"En avril 2012, les solistes, le chœur et orchestre du Volksoper Wien (l’opéra populaire de Vienne, Autriche) a réalisé une flashmob dans la gare de Vienne. Devant des passants et voyageurs aux yeux ébahis, ce sont d’autres passants, employés, qui deviennent peu à peu artistes…"
"Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologize to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again.''..TYWKIWDBI is also experiencing a slight delay. The pilot has elected to take another mental health break/blogcation. Service should be restored in a week or ten days. In the meantime, those who feel bereft of ways to avoid doing the work they are supposed to be doing are reminded of the extensive past posts here, which can be accessed by going to the right sidebar and scrolling down to either the expandable "archive" and choosing a month before you became a regular visitor, or by selecting a Category.
"You're the autopilot?" said Zaphod.
"Yes,'' said the voice from the flight console.
"You're in charge of this ship?''
"Yes,'' said the voice again, "there has been a delay. Passengers are to be kept temporarily in suspended animation, for their comfort and convenience. Coffee and biscuits are being served every year, after which passengers are returned to suspended animation for their continued comfort and convenience. Departure will take place when the flight stores are complete. We apologize for the delay.''..
"Delay?" he cried. "Have you seen the world outside this ship? It's a wasteland, a desert. Civilization's been and gone, man. There are no lemon-soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere."
"The statistical likelihood," continued the autopilot primly, "is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat."
I had to look it up, since my Kentucky acquaintances never used the term."Hester called the butterflies "King Billies." She seemed to think each one should be addressed as the king himself. "There he goes, King Billy," she would say. (p. 74)
The name Monarch is probably related to the eponymous appellation "King Billy" used by Canadians; the butterfly has the black and orange colors associated with William of Orange, Coregent with Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the hero of Protestant England for his victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne.I enjoy reading works by authors who have enough command of the language to create new turns of phrases or colorful metaphors and similes. Some examples from this book:
"Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken."And I enjoy encountering new words. (I haven't looked all these up yet):
"The equipment was not necessarily new. Most of it, in fact, seemed to be older than she was, "pre-Reagan admonistration," they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side."
"She'd asked him to tidy things up, but men and barns were like a bucket of forks, tidy was no part of the equation."
"Dellarobia was amazed he could see roadkill from the backseat. The animal was as flat as a drive-through hamburger."
"She'd seen the man's face. Straining, neck veins and ligaments bulging. He looked like a tied-up horse in a barn fire."
"She could certainly bring over some more from Hester's, as they'd canned about fifty quarts. How could a person never have heard of dilly beans?"Author/cover image at top from Sustainable Kentucky, where the book is also reviewed. The side embed is of a Monarch raised at our home last summer.
"It had no shoulder harnesses in the backseat, only lap belts, so the kids' car seats fit in a sigoggling way that was probably unsafe."
"niddy-noddy" and "Moorit" (a black sheep)
"Here is what my oldest daughter Josie Taylor Wells and I experienced, I am so glad Kerry Gorman Wells and the other girls were out of town when this storm came through. Very thankful we were not injured."No gore, but difficult to watch for other reasons (the screams of the family in the dark). Your choice...
One woman was punched in the face as she crested a hill on her bicycle in Northwest Washington. Another was hit in the back of the head as she walked to a bus stop. Neither was robbed, and after one attack, the young men laughed as they made their escape.Related incidents:
D.C. police say the recent attacks in Columbia Heights may be part of a disturbing trend that assailants across the country call the “knockout game.” Youths challenge one another to knock out a random person with a single punch...
The Internet is giving attackers bragging rights far beyond their circle of friends or even their neighborhoods. One particularly brutal video from New Jersey showing a young man hitting a woman from behind, sending her face first to the pavement, has a half-million views on YouTube...
One 10-year-old boy said he recently punched someone on a $20 dare but failed to knock the victim to the ground. “Me and my friends were hanging out and they asked me if I had done one,” the boy said. “And I said I don’t know how to play, so [they] explained it to me.”
A 15-year-old charter school student said that in “Grand Theft Auto,” “you can just run up to people, and you can just like hit them and they’ll just like fall. It looks kind of funny in the game.” She said she wouldn’t do it in real life.
