Aquamarine crystals, native silver wire, and amethyst stalactites

This is a lovely specimen, displaying vertical and horizontal Aquamarine crystals - both of which are gemmy blue and perfectly terminated. The top portion of the vertical Aqua is like clear blue glass it is so gemmy. Several smaller crystals are also present and all sit atop a matrix of Abite... From the Erongo Mountain, Erongo Region, Namibia.  3.2 cm by 7 cm by 3.3 cm. 

This is an amazing and quite thick wire of Native Silver curling atop white Quartz matrix. Silver Islet is a prized locale for collectors and one that is now under water and inaccessible. The mine itself was actually located on an islet in Lake Superior and as one would expect, eventually the water rose higher and flooded the shaft. Authetic Silvers from the Silver Islet Mine date back to as early as 1868 when ore was first discovered by Thomas MacFarlane to as late as 1884 when the mine was finally closed after yielding over $3 million in Silver. The above specimen displays a beautiful antique patina, which is indicative of its age, over strong luster. From the Silver Islet Mine, Silver Islet, Sibley Township, Thunder Bay District, Ontario, Canada.  4 cm by 3 cm by 2.5 cm.

This is definately not a common thing to fnd. I can't recall seeing another specimen that featured three stalactites of nearly the same size rising up from a single matrix. The middle Amethyst finger rises 7 cm and the others are close to the same. The surfaces of the specimen are very glassy and reflective with a great deal of light play and sparkle. There is no damage or contacts to speak of and the stalactites are all in excellent condition. Very well trimmed also. From the Santino Quarry, Artigas, Uruguay.  10.4 cm by 16.3 cm by 11.5 cm. 

Three more jaw-dropping specimens from The Tucson 2013 Showrooms.  Many more at the link.

"Hundred dollar hamburger" explained

[The phrase is] used in general aviation in the United States (perhaps with variations on the theme elsewhere?). A lot of pilots like to pick a random airport a couple or a few hours away, drop-in for a meal, refuel, and then take off again to fly back home. The sheer joy of flying seems to serve as the primary motivation, like someone taking a sports car out into the countryside for a weekend getaway. The $100 price tag refers to the cost of flying to a distant runway for no reason other than wanting to fly to it, and not specifically to any meal that may have been purchased there. It’s a euphemism, or a wink-and-a-nod, or both, even though fuel prices today would make a hundred dollar round-trip flight a bargain."

Via Twelve Mile Circle, which has links to relevant sites.

Snake (the game) being beaten

The player controls a long, thin creature, resembling a snake, which roams around on a bordered plane, picking up food (or some other item), trying to avoid hitting its own tail or the "walls" that surround the playing area. Each time the snake eats a piece of food, its tail grows longer, making the game increasingly difficult. The user controls the direction of the snake's head (up, down, left, or right), and the snake's body follows. The player cannot stop the snake from moving while the game is in progress, and cannot make the snake go in reverse.

The embed above is the final image in a GIF showing Snake being totally beaten.  It just takes a couple minutes.

Cosmetic glasses

Introductory text from a Reddit thread:

I know this is a disturbing pic to a lot of people but you are looking at some really badass reconstructive surgery and prostheses. I used to work at a prominant cancer center and we would make these types of prostheses for people who lost facial structures/tissues due to trauama, cancer, or congenital deformities. Those "piercings" around his eyebrows are implanted magnets that aid in supporting his nose. He might have prescription lenses in the glasses, but generally the glasses are used to obscure the magnets and make the transition from real to fake tissue less obvious. This man is most likely also missing part of his maxilla or palate and has and internal portion that is also supported by a series of implants and magnets. It takes a really skilled team of physicians, dentists, and anaplastologists to make these types of prostheses. Looks crazy when not worn, but this is a life changing process to go through with truley amazng results.

The photograph is truly startling, but because it depicts an alteration of the human face which may not be within some readers' comfort zones, I'll place it below the fold here...

At the Reddit thread there are links to photos of him wearing his glasses and to a video of him on a Discovery Channel program.  His name is Donnie Fritts; notes from the maxillofacial prosthetic team are here.

This reminds me of some of the remarkable cosmetic appliances constructed victims of combat injuries after WWI, and I wonder most of all how he manages to cope with the loss of the humidifying function of the nose for incoming air.

The plummeting cost of solar energy - updated

The total amount of energy we use every year – from coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and everything else – is dwarfed by the amount of solar energy hitting the planet each year. How dwarfed? The solar input is 5,000 times greater than the amount we use from all those sources, combined.

In fact, it would take only about 0.3% of the Earth’s land area to meet all of humanity’s energy needs through 2030 via solar power.

That's the most encouraging graph I've seen all year.  Via Boing Boing.

Addendum:  When I published the above post last month, one of the valid comments was that the scale of the graph was logarithmic.  Let's remedy that with this new graph -

- which I found today at The Economist, accompanied by these comments:

Rebranding is always a tricky exercise, but for one field of technology 2013 will be the year when its proponents need to bite the bullet and do it. That field is alternative energy. The word “alternative”, with its connotations of hand-wringing greenery and a need for taxpayer subsidy, has to go. And in 2013 it will. “Renewable” power will start to be seen as normal...

But it is in the field of solar energy, currently only a quarter of a percent of the planet’s electricity supply, but which grew 86% last year, that the biggest shift of attitude will be seen, for sunlight has the potential to disrupt the electricity market completely.

