"When my child wept, his tears were black."

A 6-minute clip from Werner Herzog's 50-minute film "Lessons of Darkness".  Soundtrack by Grieg, Mahler (2nd Symphony!), Pärt, Prokofiev, Shubert, Verdi, and (obviously) Wagner. I've requested it from our library; should be interesting.

Found at Videosift.

Update: I've just watched the movie.  The clip above is quite representative.  If you like the clip, you'll like the movie (and vice versa).   Mostly it's views of the burning oil fields, but there is one heart-rending segment of a mother being interviewed re the war and saying -

"Even the tears were black.  When my child wept his tears were black."  

After that the soldiers stomped on the child's head, and he hasn't spoken since then.  Her comments refer to the environmental Armageddon they lived through.

Moqo-Moqo: a Recommended Blog

Most of the blogs I have recommended have been "accumulators," typically without a single theme.  Moqo-Moqo is also an accumulator - of photographs.  I particularly like the fact that Moqo-Moqo is themed to the biological diversity of the natural world.   In recent years he/she seems to have added a bit of commentary or identification of the subject, but for the most part the emphasis is on the visual image.

Another reason I'm offering a recommendation is that unlike many (?most) other photoaccumulators, this one makes a reasonable effort to give credit to the source of the photo, either via text or via a link embedded in the photo.  Sometimes, as with the indigo bunting above, the link goes to the photo itself; other times (and less optimally) it goes to a Flickr photostream's front page or to another accumulator.  But at least the effort and courtesy is made.

Whenever TYWKIWDBI starts becoming dreary from a run of posts about business, politics, ethics, crime etc, I can always lighten the mood with some nature photos from Moqo-Moqo.  If you like that subject matter, give it a browse at the link.

"The men ate their own amputated fingers"

I think anyone with even a modicum of interest in history should read an account of Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign against the Russians. I recently finished The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army by Stephan Talty (Crown Publishers, New York, 2009).  It provides a detailed account of the military campaign, with a special emphasis on the role played by typhus in decimating Napoleon's forces.  Here are some notes and excerpts:

As he headed east, Napoleon’s army was the size of a city; between 550,000 and 600,000 soldiers crossed entered Russian territory, accompanied by 50,000 wives, whores and attendants, the horde was more than lived in the entire city of Paris.  It was in effect the fifth-largest city in the world at the time, guided by a masterful administration that could move messages at 120 mph (via semaphore).

But they weren't very tall.  Napoleon's Imperial Guard of 50,000 men were hand-picked "immortals" who met the criteria of being able to read and write and standing over 5'6" tall (most Frenchmen at the time were closer to 5' tall).

Napoleon had prior experience with typhus with his armies.  During his wars in Spain 300,000 of his men died of disease while only 100,000 died in battle.  As this army entered Poland 60,000 were sick and 30,000 had already died.  When they reached Vilna, Napoleon was losing 4000-6000 soldiers a day.

The Russians experienced similar problems: "Russian Colonel Ludwig von Wolzogen met a lieutenant resting with 30 to 40 men behind the front line and ordered him to rejoin his regiment. “This is my regiment!” the man cried. He had lost approximately 1,250 men."

After the army entered Moscow, Russian arsonists torched the wooden city while the French army pillaged it:

“Thousands of men prowled the streets brandishing Turkish scimitars inside their leather belts or sporting enormous fur hats or bits of Tartar costume. Great heaps of swag made their appearance: a jewel-encrusted spittoon from a prince’s palace, silver candlesticks and icons from the local churches, silk Persian shawls threaded with gold, bracelets thick with emeralds and diamonds, enormous rugs and even embroidered armchairs from the finest salons…”

During the retreat, the ditches along the road were filled with this booty:

Along the road one saw silver candelabra, gold crucifixes, the Complete Works of Voltaire bound in Moroccan leather, wall hangings laced with silver thread, “cases filled with diamonds or rolls of ducats.”

To keep warm, the soldiers wore their booty:

“Gaunt soldiers wore silk dresses over their uniforms; fur capes and throws; chartreuse, lilac, or white satin capes… Some wore remnants of carpets stolen from glossy Muscovite floors.

And they ate anything in their path - dogs, bears, leather, and corpses.

The men ate their own fingers that had been amputated because of frostbite, and drank their own blood…”

The final numbers for the campaign of 1812: Total dead conservatively 400K. Fewer than a quarter died of enemy action; the majority died of disease, cold, hunger, and thirst. The Imperial Guard returned with only 1500 of its original 47,000 members. The losses were magnified by the small populations of the time – a Polish loss of 75,000 then would be equivalent to 750,000 now. The Russian losses were also heavy – total dead during the war easily over 1 million.

And one final intriguing tidbit. During the march to Moscow,

“Some troops cut crude sunglasses out of bits of stained-glass window and wore them…”

Quite clever. I've never heard of that before.