In New York, a 78-year-old woman strolling in her neighborhood was punched in the head by a stranger and tumbled to the ground. In Washington, a 32-year-old woman was swarmed by teenagers on bikes, and one clocked her in the face. In Jersey City, a 46-year-old man died after someone sucker-punched him and he struck his head on an iron fence.And some distubing comments appended to the WaPo article:
"It is amazing how the Washington Post can report about this phenomenon without the issue of racial violence coming up one into the discussion. It is a shame that honesty took a back seat to what is really going on here."I found commentary on "polar bear hunting" by Thomas Sowell:
"Yep. In the hood, this is called polar bear hunting. The Post knows this but purposefully doesn't report it. Its a rapidly growing hate crime that isn't being acknowledged as such."
The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.”More at the link.
Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry...
The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game” or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens” or “young people” against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims — and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.”
Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,” the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.”
That phrase — “White Girl Bleed A Lot” — is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.
1963-1964Wow. How's that for a relevance stretching half a century into the future. I wish I still had my file box of 3x5 cards.
Resolved: That Social Security benefits should be extended to include complete medical care.
"He quite liked nuns. Not that he was a, you know, left-footer or anything like that. No, when it came to avoiding going to church, the church he stolidly avoided going to was St. Cecil and All Angels, no-nonsense C. of E..."My wife found an explanation in an old column at The Guardian:
Why are Catholics sometimes called 'left-footers'?The best image I've found of such a shovel in use is this one, from Jim Orr Photography -
The saying turns on a traditional distinction between left- and right-handed spades in Irish agriculture...
Most types of digging spade in Britain and Ireland have foot-rests at the top of their blades; two-sided spades have foot-rests on each side of the shaft and socket, while an older style of one-sided spade had only one. Two-sided spades may well have been introduced by the Protestant 'planters' in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century specialised spade and shovel mills in the north of Ireland were producing vast numbers of two-sided spades which came to be universally used in Ulster and strongly identified with the province.
One-sided spades with narrow blades and a foot-rest cut out of the side of the relatively larger wooden shaft continued in use in the south and west. The rural population of Gaelic Ireland retained the Catholic faith and tended also to retain the one-sided spade and 'dig with the wrong foot'.
In fact, the two-sided spade of Ulster was generally used with the left foot whereas the one-sided spade tended to be used with the right foot. Instinctively, the 'wrong foot' of the Catholics has come to be thought of as the left foot...--Hugh Cheape, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Miami-Dade College anthropology professor Mercedes Cros Sandoval explained, "This is a magical ritual of Cuban origin, probably, with the name 'Sarabanda,' which is a deity from the Congo area that was probably used to affect the relationship of these three young people. To me it is alien, the idea of casting your sins on innocent animals," said Sheehan.Alien, yes, but not inexplicable when one remembers the Western tradition of "sin-eating" and its relationship to Christianity.
Hicks and her team can't yet explain the connection between obesity and high rates of antibiotic prescription. "There might be reasons that more obese people need antibiotics," she says. "But it also could be that antibiotic use is leading to obesity."As always, more at the link.
Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that antibiotics might be linked to weight gain. A 2012 New York University study found that antibiotic use in the first six months of life was linked with obesity later on. Another 2012 NYU study found that mice given antibiotics gained more weight than their drug-free counterparts. As my colleague Tom Philpott has noted repeatedly, livestock operations routinely dose animals with low levels of antibiotics to promote growth.
A bizarre instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up Leonardo da Vinci.
Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance genius who painted the Mona Lisa, invented the ‘‘viola organista’’ - which looks like a baby grand piano – but never built it, experts say. The viola organista has now come to life, thanks to a Polish concert pianist with a flair for instrument-making and the patience and passion to interpret da Vinci’s plans...
‘‘This instrument has the characteristics of three we know: the harpsichord, the organ and the viola da gamba,’’ Zubrzycki said as he debuted the instrument at the Academy of Music in the southern Polish city of Krakow...More details at The Age, with a hat tip to reader Shirin for the link.
Sixty-one gleaming steel strings run across it, similar to the inside of a baby grand. Each is connected to the keyboard, complete with smaller black keys for sharp and flat notes. But unlike a piano, it has no hammered dulcimers. Instead, there are four spinning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair, like violin bows. To turn them, Zubrzycki pumps a pedal below the keyboard connected to a crankshaft. As he tinkles the keys, they press the strings down onto the wheels, emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion.