The underlying cause of this disruption is a phenomenon that solar’s supporters call Swanson’s law, in imitation of Moore’s law of transistor cost... Swanson’s law, named after Richard Swanson, the founder of SunPower, a big American solar-cell manufacturer, suggests that the cost of the photovoltaic cells needed to generate solar power falls by 20% with each doubling of global manufacturing capacity.

Moreover, technological developments that have been proved in the laboratory but have not yet moved into the factory mean Swanson’s law still has many years to run...

Reliability of supply is a crucial factor, for the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow.  But the problem of reliability is the subject of intensive research. Many organisations, both academic and commercial, are working on ways to store electricity when it is in surplus, so that it can be used when it is scarce. Progress is particularly likely during 2013 in the field of flow batteries. These devices, hybrids between traditional batteries and fuel cells, use liquid electrolytes, often made from cheap materials such as iron, to squirrel away huge amounts of energy in chemical form. “Grid-scale” storage of this or some other sort is the second way, after Swanson’s law, that the economics of renewable energy will be transformed.

More at the link.  Huge implications for world (and domestic) geopolitics within our lifetimes.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, politics without end...

While giving a fiery speech against Lincoln, Fernando Wood calls him "King Abraham Africanus The First." This epithet is based on a real pamphlet from 1864 titled "Abraham Africanus I: his secret life, revealed under the mesmeric influence; mysteries of the White House." 

This pamphlet, printed by the "Copperheads" (a group of Democrats from outside the Confederacy who were nonetheless sympathetic to the Confederate cause and opposed to Lincoln), claimed that Lincoln had signed a contract with Satan to enable him to seize the US presidency for life and to "subvert the liberties of the American people and debauch their civic aspirations; to impose upon them in every imaginable form of low cunning, and cheat them with words of double meaning and with false promises, until by these, and kindred means, that end is accomplished, and his dynasty firmly established."

Amen. 

(My wife and I watched Spielberg's Lincoln last night and were startled to hear the above epithet.  She searched the 'net afterwards and found this explanation.)

As an interesting coincidence, one of the physicians who attended Lincoln after his assassination was Albert Freeman Africanus King.

An Ideal Telescope Composed of Tensegrity

Some tensegrity practitioners feel that tensegrity is not a practical building method--it does not help that Kenneth Snelson, a prime inventor of tensegrity, is one of these skeptics.

Robert Skelton does not agree. Tensegrity is an ideal solution to building highly efficient structures in a resource constrained world, according to him. Over the years he has published a foot bridge design for architects in Switzerland that uses only one third the mass of traditional designs, and an airplane wing design that is 30% lighter than the best existing wing.

A recent post of his argued for tensegrity use in large telescopes, since mass plays a big role in the shape control of telescopes. Such dishes need to change position and resist the distortional effects of gravity.

Figure 1. Parabolic tensegrity rigid structure.

Figure 1 shows our latest parabolic tensegrity telescope concept. We believe this is the first tensegrity structure (other than a simple unit¹) that has no soft modes (i.e., it is stiff in all directions). By adjusting the tension of certain prestressed cables, one can maintain a parabolic shape for all positions of the telescope. We are now deriving the optimal complexity for this minimal-mass telescope.
The control of cable tensions requires feedback information such as force transducers in certain tension and compressive components of the structure. The design of the control algorithm should minimize the energy that would be required to suppress vibrations below a specified level and to keep the parabolic shape errors below optical tolerances. The grand challenge before us is to design a structure with minimal mass that also requires the smallest control energy to meet the performance requirements. This will be among the first attempts to truly integrate the design of structure and control rather than the traditional approach of designing the control only after the structure is determined. This integration of the control and structure design disciplines will certainly be required to meet the more stringent demands of future design challenges. Achieving this integrated approach is the focus of our ongoing research.

Links:
Telescope article:   Designing minimal-mass tensegrity telescopes of optimal complexity
Skelton's faculty page.

Distributing the Edit History of Wikipedia Infoboxes

Posted by Enrique Alfonseca, Google Research

Aside from its value as a general-purpose encyclopedia, Wikipedia is also one of the most widely used resources to acquire, either automatically or semi-automatically, knowledge bases of structured data. Much research has been devoted to automatically building disambiguation resources, parallel corpora and structured knowledge from Wikipedia. Still, most of those projects have been based on single snapshots of Wikipedia, extracting the attribute values that were valid at a particular point in time. So about a year ago we compiled and released a data set that allows researchers to see how data attributes can change over time.

Figure 1. Infobox for the Republic of Palau in 2006 and 2013 showing the capital change.

Many attributes vary over time. These include the presidents of countries, the spouses of people, the populations of cities and the number of employees of companies. Every Wikipedia page has an associated history from which the users can view and compare past versions. Having the historical values of Infobox entries available would provide a historical overview of change affecting each entry, to understand which attributes are more likely to change over time or have a regularity in their changes, and which ones attract more user interest and are actually updated in a timely fashion. We believe that such a resource will also be useful in training systems to learn to extract data from documents, as it will allow us to collect more training examples by matching old values of an attribute inside old pages.

For this reason, we released, in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., a resource containing all the edit history of infoboxes in Wikipedia pages. While this was already available indirectly in Wikimedia’s full history dumps, the smaller size of the released dataset will make it easier to download and process this data. The released dataset contains 38,979,871 infobox attribute updates for 1,845,172 different entities, and it is available for download both from Google and from Wikimedia Deutschland’s Toolserver page. A description of the dataset can be found in our paper WHAD: Wikipedia Historical Attributes Data, accepted for publication at the Language Resources and Evaluation journal.

