When you microwave an ice cube...

... the results are somewhat unexpected.

I had heard that solid ice does not respond to microwaves the way water does, so today while boiling some water for ramen, I also put in the (standard suburban) microwave one ice cube (with a paper towel to catch any meltwater).

The paper towel was unnecessary.  After 2 1/2 minutes the water in the measuring cup was in a full rolling boil, but the ice cube was ice cold.  There wasn't even a drop of water on the towel beneath.

Posting this so readers can use the info to win bar bets or impress your children at dinner.  Or perhaps next time you host a party ask guests to guess "how quickly" will the microwave melt the ice cube.  

Addendum:  several interesting observations in the comment thread.

Related:  Microwaving Ice - why defrosting is so slow.  Note: "This is why you shouldn't defrost a chicken on full power..."

Genetic map of the Habsburg Jaw - updated

The jaw, as seen in Rudolph II -

And the genetic map of the trait -

Interesting how it becomes more common as the generations continue to inbreed.  More details in this prior post, which featured this family tree for King Charles II of Spain:

Painting: Joseph Heintz the Elder: Emperor Rudolf II, c. 1592 © Kunsthistorisches Museum /Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

Reposted from 2011 to add new information about the risks of breeding with first cousins.  We've all known since our childhoods that breeding with a close relative increases the risks for the emergence of a recessive disorder like CF, sickling, hemophilia, and Gaucher's.  But this new study finds other risks:

Researchers at the city's university are entering their 18th year of the Born in Bradford study. It's one of the biggest medical trials of its kind: between 2007 and 2010, researchers recruited more than 13,000 babies in the city and then followed them closely from childhood into adolescence and now into early adulthood. More than one in six children in the study have parents who are first cousins, mostly from Bradford's Pakistani community, making it among the world's most valuable studies of the health impacts of cousin marriage.

And in data published in the last few months - and analysed in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's Born in Bradford series - the researchers found that first cousin-parentage may have wider consequences than previously thought.  

They found that even after factors like poverty were controlled for, a child of first cousins in Bradford had an 11% probability of being diagnosed with a speech and language problem, versus 7% for children whose parents are not related.

They also found a child of first cousins has a 54% chance of reaching a "good stage of development" (a government assessment given to all five year-olds in England), versus 64% for children whose parents are not related...

... it adds to a growing concern among scientists that has caught the attention of lawmakers across Europe. Two Scandinavian countries have now moved to outlaw cousin marriage entirely. In Norway, the practice became illegal last year; in Sweden, a ban will come into effect next year.

For most in the UK, the prospect of marrying a cousin is largely alien. But it wasn't always so unusual. The father of evolution Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Their son, the Victorian scientist Sir George Darwin, went on to estimate that cousin marriages accounted for almost one in 20 aristocratic unions in 19th Century Britain. One of them was Queen Victoria, who married her first cousin, Prince Albert. The novel Wuthering Heights is full of fictional examples...

But crucially, Prof Oddie thinks the main risk to genetic health in Bradford is not cousin marriage, but a similar issue known as endogamy, in which people marry members of their close community. In a tight-knit ethnic group, people are more likely to share common ancestors and genes - whether or not they are first cousins, he says.

Endogamy is not unique to Pakistani communities in the UK. It is an issue too in the UK's Jewish community and globally among the Amish and also French Canadians.

"It's often the case that the exact familial tie can't be traced, but the gene occurs more commonly within a certain group, and for that reason, both parents carry the affected gene," Prof Oddie says. "It's an oversimplification to say that cousin marriage is the root of all excess recessive disorders in Bradford or in Pakistani communities. Endogamy is an important feature."

Related:  "Mommy, what's an Icelandic incest-blocker?"

Logic puzzle involving gears

The answer is in the discussion thread at the SmartPuzzles subreddit.

"Orbital" (Samantha Harvey)

I've never been disappointed by a Booker Prize-winning novel (Prophet Song recommendation last year).  This book was the 2024 winner, and thus has been the subject of numerous reviews available online (NYT,  Guardian, New Yorker), so I'll try to avoid echoing their commentary.  

The novel is about astronauts in a space station, but it is not science fiction (the author said she wanted to write a "space pastoral" about the beauty of the planet and the cosmos).  The course of the novel covers 24 hours (16 orbits, which then serve as the titles for the chapters).  We get a look at the backgrounds of the multinational crew and their daily activities, with extended commentary on their thoughts about the planet they circle above, and the cosmos behind them.

