Sea-dwelling reptiles hundreds of millions of years ago were warmblooded, according to a new study led by Lyon University. It’s the clearest sign that some ancient reptiles, unlike modern ones, had a metabolism similar to that of mammals. Oxygen atoms in fossil teeth show plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (ten-foot-long Stenopterygius quadriscissus) had internal temperatures of 95 to 102 degrees Fahrenheit, even in chilly water.
Source: “Resolution of Body Temperature by Some Mesozoic Marine Reptiles,” Aurélien Bernard et al., Science, June 11, 2010
Most of you know the backstory about the rarest bird in the United States. Here is an update -
Three years ago, I began working with Nancy Tanner on a book about her husband’s fieldwork. In June 2009, she discovered a faded manila envelope in the back of a drawer at her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. In it were some ivory-bill images. At her invitation, I started going through them.
One of the first things I found was a glassine envelope containing a 2 1/4- by 3 1/4-inch negative. Holding it up to the light, I realized it was of the nestling ivory-bill from the Singer Tract—an image I had never seen. I quickly found another negative, then another and another. My hands began to shake. It turned out that Tanner had taken not 6 pictures on that long-ago March 6, but 14. As a group, they show the young bird not frozen in time, but rather clambering over Kuhn like a cat on a scratching post, frightened but vital.
The rest of the story is in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine, or at the link, which has an additional half-dozen photos, which have never before been available to the public.
Posted by Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi
Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Americani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student.
Convertere instrumentis computatoriis ex Latina difficile est et intellegamus grammatica nostra non sine culpa esse. Autem Latina singularis est quia plurimi libri lingua Latina iampridem scripti erant et pauci novi posthac erunt. Multi in alias linguas conversi sunt et his conversis utamur ut nostra instrumenta convertendi edoceamus. Cum hoc instrumentum facile convertat libros similes his ex quibus edidicit, nostra virtus convertendi libros celebratos (ut Commentarios de Bello Gallico Caesaris) iam bona est.
Proximo tempore locum Latinum invenies vel auxilio tibi opus eris cum litteris Latinis, conare hunc.
A late-summer immigrant to Wisconsin from more southerly regions; does not overwinter this far north. I photographed this one this afternoon at the Grady Tract of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. I would love to document a life cycle on this beautiful creature; perhaps next spring I can spot one ovipositing on some plantain.
Personally, I'll continue to just pour the yolk from one half of the shell to the other half - but this does fit into the "clever" category of the blog.
A case from 2006, nicely filmed and documented, and well worth watching for those who don't mind viewing internal anatomy and some enormous parasites. The last one minute of the film is enormously gratifying after watching the previous part...
A rather bleak painting ascribed to Jan de Baen, depicting a famous historical event in Dutch history (full title: The corpses of the de Witt brothers, Jan and Cornelis, hanging on the Groene Zoodje on the Vijverberg).
I can't figure out what the figure in the lower right corner is supposed to be doing.
Addendum: MJ Valente found the following information at the website of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam:
"De Witt held a key position in Dutch politics, being a kind of Prime Minister avant la lettre. In that role, he was repeatedly in conflict with the Orange faction, led by Prince William III of Orange (later King of England during the so-called Glorious Revolution), who felt menaced in his authority. When De Witt came to power, a collective aversion to monarchical power dominated among the Dutch people. But things changed in 1672, the ‘Disaster Year’, when the Dutch Republic was attacked by a large alliance of hostile countries. Popular feeling suddenly turned in favor of William III, and mistrust grew against Johann de Witt and his brother Cornelis.
The latter, who was also an influential political figure, got imprisoned in The Hague on false accusations of treason. On 20 August 1672, when Johan was visiting his brother in prison, the brothers were dragged out of the building and lynched outside by an angry mob. The rage seemed to be spontaneous, but was in fact well-organized and planned by Orangist militiamen. The frenzy was so immense that the De Witts were not just killed, but literally ripped apart by the inflamed mass. Body parts like heart and fingers were removed to be exposed as souvenirs, while other parts were roasted and eaten(!) by the hysterical crowd, in a bizarre outburst of cannibalism. Their corpses were eventually hung upside down on a scaffold nearby. The disgusting sight was captured in this dark painting, whose artist (attributed to Jan de Baen) seems to have witnessed the lynching and presents us his gruesome experience in this early form of visual journalism."
