National Geographic now has a tumblr

 

With photos like the one of the West Virginia coal miner above (1938), by Anthony Stewart.

The tumblr is here.

Digitizing the Vatican library

YouTube link.

Et aujourd’hui, la Bibliothèque numérise, pour rendre ses collections encore plus accessibles. Un projet d’une ampleur considérable: 82.000 manuscrits, 500 pages en moyenne par manuscrit, 150Mb par page scannée… A la fin du projet, cela représentera 45 Pétabytes de données. Ça me donne le vertige.

 The video is in English.  Text from Curiosités de Titam.

Hoods for Holy Week

Penitents take part in the procession of "La Paz" (The Peace) brotherhood during Holy Week in the Andalusian capital of Seville, southern Spain, April 5, 2009. (REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo)

A boy carried a cross and wore a hood as he prepared to take part in a procession at a school on the eve of Christianity's Holy Week in Seville, Spain, Friday.  Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters.  Source.

It's interesting to note the degree to which the symbolism of the hood has been co-opted for Americans by its historical misuse.  Every time I look at the top photo, the candle looks like a club.

More fun with a laser pointer

YouTube link.

TL;DR - some birds will also chase laser light.

"In Voluptas Mors" by Philippe Halsman

Via hera11 and A London Salmagundi.

Addendum:  Hat tips to reader Artur for identifying the photographer, and to The Dour Salmon for noting that this tableau vivant "skull" was incorporated into publicity posters for The Silence of the Lambs:

Debunking the "blood eagle"

Over a period of several years I incorporated into some of my lectures a discussion of the "blood eagle" maneuver supposedly devised by the Vikings.  Now a Smithsonian article says that this (in)famous ritual is probably apocryphal:

One does not have to search too far in the secondary sources to uncover explicit descriptions of what execution by the blood eagle entailed. At its most elaborate... the ritual involved several distinct stages. First the intended victim would be restrained, face down; next, the shape of an eagle with outstretched wings would be cut into his back. After that...(continued below the fold)...
...his ribs would be hacked from his spine with an ax, one by one, and the bones and skin on both sides pulled outward to create a pair of “wings” from the man’s back. The victim, it is said, would still be alive at this point to experience the agony of what Turner terms “saline stimulant”—having salt rubbed, quite literally, into his vast wound. After that, his exposed lungs would be pulled out of his body and spread over his “wings,” offering witnesses the sight of a final bird-like “fluttering” as he died...

That there are some problems with these claims will not surprise anyone who has studied this period of history; sources for the ninth- and 10th-century Scandinavian world are few, mostly late and open to interpretation...

Frank goes on to a learned discussion of the Norse love of gnomic poetry and of how these lines may best be translated—much depends, apparently, on the instrumental force of the ablative. Her view, though, is clearly stated: “An experienced reader of skaldic poetry, looking at [the] stanza in isolation from its saga context, would have trouble seeing it as anything but a conventional utterance, an allusion to the eagle as a carrion beast, the pale bird with red claws perched on and slashing the back of the slain: ‘Ívarr had Ella’s back scored by an eagle.’ ” And the image of an eagle’s claws, she concludes, is conventionally paired with the suffering of martyrs in texts written by Christian scribes throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period...

There are many kind of families...

Source unknown, via Ka-Ching!

Wryneck at slow shutter speed

Image from Super Punch, via A London Salmagundi ("it’s a wryneck, Jynx torquilla, a weird kind of woodpecker.")  Maybe instead of pecking, it drills into the wood.

Happy Easter

Perhaps she saw " Night of the Lepus."

Photo from tuscalooser, via Suddenly.

Education Awards on Google App Engine

Posted by Andrea Held, Google University Relations

Cross-posted with Google Developers Blog

Last year we invited proposals for innovative projects built on Google’s infrastructure. Today we are pleased to announce the 11 recipients of a Google App Engine Education Award. Professors and their students are using the award in cloud computing courses to study databases, distributed systems, web mashups and to build educational applications. Each selected project received $1000 in Google App Engine credits.

Awarding computational resources to classroom projects is always gratifying. It is impressive to see the creative ideas students and educators bring to these programs.
Below is a brief introduction to each project. Congratulations to the recipients!

John David N. Dionisio, Loyola Marymount University
Project description: The objective of this undergraduate database systems course is for students to implement one database application in two technology stacks, a traditional relational database and on Google App Engine. Students are asked to study both models and provide concrete comparison points.

Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, North Carolina State University
Project description: Advanced Distributed Systems Class
The goal of the project is to allow the students to learn distributed system concepts by developing real distributed system management systems and testing them on real world cloud computing infrastructures such as Google App Engine.

Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University
Project description: WeScheme is a programming environment that runs in the Web browser and supports interactive development. WeScheme uses App Engine to handle user accounts, serverside compilation, and file management.

Feifei Li, University of Utah
Project description: A graduate-level course that will be offered in Fall 2013 on the design and implementation of large data management system kernels. The objective is to integrate features from a relational database engine with some of the new features from NoSQL systems to enable efficient and scalable data management over a cluster of commodity machines.

Mark Liffiton, Illinois Wesleyan University
Project description: TeacherTap is a free, simple classroom-response system built on Google App Engine. It lets students give instant, anonymous feedback to teachers about a lecture or discussion from any computer or mobile device with a web browser, facilitating more adaptive class sessions.