Here are some excerpts of passages I particularly liked:

Re their reliance on life support systems:  "... and anyway, all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually." (29)

"Nell wants sometimes to ask Shaun how it is he can be an astronaut and believe in God, a Creationist God that is, but she knows what his answer would be.  He's ask how it is she an be an astronaut and not believe in God... Is Shaun's universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design?  Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork?  The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable." (66)

"You think of the training you did in water and how the still water of the training pool holds you in a way that space doesn't, how space has a ferocity and wants (though without malice, with nothing but empty indifference) to tilt you, upend and undo you, and you remember then not to fight it, only to adapt to it." (101)

Viewing the earth at night: "The night's electric excess takes their breath.  The spread of life.  The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here.  And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there's only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India.  That's all civilization has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone." (106)

"It's the planet's indifferent turning in an indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language... You'll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war." (107)

"Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?" (108)

"And when you do look out any claustrophobia becomes agoraphobia in an instant, or you have both at once." (123)

Re rationing a favorite food: "... he sent her three packs which she's been working through in morsels, the pleasure of eating it almost trumped by the pain of its being gone." (148)

"The coast of Canada portside not a coast at all but a land that's been sledgehammered into random pieces." (188)

Several of these passages come from one of my favorite chapters - "Orbit 4, ascending."  Another favorite is Orbit 7.  And the best of all is Orbit 13, which lyrically presents the "cosmic calendar" - a concept so mind-bending and important that I'm going to blog it separately.  As novels go, this one is relatively short (about 200 pages), and thus an easy read in a couple leisurely evenings.  But if your life is so tragically hectic that you don't even have that much spare time, at least sample those three chapters.

Finally, some words that were new to me (or that I had forgotten...):

"... the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon.? (41)  A small knob (!!) from Middle English.  Odd to apply it to a freestanding orb.

"... improbably soft against the truss of the raft you are navigating around." (102)  Lots of usages (the hernia one being most familiar), often but not always signifying "support."

"The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds." (107).  I encountered the word in 2014 while blogging about The Degree Confluence Project.  An obvious combination of "together" and "flow."

"... the capsule's probe penetrated neatly the spacecraft's drogue." (116)  Etymology probably from "drag," sometimes referring to conical parachutes used as braking devices, but here apparently a conical basket used as a docking point.

"...earth... lilac orange almond mauve white magenta bruised textured shellac-ed splendour." (119)  I would have written the word with a "k," but the underlying noun doesn't have one, so apparently this is acceptable (though typically written without the hyphen).  Interesting that the etymology comes from "shell."

"... great coffee grinders wimbling into wayless dark." (131)  A wimble is a hand tool for boring holes.

"A full-throttle scarper in their billionaire's rocket..." (199).  I previously encountered this word while reading Cloud Atlas; at that time a reader offered this in a comment: "To scarper = to run away, usually from authority."

"... unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling..." (207)   I am baffled by this one.  The obvious association (when capitalized - this usage wasn't) is to the dog, whose name in turn came from good luck charms children gave to American soldiers in WWII.  Perhaps it has a colloquial use re running amok etc.  Readers thoughts?

Page designations are from the hardbound first edition.

Henry, at age 111, became a father

Henry is a tuatara, hatched between the 1890s and the 1910s off the north coast of the South Island (New Zealand); he is believed to be the oldest living tuatara.

He was named after Henry VIII and, according to tuatara keeper Lindsay Hazley, "The plan was for Henry to have lots of wives." The staff tried to get him to breed with a female named Mildred in the 1980s but he bit her tail off. He fought with other tuatara, including a male named Albert. Because he was aggressive, he was kept alone. A cancerous tumour was removed from Henry's genital region in 2008, which caused Henry's libido to come back.

In 2009, Henry became a father for the first time, at the age of about 111.   It was reported in 2024 that Henry "holds the world record for living in captivity at more than 46 years."

Related:  70-year-old albatross gives birth to chick

Cringeworthy

These lesions had been present for three weeks on the posterior and right lateral surfaces of the neck of a 19-year-old beach lifeguard from southern California.  They are serpiginous in shape, raised and erythematous, but he was asymptomatic.

The case was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which will be behind a paywall for almost all readers here, so I'll offer some excerpts from a discussion of the case at Ars Technica:

The best clue to the cause—besides the look of the rash—was that the teen told doctors he worked as a beach lifeguard and liked to lie in the sand.

Despite the lack of itchiness and the higher location of the rash, the doctors concluded it was likely cutaneous larva migrans (CLM) from a hookworm, which he got from lying on a poopy beach. The standard treatment for CLM is ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that still doesn't work against COVID-19 (despite what the new US health secretary has falsely claimed), but has proven useful against hookworms. After a two-day course of ivermectin, the teen's rash cleared up.

These "extraintestinal" hookworms (as they're called in humans) pop up in the US from time to time. For instance, in July 2006, health officials in Miami-Dade, Florida, discovered an outbreak of CLM at a summer camp, where 18 campers and four staff were ultimately found to be infected. The likely source, investigators concluded: a playground sandbox that some feral cats used as a litter box.

