"Left-footed" explained

I encountered a new term while reading "Good Omens" yesterday:

"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 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.

The best image I've found of such a shovel in use is this one, from Jim Orr Photography -

- of a "loy spade" (from the Gaelic word laí, for spade).  His gallery of photographs of the shovel in use includes a closeup of the narrow-bladed tool (about half the width of a conventional shovel).

Top two photos from here (this one appears to me to be designed for use with the right foot) and (cropped from) here.

Addendum:  A tip of the ushanka to reader Aleksejs for finding the following explanatory video:

YouTube link.

I'll bet the ancient Irishmen would have loved to have had someone attach bicycle handlebars to their spades.

Family photo implanted inside a living chicken

YouTube link.

Apparently a manifestation of a Santeria ritual.

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.

More details here, via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

p.s. - I rather suspect when they named the chicken, the rescuers intended it to be spelled "trouper" rather than "trooper."

A musical instrument invented by Leonardo da Vinci... maybe (updated)

YouTube link.

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...

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.

More details at The Age, with a hat tip to reader Shirin for the link.

Addendum:   Some doubts have been raised as to the historical relevance of this instrument:

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...

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).

More at the link, found by reader Pam!

Repaired medieval book pages

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.

See also this post.

In 1937, C.S. Lewis wrote a review of Tolkien's newly-published The Hobbit

Excerpts of that review, published in the Times Literary Supplement:

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...

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.

You can read his review in toto at The Paris Review.

Cooking meals in a coffee maker

From NPR's food blog:

"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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

A fruit fly's wing markings mimic ants

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.

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...

More at the link.

Explore the demographics of your ZIP code

A Washington Post article examines the demographics of ZIP codes:

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.

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.

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.

QI is like TYWKIWDBI on steroids

Selections from an article in The Telegraph, the content of which is in turn selected from a new book - 1,339 QI Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop - the contents of which is in turn selected from the massive archives of the QI Universe:

All the mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan are named after peaks in The Lord of the Rings.

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”.

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??

Pertussis re-emerges because of anti-vaccine parents

"The problem, in part, is that the protection offered by the pertussis vaccine wears off by the time you reach adulthood. Until recently, however, this was not a problem. Back in those halcyon days when we vaccinated our children, the disease was not bouncing around our population and so it was okay that adults did not get re-immunized. (That's the whole point of herd immunity: it's hard to get sick from people who aren't sick...

"How responsible are these non-vaccinating parents for my pertussis? Very. A study recently published in the journal Pediatrics indicated that outbreaks of these antediluvian diseases clustered where parents filed non-medical exemptions – that is, where parents decided not to vaccinate their kids because of their personal beliefs. The study found that areas with high concentrations of conscientious objectors were 2.5 times more likely to have an outbreak of pertussis."

Graph credit Jen Kirby, based on data from the CDC.  Via The Dish.

High-rise buildings from the 16th century (Shibam, Yemen)

YouTube link.

Mega-churches for atheists

From the StarTribune:

Nearly three dozen gatherings dubbed "atheist mega-churches" by supporters and detractors have sprung up around the U.S. and Australia — with more to come — after finding success in Great Britain earlier this year. The movement fueled by social media and spearheaded by two prominent British comedians is no joke...

They don't bash believers but want to find a new way to meet likeminded people, engage in the community and make their presence more visible in a landscape dominated by faith...

"If you think about church, there's very little that's bad. It's singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. What part of that is not to like?"..

Sunday Assembly — whose motto is Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More — taps into that universe of people who left their faith but now miss the community church provided... It also plays into a feeling among some atheists that they should make themselves more visible...

"In the U.S., there's a little bit of a feeling that if you're not religious, you're not patriotic. I think a lot of secular people say, 'Hey, wait a minute. We are charitable, we are good people, we're good parents and we are just as good citizens as you and we're going to start a church to prove it.."

During the service, attendees stomped their feet, clapped their hands and cheered as Jones and Evans led the group through rousing renditions of "Lean on Me," ''Here Comes the Sun" and other hits that took the place of gospel songs. Congregants dissolved into laughter at a get-to-know-you game that involved clapping and slapping the hands of the person next to them and applauded as members of the audience spoke about community service projects they had started in LA.

Janis Joplin's psychedelic Porsche

YouTube link.

In September 1968, the budding rock star paid a Beverly Hills auto dealer $3,500 for the three-year-old sports car. When she bought it, the Porsche was a factory-painted "oyster white." For a flamboyant singer who wore rose-colored glasses and feather boas, that wouldn't do. So she got roadie Dave Richards to paint it with swirling psychedelic images, including Mount Tamalpais on one fender and a portrait of her with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, on another.

The singer's 1965 Porsche 356c Cabriolet, which she bought when she was living in Larkspur, is usually enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It came to Marin from the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where it was on loan.