The embedded image is Minard's famous graphic of the size of Napoleon's army during the approach to, and retreat from, Moscow; it also depicts the route and the temperatures encountered.  Click the image to examine in more detail.

Mary Pickford

Born in Canada, rose to superstardom in the glory days of early cinema. Smart enough to demand not just a salary ($675K in 1918 = $10 million today), but a percentage (to 50%!) of the profits of her films.  Co-founded United Artists film studio. 

From this studio portrait, it's easy to see why she was called the "Girl with the curls." 

Paria Canyon, Arizona

Photo credit Natalia Plekhanova.

The megaflood of the Mediterranean

It was called the "Zanclean flood" because it occurred during that time interval about 5 million years ago.  The waters of the Atlantic ocean broke through the land barrier that joined Gibraltar to Africa, spilling into what at the time was the "Mediterranean desert" (see this link on the Messinian salinity crisis).

Last month the BBC reported some new research into the event. 

Using existing borehole and seismic data, his team showed how the flood would have begun with water spilling over a sill. The water would have gradually eroded a channel into the strait, eventually triggering a catastrophic flood, Dr Garcia-Castellanos explained.

He and his colleagues created a computer model to estimate the duration of the flood, and found that, when the "incision channel" reached a critical depth, the water flow sped up. In a period ranging from a few months to two years, the scientists say that 90% of the water was transferred into the basin.

That must have been something to see.  Wish I could have been there to watch.  It's very similar to the Ryan-Pitman deluge theory about the filling of the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.

And one related interesting item.  Someone has proposed reestablishing that land bridge between Gibraltar and Africa, letting the level of the Mediterranean fall, and then letting the water back in through an enormous dam that would create gazillions of megawatts of electricity.  It would create a lot of new land (but it would trash some famous beaches - and Venice).  Read about it here.

"If we don't act now..."

Found at (where else?) Superpoop.

Is the "entire world" a "battlefield"?

I really admire Glenn Greenwald's writings for Salon.  They are among the few op-ed columns that I review on a regular basis, because he isn't afraid to ask challenging questions.  He did it when the Bush administration was in power, and he continues to do so with Obama in charge.  The most recent column is headed by the in-your-face title "Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens."

Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests."  They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations....

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens.  That's just the essence of war.  That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained.  But combat is not what we're talking about here.  The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities.  More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world.  So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks.  That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death.  What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist.

Much more at the link.  There's a lot to think about here. 

Science Channel refuses to "dumb down" any further

My post of the graphic of programming on The History Channel received a vigorous response, so I thought it appropriate to follow up with this news about the Science Channel:

SILVER SPRING, MD—Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had...

"Look, we've tried, we really have, but it's simply not possible to set the bar any lower," said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he "could not in good conscience" make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile...

Debbie Myers, general manager of the Science Channel, said the cable station has maintained a balance of 5 percent science content and 95 percent mind-numbing drivel over the past few years, and that this was as far as they were willing to go....

...on-air demonstrations of such basic scientific principles as "inertia" and "momentum" are mostly relegated to pushing a blindfolded participant strapped to an office chair down a steep hill...

While they won't be dumbing down their already crude lineup of shows, Science Channel officials assured viewers that the network will continue to cater to the lowest common denominator and will keep airing embarrassingly base content completely stripped of all intellectual integrity...

"I don't like it when the science people talk about things no one can even understand," said Rich Parker, an Ohio resident. "It's like, just quit your yapping and dip the chain saw into the liquid nitrogen already."

Before you offer a comment, please note the source at the link.

Could the Taliban be "bought off?"

The U.S., Britain, and Japan(?) are leading an effort to develop a cash incentive plan for the Taliban to stop their resistance in Afghanistan.

The scheme would offer cash, jobs and other incentives to the Taliban and fighters in other armed groups...

Parts of the funds would be spent on projects to develop the fighters' villages and  building roads to their communities...  "Many people are not actually fighting for the Taliban but alongside the Taliban because of poverty and other local concerns, because of tribal issues."

More at the link and at this link.

Research Areas of Interest: Building scalable, robust cluster applications

Posted by Brad Chen, Technical Lead/Manager

As part of our series on research areas of interest to Google, we discuss some important areas relating to cluster applications in distributed systems. In the last two decades distributed systems have undergone a metamorphosis from academic curiosities to the foundation of an entire industry. Despite these successes, at Google we see distributed systems as a technology in its infancy, with huge gaps in the supporting research (some examples here and here) that represent some of the most important problems in the space. Here are some examples:

• Resource sharing: Stranded resources like idle memory, CPU, and disk bandwidth represent huge capital and operating expenses that deliver no business value. A cluster system based upon the best published research would be likely to leave 50% or more of hardware resources idle. We encourage researchers to explore hardware/software architectures that facilitate more supple sharing to avoid stranded and underutilized computational resources.
• Balancing cost, performance, and reliability: Current cluster applications tend to be excessively rigid and brittle, offering only coarse controls to tune the balance between reliability, performance and cost. We envision systems that allow cost to be optimized based on an input specification of performance and reliability requirements. An effective solution might allow service level settings to propagate downward through the layered structure of the system.
• Self-maintaining systems: The level of expertise required to troubleshoot today's large systems is one of the biggest barriers to more and larger deployments. The published research in this area has at best marginally improved the need for such rare expertise. We envision systems that can adapt automatically to changing conditions, in which redundancy and multiple geographically distributed data centers simplify rather than complicate manageability. This will require breakthroughs in monitoring and data analysis to address the diversity of failure modes and simplify the task of keeping systems healthy.