Basically, it appears that the instrument built by Slawomir Zubrzycki is not so much a realization of a design by Leonardo da Vinci as it is a reconstruction of the instrument described as a “Geigenwerk/GeigenInstrument, oder GeigenClavicymbel” in the second volume of Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum...More at the link, found by reader Pam!
Now it’s certainly true that da Vinci made some sketches of a continuously-bowed keyboard instrument (which he dubbed the “viola organista”) , but the sketches are pretty rough, and most of them show an action that’s quite different from the one in Zubrzycki’s instrument (which uses the same rosin-coated wheels as Haiden’s geigenwerk). In short, Zubrzycki’s instrument seems to me to be a nice reconstruction of a 16th-century German instrument that just happens to share some of the characteristics of da Vinci’s imagined “viola organista” (which Haiden almost certainly knew nothing about).
You are looking at medieval parchment - animal skin - that was stabbed, cut and stitched up. Preparing animal skin, the first step in producing a medieval book, was challenging. The parchment maker had to scrape off the fleshy bits from the one side, and the hair from the other... If the parchment maker pushed too hard while removing the unwanted parts, he would cut right through the surface, which is what happened in the images above. While some cuts were simply stitched up with a thin parchment cord, it also happened that book producers turned these defects into art. I tumbled these images from a manuscript in Uppsala a while ago, in which holes are plugged with embroidery... In the last image the material was used to attach a missing corner, producing what I tend to call a “Frankenstein page”.From Erik Kwakkel's incomparable blog about medieval books; there are two additional images of repaired pages at the link.
"A coastal town in the Samar province of the central Philippines that was wiped out by Typhoon Haiyan is shown in this Nov. 11 photo. The typhoon, which packed 150 mph winds and 20-foot waves, swept through the archipelago Nov. 8, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake."This coastal town was effectively built on a sandbar, with virtually zero setback from the ordinary high water level.
While any massively large-scale internet launch is likely to suffer some problems, the level of disaster on this particular project has been quite impressive...Incisive commentary from a variety of web-knowledgeable people in the Reddit discussion thread.
The Sunlight Foundation figured out the list of contractors who worked on the site, and noted that the big ones not only are well-known DC power-player insiders, but they're also big on the lobbying and political contributions side of things. You've got companies like... Booz Allen Hamilton, famous for promoting cyberwar hype and employing Ed Snowden. There's defense contracting giant Northrup Grumman...
As you look down the list put together by the Sunlight Foundation, it's all companies like this: giant monstrosities which are simply tied in closely with the government. All the large consulting firms are listed: Accenture, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey. What's missing? Basically any company with even the slightest smidgen of experience building and maintaining large-scale, public-facing web-based apps. The list has no "internet native" companies.
The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice, resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with Alice, Flatland, Phantastes, The Wind in the Willows...You can read his review in toto at The Paris Review.
To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone... Though all is marvellous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own world, though the fortunate child who meets them will have no notion—and his unlearned elders not much more—of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they spring.
For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.
"I'm unreasonably proud of our new house, and though having a dedicated library wasn't the top selling point, it makes me very happy. There are some boxes still to unpack. Most of these aren't opened in any given decade, but I refuse to be parted from them and tend to hyperventilate if I can't find one when I want it. The clock at top left was given to my father by my mother about 35 years ago. It's thought to be in working condition but he never wound it and I'm not going to break precedent."
"These are just 2 of our many bookcases, but they represent a good cross-section of our interests. At the very top, from left to right is: a Japanese vase brought back from Japan for us by a friend, my husband's 2 meter handheld radio, a tiny Japanese sand garden (with a tiny bulldozer -- it's the construction version), 2 candlesticks given us by my husband's grandmother, a sushi set, and a tin with my seashell collection.Morganna and Jrincayc's handmade crafts can be accessed at Lizbeth's Garden, or at their Etsy shop.
In the lefthand bookcase, top shelf, is my L.M. Montgomery collection, I believe I have all her books in modern paperbacks. The next shelf is game and card books on the left, and engineering and machine books on the right. The 3rd shelf down is my Alexander McCall Smith and Laurie R. King books. A water egg-timer is in front of the books. The 4th shelf is a collection of science books and atlases on the left, and guidebooks to animals and birds on the right. The bottom of the bookcase (not seen) is a cupboard and is full of the 1956 Compton's Picture Encyclopedia and some extra kitchen items.