And Rob from Amersfoort adds the following:
1672 was indeed called the Year of Disaster, when The Netherlands where attacked by England, France ànd Germany.
The scaffold was located near the prison where Johan's brother was held (the Gevangenpoort, a building with a city gate, it still exists). On the other side of the road the Dutch center of government (the Binnenhof) is located (with the parliament and the office of the PM).
I wrote a essay about Johan de Witt when I was in high school. Watching this scene always makes me feel sad, he was a good man. This is an example of what happens when people are stirred up by populists. Remarkable is that in 2002 the same thing happened at the same location after a famous politician was shot; a crowd of angry people gathered near the Binnenhof, ready to lynch the first politician they would see ...
NB the head of the first Dutch PM, a man born in Amersfoort, was chopped of inside the Binnenhof, after he was falsely accused by the ruling prince of Orange. The latter was the grand-uncle of prince Willem III who stirred up the lynch mob in 1672. Later Willem III became king of England, so for him it worked out fine.
"The Milwaukee airport has a sign “Recombobulation Area.” What does it mean? I figured out the answer only from an etymological point of view, though I never suspected that etymology can be of any practical use. To be discombobulated means to be in a state of confusion. The word must have been produced in imitation of some other dis-verb or participle. Since this coinage is a bastard, lacking respectable parentage, the dis-less opposite does not exist. No linguist will object: after all, one can be disturbed and disconcerted but not turbed or concerted and even dismembered without much prospect of being membered (re-membered) again. People at Milwaukee took off the prefix and probably assumed that most people would guess that, if discombobulated means “confused, perplexed,” combobulated should mean “disconfused,” that is, “having a full grasp of one’s sense of direction.” Then (by back formation) they coined the verb combobulate and a verbal noun (combobulation)..."
This is described as "West Saxon literary dialect of Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon)." Thankfully with subtitles (which you'll probably need fullscreen to read). It's interesting how some words are virtually unchanged since the 11th century - but I doubt I could get by were I suddenly to become a Minnesota Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Re the absence of "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen", I found this at Wikipedia:
The doxology of the prayer is not contained in Luke's version, nor is it present in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, representative of the Alexandrian text, but is present in the manuscripts representative of the Byzantine text...
High divorce rates, rising co-habitation and a tendency to delay marriage are main factors.
Marriage rates among young adults have been dropping for decades. But data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau show that for the first time the proportion of people between the ages of 25 and 34 who have never been married exceeded those who were married in 2009—46.3% versus 44.9%...
Officials point to myriad reasons, including a lack of ducks, aging Baby Boomers, urbanization, time and access constraints and the simple fact that hunting ducks can be more difficult and expensive than hunting other species...
The Portsmouth Sinfonia was an orchestra founded by a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art in Portsmouth, England, in 1970. The Sinfonia had an unusual entrance requirement, in that players had to either be non-musicians, or if a musician, play an instrument that was entirely new to them. Among the founding members was one of their teachers, English composer Gavin Bryars. The orchestra started as a one-off, tongue-in-cheek performance art ensemble but became a cultural phenomenon over the following ten years, with concerts, record albums, a film and a hit single. They last performed publicly in 1979... The only rules were that everyone had to come for rehearsals and that people should try their best to get it right and not intentionally try to play badly.
A hat tip to reader Shackleford Hurtmore for alerting me to this remarkable group.
"Jesus Martinez-Frias, a planetary geologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, pioneered research into megacryometeors in January 2000 after ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds (3.0 kg) rained on Spain out of cloudless skies for ten days.
The process that creates megacryometeors is not fully understood, mainly in relation with the atmospheric dynamics necessary to produce them. They may have a similar mechanism of formation to that producing hailstones. Scientific studies show that their composition matches normal tropospheric rainwater for the areas in which they fall. In addition, megacryometeors display textural variations of the ice and hydro-chemical and isotopic heterogeneity, which evidence a complex formation process in the atmosphere. It is known that they do not come from airplane toilets because the large chunks of ice that occasionally do fall from airliners are distinctly blue due to the disinfectant used. However, others have speculated that these ice chunks must have fallen from aircraft fuselages after plain water ice accumulating on those aircraft through normal atmospheric conditions has simply broken loose. However, similar events occurred prior to the invention of aircraft...
More than 50 megacryometeors have been recorded since the year 2000. They vary in mass between 0.5 kilograms (1.1 lb) to more than 200 kilograms (440 lb). One in Brazil weighed in at 220 kilograms (490 lb)."