What kind of information can be learned from this data? Some examples from preliminary analyses include the following:

• Every country in the world has a population in its Wikipedia attribute, which is updated at least yearly for more than 90% of them. The average error rate with respect to the yearly World Bank estimates is between two and three percent, mostly due to rounding.
• 50% of deaths are updated into Wikipedia infoboxes within a couple of days... but for scientists it takes 31 days to reach 50% coverage!
• For the last episode of TV shows, the airing date is updated for 50% of them within 9 days; for for the first episode of TV shows, it takes 106 days.

While infobox attribute updates will be much easier to process as they transition into the Wikidata project, we are not there yet and we believe that the availability of this dataset will facilitate the study of changing attribute values. We are looking forward to the results of those studies.

Thanks to Googler Jean-Yves Delort and Guillermo Garrido and Anselmo Peñas from UNED for putting this dataset together, and to Angelika Mühlbauer and Kai Nissen from Wikipedia Deutschland for their support. Thanks also to Thomas Hofmann and Fernando Pereira for making this data release possible.

Open Access for Publications

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President, Engineering

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently announced a new option for publication rights management, wherein researchers can choose to pay for the public to have perpetual open access to the publication. Google applauds this new option, and today we are announcing that we will pay the open access fees for all articles by Google researchers that are published in ACM journals. IEEE also has an open access option for some of its publications, and we also pay the open access fee for them and for publications in like organizations.

Google has always believed that by improving access to the world’s knowledge, we can help improve everyone’s lives. When it comes to scientific research, we have consistently said that open access to publications speeds up research, accelerates innovation, and helps grow the global economy.

Policies like ACM’s continue to demonstrate the sustainability of open access publishing. It will also provide better access to the papers that we write at Google. We encourage researchers everywhere to pursue open access options whenever publishing articles, and to continue to make publications available as widely as possible, within your rights.

Crystalline native gold on quartz matrix

This is one of the largest Belshazzar Gold specimens that I've seen at the shows. It contains over 22 ounces of Native Gold, visible on all sides of this cabinet sized specimen! The Gold consists of fine crystals and wires...

From the Belshazzar Mine, Quartzburg District, Boise County, Idaho.
Measures 12 cm by 7.2 cm by 6 cm.

A showpiece from the Tucson Show 2013.  This specimen sold for $55,000.  For the rockhound or any lover of natural beauty, there are some truly awesome photographs at the link.

"Holding nature's land speed record for 10 million consecutive years"

YouTube link.

Via Neatorama.

Electricity usage in the United States. A cartogram from 1921.

From the archives of the StarTribune, this cartogram depicting the number of households having electricity in each state:

How each state ranks may be judged by its size as shown on the map, which was prepared by the General Electric company, Schenectady, N.Y., from data compiled through a national survey made by the commercial service section of its publication bureau.

 

New York ranks first, having an electrical population (served by central stations) of 8,620,700, or 78.7 per cent of its actual population. The second largest state is Pennsylvania, with an electrical population of 6,330,000, or 68.8 per cent of the actual population; third, Illinois, with 5,150,000, or 79.8 per cent; fourth, Massachusetts, with 4,030,000 or 97.8 per cent; fifth, Ohio, with 3,550,000, or 66.1 per cent, and sixth, California, with 2,827,000, or 86.5 per cent.

 

At the bottom of the list is Nevada, squeezed into a tiny circumference on the map, because it has only 66,300 persons served by central power stations, which, however, is 54.3 per cent of its actual population...

 

The electrical population of the United States is 62,023,400, out of an actual population (last previous census) of 108,148,000, a percentage of 57.3.

This was of personal interest to me because my father used to work for REA (the Rural Electrification Administration) in the 1950s.

School may discipline teacher who advised students of their Constitutional rights

From the Chicago-area Daily Herald:

[John Dryden] wants people to focus on the issue he raised: Whether school officials considered that students could incriminate themselves with their answers to the survey that included questions about drug and alcohol use.

Dryden, a social studies teacher, told some of his students April 18 that they had a 5th Amendment right to not incriminate themselves by answering questions on the survey, which had each student's name printed on it...

The survey asked about drug, alcohol and tobacco use, and emotions, according to Brad Newkirk, chief academic officer. The results were to be reviewed by school officials, including social workers, counselors and psychologists.

The survey was not a diagnostic tool, but a "screener" to figure out which students might need specific help, Newkirk said. Superintendent Jack Barshinger said teacher support for doing a survey grew after several suicides by students in recent years. Students and staff typically said they had no idea those teens were in distress...

Dryden said it was just "dumb luck" he learned about the contents. He picked up surveys from his mailbox about 10 minutes before his first class. Seeing students' names on them, unlike past surveys, he started reading the 34 questions.

"Oh. Well. Ummm, somebody needs to remind them they have the ability not to incriminate themselves," he recalled thinking. It was particularly on his mind because his classes had recently finished reviewing the Bill of Rights...

Dryden faces having a "letter of remedy" placed in his employment file. He said this week he is negotiating the matter with district authorities.

Discussed at Reddit.

Stylish compression garments

Anyone who has dealt with edema will be familiar with compression stockings (we used to call them TED hose).  They were designed for function, not fashion, and were colored and styled to be as inobtrusive as possible.  The only ones I ever remember seeing were either white or "flesh" colored (and the "flesh" was always Caucasian - though that may have changed in recent years).