In the righthand bookcase, top shelf, is our collection of Ursula K. LeGuin books, my collection of small cat sculptures, and a jadeite casserole dish, complete with metal stand. The next shelf is our poetry books, my collection of nesting dolls, and a cat pepper shaker. The 3rd shelf is art books, some gardening, cooking, and craft books, a book on Tibet, and some poetry books that don't fit on the shelf above. The bottom of the bookcase (not seen) is a cupboard with more extra kitchen items."
This powerful photo says so much about Jim Kelley, and it says even more about running.The rest of the story is at the link.
My friend Jim died this month while out on a run, doing one of his favorite things in the world. A car struck him as he was crossing the street.
Jim was amazing and selfless. He placed in the top three in his age group 90 percent of the time. He loved to run, more than anybody I know, whether by himself or supporting others...
Jim wasn't a dressy guy. He loved jeans and T-shirts. Teri, Jim’s wife of more than 30 years, told everybody to come to his funeral dressed in their running clothes. That's how Jim would be buried, she said. Come in your tights and your running shorts. Wear your running shoes.
I was one of Jim’s pallbearers. When it was time to go to the cemetery, the funeral director had this idea. The cemetery was only a mile away, he said to us. Instead of vehicles following behind, would we want to honor Jim by running behind the hearse?
It was a genius idea.
Annuals('Plants that flower the first season theseed is sown, and then die.')
All I planted came up,
balsam and nasturtium and
cosmos and the Marvel of Peru
first the cotyledon
then thickly the differentiated
true leaves of the seedlings,
and I transplanted them,
carefully shaking out each one's
hairfine rootlets from the earth,
and they have thriven,
well-watered in the new-turned earth;
and grow apace now--
but not one shows signs of a flower,
not one.
If August passes
flowerless,
and the frosts come,
will I have learned to rejoice enough
in the sober wonder of
green healthy leaves?
"Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998....
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen... It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so..."
"I'm not a big shopper, but I swear to avocados that once I start roaming the aisles..."I presume it originated as a polite way to avoid taking God's name in vain, but I've never encountered it before, either in conversation or six decades of reading. I wonder if this phrase is a local colloquialism from some part of the country where I've never lived.
What we often refer to as Category A can be viewed as a “neoliberal” approach to social insurance, heavy on private provisioning and means-testing. This term often obscures more than it helps, but think of it as a plan for reworking the entire logic of government to simply act as an enabler to market activities, with perhaps some coordinated charity to individuals most in need.
Via The Dish (more discussion at both links). Cartoon from The New Yorker.This contrasts with the Category B grouping, which we associate with the New Deal and the Great Society. This approach creates a universal floor so that individuals don’t experience basic welfare goods as commodities to buy and sell themselves. This is a continuum rather than a hard line, of course, but readers will note that Social Security and Medicare are more in Category B category rather than Category A. My man Franklin Delano Roosevelt may not have known about JavaScript and agile programming, but he knew a few things about the public provisioning of social insurance, and he realized the second category, while conceptually more work for the government, can eliminate a lot of unnecessary administrative problems.
"My nephew came home from Afghanistan complaining about the food in the mess hall," says Jody Anderson, a retired photographer in southern Oregon. "But the soldiers were allowed only to have coffee makers in their rooms."
So Anderson started developing recipes for the coffee maker, including ones for mac 'n' cheese, short ribs and chicken soup...
As Anderson describes it, the design of a traditional coffee maker gives you three basic cooking techniques:
- Steam: The basket at the top is a great place to steam vegetables. You can throw in broccoli, cauliflower or any vegetable that cooks in about the same time as those.
- Poach: The carafe at the bottom serves as a simple vessel for poaching fish and chicken. You can also use it to hard-boil eggs or make couscous and oatmeal.
- Grill: This technique is a bit more advanced — and time-consuming. But if you're really itching for a grilled cheese sandwich or a cinnamon bun in a motel room, the coffee maker's burner can serve as a miniature grill.
Calculations show that the celestial visitor could be dazzlingly bright in November 2013 and be easily visible in broad daylight as it rounds the Sun. Comet ISON is so named because it was first spotted on photos taken by Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok from Russia using the International Scientific Optical Network telescope...