It's fitting that one of the earliest known depictions of quicksand comes from one of the earliest known comic strips—a 230-foot-long piece of linen embroidered with wool yarn nearly 1,000 years ago. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, and in one panel, Harold, later King of England, pauses to rescue a pair of soldiers who have become trapped in the mud near Mont St. Michel...
"Allegedly they were sourced from an endangered strain in South Africa and have been cultivated for the past seven years, now available for limited commercial purchase in Europe. They have the same genetic makeup as a strawberry, but are white with red seeds and taste like pineapples."
Blackflies are being blamed for an upsurge in the number of people experiencing severe reactions after being bitten by insects. In some cases, victims have suffered grotesquely swollen limbs, requiring hospital treatment with intravenous antibiotics...
The insects are a major nuisance in North America as they are a scourge to livestock, and many states operate control programmes based on spraying pesticides. In Africa, the insect plays a key role in the transmission of the parasite that causes river blindness...
Stuart Hine, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum, said: "Blackflies are quite pernicious. Their mouth parts are scissor-like and they lacerate the skin and then suck the blood. They inject an anaesthetic so after the initial bite you can't feel it. When you scratch it and germs get in, then you can get a serious infection...
"By lunchtime, my leg was so swollen, an occupational health nurse feared I had deep-vein thrombosis and sent me to an accident and emergency ward. I was limping heavily and my leg was getting bigger by the hour... The next day when I returned to A&E my leg was too big to pull up my trousers..."
Personally I've always dreaded deerflies more than blackflies. No post about blackflies would be complete without including a video of the famous Canadian folk song by Wade Hemsworth, based on his true-life personal experience. The lyrics are in the pulldown at the YouTube link.
Many blogs today are citing some of the results of the U. S. Religious Knowledge Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life. Most discussions seem to focus on the finding that atheists and agnostics as a group scored higher on the survey than did persons with affiliations to conventional religious groups. The Executive Summary discusses this result and the other observations from the survey.
The Pew site also offers a abbreviated quiz for the general public (15 questions, compared to 32 on the actual survey). My results are shown above; I missed just one question (on the Jewish Sabbath - forgive me, Ira!). I should think that most TYWKIWDBI readers will do just as well, because the questions do not really require knowledge of dogma or doctrine - just simple knowledge about Mother Theresa and Bible stories and Ramadan and such. What surprises me is how poorly the public does on what seem to be basic knowledge questions. Below are the results (sorted by religious affiliation) for the abbreviated quiz, which I invite you to try at this link.
More details at Cracked. Wikipedia points out the essential difference between an inverted cross and an inverted crucifix:
In Roman Catholicism the Petrine Cross is not seen as Satanic in any way. However, an inverted crucifix (a Latin cross with an artistic depiction of the crucified body of Christ upon it) is seen as immensely disrespectful, and could be used to represent Satanic forces. The distinction between a Cross of Peter and upturned Crucifix is sometimes obscured, leading to confusion about the acceptability of each symbol. This was seen when controversy arose over the aforementioned Papal visit to Israel; pictures of the Pope sitting before a Petrine Cross were widely circulated on the Internet in an attempt to prove that the Catholic Church is associated with Satanism and the Antichrist.
Erich Schuller, of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, said his lab has recently carried out tests in which they used brand new steins and hit them against human skulls. "The bones often will break, but we haven't been able to break the steins," Schuller told SPIEGEL. "A hard hit with a stein packs more than 8,500 newtons of power -- the human head in the parietal region breaks with about 4,000 newtons."
One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded.
More at the link. I didn't know what to think of it. Today the story was picked up by the Telegraph - re British nuclear weapons sites:
He said: "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted - both then and now - to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation."
The testimony was supposed to take place today. I'll defer any commentary, except to say I'd be delighted if it's true.
"...the complex eyes of the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) perceive more colours than you can imagine."
The comment probably refers to the fact that these creatures can see ultraviolet and infrared. Awesome. (I wonder if that is why at least this one seems to have asymmetric eyes and curious stomata in the globe?)
"I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole...
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said, "I don't know where they're going to get all this money, because we're running out of rich people in this country." Actually, we have more billionaires here in the U.S. than all the other countries in the top ten combined, and their wealth grew 27% in the last year. Did yours?
Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 -- just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane...