Eni Mustafaraj, Wellesley College
Project description: Topics in Computer Science: Web Mashups. A CS2 course that combines Google App Engine and MIT App Inventor. Students will learn to build apps with App Inventor to collect data about their life on campus. They will use Google App Engine to build web services and apps to host the data and remix it to create web mashups. Offered in the 2013 Spring semester.

Manish Parashar, Rutgers University
Project description: Cloud Computing for Scientific Applications -- Autonomic Cloud Computing teaches students how a hybrid HPC/Grid + Cloud cyber infrastructure can be effectively used to support real-world science and engineering applications. The goal of our efforts is to explore application formulations, Cloud and hybrid HPC/Grid + Cloud infrastructure usage modes that are meaningful for various classes of science and engineering application workflows.

Orit Shaer, Wellesley College
Project description: GreenTouch
GreenTouch is a collaborative environment that enables novice users to engage in authentic scientific inquiry. It consists of a mobile user interface for capturing data in the field, a web application for data curation in the cloud, and a tabletop user interface for exploratory analysis of heterogeneous data.

Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
Project description: WeLearn Mobile Platform: Making Mobile Devices Effective Tools for K-12. The platform makes mobile devices (Android, iOS, WP8) effective, essential tools for all-the-time, everywhere learning. WeLearn’s suite of productivity and communication apps enable learners to work collaboratively; WeLearn’s portal, hosted on Google App Engine, enables teachers to send assignments, review, and grade student artifacts. WeLearn is available to educators at no charge.

Jonathan White, Harding University
Project description: Teaching Cloud Computing in an Introduction to Engineering class for freshmen. We explore how well-designed systems are built to withstand unpredictable stresses, whether that system is a building, a piece of software or even the human body. The grant from Google is allowing us to add an overview of cloud computing as a platform that is robust under diverse loads.

Dr. Jiaofei Zhong, University of Central Missouri
Project description: By building an online Course Management System, students will be able to work on their team projects in the cloud. The system allows instructors and students to manage the course materials, including course syllabus, slides, assignments and tests in the cloud; the tool can be shared with educational institutions worldwide.

Pontiac hood ornament

This is a close-up of the hood ornament of a 1952 Pontiac Chieftain automobile. This car was at the Gilmore Car Museum for a car show. I used my 70-300mm (2x crop factor) lens and a small aperture to make sure the background was blurred out. Processing was minimal, although I tried to bring out the head and downplay the color of the car itself.

From James Howe Photography, via Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities and Treasures.

Isolated for 40 years in the Taiga

The Lykovs lived in this hand-built log cabin, lit by a single window "the size of a backpack pocket" and warmed by a smoky wood-fired stove. 

Excerpts from a remarkable story at Smithsonian:

The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:

The silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics, praying: 'This is for our sins, our sins.' The other, keeping behind a post... sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

...The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."

Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man's name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century...

Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed...

...they had no technology for replacing metal. A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds...

Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders...

The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop.

I'll stop here; it's not fair to excerpt more from the Smithsonian article.  Several comments.  First, it is possible for humans to run down wild animals, including antelope, because the muscles and cardiovascular systems of the latter are built for sprinting, but not for endurance.  Secondly, the way to boil water in the absence of metal is to heat rocks in a fire and then dump them into the water in a wooden vessel (fire-cracked rock is a familiar archaeological find at ancient campsites).

A video documentary about this remarkable family (in Russian, and unfortunately unembeddable) is at these links:  Part One.  Part Two.  Part Three.

Update March 2013:  This afternoon I received the following email from the staff at VICE:

VICE is releasing a beautiful new documentary called Agafia's Taiga Life that follows a family of Russian Old Believers who journeyed deep into Siberia's vast taiga to escape persecution and protect in 1963.

We are going to be holding a screening of the doc tomorrow, Thursday, March 28th at NYC's historic Explorers Club. Reception at 6pm | 7pm screening.

I understand that tickets are available through The Explorer's Club. Here's the trailer:

YouTube link.

Pure joy

YouTube link.

Five-year-old Pernille plays in a field with 14 German Shepherds from kennel Finika in Norway.  A mental health break from The Dish.

Chess is mandatory for students in Armenia

In Armenia, learning to play the grand game of strategy in school is mandatory for children - the only country in the world that makes chess compulsory - and the initiative has paid dividends. Armenia, a Caucasus country with a population of just three million, is a chess powerhouse...

In 2011, Armenia made chess compulsory for second, third and fourth-graders. That's why Susie and her classmates have two hours of chess every week in school...

"Chess is having a good influence on their performance in other subjects too. The kids are learning how to think, it's making them more confident," said teacher Rosanna Putanyan, watching her pupils play from the periphery...

"Chess develops various skills - leadership capacities, decision-making, strategic planning, logical thinking and responsibility," Ashotyan said. "We are building these traits in our youngsters. The future of the world depends on such creative leaders who have the capacity to make the right decisions, as well as the character to take responsibility for wrong decisions."

More than $3m has been spent on the project so far to supply chess equipment and learning aids in all Armenian schools, Ashotyan added. The majority of the budget was allocated to train chess players to become good teachers. In coming years, spending on chess is expected to rise, he said.

Kudos to Armenia.  Further details at Aljazeera.

Carmina Burana's "O Fortuna" modernized

YouTube link.