Research in these areas will improve the current state of cluster applications enabling systems that are less expensive, easier to monitor, and can scale more efficiently.

Previous posts in the series: Mulitmedia

Myrna Darby, Ziegfeld girl

Via Vintage Blog.

Bannerman Castle

Bannerman Castle is one of very few actual castles in the United States.  Located on Pollapel Island in the Hudson River north of New York, it was built a century ago and eventually used as a military suplus warehouse.  It is now abandoned and deteriorating.

Pix via Artificial Owl.

How to determine a company's physical location

Companies that do business on the web often do not publicize their brick-and-mortar location.  The Consumerist offers this tip:

By law, any website that collects data from its users is required to post a privacy policy, and all privacy policies are required to display a physical address to send mail to.  You can also then use that address in databases to track down other contact information associated with it, like a live phone number.

A good tip to tuck away for possible future use.

Loopholes in the Credit CARD Act

The credit card reform bill becomes effective in February.  Walletpop has these reminders:

There is no cap on the interest rate card companies are allowed to charge. While companies can't hike your rates on existing balances unless you're 60 days late with a payment, they can raise rates on future purchases any time and for any (or no) reason...

While the CARD Act has limits on the severity of penalty fees you can be charged, there's no rule against card companies making up as many new fees as they can conjure [annual fees, paper bill fees, inactivity fees] and charging whatever they like for them...

We told you card companies can't hike your rates on existing balances. That's true as long as you have a fixed-rate card instead of a variable rate card... This is the reason why card issuers have been switching people to variable-rate cards as fast as they can print out and mail the notices.


Your card company can lower your credit limit or close your card without giving you any warning at all... issuers tend to close cards that are inactive or aren't used very often...

More at the link.

Bagger 288 - the video

This is quite a strange video.  You will either love it or hate it, probably depending on your age (or maturity).  There is a more prosaic explanation of Bagger 288 at Neatorama.

How many temporary nurses are incompetent?

Every profession has incompetent personnel - doctors, lawyers, airplane pilots, accountants, etc.  Last month an article published at Propublica and at The Los Angeles, and reposted by Mother Jones, raised a question as to whether there are in inordinate numbe of incompetent temporary nurses:

Firms that supply temporary nurses to the nation's hospitals are taking perilous shortcuts in their screening and supervision... Emboldened by a chronic nursing shortage and scant regulation, the firms vie for their share of a free-wheeling, $4-billion industry. Some have become havens for nurses who hopscotch from place to place to avoid the consequences of their misconduct...

• Firms hired nurses who had criminal records or left states where their licenses had been restricted or revoked...

• Temp agencies shuffled errant nurses from one hospital to another, even as complaints mounted...

• Nurses who got in trouble at one agency had no problem landing a job at another...

When staff nurses err, hospitals typically retrain or monitor them afterward. Temp nurses often are just exchanged for replacements, never receiving further guidance...

Many agencies allow applicants to take competency tests online. Testifying in a malpractice lawsuit earlier this year, an official at Fastaff, a large traveling-nurse firm based in Colorado, said applicants have been hired without even a phone interview...

Much, much more at the link.  My mom was a nurse, so I would never diss the profession in general, but I would encourage people to be aware of the potential problems with temporary personnel.

Award-winning photos from the National Wildlife Federation

The NWF website has another dozen or so photos from their 2009 photography competition. 

Credits: John Eastcott and Yva Momatiuk (top), Guillaume Mazille (middle), Marcia M. Olinger (bottom).

Get Out

A multi-award-winning French animation.  You can read more about the film and its awards at the film's website.  Via Neatorama.

Creature of the night

Several weeks ago I featured a Monarch butterfly dress.  The ?cape pictured in the drawing above appears to be more moth-like.  I presume it was designed to be worn while flitting about under the nighttime street lights of Paris.

Found at Vintage Blog, where there's lots of interesting photos and artwork.

Monarchs use Earth's magnetic field to navigate

The two newly-hatched monarchs on my fingers above nectared in our yard for a while after release last summer, then eventually headed toward Mexico.  It has always been taken for granted that butterflies use solar orientation for navigation.  Now some recent research indicates that they, like birds, may also incorporate a system of geomagnetic detection:

The research team used fruit flies engineered to lack their own Cryptochrome (Cry1) molecule, a UV/blue-light photoreceptor already known to be involved in the insects' light-dependent magnetic sense. By inserting into those deficient flies butterfly Cry1... the researchers found that either form can restore... magnetic sense in a light-dependent manner, illustrating a role for both Cry types in magnetoreception.