In most cases, the rash from a wandering worm is in a foot, ankle, thigh, or rear—basically from a person walking or sitting in fecal-contaminated soil with exposed skin.

More info about hookworms at the link.

A public letter from top leaders in the U.S. military

"Regarding the Feb. 23 front-page article “Pentagon cull sends U.S. into unknown”:

As former secretaries of the military departments and retired four-star uniformed officers, we are deeply alarmed by the decision to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations and the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force without due cause. These actions by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth jeopardize the strength, stability and integrity of our armed forces.

For 236 years, the U.S. military has upheld the principle of civilian control — a cornerstone of our democracy and an essential guarantee of sound national security decision-making. Civilian control means military leaders are mindful that it is the president and his appointed civilian defense leaders who set policy, which the military executes by implementing the president’s lawful orders. But this principle does not compel military leaders to demonstrate partisan loyalty to the president or to execute unlawful orders. Their oath is to support and defend the Constitution, not of loyalty to any individual.

Healthy civil-military relations require mutual trust and respect so civilian leaders will seek out the “best military advice” of the nation’s nonpartisan career military leaders, who will in turn be unafraid to provide that counsel. Civilian control and healthy civil-military relations are what make America’s system for providing for the nation’s security both unique and effective. They are designed to ensure that our armed forces serve as effective instruments of American foreign policy rather than as a tool for domestic political ends.

Firing officers for implementing the policies of previous civilian leaders undermines these principles, creating an untenable environment where military leaders risk retribution for following lawful orders at the time those orders were given. If the defense secretary seeks change, he should adjust policy, not purge personnel.

Abruptly removing general and flag officers without adequate justification disrupts the chain of command, weakens morale and exacerbates challenges in an already turbulent global security environment. Open and honest communication between civilian and military leaders is vital to effective defense policy. These firings risk politicizing the military. They send a chilling message that will discourage senior officers from providing the candid military advice necessary for sound strategic decisions.

Our military’s effectiveness depends on stable, nonpartisan leadership dedicated singularly to defending the nation. Changes in military leadership should be guided solely by national security needs, not political motivations. The men and women who serve our country — and all Americans — deserve nothing less."

The text above is a letter to the editor, published this week by The Washington Post.  The signatories to the letter are as follows:

Steve Abbot, retired Navy admiral, was deputy homeland security adviser

Thad Allen, retired Coast Guard admiral, was 23rd commandant of the Coast Guard

Louis Caldera, 17th secretary of the Army

George Casey, retired Army general, was the 36th chief of staff of the Army

Debbie Lee James was the 23rd secretary of the Air Force

Sean O'Keefe was the 69th secretary of the Navy

The letter is fulltext with my highlighting added for emphasis.  The embedded photo is cropped for size from the original at the source.  

I'm closing comments for this post.  Please direct your comments and your anger or support to The Washington Post or (preferably) your elected representatives.

"Playground"

It was an easy decision for me to add Playground to my ever-growing list of recommended books.  This was not a "discovery" on my part; the book has been praised in reviews in The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post.  I chose it because it has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the author has previously won a Pulitzer.

Those curious about the book should consult the cited reviews.  The novel is not plot-driven; the storyline's focus is on a proposal to construct in French Polynesia factories for creating habitats that can be used for "seasteading" the ocean.  What the author provides is an in-depth study of the people destined to be involved in this venture, from their childhoods in our lifetimes to the conclusion in a near alternate future.  I was impressed by the author's obvious research not only into all aspects of oceanography, but also into artificial intelligence.

Herewith some excerpts of memorable passages (page citations from the hardback first edition):

"A leatherback, she'd once read, must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea." (15)

"On the one night of the year when the moon's cycle and the temperature of the water both declared their undecodable now, the whole reef exploded in a heave of joyous sex.  All the colonies in every direction for as far as Evie could see shot their trillions of sperm and egg into the sea at once... As the flecks eddied all around her, something in Evie whispered, I could die now.  I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end." (112)

"Just remember.  Impossible decisions are really the easy decisions."

"Wait, what?  Is this some kind of deep feminine wisdom?"...

"If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit.  Either choice can have your belief.  It doesn't matter which you choose.  You shed one chooser and grow into another."