That makes it a type of comet called a sungrazer, and there is a risk that the comet - essentially a giant ball of rock and ice, will break up when it makes that close approach.
But it could become brighter than the greatest comet of the last century, Comet Ikeya-Seki, which excited astronomers in 1965...The article at The Telegraph indicates that this comet should be "fifteen times brighter than the moon."
Comet ISON, which has the official label C/2012 S1, appears to be on a nearly parabolic orbit which leads scientists to believe that it is making its first trip through the Solar System. This means it may have been dislodged from a vast reservoir of icy debris surrounding the Sun far beyond the planets, called the Oort Cloud. It is a giant ball of rock and ice that is likely to be packed with volatiles including water ice that will erupt as brilliant jets of gas and dust when it is at its best.
The comet has dramatically brightened with an outburst of gases in recent days as it draws ever closer to the sun, the Times reported, and if it survives it could be the greatest celestial display in more than 300 years. It is now visible to the naked eye and is expected to continue brightening over the next few weeks until it outshines the moon...
If predictions are correct the galactic show will rival the Great Comet of 1680, which had a tail 90 million miles long and could be seen during the day because it was so bright, leading many to think it was a punishment from God. Even if Ison breaks up before then, or fails to survive its perihelion, its closest scrape with the sun, experts believe its death throes could be spectacular...
If the comet – which is best observed through a telescope or strong binoculars – survives its scrape with the sun it will reach its most brilliant in early December.Please read Danack's comment from last fall regarding the size and location of the comet.
Within the next two weeks of 2013, rapidly brightening Comet ISON might sprout a tail that rivals even Comet McNaught.More info from NASA here (and undoubtedly more to come in the next few weeks)
I wrote this application because i've seen that in many business websites, on contact section, the information about the location of that business is very poorly. As a personal experince, last summer, it was a little bit difficult for me to find the location of a hotel where i spent my vacation in chalkidiki, using just the information provided on the hotels website and the emails from the manager of the hotel.
They wrote to me, that I can reach to the hotel very simple: passing the pefkochori town, 2 km ahead, from the main road, it is a small road on right and in front of the road is a big indicator with the name of the hotel. Following that little road until the end, I shall reach to the destination. For some reason, they didn't provide me the geographical coordinates, so I can use my navigator gadget.
Passing Pefkochori, I spent half an hour trying to find that little particular road on the right. Finally, I remarked the very big colorless sign with the name of the hotel, among 4 other signs, bigger than the one I search it.
So, an ideea sprouts in my mind: what if I do a small application, that anyone can put in his business website, to provide a route starting at the location selected by your website visitor and potentially customer or determined through the web browser of your visitor / customer and having as destination the location of your business.
I coded the application, and here it is!
Don't panic, it's very simple tot include this widget in your website by copying the following code:
This code is safe to be included in your website. It is safe for you and also for me.
To make this code to work properly, you must replace the parameters that I revealed: width and height of the frame where the application will work and latitude and longitude where your business is situated.
Benefits of using my application in your website:
- first of all, it provides to everyone a way to reach to your business;
- the route to your location is literarly explained in the right panel, so your customer shall not need to have a navigator to reach your business;
- if you click the HINT in the yellow box, your customer shall see a 4 day weather forecast in your area;
- your customer can use this application from the mobile phone from any part of the route to you and see the route explained in details;
- using this web widget (code), your website shall be included in the directory I intend to create, so, in that way, your business shall be more visible to your customers.
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| Global 30 meter resolution thematic maps of the Earth’s land surface: Landsat composite reference image (2000), summary map of forest loss, extent and gain (2000-2012), individual maps of forest extent, gain, loss, and loss color-coded by year. Click to enlarge |
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| The Chaco woodlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina are under intensive pressure from agroindustrial development. Paraguay’s Chaco woodlands within the western half of the country are experiencing rapid deforestation in the development of cattle ranches. The result is the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Click to enlarge |
[T]he potato is the most common cause of solanine poisoning in humans. But how do you know when solanine is present in a potato? The tuber is turning green.More at the Smithsonian's Food & Think blog. Photo credit unknown.Though the green color that forms on the skin of a potato is actually chlorophyll, which isn’t toxic at all (it’s the plant’s response to light exposure), the presence of chlorophyll indicates concentrations of solanine. The nerve toxin is produced in the green part of the potato (the leaves, the stem, and any green spots on the skin).