Courtesy of the Sydney Symphony:

In the tradition of Carlton's Big Beer Ad, we invited our Facebook fans to change the lyrics of the iconic opening chorus of Carmina Burana to whatever they liked, and we would get the fabulous Sydney Philharmonia Choirs to sing the winning entry. We received a huge number of entries about a range of topics. Matthew Hodge's entry, an Ode to Sleep Deprived Parents and was declared the winner!

The lyrics are brilliant, but I wish the recording hadn't suppressed the driving music, which is such a dramatic force. For reference, here is the original:

v YouTube link.

Top video via Neatorama.

Don't buy premium golf clubs online

Advice from a Wall Street Journal article:

The counterfeiting of golf merchandise—clubs and balls, but also bags and apparel—is a whopping business. A working group established to fight counterfeiting nine years ago by the five biggest golf manufacturers estimates that fake golf gear approaches 10% of the legitimate market world-wide.

Big raids inside the U.S., like the one in South Carolina, are rare, however, because 95% of the U.S. counterfeit golf trade is online, with the products delivered directly to individual consumers, according to the group...

From the exterior, the best counterfeit golf clubs these days can be hard to differentiate from legitimate clubs. "These guys have become very good at what they're doing," said Kerry Kabase, vice president of purchasing for Edwin Watts Golf. The old telltale signs, such as irregular paint and misshapen hosels, with glue oozing out, are less common.

At a recent golf-industry show, however, the U.S. working group displayed examples of counterfeit clubheads sawed in half, and you can see the type of irregularities that impact performance: irregular interior walls, or supposedly hollow iron-head cavities that instead are solid steel. Performance is erratic. Some fake clubs may play decently well for high-handicappers, others less so. One common flaw is inconsistent performance among irons in a set.

There are virtually no counterfeit clubs or balls sold at authorized retail outlets in the U.S., the group says. If you're shopping online, however, beware any club set whose price seems too good to be true—especially if the order will be shipped from China.

I think my Christmas present from a local store (a TaylorMade Burner Superfast driver) should be o.k.  I'll find out as soon as this godforsaken snow melts...

The complex genetics of mimicry

A New York Times article describes how a Brazilian butterfly can manifest seven different wing patterns:

The gaudy brown Brazilian butterfly known as Heliconius numata has long puzzled geneticists. It has seven different wing patterns, each of which mimics that of a different local species of Melinaea, another group of butterflies...

To help perfect their imitation of the seven Melinaea models, the butterflies have
somehow locked what should be a continuous range of natural variation into seven specific patterns...

But how do the Heliconius butterflies pull off the trick of having seven different forms in a single interbreeding population? Each wing pattern is specified by many different genes, but since genes get shuffled in each generation, the different wing patterns should quickly merge together when parents with different wing patterns mate.

A team of French and British biologists, led by Mathieu Joron of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, has discovered the butterfly’s solution. It has locked together in a supergene a cluster of 18 genes involved in specifying the wing pattern. The supergene is inherited as a single unit, the biologists report in the current issue of Nature. 

Further details at the Nature and NYT links.  Via the February 2013 issue of Badger Butterflyer, the outstanding newsletter of the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association.

For the enthusiast, there is also an explanatory video.

Every picture tells a story

I'll let you ponder this one for a moment.  The original caption is below the fold...

"Farmer Donald O'Reilly searched for sheep and lambs trapped in a snow drift near other animals that had just been rescued near Aughafatten, Ireland, Tuesday."

Credit: Cathal McNaughton/Reuters, via The Wall Streeet Journal.

"Remote administration tools" explained

The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker's computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman's screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman's computer.

The woman is startled. "Did it scare you?" she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. "Yes," he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a "dangerous site."...

"Man I feel dirty looking at these pics," wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums, one of the top "aboveground" hacking discussion sites on the Internet (it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female "slaves" surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women's own webcams. "Poor people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea they are the laughing stock on HackForums," he continued. "It would be funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes across this thread."

Whether this would in fact be "funny" is unlikely. RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people's private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising...

Welcome to the weird world of the ratters. They operate quite openly online, sharing the best techniques for picking up new female slaves (and avoiding that most unwanted of creatures, "old perverted men") in public forums. Even when their activities trip a victim's webcam light and the unsettled victim reaches forward to put a piece of tape over the webcam, the basic attitude is humorous—Ha! You got us! On to the next slave!..

Today, a cottage industry exists to build sophisticated RAT tools with names like DarkComet and BlackShades and to install and administer them on dozens or even hundreds of remote computers. When anti-malware vendors began to detect and clean these programs from infected computers, the RAT community built "crypters" to disguise the target code further. Today, serious ratters seek software that is currently "FUD"—fully undetectable...

Additional grim details are available at Ars Technica, via Get Cynical, which recently underwent a near-death experience, but is now alive and kicking again.

Lake Baikal in winter

Via English Russia, which also offered this photo to illustrate the lack of snow removal in Kiev (March 24):

Last by 35 lengths...

Via Criggo.

Monarch butterflies missing in New Zealand

Posted at the Herald Sun on Feb 28:

Butterfly researchers are gathering in Auckland next month to figure out what has happened to the population of native butterflies usually seen en masse nationwide.

"We've heard from many monarch lovers in Canterbury and Otago that the monarchs haven't returned this summer - and it's something that's got us baffled," says Jacqui Knight, secretary of the Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust...