The research is described in their paper, "Animal cryptochromes mediate magnetoreception by an unconventional photochemical mechanism," posted on-line in the journal Nature on January 24.

Glow-in-the-dark

The low-level radioactivity of tritium can be converted into fluorescent light energy ("litroenergy") by bringing it into contact with phosphorus.  By encapsulating both components inside microspheres, a Wisconsin company is developing glow-in-the-dark paints. 

The MPK packaging of tritium into microspheres that have a 5,000-pound crush resistance, makes this technology safe. In the case of release into the air, it essentially is released as hydrogen. The "soft" radioactive emissions from the tritium do not penetrate through the walls of the microsphere encapsulation... The cost to light up 8½ x 11 piece of plastic... with Litrospheres is about 35 cents.

Another company is using similar technology to produce luminescent lighting strips:

The Lunabright products activate after a few minutes' exposure to daylight or artificial light, then continue to glow for several hours.  The presumed use would be for safety- and security-related applications.

I'm not pimping either of the products or the companies - just thought the new technologies are kind of cool.

No blogging tonight

Brett Favre and I are still recovering from that Vikings-Saints game yesterday...

See you tomorrow.

Two films by the Lumière brothers (1895)

The top one depicts workers leaving the Lumière factory, and the second shows a train arriving at La Ciotat.

Found at The Clever Pup, which has "interesting articles for interesting people."

Paintings by a famous person

Not famous for being a painter, mind you.  Famous as an actor.  You can find his name (and a link to a gallery of additional paintings) at John Farrier's Zeray Gazette.

"No, I wasn't THAT Joker, you idiot!"

Via Americana Lodge.

Note:  This image was Photoshopped;  original here shows the appropriate photo being handed to him.  Hat tip to Seabass.

The Skálholt Map

The Skálholt Map... is less well known [than the controversial "Vinland" map], but has the advantage of being authentic. The first version was made in 1570 by Sigurd Stefánsson, a teacher in Skálholt, then an important religious and educational centre on Iceland. Stefánsson attempted to plot the American locations mentioned in the Vinland Saga on a map of the North Atlantic. Stefánsson’s original is lost; this copy dates from 1669, and was included in description of Iceland by Biørn Jonsen of Skarsaa...

Greenland is of course an island, but was considered by the Vikings to be a huge peninsula of a contiguous northern mainland, that continued to America, where are noted Helleland, Markland and Skraelingeland (after the Viking name for the natives). Marked vertically on the map’s southwestern edge is the name Promontorium Winlandiae (Promontory of Vinland)...

Text and image (click to enlarge) from the always-interesting Strange Maps.

David Kelly's autopsy results to be kept secret

Kelly, of course, was the biological weapons expert whose unexpected death was ruled a suicide.

Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, "I will probably be found dead in the woods."

Doubts have been raised as to whether the cutting of the ulnar artery, outdoors on a cold night, could have lead to his death, especially since there was little blood at the scene, and the knife found by his body had no fingerprints on it.

Now the results of his postmortem examination are to be kept secret:

In a draconian – and highly unusual – order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence...

The normal rules on post-mortems allow close relatives and ‘properly interested persons’ to apply to see a copy of the report and to ‘inspect’ other documents.  Lord Hutton’s measure has overridden these rules, so the files will not be opened until all such people are likely to be dead.

Last night, the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain the legal basis for Lord Hutton’s order.

Smells fishy.  Anyone who thinks it is the victim's family that is being "protected" is, I think, highly gullible.

(p.s. - did you know the word "gullible" is not in any standard or online dictionary?)

Zoomable paper map of London

When I lived in Chiswick for 6 months, I seldom went out without a map in my pocket.  This one is cleverly designed:

It unfolds from a little square into a bigger, four-sectioned overview of the city-center. Any of these four quarters can then be folded out... to reveal a larger, zoomed version of the plan.

Disguising a laptop inside a book

One presumes this was created more for hiding one's laptop on the shelf of an apartment rather than as a carrying case per se, because there are lots of cases available, probably with better padding.

Designed to look like a heavy, ancient leather-bound tome, the BookBook notebook sleeve is in fact a zip-open, padded leather-bound tome, a vintage hardback disguise for the MacBook.

Here's the part I think is clever:

...the zipper-pulls resemble, to the uninterested eye at least, bookmark tails...

Queen Eadgyth's tomb discovered

 When the tomb was opened in 2008 a lead coffin 70cm long was found inside, bearing an inscription that read: 'The rescued remains of Queen Eadgyth are in this sarcophagus, after the second renovation of this monument in 1510.' The lead box contained the bones of a woman aged in her thirties, wrapped in white silk.

In the 10th century, she was the equivalent of Princess Diana, but I had not heard of her until this morning.