The reason it exists? It’s a part of the plant’s defense against insects, disease and other predators. If you eat enough of the green stuff, it can cause vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, paralysis of the central nervous system... but in some rare cases the poisoning can cause coma—even death...
Fatal cases of solanine poisoning are very rare these days. Most commercial varieties of potatoes are screened for solanine, but any potato will build up the toxin to dangerous levels if exposed to light or stored improperly. Often, the highest concentrations of solanine are in the peel, just below the surface and in the sprouted “eyes”—things that are typically removed in cooking preparation...
The art appears on the fruit fly’s wings. These translucent appendages contain what has been called the image of an ant. The perfect image is of what appears to be at first glance “ant-like.” Six legs, a pair of antennae, head, thorax and “tapered” abdomen. According to fly specialist Dr Brigitte Howarth, from the Zayed University, the images are “absolutely perfect.” It was the doctor who first spotted the Goniurellia tridens in the UAE.More at the link.
The G. tridens is part of the tephritidae family that includes 5,000 different species of fruit flies. These insects are also known as peacock flies because of their colorful body markings. These particular fruit flies are called the picture wing species and there are 27 different types who have wing images that range from simple shapes to very complex, like the fly that Dr Howarth discovered...
The Washington Post analyzed census data to find Zip codes where people rank highest on a combination of income and education. They are Super Zips.I don't live in a "Super ZIP" (in yellow). I'm in the bile-green category one step down. The image I've embedded is a screencap but the map at WaPo is interactive; you can click on your ZIP code to reveal specific data.
The ranks, ranging from 0 to 99, represent the average of each Zip’s percentile rankings for median household income and for the share of adults with college degrees. Super Zips rank 95 or higher...
The map... shows the nation’s 650 Super Zips. Among them, the typical household income is $120,272, and 68 percent of adults hold college degrees. That compares with $53,962 and 27 percent for the remaining 23,925 Zips shown. Only Zips with at least 500 adults are displayed.
The AKC describes the Labrador's temperament as a kind, pleasant, outgoing and tractable nature. Labradors' sense of smell allows them to home in on almost any scent and follow the path of its origin. They generally stay on the scent until they find it...
Labradors instinctively enjoy holding objects and even hands or arms in their mouths, which they can do with great gentleness (a Labrador can carry an egg in its mouth without breaking it).They are known to have a very soft feel to the mouth, as a result of being bred to retrieve game such as waterfowl. They are prone to chewing objects...
Labradors often enjoy retrieving a ball endlessly (often obsessively)... Labradors have a well-known reputation for appetite, and some individuals may be highly indiscriminate, eating digestible and non-food objects alike. They are persistent and persuasive in requesting food...
They are a very intelligent breed. They are ranked # 7 in Stanley Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs... Labradors as a breed are curious, exploratory and love company, following both people and interesting scents for food, attention and novelty value. In this way, they can often "vanish" or otherwise become separated from their owners with little fanfare.
All the mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan are named after peaks in The Lord of the Rings.For more, see the book - and the program (which sadly doesn't air in this country). I believe I recall one of the QI elves visiting this blog some years ago. Still here??
Agatha Christie was a keen surfer.
Lord Kitchener had four spaniels called Shot, Bang, Miss and Damn.
At any one time, 45 million people in the world are drunk.
The Beatles classic Yesterday was originally entitled “Scrambled Eggs”.
Since 1990, more people have been killed by sandcastles than by sharks.
Wordsworth had no sense of smell.
Your eyebrows renew themselves every 64 days.
If Jane Austen hadn’t broken off her engagement, she would have been known as Mrs Harris Bigg-Wither.
Sgiomlaireachd (pronounced “scum-leerie”) is a Scots Gaelic word meaning “the kind of friend who only drops in at mealtimes”.
There is one Kalashnikov assault rifle in circulation for every 70 people on Earth.
There is only one sneeze in the Bible.
The only member of ZZ Top who doesn’t have a beard is drummer Frank Beard.
Silent letters in words such as “knife” and “psychic” are called aphthongs.
Splenda was an insecticide that became a sweetener when a lab assistant misheard an instruction to “test it” as “taste it”.