New Zealanders are concerned, she says, as they hold the notoriously social and graceful insect close to their hearts. "We love the monarch, and who wouldn't? It's a wonderful, beautiful insect and one we really need to look after."

While the population was likely to bounce back next year, experts say the anecdotal decline could be an indicator that times are tough for other insects in the food chain. "Monarchs are an indicator species, telling us a lot about how other insects are going, and this is something to watch closely as we need our insects."

Reluctant skydiver

YouTube link.

Via English Russia.

Sequestration reaches NASA

NASA Internal Memo: Guidance for Education and Public Outreach Activities Under Sequestration 

Subject: Guidance for Education and Public Outreach Activities Under Sequestration

As you know, we have taken the first steps in addressing the mandatory spending cuts called for in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The law mandates a series of indiscriminate and significant across-the-board spending reductions totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

As a result, we are forced to implement a number of new cost-saving measures, policies, and reviews in order to minimize impacts to the mission-critical activities of the Agency. We have already provided new guidance regarding conferences, travel, and training that reflect the new fiscal reality in which we find ourselves. Some have asked for more specific guidance at it relates to public outreach and engagement activities. That guidance is provided below.

Effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review. In terms of scope, this includes all public engagement and outreach events, programs, activities, and products developed and implemented by Headquarters, Mission Directorates, and Centers across the Agency, including all education and public outreach efforts conducted by programs and projects...

The rest of the text of the memorandum is at SpaceRef via Reddit.

It's worth noting here that the mandatory "across-the-board" spending cuts did not affect the salaries of Senators and Congressmen.

Wealthy Americans donate only 1.3% to charity

In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns...

But the researchers also found something else: differences in behavior among wealthy households, depending on the type of neighborhood they lived in. Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas—areas where more than 40 percent of households earned at least $200,000 a year—were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.

Wealth affects not only how much money is given but to whom it is given. The poor tend to give to religious organizations and social-service charities, while the wealthy prefer to support colleges and universities, arts organizations, and museums. Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, 34 went to educational institutions, the vast majority of them colleges and universities, like Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley, that cater to the nation’s and the world’s elite. Museums and arts organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art received nine of these major gifts, with the remaining donations spread among medical facilities and fashionable charities like the Central Park Conservancy. Not a single one of them went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed. More gifts in this group went to elite prep schools... than to any of our nation’s largest social-service organizations, including United Way, the Salvation Army, and Feeding America (which got, among them, zero).

Via The Atlantic.  The author of this text has written a book on the subject.

The Panther Cave pictographs - enchanced 3D

YouTube link.

Panther Cave is a rock shelter in Seminole Canyon State Park, Texas, named for a dramatic leaping cat that is the largest of its many pictographs. Copious overpainting indicates the site was used as a canvas by generations of rock painters. Cats, humans wearing headdresses, abstract figures from six inches to more than 10 feet high decorate the rock face. 

The images are predominantly in the Pecos River and Red Linear styles and date back about 4,000 years. Pecos River Style is the oldest, starting around 5000 years ago. Its iconography features monumental polychrome designs of zoomorphic figures and of anthropomorphic figures called shamans. Pecos River art is thought to have had ritual significance, perhaps having been painted for ceremonial religious purposes. Red Linear style is characterized by small red stick figures engaged in a variety of shared activities like hunting, fighting, sex and childbirth. Red Linear figures often incorporated the older large Pecos River animal figures in their scenes...

Acutely aware of the precarious situation Panther Cave and other rock art sites find themselves in, the SHUMLA Archeological Research and Education Center launched the Lower Pecos Rock Art Recording and Preservation Project in 2009... They used 3D modeling software to showcase the natural contours and shape of the cave, then used color enhancement to highlight the stunning complexity of figures that are not clear to the naked eye. The finished product is a riot of color, giving viewers whole new insight into the pictographs that layer the site.

Wow.

NIce teeth

This False Killer Whale reminds me of the one that fell from the sky in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Photo: Doug Perrine/HotSpot Media, via The Telegraph.

"Three-person embryos" are now possible

The [British]government is considering whether to propose legal changes that would allow radical new treatments for families at risk of incurable genetic diseases that involve the creation of so-called "three-person embryos".

A national consultation released on Wednesday by the UK's fertility watchdog found public support for techniques that involve introducing DNA from a third person to embryos which could prevent mothers from passing on devastating diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, to their children.

If ministers and MPs give the procedures the green light, Britain would become the first country to offer treatments that lead to children being born with DNA from three people: their parents and a woman donor. The amount of DNA from the donor is tiny compared with the parents...

Scientists have developed two techniques to prevent faulty mitochondria being passed on to children. Known as maternal spindle transfer and pronuclear transfer, they both involve transferring the genetic material from the parents into an egg donated by a healthy woman.

The treatment is controversial on several grounds, not least that the genetic modifications in the embryo pass down to all future generations. The techniques have never been tried in humans, but have worked in animal studies.

Further details at The Guardian.

Igwe - Prothero - Maher - MAAF - McCollum

So what do all these have in common?  They have a new face on Wikipedia. 

Vashti McCollum 

Not sure how this slipped off my radar but somehow this page re-write by Lei Pinter from last year never got the attention it deserves.  This was a lot of work, records on Vashti McCollum (the person) from notable sources were difficult to come by.   She tried to get a photo released by the family but couldn't make that happen. Possibly one of the GSoW readers might be able to help us out? 