The crumbling remains of Alfred the Great's granddaughter - a Saxon princess who married one of the most powerful men in Europe - have been unearthed more than 1,000 years after her death.  The almost intact bones of Queen Eadgyth - the early English form of Edith - were discovered wrapped in silk, inside a lead coffin in a German cathedral.

Queen Eadgyth lived at the dawn of the English nation.  Her grandfather Alfred the Great was the first monarch to style himself King of the Anglo Saxons, while her step-brother Athelstan was the first King of the English.

More details and pictures at the link.  Posted for my mom, for whom this queen is a namesake.  There have been very few famous Ediths (Roosevelt, Piaf, Wharton, Evans, Bunker, and Head are the best known)

An 8-year-old blues guitarist

Not your ordinary second-grader.

Via Bits and Pieces/

Dirty Harry meets Rain Man

An xkcd creation, via Miss Cellania.

Getting ready to eat some gold leaf

A man holds a spoon full of gold leaf, ready to eat it with his sushi at the "Seven Sushi Samurai" Sushi of the Year awards 2009 at the Olympia exhibition center in west London, on November 14, 2009. The gold leaf was an ingredient in last year's winner Mitsunori Kusakabe's entry. (LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images) 

From an interesting set of 37 photos at Boston.com's The Big Picture, presenting gold objects and aspects of gold mining and processing.

Watermill at Brantome, France

Looks like it's been converted into a ?restaurant.   Click to enlarge.

Found at Pixdaus, credited to Gaby31 without other identifying information.

Update:  Location identified by Corentin as Brantome, France.  Another photo here.

A simple math puzzle

A ball 13 inches in diameter has a 5-inch hole drilled through the center. How deep is the hole?

You can do this one in your head.  The answer is in the comment section.

Found at Futility Closet, where it was credited to Henry Dudeny.

Revisiting the Landmark books after ~50 years

Somewhere in one of our family photo albums is a picture of me as a child, curled up in a comfy chair reading The Barbary Pirates from the Landmark series.  I had a modest degree of impairment from the 1952 polio epidemic, which limited my participation in athletics, so as a youngster I spent a lot of time reading - a habit that was encouraged by the school I attended which gave us reading lists for every summer vacation. 

The books I remember best were from the Landmark series, so on a whim this past week I obtained three of them from our local library.  I started with The Barbary Pirates, and noted for the first time that the author was C. S. Forester - a name that would have meant nothing to me in the 1950s, but now one that I recognize as the author of the Horatio Hornblower series and The African Queen.  It's interesting that in the midst of that successful career he then took time to write a book for youngsters.  Rereading it now, I was again impressed.  It began with a history of the Barbary ("Berber") coast and a lucent explanation of why the U.S., which had just then become an independent nation, chose to get involved in naval warfare clear across the Atlantic.  He then described selected naval actions and brief bios of relevant personnel.  I read it in just a couple hours and decided it was a reasonably sophisticated book for a junior high school student.

Then I read Kit Carson and the Wild Frontier, written for seemingly a slightly lower grade level.  With my adult perspective, some of the aspects of his biography were less "heroic" than they would have appeared in the 1950s.  Carson started his career trapping beaver in Mexican territory (breaking an international treaty), bribed a local government official to do so, then trapped beaver on Indian land, then slaughtered bison including white ones (!) to make a showy tepee for his wife, and got an Arapaho woman "servant" (slave?) for her.  He was unable to read or write his name, money "meant nothing to him" so he spent it in sprees on return to towns, and his second wife was 15 years old.  He finished his career helping Fremont instigate sedition among the California settlers to overthrow their local government, then drove the Navaho out of Canyon de Chelly using a scorched earth policy destroying their corn fields and slaughtering their herds.  A true "American hero."

The third book was Andrew Carnegie and the Age of Steel.  Straightforward linear biography, written for an even younger target audience, so I zoomed through the whole book in an hour.  But I learned stuff, because I had never read anything about him before that.  I suppose to be quite pragmatic about it, I could have learned more from expending the same hour at Wikipedia and a few linked sites, but I did wind up with an understanding of why the Landmark books made such an impression on me as a child.

There were two Landmark series.  The main one covered U.S. history and biographies of Americans; those 122 books are listed at Library Thing.  The other was a World Landmark series; those 63 titles are listed at Bibliomania.  If you know a young person with an inquisitive mind and an interest in history, these books are not a bad place for him/her to explore.

Girls wearing denim - the "latest fad"

"Wellesley freshmen students gathered outside the Hathaway House Bookshop. (note girls wearing denim, the latest fad)."

Photo from 1953 by Lisa Larson, from the LIFE archives.  Click here for larger photo.

Warrantless wiretapping suit dismissed

A federal judge has dismissed a suit filed on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the surveillance of their phone calls and emails by the National Security Agency peformed without a court order.

In the ruling, issued late Thursday, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker held that the privacy harm to millions of Americans from the illegal spying dragnet was not a "particularized injury" but instead a "generalized grievance" because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and Internet service.