Now a new product is available to breast cancer patients and others wishing to prevent or suppress lymphedema in the upper extremity.

It used to be that the only kind of sleeves available looked like big ugly bandages, but LympheDIVAs, a company started by two women with breast cancer in Philadelphia, was one of the first to change that. LympheDIVAs creates sleeves and gauntlets so funky and pretty, you could imagine wearing them just because they look cool. I wear their product regularly, and have found them to be pretty great. When I put on my "Lotus Dragon" one, people think I have an actual sleeve tattoo, which cracks me up.

Further details at Boing Boing.

At a "build party" you can assemble your own functioning, untraceable, AK47

YouTube link.

A journalist for Mother Jones explains the process in the video above.

Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun's key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we're assembling the guns for our own "personal use," whatever that may entail, we're not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California's stringent assault weapons ban, that's perfectly within the law.

Here's a field test of a similarly-assembled weapon:

YouTube link.

Via The Dish.

Vamp

See if you can guess the identity of this famous actress.

Her grandparents were Welsh, Swedish, and Scottish.  She was born in Montana and was named after a whistle stop in Nebraska.

[Her] silent film roles were mainly those of vamps or femme fatales, and she frequently portrayed characters of Asian or Eurasian background in films... which she later recalled "...kind of solidified my exotic non-American image."  It took years for her to overcome this stereotype, and as late as 1932 she was cast as a villainous Eurasian half-breed... She also played a sadistic Chinese princess in The Mask of Fu Manchu...

I leave a final, decisive clue below the fold.
Perhaps if she were carrying Asta...

Photo credit Vintage Photography.

Explore more with Mapping with Google

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Program Manager

In September 2012 we launched Course Builder, an open source learning platform for educators or anyone with something to teach, to create online courses. This was our experimental first step in the world of online education, and since then the features of Course Builder have continued to evolve. Mapping with Google, our latest MOOC, showcases new features of the platform.

From your own backyard all the way to Mount Everest, Google Maps and Google Earth are here to help you explore the world. You can learn to harness the world’s most comprehensive and accurate mapping tools by registering for Mapping with Google.

Mapping with Google is a self-paced, online course developed to help you better navigate the world around you by improving your use of the new Google Maps, Maps Engine Lite, and Google Earth. All registrants will receive an invitation to preview the new Google Maps.

Through a combination of video and text lessons, activities, and projects, you’ll learn to do much more than look up directions or find your house from outer space. Tell a story of your favorite locations with rich 3D imagery, or plot sights to see on your upcoming trip and share with your travel buddies. During the course, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from Google experts and collaborate with a worldwide community of participants, via Google+ Hangouts and a course forum.

Mapping with Google will be offered from June 10 - June 24, and you can choose whether to explore the features of Google Maps, Google Earth, or both. In addition, you’ll have the option to complete a project, applying the skills you’ve learned to earn a certificate. Visit g.co/mappingcourse to learn more and register today.

The world is a big place; we like to think that you can make it a bit more manageable and adventurous with Google’s mapping tools.

"Pistol Packin Mama"

Roosevelt was a peripatetic traveler, covering large distances in service of the many projects she pursued both during and after the FDR presidency. It was Eleanor’s determination to drive her own car that led to her pistol ownership. The Secret Service begged her to take an agent, a police escort, or at least a chauffeur; she refused. The pistol was a compromise: a small bit of protection to put their minds at ease...

Although Eleanor told the fascinated press, when she first got the weapon, that she was a “fairly good shot,” a New York Times reporter at the 1972 dedication of the Eleanor Roosevelt Wings of the FDR Library interviewed several of Eleanor’s friends who said that she carried the permit, but not the pistol.

Found in Slate's Vault. I doubt this is who Bing Crosby had in mind for his song.

A dose of Dilbert

Thousands more are here.

This is a "Schnee bath"

The Schnee Four Cell Bath was used for treating general rheumatic conditions and painful joints. A patient would be seated with an individual bath for each limb. Each bath had its own current, which could be varied independently.  In this treatment patients could bear a much stronger current than with electrodes on small areas, because of the large skin area exposed to the current in each bath. There was no danger of electric shock as in a full bath as the porcelain tubs were not connected to water pipes and were well insulated from earthing. The quantity of water required was not great and did not depend on a nearby water supply. It also allowed the person to be treated without undressing, speeding up treatment times and proving much more comfortable and convenient than a full body bath.

Text from the Sacred Medical Order of Hope.  Photo from Edward Reginald Morton and Elkin Cumberbatch’s Essentials of Medical Electricity (Third Edition) (1916), via A London Salmagundi.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2012, with a hat tip to reader Rein in the Netherlands, who sent me this 1930s photo of a Schnee bath in Bethesda, the first Dutch spa, established in 1849 in Laag Soeren.

The "Schnee" is not a reference to the German word for snow; it was the name of the inventor, who lived in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Czechoslovakia.

Photo credit: Mrs. Kike Laagewaard, granddaughter of the last managing director of the spa.

The unhappy life of the real Christopher Robin

A reminder that the protagonist of the Pooh stories was a real person:

In the case of Christopher Robin at least we have a little window into the human test-tube: for CR wrote a book describing the hell of being Christopher Robin, The Enchanted Places (1974)... It seems that writing the books was essentially an excuse not to be with his son, or perhaps better, to be with him in a different way...