Maybe the worst whiner of all: Stephen Schwarzman, #69 on Forbes' list of richest Americans, compared Obama's tax hike to "when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Wow..."
A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system...
Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I...
Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.
“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension...
More at the link, although it doesn't explain how the company will make a profit running the libraries. Presumably they receive a fee from the state, and then run the library for less than the fee amount. (?)
The nest, atop a 130-foot light pole at Hwy. 169 and Crosstown Hwy. 62, has been home to the distinctive black-and-white raptors for the past five years. When workers began replacing nearby poles last spring, the sight fueled many concerned calls to the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and the nest got a reprieve... MnDOT held off removing the pole until the adults and this year's three offspring were gone. The birds emptied the nest last month and headed back to South America.
The nest is 4 feet across and 2 feet deep. More details at the Star Tribune.
Eric Fischer has a remarkable Flickr set of over a hundred city maps which plot population according to race and/or ethnicity: "Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000."
Pictured above are Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota and Madison, Wisconsin.
"But the superstitious noted that the death of Prince Albert Victor on a Thursday broke a remarkable spell or curse which had hung over the present royal family of England for more than a century and three-quarters — bringing about the death of all the prominent members of that family on Saturdays. William III died Saturday, March 18, 1702; Queen Anne died Saturday, August 1, 1714; George I died Saturday, June 10, 1727; George II died Saturday, October 25, 1760; George III died Saturday, January 29, 1820; George IV died Saturday, June 26, 1830; the Duchess of Kent died Saturday, March 16, 1861; the Prince Consort, husband of Queen Victoria and grandfather of the recent deceased Prince Albert Victor, died Saturday, December 14, 1861; Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, Victoria’s second daughter, and sister of Albert, died Saturday, December 14, 1878..."
– William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
One wonders whether the list is simply selectively compiled from the obits of a huge family, or whether circumstances of the era made it more "convenient" for deaths to occur on Saturdays.
Anyone who has read The Kite Runner knows the importance of kites in the lives of Afghan children. This week, the U.S. Agency for International Development arranged an event to give away kites to children.
But the policemen appeared to ignore her. Asked why one of his officers was loading his truck with kites, Maj. Farouk Wardak, head of the criminal investigation division of the 16th Police District, said, "It's OK. He's not just a policeman, he's my bodyguard."
The district police chief, Col. Haji Ahmad Fazli, insisted on taking over from the American contractors the job of passing out the kites. He denied that his men were kite thieves.
"We are not taking them," he said. "We are flying them ourselves."
The rest of the story is at the Star Tribune link. Ironically, the kite festival was being conducted "to promote the use of Afghanistan's justice system and increase public legal knowledge." What a totally f***ed-up country.
Several weeks ago I wrote a post about chopines, based on an intriguing photo with a long-distance view of the footwear. This week I found the much better image above; the items are dated ~1600, and come from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum:
These chopines are made of pine-wood. The wood is covered in kid leather with punched decoration and figured silk underlay. This pair are fairly modest. More extreme versions were over 50 cms high. Chopines were based on the shoes worn at Turkish baths. They were first worn by Venetian prostitutes and fashionable Venetian aristocrats then adopted them. The chopine was originally a form of overshoe, which is why it has no back. Later versions could be worn as either overshoes or on their own.
I've been blogging the "severed feet washing ashore" saga in the Pacific Northwest since its onset, so for completeness I should probably report on other similar incidents. A hat tip therefore to reader Djinny for notifying me that a a jogger found a boot with a foot and part of a leg floating in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga. A later report indicated that a body wearing military style clothing, but missing a leg and foot has subsequently been located in the river.
Photo closeup of a Grevy's Zebra at the Frankfurt zoo by Fredrik Von Erichsen//Getty Images, via The Big Picture (from a nice set of 57 animal photos).
More details at the Telegraph and at the New York Times. Now for my personal context...
In the late 1950s my family went to Florida for a winter vacation and visited the Daytona Beach area. In those days it was permissible to drive one's car on the beach [?is that still true?]. Because the car was not on a highway, my father decided it would be o.k. for me to steer the car while sitting on his lap. As we zipped down the beach, he told me we were going to get too close to an ice-cream vendor's shack, and told me to turn steer toward the left.
At about seven years of age, I had no experience steering cars, but plenty of experience steering a boat (those of you who grew up in the upper Midwest will understand...). The boats we rented at the lake were 16' wooden boats with 7.5 horsepower Evinrude outboard motors. Because it was a rear-mounted outboard, to turn the boat to the left, you pushed the tiller to the right.