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional..."

More at the link.  I have no understanding of the legal argument involved, which was explained in a Reddit discussion thread -

The plaintiffs didn't have standing. One of the elements of standing is that you cannot bring a claim for a general grievance. An injury that is felt by everyone or almost everyone can theoretically be dealt with by the elected branches of government, and our constitution says that they are the ones who should deal with those types of problems. Because the alleged injury in this case was not particular to the plaintiffs, but instead was suffered by millions and millions of Americans, they did not have standing and the case had to be dismissed. It is disappointing but not surprising, as that is how standing always works...

- but I don't like the decision and its implications.

News video re Bible passages coded onto gunsights

I cited a BBC article on his subject several days ago.  General Petraeus has expressed his displeasure with this development:

General David Petraeus, the chief of the US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, called the inscriptions, which he said he only learnt about on Wednesday, "disturbing".

"This is a serious concern to me and the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan because it indeed conveys a perception that is absolutely contrary to what we have sought to do," he said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Thursday.

A NATO colonel has said they will also respond appropriately -

"We started to take action and notify both the ministry of defence and our chain of command and they have all taken action so that we don't purchase any more of these sights. 

More at the link. 

First thing let's do, let's... cut down all the trees

The photo above is labelled "Clearing in 'Ireland'", with the latter in quotes.  It comes from the William James Topley collection at the Library and Archives Canada.  Based on the source and the tree stumps in the background, the "Ireland" referred to here must be a community in Canada, not the mother country of Ireland.

It's quite a remarkable scene.  The man in front of the cabin has presumably been involved in the clearing of a vast area of forest, perhaps for a farm, or for the commercial harvesting of the timber.    Nowadays Americans (and presumably Canadians) tend to decry the clear-cutting of the Amazon, neglectful of (or ignorant of) the fact that their own homes and businesses are situated where once vast forests stood.   I know this happened in northern Minnesota in a virtual ecologic holocaust when the stands of white pine were first harvested in the late 19th century.

This photo came from the Flickr photostream of the Library and Archives Canada, in a subset labeled The Shamrock and the Maple Leaf, documenting the immigration of the Irish into Canada.  It's a visually interesting source that some Canadian blogger might want to make use of...

Pictured below, from the same set, "Group of [Irish] immigrant girls, Québec, 1908 / Groupe d'immigrantes, Québec, 1908".

Panoramic video of Haiti

The CNN website has three pages (click arrows upper right) of a panoramic video of the Haitian devastation. I can't embed the video here, so you'll need to go to the link.

What impresses me is that it's possible to pan around the scene 360 degrees while the video is in motion. Frankly the informational content of the video is rather modest; the vehicle moves too fast, so you need to pause and then pan, and the damage is what one would expect.  (I found it a bit unnerving when the CNN crew apparently decided they were important enought to swerve into the adjacent lane and blow their horn at oncoming traffic).

My mind boggles from the technology involved.  You can see the apparatus in the shadow of the man carrying it on page two.  It's not huge - just like having a big backpack with a thingy sticking up out of the top.  This is so much better than recording a conventional video where you have to look wherever the videographer chooses to look.  I would love to see one of these employed on a hiking trail, especially at Huashan, or El Caminito del Rey.

Jon Stewart calls Keith Olberman re his name-calling rants

I couldn't find Stewart's bit by itself on YouTube. This is Olberman's rather meek "mea culpa," which incorporates Stewart's spiel. Personally I think Olberman deserved the criticism.

Do you know how to pronounce "Van Gogh" correctly? How about Brett Favre?

Newspapers, publishers (and presumably some major websites) have "style books" designating a uniform code of accepted grammatical constructions for the business.  When a media company extends to the aural realm, it becomes necessary to also include a pronunciation guide.  Today I located part of such a guide from the BBC, which I presume has one of the best ones because of the remarkable breadth of their news coverage.

On the subject of Vincent Van Gogh, they offer the following:

But what is the real pronunciation of Van Gogh? Native English speakers can be heard saying Van GOFF (-v as in vet, -a as in pan, -g as in get, -f as in fit) or van GOH (-oh as in no).

In fact, most Dutch people pronounce his surname along the lines of Vun KHOKH (-v as in vet, -u as in bun, -kh as in Scottish loch) or Fun KHOKH (-f as in fit, -u as in bun, -kh as in Scottish loch)...

At the Pronunciation Unit, we don't expect non-native Dutch speakers to pronounce his name with a perfect Dutch accent. Instead, we recommend the established Anglicisation Van GOKH (-v as in vet, -g as in get, -kh as in Scottish loch) which is codified in numerous British English pronunciation dictionaries.

This recommendation represents a compromise between the aforementioned English pronunciations and the Dutch pronunciations.

The "How To Say..." page of the BBC's Magazine Monitor has additional offerings on such subjects as Morgan Tsvangirai, Dmitry Medvedev, David Bowie, and many others.