He helped his father with plot lines – there really is a Poohsticks Bridge; he put on a Pooh play with some children in the Hundred Acres Wood for his parents and assorted friends.

However, imagine his dismay at arriving at boarding school – a long way from Hogwarts unfortunately – and immediately being known as ‘that Christopher Robin’. A record had been made of A.A.Milnes’ poem Vespers and some of CR’s classmates took to playing it again and again in the evening.

In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

Further details at Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog.

Boston traffic, 1949

Is it any better now, Chris?

Photo: Cornell Capa, via First Time User.

Pulling the old "switcheroo"

State authorities this morning raided 29 bars and restaurants across New Jersey on suspicion that they have been re-filling empty bottles of their most expensive liquors with cheaper alcohol.

Dubbed "Operation Swill," the year-long investigation found the establishments fooled customers so they could charge higher prices and bolster their profits...

The raided establishments included famous names, including TGI Friday, Ruby Tuesday, and Applebee's (list at the link).

This struck a chord with me because three of my college roommates worked their way through school as bartenders, and at least in that era (Boston, 1960s), bartenders were sometimes allowed to take home the almost-empties as a tip.   As a consequence our dorm room had Johnny Walker Black Label and Maker's Mark bottles on the shelf - which we of course filled and refilled with the cheapest available generic substitutes.

We enjoyed having schoolmates come to parties and compliment us by saying "You know, you can really tell fine liquor."  Sure....

In memoriam, Lieut. L. Stanley Finseth, 1920-1943

Born Jan 31, 1920 and raised on the family farm at Kenyon, MN, my uncle Levi Stanley Finseth graduated from Byron H.S. in 1938. He then enrolled at St. Olaf college and later enlisted in the Air Force in 1942. As navigator of a bomber crew he flew 35 missions in North Africa, but died with his crew when their plane was brought down by enemy action over Switzerland on October 1, 1943.

Memorial gifts in his honor were directed to St. Olaf's WCAL, the first listener-supported public radio station. In 1946 when I was born my parents named me after him.

Reposted from 2009 for Memorial Day.

I am... Batman !!

Mourning Cloaks (Nymphalis Antiopa) overwinter at our latitude, then emerge as harbingers of spring, typically before any other butterflies.  This fellow has some ragged edges on the trailing edge of his/her hindwing, suggesting successful escapes from bird beaks, or perhaps just the wear and tear of aging.  Basking in the sun on a porch railing is a typical warming behavior on a coolish spring day.  (closeup photos here)

"Rabbit Island", off the coast of Japan, is the site of an abandoned WWII poison gas production facility, but now it's home to hundreds of rabbits that thrive in a predator-free paradise.

A thread at Reddit addresses the question What is the "rule #1" in your profession or hobby? There are some amusing replies among the 14,000 responses.  In one of the emergency rooms at Parkland Hospital in Dallas in the 1970s, #1 on a list of posted rules was "Don't hurt yourself."  Rule #2 was "Don't yell at the nurses (See rule #1)."

Some amazing plays happen in high school basketball games.  Here's an unusual buzzer-beater.

A lady recounts how dolphins saved her life and that of her pet dog.

At Google Images you can pull up hundreds of photos of "cat litter cake." (edible cake that looks like dirty cat litter).  Perhaps not safe for non-ailurophiles.

The Mnozil brass present a most unusual performance of "Lonely Boy."

Wikipedia has a listing of The 50 Greatest [animated] Cartoons.

An erotic statue from Pompeii is now being exhibited at the British Museum. "The sculpture is of the mythical half-goat, half-man Pan having sex with a nanny goat. The Times reports that the museum is determined to display the object in plain sight, rather than hidden behind a curtain or in a "museum secretum" – a restricted area for those aged over 14 in the Naples Museum."  Graphic photo at the link.

Some prisoners in Venezuela are sewing their mouths shut (or partially shut).  The reasons for this are explained at the Atlantic article.

The National Forensic League's website has a list of all the debate topics from 1939 to 2012-13.   I vividly remember spending weekends in empty schoolrooms debating federal aid to education, the Common Market, and Social Security/medical care.

A Reddit thread compiles suggestions of books that are better understood/enjoyed when read for a second, third, or fourth time.

For the home handyman: how to fill missing knockouts in electric boxes.  Also an explanation of combustion air vents, and preventing or correcting problems with them.

The world's most expensive car crash: a pileup of ten Ferraris and similar cars on their way to a supercar event in Hiroshima.

"Archaeologists surveying the construction site of the former City Hall in Rotterdam have unearthed a collection of 477 coins stuffed inside a 16th century shoe. The oldest coin in the hoard dates to 1472 and the most recent to 1592."

If you use a credit card and the clerk asks for your ZIP code, giving that information may subject you to unwanted sales mailings, or your data may be sold to a data broker.

A Texas homeowner threw gasoline on a snake and set it on fire.  The resulting karma-fueled fire burned down her home.

A supercut of rabbits in the movies.

Food may taste bad after you brush your teeth because surfactants in toothpaste interfere with receptors on your taste buds.

A GIF of a dog happily cavorting with a venetian blind.

Trolltunga

I always like to end my blogging morning with a good image at the top of the page. Here's another photo of this famous rock formation (named because of its resemblance to a troll's tongue):

It is located near Odda and the Hardanger Fjord, well south of the Fjaerland Fjord where my ancestors lived.

See also Preikestolen.

