A wooden railway discovered in Newcastle

Fascinating; I'd never heard of these.  As reported in The History Blog:

Archaeologists excavating the site of the Neptune Shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne, northeastern England, before development have discovered a 25-meter (82 feet) stretch of an 18th century wooden railway. These rails weren’t transporting trains — they wouldn’t be invented until the next century — but rather wooden wagons, aka chaldrons, pulled by horses. This is a section of the Willington Waggonway built in the 1760s to transport coal from several local collieries to the river Tyne...

...the networks of waggonways were essential to the development of the industry. They enabled collieries to transport far more coal than wagons on traditional roads. One horse could deliver between 10 to 13 long tons of coal per trip along the waggonways, four times more than that same horse could deliver off track. They were built like Roman aqueducts, at a slight downhill incline from colliery to dock, whenever possible so gravity could help drive the wagons...

 It’s a discovery of major historical significance, not just because of its importance to the history of the region, but because the rail gauge is standard gauge, still the most widely used rail width in the world... 

More information at The History Blog, especially re the development of standard gauge.  You learn something every day.

Photo cropped from the original at The Journal.

A healthy baby with harlequin color change

A 4-day-old, full-term, healthy female infant underwent a change in skin color from normal to red over one half of her body... consistent with harlequin color change — the development of redness on the dependent side of the body, with simultaneous blanching of the contralateral side... Up to 10% of infants undergo this color change, which occurs between the second and fifth days of life. The shifts from normal to red color usually clear up completely within 3 weeks. Harlequin color change is thought to be caused by aberrant dilatation of the peripheral vasculature, possibly as a result of incomplete development of the hypothalamus.

Credit: Bethou Adhisivam, D.N.B. (Ped.), and Venkatesh Chandrasekaran, D.N.B. (Ped.), publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A king on a helter skelter, and a duchess with false teeth

George VI at the 1925 Wembley Exhibition in London.  For more information on helter-skelters, see this 2009 post.

Photo via The Oddment Emporium and Educated Insolence.  The latter tumblr also provided me with this photo...

...of a young lady who became world famous after her murder in 1918.  She is...

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.

The history of the word "cracker"

Last week, Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the murder trial of George Zimmerman...  Jeantel said that Martin told her that a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him...

"Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults [is] older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip... Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition...

But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least...

Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator. What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?...

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."

By the early 1800s, those immigrants to the South started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor and a term of endearment...

Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks...

"Just because you lived in the South doesn't mean you're a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "To really call yourself a cracker you have to live the cracker way — you have to start your kitchen at 4 in the morning," he said.

Just like all those touristy, overpriced soul food joints, Ste. Claire said that you can find fancified cracker cuisine for sale at restaurants all over the South. "You can spend $40 on cracker food," he said. "I call that the revenge of the crackers. I'm sure a lot of crackers are rolling over in their graves at that."

More details at the Code Switch blog at NPR, via Sentence First.

Spiders will chase laser pointer dots

YouTube link.

"Smart houses" may pose security risks

Exerpts from a column by a staff member at Forbes:

“I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning.

He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well.

“They just came on and now they’re off,” he said. “I’ll be darned.”...

Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of “smart homes” that had done something rather stupid. The homes all have an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web. The dumb thing? Their systems had been made crawl-able by search engines – meaning they show up in search results — and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.

More at the link, via The Dish.

Emblematic of our modern world

A Mongolian takes a picture of a New Zealander in Edinburgh.

Photo credit: DAVID CHESKIN/PA, via The Telegraph.