Anyway, Lei tells a terrific story of a woman who faces off with the government over religious instruction in her son's school in the mid-1940's in Illinois.  We skeptics should be ashamed at the condition Lei found the page in before she started working on it.  Is this how we treat our representatives?  If we don't show them respect, why should we expect people outside our community to show them respect?  Thanks to Lei and the GSoW team, we now have McCollum's Wiki Back.

 

Leo Igwe

This page was in very sorry shape when Vera de Kok first took it on as you can see here. Brian Engler uploaded an image he took at TAM 2012.  Then Nathan Miller finished it up with a total re-write.  Much improved, great teamwork all.  Current Page

The Igwe release hit the front page of Wikipedia as a Did You Know in Feburary.  For regular followers of this blog you know that getting the front page for 8 hours is a big deal.  An extra effort is required to make it happen, and only brand new pages (no more than 5 days) or newly expanded pages within 5 days of its re-release are given that honor.  When I say expanded, I mean really expanded.  When you look at the before and after of Igwe's page you will see what I mean.  Only well-written and scrutinized articles are allowed.

The Igwe page received 3,607 views on that day.   That is about 3,550% above what is normal for page views.

That number is only a part of the story.  Igwe's article discusses other human rights groups doing similar work.  During the DYK for Igwe's article, the pages for Stepping Stones Nigeria received a 1,652%  daily increase.  That's a measurable effect to show how well we are raising awareness. The article on Witch Children in Africa, which receives virtually no traffic, received 4,339 visitors during that day.

Skeptical organizations receive extra attention from these Did You Know?  features as well. The Center For Inquiry article's daily traffic spiked by 33%, and daily visits to the James Randi Educational Foundation article grew by 20%.

Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers

Frederick Green along with some help from the team took on the rewrite of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers page.  Here is the before  and now the after.

Because we expanded the article enough we were able to ask for a DYK, which appeared on the front page of Wikipedia on March 10, 2013.  Stats show a spike of 2,565 views.

The hook we used was this one... DYK ... that the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers provides "atheists in foxholes" with advocacy, community and education?

The atheists in foxhole page received 1709 views when normally it receives about 250 each day.

Donald Prothero

Everyone seemed surprised that Don Prothero did not already have a Wikipedia page, and once I started reading through Lei Pinter's drafts I can see why.  This man was long ago deserving a page.

We secured a Did You Know for Prothero also.  In the wee hours of the morning for America this appeared on the front page of Wikipedia.  DYK... that Stephen Jay Gould once called Donald Prothero "the best punctuated equilibrium researcher on the West Coast"?"

Prothero's page received only 1,120 views (probably because of the timing of the DYK).  Gould's page received a 50% increase in views, and the punctuated equilibrium page spiked with a 300% increase.

Bill Maher 

No, I didn't rewrite Bill Maher's Wikipedia page.  This is a example of working backwards, and guerrilla skepticism on Wikipedia.  I finally got around to watching Jamy Ian Swiss's lecture from TAM 2012.  In this video he talks about what scientific skepticism is.  I thought it was a good definition and would improve readers understanding of the term.  So I went to the scientific skepticism Wikipedia page and left a quote and citation to the video.  That one edit will expose the Swiss video (and the Swiss WP page) to 100K readers each year.  (note: the Swiss video on the JREF channel currently has 7,687 views.  If someone wanted to check back periodically, they could tell if there is a noticeable increase in views from today)

But this does not explain why I'm talking about Bill Maher.   In his video, Swiss goes on a awesome rant and calls Maher (an)  "anti-science, anti-vaxer, dangerous ignoramus, promoting toxic anti-scientific nonsense that kills people!"  That quote is just too good to waste.  So I ventured over to Maher's WP page and saw that the majority of the page is positive.  A man this popular and controversial needs a criticism section.  But this isn't a simple edit that just any editor of WP is going to be able to place without some problems.  So I made my intentions known on the Maher talk page, then went to my GSoW team and asked for more critical (and scholarly) citations from notable people. 

I got several suggestions and started to compile a list.  One of these citations wouldn't be enough alone, but several all together shows that there is a concurrence within the scientific skepticism community that Maher's anti-vax propaganda is dangerous.  So I added a criticism section to the Maher page.  Here is the page as I left it that night.

It took a few hours before other editors (not on the GSoW team) toned down my edit.  Swiss is quite aggressively verbal, as are others like Gardner who said, he (Gardner) was happy that Maher did not have children of his own that he could kill.  The rules dealing with living persons on Wikipedia are written so someone can't quote mine and attack.  The editors were quite right that the page is improved as it exists today.  They also changed my edit from anti-vax to anti-vaccination (which one of the GSoW editors also suggested) to make it clearer to readers.  

Also in the lede, before I got a hold of the page, the part in the second paragraph said... "He is also a critic of religion and is an advisory board member of Project Reason, a foundation to promote scientific knowledge and secular values within society."  I thought that was too wordy, and that the editor who wrote this was trying to infer that Maher was very sciency.  So I took off everything after the words "Project Reason."

The reason why I say this was working backwards, is because I was starting with a good citation from a notable person/place and then I took a look around WP and found a place to leave it.  Just the opposite of what most editors do.  Trust me this is much simpler to do this way.