Top image via Reddit; second one via Wikipedia.

The "long fall" photograph of 9/11

Excerpts from a story at the Motherboard section of Vice:

The events of 9/11 remain the most photographed in history. It’s from out of that mass witness and record that one image, the 9/11 photograph that still hardly anyone has ever seen, seemed to challenge our deepest notions of not only what it meant to die – and eventually be partially reconstructed – in the new data age, but what confronting death, as witnesses or consumers of information, said about ourselves as witnesses or consumers of information. Making it all the more arresting, perhaps, was its stark, almost calm anonymity. Nobody had a clue as to who the photo’s subject, seen plummeting from the very top of the North Tower, could be. Countless newspapers and wires ran the image the following morning, but almost immediately got so much shit from readers that for most outlets there became no other option but to pull the photo. Eleven years on, the Falling Man is still suspended.

In deference to the sensitivities of some readers, I'll place the photo and some additional text below the fold...

Richard Drew, a photojournalist on assignment with the Associated Press who had been preparing to photograph a fashion show that morning but who was quickly dispatched to the towers by his editor, managed to snap a 12-frame sequence of the figure in free fall...

But of the dozen frames in Drew’s otherwise chaotic, painfully mortal sequence, one stands apart. It’s a quiet, intimate image. And compositionally sound: the “jumper” is upside down, perfectly vertical, straddling the upper third of the frame and splitting the North and South Towers...

Drew’s image ran the morning of Sept. 12 on page seven of The New York Times, as well as in countless papers across the country and the world... Readers were incensed. Had the press no decency? Tasteless, crass, voyeuristic. From the Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, dailies pulled the image and were forced to go on the immediate defensive as they wiped the image from their online records... But mostly the image hasn’t been seen in print since 2001. Drew has called it “the most famous photograph no one has seen.”

You can finish reading the story at Vice.

Tornados producing a "dead man walking"

The image above is a screencap from a video on a television documentary about tornados.  Twin twisters rotating about one another produced a figure that could be viewed as humanoid in shape.

A discussion thread at the extensively-redacted AskHistorians subReddit examines whether or not there was a legend among pre-contact plains native Americans of some tornados being referred to as "dead man walking" and whether this image is representative of that.

I have often wondered why tornados are not depicted in ancient rock art petroglyphs in North America.

Americans do not have a constitutional right to vote

Surprised?

The U.S. has waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan justified, at least in rhetoric, by the claim that people deserve the right to vote for their leaders. Most of us assume that the right to vote has long been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Not according to the Supreme Court. In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Court ruled that “[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”..

The right to vote is the foundation of any democracy. Yet most Americans do not realize that we do not have a constitutionally protected right to vote. While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15th), sex (19th) and age (26th), no affirmative right to vote exists...

Two Congressmen from Minnesota and Wisconsin want to change that:

Two members of the House of Representatives, Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and Representative Keith Ellison, D-Minn., announced on May 13 that they would introduce an amendment to the federal Constitution guaranteeing the right to vote in America.  Here is their proposed amendment:

SECTION 1: Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.

SECTION 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.

There's more at the Salon source.

"Balloon syndrome" in a hedgehog (and "flatus profuse" in 1593)

A variety of British sources today are reporting the unusual case of a hedgehog that was inflated like a balloon (the above image is via The Times).   On the left is an almost-unrecognizable hedgehog lying on its back on a towel, presumably on some type of tray for the xray machine.  The image at the right is an AP view of the little critter, showing the skin inflated by gas.

The subcutaneous emphysema developed because a wound became infected with gas-producing organisms.   The same thing can happen in humans; here are excerpts from a 2009 report published in Surgical Infections:

‘‘Flatus Profuse Present in the Muscles’’: Subcutaneous Emphysema of the Lower Abdominal Wall and Thighs, Described in 1593 by Fabricius Hildanus

Between 1598 and 1641, 600 medical and surgical observations made by the famous German surgeon Guilhelmius Fabricius Hildanus (1560–1634) were published in his Observationum et curationum chirurgicarum centuriae I–VI.  One of the case reports, published as Observatio LXX in the fifth Centuria, bears the title (in translation) Of flatus, profuse present in the muscles. This case report probably is the earliest accurate observation of subcutaneous emphysema of the lower abdomen and thighs attributable to a retroperitoneal abscess.

Here is an English translation of the most essential part of this case report:

In the year 1593, in Keulen, I was sent for a boy of about ten years old, who has suffered heavily from smallpox, of which he was almost cured, but now his belly, down from the umbilicus, and his hips and thighs were peculiarly extended with flatus, which was present between the skin and the muscles, and partly in the muscles, and when these parts were touched with our hands, they rustled, just as fresh calf’s meat, that the butcher has inflated with air. He felt no pain, his internal parts were comfortable, and with almost no effects of the previous illness. We used several means, internally, to strengthen the noble internal organs, and externally, to make the flatus disappear, which ultimately resulted in a favourable outcome. 

Those familiar with the word flatus being used only in reference to farts will recognize now that it can also be applied to other collections of air or gas, and is derived from the Latin verb flare ("to blow") which gives us inflation.

I also find it interesting that this report gives such a good description of the crepitus detectable in SQ emphysema ("when these parts were touched with our hands, they rustled...") and I'm very curious about the next part: "...just as fresh calf's meat, that the butcher has inflated with air."

Why would butchers of the time inflate meat with air??  Does anyone know?

Was this week's murder of a British soldier a "terrorist" attack?