And that's what I did with the car, turning the steering wheel to the right. Dad fortunately still had control of the brakes. I would have forgotten all about the incident, but was reminded of it on many occasions as I grew older.
The sukka, a temporary outdoor dwelling, is constructed annually by practicing Jewish people during the Festival of Tabernacles. An autumn celebration, the holiday and its dwelling have many religious and mystical associations. One unusual aspect of the week-long festivity is dwelling--eating, studying, and sleeping--in a sukka, defined as a temporary edifice where you feel the wind and can view the stars through its shabby, temporary construction.
Innovative upholders of this ancient Jewish tradition are hosting a Sukka City contest in New York City, where they deployed some creatively modulated and adorned booths. The exhibit stands in Union Square Park until the close of the holiday, September 21st.
Of interest to us, of course, is the tensegrity-based booths that were erected this year. A stand out is the proposed bamboo structure, a 5 modules of a 3 strut tensegrity mast called "Pillar of Cloud, Pillar of Fire" by Andrew Sternad, John Kleinschmidt. They write in their artistic statement,
The structural system is inherently economical and achieves a height of 20 cubits with the absolute minimum of material. Additionally, the entire structure can be constructed horizontally on the ground and rotated up into position. It can also collapse into a single bundle with the removal of certain key components. The structure can be thought of as a stack of self-supporting modules, each made up of three rigid poles and a series of cables. The module resting on the ground uses perforated tubular steel poles (which contain led strip lights and mounted spotlights) and steel cable. The modules above together represent the roof and use only organic materials: bamboo poles and hemp rope. Sheer nylon fabric stretches taut between selected facets of the structure.
And the winner is: "In Tension" by the Brooklyn firm SO-IL won a prize for best sukka. It is a 3 strut tensegrity with mesh walls and seats inside. A local newspaper razzed the entry, objecting that SO-IL already displayed this structure elsewhere. See here.
While these booths may not meet traditional Jewish specifications, it is exciting to see the tensegrity structures deployed by modern people adhering to such a venerable, ancient faith. What next? A tensegrity pagoda?
The group of Munkiana Devil Rays were spotted in Baja California Sur, Mexico, by German conservation photographer Florian Schulz. He described how he was able to capture his jaw-dropping image named Flight of the Rays: "During an aerial expedition I came across something I had never seen before. Not even my pilot, who has surveyed this area for 20 years, had seen anything like it. As we got closer we started to discover its nature: an unprecedented congregation of rays. The group was as thick as it was wide, all heading towards the same direction.
People are always terrified of change. The idea was to try to keep everything just the way it was … not to let the strings become untuned. Capitalism untunes all the strings. Capitalism is, as Appleby says, a relentless revolution. Joseph Schumpeter, the columnist, in 1942 defined capitalism as creative annihilation — it wipes out entire industries. There’s always a momentum for something new...
"Freeway signs warning of upcoming drug checkpoints are actually a ruse: the local sheriff sets up a checkpoint at the next offramp and searches panicky motorists who pull off to ditch their stashes. An accompanying map on the original post gives the locations of similar checkpoints all over the USA, and warns, "if you see one of these signs, don't fucking exit.""
Found at 420 Tribune, which discusses the ethics and legality of such ruses and searches. Via Boing Boing.
"German prospector Bernhard Otto Holtermann with a mass of nearly all solid gold, Hill End, New South Wales, 1872. The gold weighed 630lb & valued at 12,000 pounds."
...some of the 700 or so members of the hospitality business who have either committed to, or are contemplating, legal action against TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel review site, over what they regard as unfair reports...
The Guardian spoke this week to a hotelier in the south-west of England who said he believed his business had been targeted on TripAdvisor by a sacked member of staff. The unfavourable review claimed the person had been bitten by fleas and seen rats...
Central to any case will be whether TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Massachusetts, and a part of the online travel firm Expedia, can be held liable as its business is based on publishing user-generated content – the opinions of others...
...a spokeswoman [for TripAdvisor] said: "We believe our more than 35m reviews and opinions are authentic and honest from real travellers, which is why we enjoy tremendous user loyalty and growth. If the reviews people read didn't paint an accurate picture users would not keep coming back." All reviews were screened by online tools and "quality assurance specialists" investigated "suspicious" ones. Hoteliers had the chance to post a response to reviews. TripAdvisor said it advised travellers to disregard the "anomalies that appear overly critical or overly complimentary".