This is guerrilla skepticism,  it is getting our skeptical message into areas that it wasn't before.  In ways that are non-traditional and mole-like.   

So to review, Maher's page now has citations for the SGU podcast, the JREF Swiss video and David Gorski's blog on ScienceBlog.  There are hyperlinks to many of our resources that were not there before, Steven Novella, Jamy Ian Swiss, Paul Offit, David Gorski, ScienceBlogs and Martin Gardner.   In the footnotes, beside each citation I have hyperlinked to the SGU, CSICOP and JREF.  

Time will tell if these edits I left will have any influence on changing minds.  It is too early to tell if people will click on the hyperlinks and discover our spokespeople and organizations.  I'm sure most people don't read through an entire Wikipedia page, they look for what they need and move on.  

But we have to try.  If I had just shared the Swiss video on my Facebook or Twitter timeline, it would have only reached about 2K people, and maybe only 20 people would click on the link and watch the video.  Then my "update" would move on and no one would notice it again. 

Leaving these edits, will expose people who are not necessarily in the skeptic community to the video/podcast/blog.  And not just for some arbitrary moment on a Facebook feed.  But every day, every month, every year (as long as they aren't removed).  And how many potential views are we talking about?  I'll leave you to play with this graph, but at the time of this writing the Maher page is receiving about 100K views each month.  Over a million views each year.  Quite a sizable difference from the 20 +/- views it would have received on my Facebook feed.

I wonder if Maher had been following the changes to his Wikipedia page?  He came out with this while I was writing this blog.  Religion, it's like Wikipedia. 

==================================

Now, I hope I've whet your appetite.  This is powerful stuff.  We need your help, there are thousands of edits just waiting to be added into Wikipedia, maybe even hundreds of thousands of edits.  And hundreds of pages that need to be created or rewritten.  We need people who are good at proof-reading, and people who can improve the basic edits we leave.  Researchers, current editors, people willing to caption videos and so much more.  And it needs to happen in English and other languages.  We aren't looking for a handout, we don't want your money.  We want your time, we want your attention.  We train, we mentor,  please join this most powerful and important project.  

Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com if you have questions.  Or friend me on Facebook or twitter.  We are all busy people, my work-load would make your head spin, but this is important, what are you waiting for? Join us.  

How the puffin holds all those little fish

I've seen the photos and wondered about it, and so have you.  He must have amazing diving and fishing skills, but how does he grab and hold the eleventh sand eel* without letting go of the first ten?

The discussion thread at Reddit eventually led me to this photo at Living Wilderness -

- and a note that "An Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) shows off its tongue, which is specially adapted to allow it to carry many fish in its bill at one time. Atlantic puffins typically carry about 10 fish in their bills at one time, using their tongues to hold their catch against spines on their palate."

Also of interest is that the male puffin sheds that colorful outer layer of its beak after the courting season is over:

The sheath has separated from the bill. Light passing through the thin covering makes it look yellowish gray. The entire sheath has moved forward and downward, partly covering the nasal opening.

You learn something every day.

* a link for those who, like me, need to look up what a sand eel is.

Middle photo credit 2010 Kevin Ebi/LivingWilderness.com.  Bottom photo credit Ralph Eldridge.

A "dancing" remote-controlled airplane

YouTube link.

 Some words of explanation re how it manages to stay aloft at such low speeds at Reddit.

Book (title) of the year

I posted the results of the Diagram Prize in 2008 and 2009, but had forgotten about it for several years.  Here are this year's results, courtesy of The Bookseller:

Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has been named as the winner of Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The title won 38% of the public vote, fighting off competition from fellow contenders How Tea Cosies Changed the World and God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.

Although the winner receives no prize attention, the nominator of the title, Deep Books' marketing manager Alan Ritchie, will receive a bottle of wine.

Previous winners of the title have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Highlights in the History of Concrete, Bombproof Your Horse and Cooking with Poo.

Philip Stone, The Bookseller charts editor and Diagram Prize administrator, said: "People might think the Diagram Prize is just a bit of fun, but it spotlights an undervalued art that can make or break a work of literature. Books such as A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time all owe a sizeable part of their huge successes to their odd
monikers."

If you're known as a competent engineer...

More Dilberts.

Getting drunk after one drink

"It only takes one drink to get me drunk.  The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth."                 ---George Burns. 

Via Lapham's Quarterly, which has an assortment of other potent potable quotatations, including the famous Dorothy Parker rhyme.

Marijuana vending machines

They are real.

Dispense Labs plans to lease the machines to dispensaries so they can offer round-the-clock convenience to a customer base that's far more likely to do its pot shopping at night. The so-called Autospense will be placed behind a vending cage accessible — like the machines themselves — only with a valid registration card. Fingerprint authentication provides additional security, and closed-circuit cameras, locks, and strict record keeping are relied upon to prevent machine tampering.

Via Gawker.

A simple white pottery bowl

A simple white bowl bought at an American garage or "tag" sale for $3 has sold at a New York City auction for more than $2.22m after it was recognised as a rare Chinese relic.

The 1,000-year-old bowl was part of the opening session of Sotheby's fine Chinese ceramics and works of art auction on Tuesday. Sotheby's said it was sold to a London dealer for $2.225m, far above the pre-sale estimate of $200,000 to $300,000.

The person who put the bowl up for auction bought it at a US "tag sale" or garage sale in 2007 and had it displayed in the living room for several years before becoming curious about its origins and having it examined.