The argument in this Guardian column argues that terrorism is defined as attacks directed at civilians:

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be "terrorism" because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country. 

More at the link (those who reflexly dislike Glenn Greenwald's column can give it a pass).

A Segway for golfers

YouTube link.

The video is a promotional one by the company.  At their website they offer data suggesting that the two-wheeled Segway is gentler on turf than the 4-wheeled conventional carts.  At $6K, they won't be widely bought by the general public, but perhaps they will find their way into the rental business.

Syntactic Ngrams over Time

Posted by Yoav Goldberg, Professor at Bar Ilan University & Post-doc at Google 2011-2013

We are proud to announce the release of a very large dataset of counted dependency tree fragments from the English Books Corpus. This resource will help researchers, among other things, to model the meaning of English words over time and create better natural-language analysis tools. The resource is based on information derived from a syntactic analysis of the text of millions of English books.

Sentences in languages such as English have structure. This structure is called syntax, and knowing the syntax of a sentence is a step towards understanding its meaning. The process of taking a sentence and transforming it into a syntactic structure is called parsing. At Google, we parse a lot of text every day, in order to better understand it and be able to provide better results and services in many of our products.

There are many kinds of syntactic representations (you may be familiar with sentence diagramming), and at Google we've been focused on a certain type of syntactic representation called "dependency trees". Dependency-trees representation is centered around words and the relations between them. Each word in a sentence can either modify or be modified by other words. The various modifications can be represented as a tree, in which each node is a word.

For example, the sentence "we really like syntax" is analyzed as:



The verb "like" is the main word of the sentence. It is modified by a subject (denoted nsubj) "we", a direct object (denoted dobj) "syntax", and an adverbial modifier "really".

An interesting property of syntax is that, in many cases, one could recover the structure of a sentence without knowing the meaning of most of the words. For example, consider the sentence "the krumpets gnorked the koof with a shlap". We bet you could infer its structure, and tell that group of something which is called a krumpet did something called "gnorking" to something called a "koof", and that they did so with a "shlap".

This property by which you could infer the structure of the sentence based on various hints, without knowing the actual meaning of the words, is very useful. For one, it suggests that a even computer could do a reasonable job at such an analysis, and indeed it can! While still not perfect, parsing algorithms these days can analyze sentences with impressive speed and accuracy. For instance, our parser correctly analyzes the made-up sentence above.



Let's try a more difficult example. Something rather long and literary, like the opening sentence of One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, as translated by Gregory Rabassa:

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.



Pretty good for an automatic process, eh?

And it doesn’t end here. Once we know the structure of many sentences, we can use these structures to infer the meaning of words, or at least find words which have a similar meaning to each other.

For example, consider the fragments:
"order a XYZ"
"XYZ is tasty"
"XYZ with ketchup"
"juicy XYZ"

By looking at the words modifying XYZ and their relations to it, you could probably infer that XYZ is a kind of food. And even if you are a robot and don't really know what a "food" is, you could probably tell that the XYZ must be similar to other unknown concepts such as "steak" or "tofu".

But maybe you don't want to infer anything. Maybe you already know what you are looking for, say "tasty food". In order to find such tasty food, one could collect the list of words which are objects of the verb "ate", and are commonly modified by the adjective "tasty" and "juicy". This should provide you a large list of yummy foods.

Imagine what you could achieve if you had hundreds of millions of such fragments. The possibilities are endless, and we are curious to know what the research community may come up with. So we parsed a lot of text (over 3.5 million English books, or roughly 350 billion words), extracted such tree fragments, counted how many times each fragment appeared, and put the counts online for everyone to download and play with.

350 billion words is a lot of text, and the resulting dataset of fragments is very, very large. The resulting datasets, each representing a particular type of tree fragments, contain billions of unique items, and each dataset’s compressed files takes tens of gigabytes. Some coding and data analysis skills will be required to process it, but we hope that with this data amazing research will be possible, by experts and non-experts alike.

The dataset is based on the English Books corpus, the same dataset behind the ngram-viewer. This time there is no easy-to-use GUI, but we still retain the time information, so for each syntactic fragment, you know not only how many times it appeared overall, but also how many times it appeared in each year -- so you could, for example, look at the subjects of the word “drank” at each decade from 1900 to 2000 and learn how drinking habits changed over time (much more ‘beer’ and ‘coffee’, somewhat less ‘wine’ and ‘glass’ (probably ‘of wine’). There’s also a drop in ‘whisky’, and an increase in ‘alcohol’. Brandy catches on around 1930s, and start dropping around 1980s. There is an increase in ‘juice’, and, thankfully, some decrease in ‘poison’).

The dataset is described in details in this scientific paper, and is available for download here.

Joy

Found at imgur (p.s. - discovered this week that it's pronounced "imager").

And GIF is pronounced "jif" (according to its creator):

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

The counterargument is presented at Sentence First:

I’ve written about the pronunciation of GIF before, but a lot of people are still confused about it. There’s no need to be. Wilhite may have invented the GIF but he can’t decide its pronunciation for everyone. Each of us gets to choose how we say a new word, and most people say GIF with a hard g – unsurprisingly, given the sound’s dominance in English words containing the letter. Language being democratic, hard-g /gɪf/ is therefore the dominant usage. But “jif” is a significant variant, equally standard and clearly preferred by some communities...