While there could be some "sour grapes" responses from establishments getting mixed or bad reviews, it seems possible that if there are a limited number of establishments in a town or resort area, someone wanting to help their own situation could leave bad reviews for their competitors.
Thanks to its shared border with Canada, the Detroit River was notoriously hard to control. Historians estimate that up to 75 percent of the alcohol consumed in the United States during the Prohibition was transported by ordinary people (not just gangsters!) between Windsor, Canada, and Detroit. One of the more elaborate bootlegging devices was an cable tunnel that ferried submarine "torpedoes" filled with alcohol across the river. While customs guards focused on people smuggling alcohol under their clothes, this ingenious contraption quietly reeled in forty cases of liquor an hour.
Via Popular Science, where there is a gallery on The Science of Prohibition, 1919-1933.
American Book Review has listed their choices for the top 100 first lines. The ranking would of course be subjective and largely irrelevant, but it's fun to browse the list. Here are the first sixteen:
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Kneejerk impression: fake. But it's real, done by using layered liquids of different densities. The details are at Cooking with Family and Friends:
Take a shaker tin and fill it 3/4 with ice. Add 2 ounces each of Malibu, Vodka, and Triple Sec first. Tilt the tin and add 2 ounces Grenadine. Then add 2 ounces OJ and 2 ounces Sweet and Sour. Finally topping it off with 2 ounces Blue Curacao.
A great time to be out walking. Shown above: a New England aster, common in the fields, parks, and farmland margins around here, and a Crescent (not sure if it's a Pearl Crescent or a Northern Crescent), nectaring on what I believe is another type of aster.
“A young worker mends army uniforms in America. Her sailor suit-style is typical of childrenswear at the time. Boys would have worn a similar top, but with trousers. The bows which girls wore in their hair became known as ‘flappers’ because of the way they fell onto the head. The name would stick with this generation, as they grew up in the Twenties.”
Scanned and quoted from the book “Decades of Fashion” by Harriet Worsley. Posted at Beautiful Century, viaEdwardian Era.
Apparently it's real, because after a search I was able to find one other photo of a similar starfish, listed as Daytona Beach 2004. Photo credit for this one to TheMarque.
Addendum: A hat tip to Mnkyfuc for identifying this as Astropecten articulatus (described as "very common" at 20-30m depth on the continental shelf off Charleston, S.C.). More pix at the link.
Text from Ordinary Finds, where there is always something interesting. Embedded above is the aforementioned Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity [a hat tip to Ryan for identifying the conductor as Taijiro Iimori leading the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra]. I really love Isao Tomita's performance of The Planets on a Moog synthesizer, which I ought to blog sometime.
If I wait, I'll forget it. Here it his rendition of the Jupiter movement (not a very good video re sound or visuals, but it's all I could find):
I'm not questioning the incident, which was widely covered in the blogosphere and mainstream news services today. My question focuses on the wording of the title. For the discussion, I'll defer to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words:
Q: Am I right in thinking that “three troops were wounded” not only sounds daft but is incorrect when what is meant is “three soldiers”? “Three troopers”, yes, if they were part of a regiment that is or was mounted.
A: The traditional position that you are likely to find in reference books is that troop is a collective term for a group of people of unspecified number (it’s from medieval Latin troppus, a flock, and is the same word as troupe for a theatrical group). You can refer to more than one troop in the sense of a set of such collections (“the jamboree was attended by several dozen scout troops”) and use troops as a generalised collective term for the forces...
The usage of troops that you refer to is actually not that new. For more than two centuries writers have used it for a countable number of individuals, provided the number is large and not closely specified...
I’m told that singular troop for an individual has been recorded in US military slang from World War Two. People who were in the services during the 1950s and 1960s confirm it was then common in the US Army (“Yo troop! Take ten troops and police up that latrine!”)...
Troop has developed into a singular and small plural count noun for several reasons. There are now many more women in the various US armed forces and this presents gender-related difficulties in finding suitable terms for individuals (serviceman does not work any longer). More significantly, it’s been difficult to find an inclusive term for a single member of the combined services — soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and so on... Combatant is almost always pejorative (“enemy combatant”). Not least, troop is usefully short for fitting into headlines...