"They used regular house paint," Michael Joplin recalled. "They were just playing around, saying, 'Hey, let's make an art car.' They were having a lot of fun. It was a convertible, and she would drive it around with the top down. People would leave notes for her on it."

More details about the history of the car at the YouTube "about" section, where my objection re the choice of the song in the video is anticipated by the comment that her iconic "my friends all drive Porches, I must make amends" lyrics couldn't be used because of copyright protection.

"Pink for boys, and blue for girls"

Excerpts from an essay at Smithsonian:

Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

Photo: TongRo Image Stock / Corbis

"Balayage" explained

My curiosity was tweaked by the 1974 photo above, from the New York Times' Lively Morgue:

"“We never speak of dying,” a misspelled ad boasts, quoted in a roundup of hair coloring techniques available in the city.  While the procedure pictured here — which required 1,000 feet of cotton stripping — might resemble some kind of April Fool’s prank carried out by the colorist, it was apparently a real thing for fine hair, called balayage au cotton." 

The caption that mocked misspelling in the advertisement had its own misspelling; I eventually found balayage au coton defined at A Way With Words:

 n.— The shop has imported a young man named Yvan from the Carita salon in Paris to do what he calls a “balayage au cotton.” Starting at the nape, Yvan lifted out fine strands and applied a lightening paste with a thin brush. Instead of the usual foil wrapping, he tucked pieces of cotton wadding to support the strands in process and keep them from the rest of the hair. When he was three-quarters through, he had used 1,000 feet of cotton stripping and Miss Weston looked as though she were wearing an enormous white wig. The idea of the balayage (the word means sweeping) is to lighten fine strands of hair, rather than add color...

The definitive answer came at Maxine Salon:

The most natural-looking results are usually those that look the most random, which calls for a very specific placement strategy... It’s important to note that balayage is definitely not just for blondes. Brunettes, redheads, even those with black hair can all take advantage of hair painting. The results will be subtle, but they’ll add the dimension that everyone craves, giving a dark brunette swirls of cinnamon or caramel, for example....

Foils often end up looking contrived - a neat row of uniform highlights. When a section of hair is colored using a foil, the entire section is saturated with color resulting in dense, unnatural stripes of color.

Balayage color is painted in soft brush strokes across the surface of the hair, leaving you with natural-looking swipes of color that flow from thick to thin and play off the hair's natural movement. Even better, balayage won't leave you with any signs of demarcation, creating a softer and more manageable grow-out. 

YouTube link.

I suppose women readers have known about all of this for years, but it was new to me.  You learn something every day.

DNA testing reveals fake "herbal supplements"

As reported in the New York Times:

Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not what they claimed to be, and that pills labeled as popular herbs were often diluted — or replaced entirely — by cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and rice.

Consumer advocates and scientists say the research provides more evidence that the herbal supplement industry is riddled with questionable practices. Industry representatives argue that any problems are not widespread. 

For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names. 

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence. 

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies...

Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place. 

More at the link.

The physics of sudden beer foaming

YouTube link. (the video is silent)

From Physics Buzz:

A team of three international scientists has explained the physics behind why beer in a bottle transforms into an overflowing mass of foam when the bottle receives a vertical tap on the mouth, as shown in the video. They will present their work and its applications outside of the bottle at the 66th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics.

Abstract: "A sudden vertical impact on the mouth of a beer bottle generates a compression wave that propagates through the glass towards the bottom. When this wave reaches the base of the bottle, it is transmitted to the liquid as an expansion wave that travels to free surface, where it bounces back as a compression wave. This train of expansion-compression waves drives the forced cavitation of existing air pockets, leading to their violent collapse. A cloud of very small daughter bubbles are generated upon these collapses, that expand much faster than their mothers due to their smaller size. These rapidly growing bubble clusters effectively act as buoyancy sources, what leads to the formation of bubble-laden plumes whose void fraction increases quickly by several orders of magnitude, eventually turning most of the liquid into foam."

A comparison of trephination techniques

"This skull shows four different instruments used for trephination. The instruments include a shark’s tooth, a flint-pointed bow drill, a flint scraper and obsidian – a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Each instrument makes a different type and size of hole. This skull was owned by Dr Thomas Wilson Parry (1866-1945), an English doctor who did extensive practical research into Neolithic trephination instruments and techniques."

Text and images from Science Museum (U.K.), via Sutured Infection.

Dice can "dramatically decompose"

Cellulose nitrate was used to make dice from the late 1860s until the middle of the twentieth century, and the material remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.

From Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell, 2002.

After reading that I immediately checked my box of D&D dice, which have been sitting on the shelf for years. They all seem to be intact.

Text and image via Sutured Infection.

How thieves can bypass a door alarm

 

Image cropped from the original at Reddit, where the comment thread includes discussion of the tools/techniques employed by the malefactors.