Inspired by this story, I'm going to attend an estate auction this weekend.  Seriously.  Look at all this stuff.

Photo credit AFP/Getty Images.

Dolley Madison on "American Experience"

YouTube link.

I can't recommend this PBS series highly enough; every one of the programs I have watched have been outstanding.  Just watched this episode this past week, and learned a lot about this amazing lady.

The Popul Vuh creation myth

Popol Vuh "is a corpus of mytho-historical narratives of the Post Classic K'iche' kingdom in Guatemala's western highlands." Popol Vuh's prominent features are its creation myth, its diluvian suggestion, its epic tales..., and its genealogies."

Chapters 1-3 contain Popol Vuh's creation myth...

"This is the first account, the first narrative. There was neither man, nor animal, birds, fishes, crabs, trees, stones, caves, ravines, grasses, nor forests; there was only the sky. The surface of the earth had not appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of the sky. There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in the sky. There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed. There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light. [...] Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together; then they conferred about life and light, what they would do so that there would be light and dawn, who it would be who would provide food and sustenance. Thus let it be done! Let the emptiness be filled! Let the water recede and make a void, let the earth appear and become solid; let it be done. Thus they spoke. Let there be light, let there be dawn in the sky and on the earth! There shall be neither glory nor grandeur in our creation and formation until the human being is made, man is formed. [...] First the earth was formed, the mountains and the valleys; the currents of water were divided, the rivulets were running freely between the hills, and the water was separated when the high mountains appeared. Thus was the earth created, when it was formed by the Heart of Heaven, the Heart of Earth, as they are called who first made it fruitful, when the sky was in suspense, and the earth was submerged in the water."

Together, gods attempted to create living beings so that they may be praised and venerated by their creation. Their first attempts (animals, mud man, and wooden man) proved unsuccessful because they lacked speech, souls, and intellect.

"This the Forefathers did, Tepeu and Gucumatz, as they were called. After that they began to talk about the creation and the making of our first mother and father; of yellow corn and of white corn they made their flesh; of cornmeal dough they made the arms and the legs of man. Only dough of corn meal went into the flesh of our first fathers, the four men, who were created. [...] And as they had the appearance of men, they were men; they talked, conversed, saw and heard, walked, grasped things; they were good and handsome men, and their figure was the figure of a man."

Women were created later while the first four men slept.

More at Wikipedia.

Marlon Brando used cue cards

Two observations from the source Reddit thread:

Brando was notorius for never learning his lines for movies. Like in Superman, he read his lines off the babies diaper / costume because he refused to read the script before hand.

"During his long monologue over the body of his wife, for example, Brando's dramatic lifting of his eyes upward is not spontaneous dramatic acting but a search for his next cue."

Brando always claimed that he wanted to say scripted lines as if they were just occurring to him--eventually leading to him being fed lines over an earpiece in Don Juan DeMarco. At least that was his official reason. Maybe he just hated memorizing lines.

Somehow I always thought that professional actors had impressive memories that I would never be able to match.  Now I realize, I could have been an actor.  I coulda' been somebody...

I'm back

I did peek at the internet just briefly during this past week, and against my will my mouse saved 57 more "blogworthy" bookmarks.  Sigh. 

Oops.  That should be *sigh*.

I'm still time-limited until I get my taxes done, but will post a little each day just to clean up some of the backlog, because bookmarks seem to breed and multiply if you leave them in the folders too long.

A day without the internet is like...

... 4 or 5 hours longer.  Getting actual real-life work done.  Woo Hoo!!!

Consider once again a "pale blue dot"

YouTube link.

I need to stop blogging for about a week, and I want to leave this post on the top of the front page while I'm gone.

The Voyager spacecraft's "pale blue dot" image, and Carl Sagan's commentary upon it, have been the subject of many video tributes; the one embedded above is my favorite because of the juxtaposition of so many classic film clips accompanying the spoken text.

Voyager carries a golden "phonograph record" embedded with basic information about our solar system and human biology, which most people understand as an attempt to initiate contact with other, extraterrestrial, intelligent species.  It's really nothing of the sort, because it didn't even exit the solar system until 2012, and after another 40,000 years it will still be 1.6 light-years from the nearest other star.  So the artifacts on Voyager are best viewed as a time capsule of our current existence rather than a communication device.

Traversing cosmic distances requires faster speeds than can (currently) be achieved by physical objects.  Which leads us to a consideration of radio transmissions.  Here's the opening scene from the movie "Contact," which depicts radio signals from earth penetrating out into space:

YouTube link. 

The further out you go, of course, the older are the signals you/[or an alien] could potentially hear/detect.  The viewpoint pulls back beyond our solar system until it is even outside our galaxy.

I had always been impressed by that.  Until... several weeks ago I encountered this spectacular image at Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival:

I had to compress the image to stay within the limits of my bloghost, so I don't know if the embed above will be clickable to supersize.  If not, you can view the original here in all its glory*.  At the right bottom is a box, enlarged from the right center of the image, showing another "pale blue dot."

But this time, that blue dot is not Earth, as it is in the Sagan/Voyager story, but rather a representation of a sphere of a diameter of 200 light-years.  That's the total distance that emissions from earth have traveled since our development of the technology.