"For several seconds, Didier cold not decide if what his wife had just said was banal and absurd or the single insight that his entire life had been struggling toward, the one that would solve all the flaws of his temperament and leave him enlightened..." (279)

"I worked for the love of it, the sheer joy... to escape the hell of my family and to make a good thing out of nothing.  The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers." (304)

"She did her best to depict the baroque, astonishing architectures of creatures who made up that three-fifths of the ocean biomass too small for humans to see." (318)

"She had grown old, older than half of the world’s current countries. She had seen the collapse of the infinite fisheries off the Grand Banks, observed the disappearance of snow crabs from the Bering Sea, watched miles-wide drag nets dredge up in one afternoon coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow, seen the global sea acidify, watched most of the world’s reefs bleach white, and witnessed the start of nodule mining that would rip the heart from the living deep. She had lived to see trash at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the remotest places on Earth turned into resorts, the Gulf Stream wavering, and a photic zone too hot to mix, leaving the nutrients trapped in the layers below. Nine-tenths of large life is missing, and the rest filled with heavy metals. The largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored.” (348)

And some words that were new to me (or that I had forgotten...):

"Here he was, so close she could feel his wake: a great chevron-morph goliath she called the Loner."  A wide V-shaped form, from the Old French chevron, so called because it looks like rafters of a shallow roof [here referring to a manta].

"She let loose a whispered stream of joual invective so vile..."  The dialect of working-class Quebecers. 

"The cleaning station would soon become a lekking site, with gangs of hopped-up males circling the edges..."  An aggregation of male animals for the purposes of courtship and display, from Germanic roots meaning "play."

"He was no great student of cleromancy, and his father, the miner, had mocked it as a superstition that united peasants and elites."  Divination by throwing dice or any such marked objects, like beans, pebbles, or bone, from the Greek for "a lot."

Consider Pluto's orbit

Pluto's orbital period is 248 earth-years.  That means from the time it was discovered (in 1930) until now, it hasn't accomplished even one revolution around the sun.

Two relevant thoughts from the Reddit thread:

"...assuming they have the same life span as humans, Plutonians would never celebrate their Plutonian birthday!"

"I wonder when Plutonians celebrate their New Year, and how much more awesome the parties must be if you have to wait that long."

Image via Thinking Sci-Fi.  Reposted from 2013.

Spiny lobster

I didn't want to end the blogging week with a picture of someone getting their teeth hammered out at the top of the queue, so I'll insert this one of a spiny lobster, from a gallery of underwater photography at The Guardian.

Today is Edward Gorey's one-hundredth birthday

During my blogcation, I had the opportunity to reread several books by Edward Gorey.  I've amended and updated my post on The Gashlycrumb Tinies, but as I discovered while reading his books, some of the humor was frankly a bit unsettling -

Especially when the subject matter involves children:

Reposted from 2016 for Halloween 2021.  Reposted from 2021 to celebrate Gorey's one-hundredth birthday.

"Bad Sisters"

I almost gave up on this series because the principal character (the one destined to be murdered) is so extremely and unremittingly repulsive because of his misogyny.  He combines the sinister characteristics of Fagin with the worst sliminess of Uriah Heep.  OTOH, all the characters (including the doomed man) are superbly portrayed by a cast that was unfamiliar to me, but who I will look forward to seeing again in season 2.  In the end, the series was enjoyable and thoroughly worth watching.

10 episodes, streaming on Apple TV; not yet on DVD AFAIK.

Reposted from December to add the trailer for season 2.  I doubted that the second year could match the first because the storyline of the first one was so unique.  But I thoroughly enjoyed the second season as well, thanks to the superb acting by all of the female cast members.

WARNING:  Don't watch the season 2 trailer until after you've watch the season 1 episodes (it has multiple spoilers for the first season).

As always, I welcome readers' comments, but I'll block any that contain even a hint of a spoiler.

Humorous golf terms

In episode 2 of the second season of "Bad Sisters," one character says that his golf nickname is "Adolph" because he "takes two shots in the bunker."  After I finished laughing, I did a quick search, which led me to a list assembled in a Golf Monthly forum, several of which I have abstracted below.  Golfers will understand what these mean:

A Salman Rushdie - an impossible read

A Rock Hudson - thought it was straight, but it wasn't

A Cuban - needs one more revolution

An Adolf Hitler - two shots in the bunker

A Glenn Miller - kept low and didn't make it over the water

A Rodney King - over-clubbed

An O.J. Simpson - got away with it

A Princess Grace - should have taken a driver

A Princess Di - shouldn't have taken a driver

A Jean-Marie LePen - a long way right

A circus tent - a BIG top

A Ryanair - flies well but lands a long way from the target

Many are in poor taste; the egregiously bad ones I left behind at the link.

Death by deep-sea implosion

An animation depicting what presumably happened to the crew of the Titan submersible that descended in 2023 to examine the wreckage of the Titanic.  

"Simulations developed in 2023 suggest the implosion of the vessel took less than one second, likely only tens of milliseconds, faster than the brain can process information; there would not have been time for the victims to experience the collapse of the hull, and they would have died immediately, with no pain, as their bodies were crushed."

Tragic, but way better than death by asphyxiation.

Geometry puzzle

The diagram is NOT drawn to scale, so don't put a ruler on line x to measure the distance.  Figure it out in your head using simple logic and math.