In the meantime, you don’t have to adopt the inventor’s preference. He did us a great technical service, but he’s not the boss of English. You’re the boss of your own English. GIF is in the public domain: say it any way you want.

"Robo Raven" - a robotic bird

YouTube link.

Professor S.K. Gupta has been working on creating a robotic bird for over 8 years now, and other engineering groups across the world have also been working on robotic birds. And while the RoboRaven isn’t the first robotic bird to take flight, it is the first robotic bird to have two independently functioning wings. That gives it a huge advantage in flight, since the independent operation gives it more aerodynamic configurations and more practical applications.

At 1:49 in the video the robotic bird is attacked by a hawk.

Via The Dish.

Redefining "special needs"

"...everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!""

---from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Shadow art

The artist is Kumi Yamashita.  An image of the final product is posted at her Facebook page.  See also my previous post about her portraits created with thread and nails and with denim.

Things you might not know about golf

The longest drive ever was 515 yards.

The longest putt ever was a monstrous 375 feet.

The longest golf course in the world is the par 77 International Golf Club in Massachusetts which measures a fearsome 8325 yards.

The longest golf hole in the world is the 7th hole (par 7) of the Sano Course at the Satsuki Golf Club in Japan. It measures an incredible 909 yards.

125,000 golf balls a year are hit into the water at the famous 17th hole of the Stadium Course at Sawgrass.

It is thought the word golf comes from the Dutch word "kolf" or "kolve", meaning "club". Historians believe this was passed on to the Scottish, whose own dialect changed this to "golve," "gowl" or "gouf". 

Found at The First Tee.

Clever pommel horse routine

YouTube link.

Some YouTube commenters think this is FAKE! (allcaps with exclamation point), while another asks why he has a face on his chest. *sigh*

Via Neatorama.

The rites of spring

As a partial explanation of my absence from the blog for several days, I'll offer this photoessay showing the outburst of growth in the woods behind our home.  This past winter was unusually prolonged, so when non-Arctic temperatures finally arrived, most people in this part of the country rushed outdoors.  I headed to the woods behind our house.  (The photos should enlarge with a click)

This tree arches over the entry to the woods; this past winter we had several dead and undesirable trees taken out and failed to realize that this tree was leaning on one of those.  When its support was removed it bent to the extent that the top branches now touch the ground.  Not sure if they will collect enough light there for the tree to thrive, but for now it creates a living gateway.

In the Upper Midwest of the U.S., the primary choices for foliage plants in shaded woodlands are hostas.   This cluster at the base of the arching tree was one of the first I planted perhaps 10 years ago.  It will fill out to cover the entire mulched area before midsummer.  All except one of the clusters have had Repellex tablets placed in the root zone in an effort to dissuade rabbits from enjoying lunch here; one plant serves as a control.  We'll see what happens.

 

An even more striking foliage plant in my view is Pulmonaria spp.  I think we planted just a few; now they have proliferated in scattered locations in the woods.  I love the leaf patterns; the flowers are a bonus in the early spring but don't last long.  

These Lilies of the Valley came to us in an exchange with a neighbor to whom we donated some of the pulmonaria.  The other flowers in bloom this week include the bleeding hearts (photo at the top of this post), phlox, trillium, bluebells, dandelions, wild geraniums and violets.

 

Last fall I spent uncounted hours laying down landscape fabric and then dragging tarps full of hardwood mulch to the woods to create walking paths.   There's still lots of work to do to finish the paths (I'm laying down logs from the cut trees and partially embedding them on the sides of the paths to keep the mulch from spreading.   The paths give me a more secure footing for walking and also subdivide the garden into areas where we can experiment with different botanical combinations.

This hosta was the first one I planted in the woods after I spent the better part of probably two summers grubbing out the buckthorn and honeysuckle underbrush by the roots.  The soil back here is black loam several inches deep, and the other plants love it once you remove the invasives that steal all the water and light.  This fellow will be huge by the end of the summer; I probably should subdivide him.

We've added bluebells; these are not the English bluebells that you see in immense masses in the forests of the National Trust in Britain.  I put chicken wire around this cluster this week to keep the rabbits at bay, because we want to harvest the seeds to scatter in other areas of the woods.  Last summer the rabbits nibbled these down to the ground.

 

It makes sense to incorporate some landscape features into the planting scheme (and it makes way more sense than trying to move them).  Here three varieties of hosta cluster around a set of large boulders.

Some phlox was initially planted in the center of this area; it has now spread up and down the hillside.  The ferns are escaping from their bed and may have to be restrained because they will shade out everything else, and they are aggressive spreaders in soil like this.

A felicitous combination of plants - Jacks in the Pulpit at the far left just getting started, a variegated hosta, a Pulmonaria cluster, and at the far right some native violets.

Both the white trillium and the yellow ones need some protection from rabbits until they manage to spread to some distant locations.  The chicken wire is unattractive and "unnatural,", but is a temporary means to an end.

I really enjoy having Jacks-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in the woods.  Never had to plant them; the year after I got out all the invasive underbrush, a couple Jacks emerged.  Now there are hundreds of them; the largest/oldest ones in the woods get as high as my thigh.

Last fall I wrote a post for this blog about propagating Jacks; I heard recently from my friend that her transplants have emerged and appear healthy.

I'll be back out in the woods and yard in the days to come.  Also facing the annual monster chore of Cleaning The Garage.  And hobby and family stuff is accelerating - and the Monarchs will be arriving within a week or so.  So the blog posts will be fewer for the next several weeks.