I can't get this image out of my head.  That little dot is the maximal extent of human influence in our galaxy - and there are over a hundred billion such galaxies in the known universe. 

The human mind isn't capable of processing such realities.  At least mine isn't.

Now I'm off for a week or so.

p.s. - see also Stephen Hawking's thoughts on communication with alien intelligent life.

*the text at the bottom left reads "Thanks to Nick Risinger for the artist's conception of the Milky Way."  Image taken from here.

How Ixonia, Wisconsin got its name

It remained the town of Union for only five years and then was divided into two individual towns. Town 7 was called Concord without any disagreement, but a dispute resulted in the naming of town 8. To simplify matters it was agreed upon to put the letters of the alphabet on slips of paper and have young Mary Piper draw them until a name could be formed. As the result, "Ixonia" was the name given town 8 on January 21, 1846, and remains the only town bearing this name in the United States.

I'll bet they didn't sing "Heigh ho, heigh ho...

Belgian miners in an elevator, approximately 1900. 

Via VintagePhoto at LiveJournal and 22 Words.

Seeking advice re apple scab

Several years ago, in a post about the dangers of monoculture manifested as the "pistachio disaster," I offered this comment:

We and our neighbors became familiar with anthracnose when it spread through our subdivision several years ago in the form of "apple scab" on the beautiful (and popular) crabapple trees.  The leaves developed black lesions and fell early from the tree.  If any of you notice something similar with your apple/crabapple trees, be sure to call an arborist, because although the tree can tolerate partial defoliation, if it happens several years in a row, it can kill the tree.  

The crabapple is one of the focal points of our front garden in the spring, when the floral display bursts into flame and it becomes abuzz with pollinating insects, and once again weeks later when the petal drop...

... makes us feel like emperors treading a victory path.  

The "apple scab" seemed to end years ago after treatment of the tree and after we raked up and discarded all the infected fallen leaves.  But... the arborist has been returning annually to retreat the tree with a "spring foliar spray" at $120 per year, and this year I've decided to withhold treatment in order to redirect the funds to other purposes.  Any advice from those of you with experience in such matters?  Can we just wait and leave the tree untreated and monitor it for the return of the apple scab, or is it latent and ready to devastate the tree again?

Trailer for "The Intouchables"

YouTube link.

Seems like a good movie - any comments? 

p.s. - I presume "intouchable" is untranslated French? but then why combine it with "the" rather than "le"?

Reaction to the "Pop Tart gun" incident

In case you missed it, here is the "Pop Tart gun" incident, as described by the Washington Post:

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended for two days for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang”— an offense the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.

The pastry “gun” was a rectangular strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain Friday morning, but then found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.

Welch said an assistant principal at Park Elementary School told him that his son pointed the pastry at a classmate — though the child maintains he pointed it at the ceiling...

Anne Arundel officials could not comment on the pastry incident because of confidentiality laws, schools spokesman Bob Mosier said. He did say, however, that a letter was sent home to families Friday and is posted on the school’s Web site.

In the letter, Myrna Phillips, assistant principal at the school, informed parents that a student “used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class” but said no “physical threats” were made and no one was harmed.

If children are troubled by the incident, Phillips wrote, parents should “help them share their feelings.” In addition, a counselor will be available to students, the letter said. “In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices,” she wrote.

More at the link (Pop Tart photo via, child photo from ABC15.com).

I have expressed my own disdain for "zero tolerance" school policies on several occasions (here, here, here, or search the blog for "zero brains"), but an Illinois church (Grace-Gospel Fellowship church near Chicago) has taken it to the next level:

The story of the little boy suspended over his Pop Tart gun not only inspired legislation to stop such absurd school discipline, it inspired an Illinois church to celebrate “Second Amendment Sunday” with an “assault” Pop Tart gun-biting contest for Sunday school students...

Kirkwood told Doug Giles of Clash Daily that Christians must stop being apathetic and stand up and fight for our God-given rights...

“Each child who wanted to participate chewed a pop-tart into the shape of a gun and the top four would win prizes; in this case a toy gun,” Kirkwood told Giles. Clash Daily reported the following on the awesome prizes:

“Second runner up received a double barrel shot-gun that we nicknamed ‘The Biden,’ and when we presented it we made sure to say what ‘not’ to do with it in a real situation. The prize for runner up was a Navy Seal sniper rifle that we named ‘The Chris Kyle’ in honor of the American Sniper. We felt that it was appropriate,” added Kirkwood, “given the insulting way that this administration ignored the death of this American hero, yet had the crust to send a delegation to the memorial service for Hugo Chavez.”

What was the top award? Kirkwood smiled and noted, “You know, I stood in the toy aisle for a good half an hour to choose just the right one and it turned out to be the biggest Nerf gun that I could find, and the kicker – the box was marked ‘semi-auto’ and ‘high capacity,’ so we named that one ‘the Feinstein.’”

And this from Clash Daily:

What was the general response to this rather unique worship service? “Well one couple did walk out, though I was told it was for another engagement, but overall the response was tremendous and we plan on doing it every year … and next year the prizes will be even better.  Our Bible Boot Camp class (High School age) will be challenged to come up with a 5 minute speech on the right to bear arms and the winner will walk away with a Ruger 10/22,” said Kirkwood, “who knows, maybe by then we’ll have sponsors.”

Last two photos via Clash Daily (where the comment thread is... interesting).

I'll defer any commentary.