not pack very quickly, because it was an awful lot of cash, 

And the police arrived at the Presidential Palace with an arrest warrant, 

And the family was still packing, because it was a lot of cash,

And the Legislature met to swear in the VP, Dina Balluarte, a real loose cannon, 

And she gave a speech in which she thanked the military and god, in that order, 

And Castillo was photographed leaving the Presidential Palace with a police escort,

And now life will go on.

Addendum December 10: 

"I was recently in Monobamba, Perú, a small town at 1,500 meters near San Ramón, the city where I usually stay. Our hostess told us about her visit to a rural area another 1,000 meters up. They met some women potato farmers who said that the glacier had completely melted, and they no longer had a water source. Furthermore, the rain was two weeks overdue, and they were concerned about their potato crop. There were some lagoons within an hour’s walk for drinking water, but the long-term looked bleak. 

This woman and her neighbors are only a sample of the potato farmers along the sierra at the same altitude. I don’t see a solution, and the national government has no idea what to do, so they do nothing. I take that back. The national government is busy embezzling money set aside for potato farmers at 2,500 meters in the sierra."

Archeological evidence of crucifixion in Britain

From Smithsonian Magazine:

Sometime between 130 and 360 C.E., a 25- to 35-year-old man in what’s now Cambridgeshire, England, died by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman Empire. His skeleton—found with a telltale nail hammered through its heel bone—represents one of the few surviving physical traces of the ancient punishment, report David Ingham and Corinne Duhig for British Archaeology magazine...

Archaeological evidence of crucifixion is rare, as victims often didn’t receive a proper burial. Additionally, most crucifixions used rope rather than nails to bind the condemned to a cross.

According to BBC News, scholars know of only three other possible physical examples of crucifixion during the ancient era: one found in La Larda in Gavello, Italy; one from Mendes in Egypt; and one from Giv’at ha-Mivtar in north Jerusalem...

Excavators discovered the remains, dubbed Skeleton 4926, during a dig conducted ahead of construction in the village of Fenstanton in 2017, reports PA Media. The community stands along the route of the Via Devana, an ancient Roman road that connected Cambridge to Godmanchester...

Skeleton 4926 showed evidence of severe suffering endured before death. According to a separate Cambridge statement, the man’s legs bore signs of infection or inflammation, possibly caused by binding or shackles. Six of his ribs were fractured, likely by blows from a sword.

Photo from British Archaeology magazine, where there is lots more information and many photos of the dig and the objects found.

See also: A modern equivalent of death by crucifixion

"High overshoot" climate change ahead

An interesting article at The Washington Post looks at 1,200 possible scenarios regarding our planet's future climate (using the semi-arbitrary year of 2100 as an end point).  Most of the scenarios result in a global mean temperature rise of 2-5 degrees Celsius, widely considered to result in ominous or even extinction-level effects.

Of the "hopeful" scenarios, only 112 result in an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius or less by 2100.  The components of the scenarios (see the link for detail) involve such things as CO2 removal, decreased CO2 production, changing energy demand, reducing methane production etc.  If you narrow down the choices that permit "reasonable assumptions" about human behavior, there are no paths to keeping the mean temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

I'm in the "doom and gloom" camp.  I don't think humans will do anything meaningful. I think the people who have the power to effect meaningful change will not do so; they will continue to "kick the can down the road" hoping a future generation will solve the problem.  This includes businessmen, politicians, and individuals.  The former two groups will come up with multi-year "plans" but not allow their company or country to suffer while they themselves are still in power.  Adult individuals will remain either ignorant or indifferent because the latter years of the century are beyond their lifespan.

And I often wonder if in fact we have already gone past a "tipping point" but nobody is telling us that because they don't want the global public to panic.