What is missing from the site are clickable audio files that allow one to hear the word rather than read the text.  That feature was incorporated into the surprisingly useful Miss Pronouncer.com website, which has assembled audio files of the names of people and places in Wisconsin.  An LATimes article explained the need for this site and the meticulous work that went into its creation - not just a presumption of what the correct pronunciation should be, but actual travel to places, interviews with local residents, and asking some subjects to pronounce their own names.  Trying to intuit the proper pronunciation can lead one astray:

The town of Genoa, Wis.? Forget the Italian version. It's "gen-NO-wah."
Berlin, Wis.? Make sure to draw out the first syllable: "BERRR-lin."

You can click these links to hear the pronunciation of Lac Courte Oreilles, Lake Butte des Morts, Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz, or Vikings quarterback Brett Favre.  There are many more at the Miss Pronouncer site.

I should also add that when I lived in Kentucky and we could identify out-of-state people because they would mispronounce town names like Versailles (in Kentucky it's ver-SALES) and Athens (say AY-thens).   More states should have web-based pronunciation guides.  If you know of any, please offer them in the comment section.

Addendum:  Bryan Klimt found one for Texas locales.

Lip window

This is certainly a remarkable body modification (click to enlarge photo).

I couldn't bring myself to track down the backstory at the sites watermarked on the photo, but as best I can tell from reading the discussion thread at Reddit, this is a Pyrex plug; presumably refraction of transmitted light explains the visualization of both top and bottom teeth through the plug.

Update:  While I was writing this post, I kept thinking that this modification reminded me of something, but I couldn't remember what it was.  Last night it came to me - the "Futches Reich" postal forgery produced during WWII for Operation Cornflakes (third stamp below, click to enlarge):

Some people refer to it as the "Hitler zombie" stamp.  Philatelists will already be familiar with it; others interested in reading about it should go to this outstanding website on propaganda and espionage philately.

Classic MS3TK

How To Be Well Groomed (1949)

Meet the typical teenager of 1949.

Lipoxeny after the "Murder in the cathedral"

After the "meddlesome priest" Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in 1170, those who viewed the body were witness to the process of lipoxeny* resulting in part from the 12th century view that bathing was either a sin, an indulgence, or an invitation to illness -

Layer upon layer of clothing was removed: a mantle, a surplice, a lamb’s wool coat, another and then a third, the black Benedictine robe, a shirt, and then a haircloth. When the final garments were removed, the lice that had lied in the clothes near to the warmth and nutrition of the body “boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron, and the onlookers burst into alternate weeping and laughter."

* "desertion of the host by a parasite."  The term typically refers to the parasite moving after reaching full maturity.  In this case the louse seeks a better host because this one is too cold.  Interestingly, the lice reportedly also move if the host gets too hot (i.e. develops a fever from typhus).

Birth of black bears being recorded on webcam

The North American Bear Center (in Ely, Minnesota) has a webcam positioned in the den of Lily, a pregnant black bear.  They are posting updates from the DenCam -

Lily is keeping over 14,000 viewers in suspense.  Among them are the researchers who stayed up all night logging bouts of labor and being amazed at Lily’s occasional body slams.  We suspect hard cramps are what make her slam her body around in the den so hard the camera shakes and booms.  We have never heard of such behavior.  Is this common during labor, or is it unique to Lily.   We first observed labor yesterday at 1:59 PM CST (we’re in Minnesota) as Lily lay on her back flexing the muscles of her head as she clenched her teeth for 41 minutes.

Now that she is in labor the traffic to the website is enormous, and it may be difficult to view the webcam feed live.

"Composite" rubies

This month's newsletter from my local gem and mineral club included a very informative article on composite rubies, from which I've excerpted the following:

Composite rubies must be distinguished from other rubies, and it is important to understand what types of rubies are now available in order to grasp the full picture. Today there are two general categories of gemstones, including ruby: treated and natural (that is, not enhanced in any way). Rubies have been routinely enhanced by a variety of techniques for almost half a century, and are well accepted within the trade. The most common type of treatment for ruby is heating, which improves the color and clarity to varying degrees. Today anyone buying a ruby should assume it’s been heated (and possibly treated in other ways) unless there is documentation from a respected laboratory confirming that it is entirely natural...

But "treated" rubies should not be confused with "rubies" made from multiple pieces of low-quality corundum fused together with tinted glass."  "Treated" rubies are single stones that have been improved in some way to look more attractive. Some were lovely even prior to treatment, the treatment simply having made them even more attractive. Composite rubies are an altogether different thing, much less durable, and of much lower value.

Composite rubies began to surface in the USA in 2008. By early 2009 they were appearing in disturbing numbers, often among military personnel returning home with sparkling "treasures" purchased at "bargain prices" while "close to the mines," never suspecting they were victims of a scam. Today they are being sold in department store chains, mass-merchandisers, on the internet, television shopping channels, and at auction. In most cases, the prices seem to be "bargains" by comparison to the cost of other rubies sold in other stores, when, in fact, nothing is farther from the truth. Since they are not genuine rubies, there can be no comparison...

More at the link.  The photo above shows the air bubbles in a composite "ruby."

And while researching this, I encountered a story this week that a class action lawsuit is being filed against Macy's for selling glass-filled "rubies" and other bogus gemstones.  The world of diamonds and colored gemstones is a minefield for the unwary - enter with care.

A resurgence of rickets in Britain

A British Medical Journal article attributes the return of the disease to lifestyle changes which have decreased exposure to sunlight:

Scientists say that rickets is becoming “disturbingly common” among British children. The disease is caused by chronic vitamin D deficiencies, which can be triggered by long periods out of natural sunlight and a poor diet... More than 20 new cases are discovered every year in Newcastle alone... Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computer... Fifty years ago many children would have been given regular doses of cod liver oil, but this practice has all but died out...

Half of all adults in Britain are estimated to suffer vitamin D deficiency in the winter and spring — one in six severely so, with the problem worse in Scotland and the North of England. Asian populations and individuals who cover much of their skin for religious reasons are also at increased risk.

There will be some disagreement as to whether the proper remediation is vitamin D supplementation or encouraging more sunlight exposure (or giving the kids laptops).

Bottlenose dolphins create mud rings

The natural world is endlessly fascinating.  The clip above is from the first episode (Challenges of Life) of the new BBC series Life.  You'll recognize the narrator.

I can't resist appending this quotation:

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

You'll recognize the source.

Via Reddit.

The NYT will set up a "paywall"

The announcement came this week:

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.

I have enjoyed browsing the New York Times; for those unfamiliar with the site, their interface is one of the most efficient and user-friendly I have encountered (go to the skimmer at this link, then navigate via the right sidebar). 

Whether I will pay for access depends on the cutoff point at which the NYT sets the paywall, and whether it affects NYT affiliates such as the excellent Big Picture at Boston.com.  Ezra Klein at WaPo ponders what effect the NYT move will have upon blog readers -

But what to do about blogs? Already, much of what blogs do is summarize, quote or otherwise relay information that's tucked inside a long newspaper story that busy readers don't have time to find or read. This will increase that market: A blogger with a few subscriptions can distill the information from the newspapers that readers don't have subscriptions to.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.  I'm not going to worry about it one way or the other.

People ages 1-100

My favorites are 83, 91, and 96.

WWII war gas posters

From the archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.  It's an amazing photostream of thousands of the favorite photos of the archivists at the museum.

Three suicides at Guantanamo

The deaths of three prisoners at the Guantanamo detention facility in 2006 have been the subject of a study by faculty and students at Seton Hall University.   The study asks how prisoners kept in isolation could coordinate a simultaneous "mass suicide" by doing the following...

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

...while under observation by personnel and cameras.  The commander of the facility announced that the deaths were not just ordinary suicides, but a form of "asymmetric warfare" against the United States.

Two of the three dead detainees were Saudis and one was Yemeni; they had been detained for years without charges; one of them was 17 years old at the time he was detained and 22 when he died; and they had participated in several of the hunger strikes at the camp to protest the brutality, torture and abuse to which they were routinely subjected.  Perversely, one of the three victims had been cleared for release earlier that month.

Obama's Department of Justice has filed a brief demanding dismissal of the case filed by the parents of the victims, effectively saying -

We can kidnap your sons from anywhere in the world, far away from any "battlefield," ship them thousands of miles away to an island-prison, abuse and torture them mercilessly, and when we either drive them to suicide or kill them, you have no right to any legal remedy or even any recourse to find out what happened.

The most extensive discussion of this situation will appear in the March issue of Harper's, but is available to read online now.

Update: More on this subject at The Daily Dish.

"Killer Zeppelin" not used against Napoleon

Here's an interesting excerpt from The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army. (Stephan Talty, Crown Publishers, New York)

“The Russian commander even requested a secret weapon that was to have been deployed early in the war [of 1812]: a gigantic balloon designed to float over the approaching French and detonate, vaporizing the enemy in one blinding flash...

Rostopchin, the military governor of Moscow, was an enthusiastic supporter of the death zeppelin and met with its inventor, a German named Franz Leppich. “This invention will render the military arts obsolete,” he wrote Alexander...

The device, however, had trouble getting into the air as its wings kept breaking off during tests, plunging the balloon to the ground.  It never saw action in the campaign.”

The term zeppelin is being used a bit too loosely by the author, since it really should refer to rigid airships of the 20th century.  Nevertheless, I find it interesting that hot-air balloon technology was adapted so quickly to warfare; I had not been aware of its use in that regard until the American Civil War in the mid 19th century. 

And the deployment proposed for the Napoleon/Russian confrontation wasn't just simple troop spotting - it was to be an airburst weapon sort of like the balloon in the movie Black Sunday.  One wonders what combustible would have been used it in...

Image credit of early 19th century balloons.