TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")

Castellers build castells (human towers)

2012-05-27T17:23:00.001-05:00

The tradition of building castells originated in Valls, near the city of Tarragona, in the southern part of Catalonia towards the end of the 18th century. Later it developed a following in other regions of Catalonia and, since 1981, when the first castell of 9 levels of the 20th century was built, it has become very popular in most of Catalonia.

A castell is considered a success when stages of its assembling and disassembling, can be done in complete succession. The assembly is complete once all castellers have climbed into their designated places, and the enxaneta climbs into place at the top and raises one hand with four fingers erect, in a gesture said to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag. The enxaneta then climbs down the other side of the castell, after which the remaining levels of castellers descend in highest-to-lowest order until all have reached safety.

The sash (faixa) is the most important part of their outfit, since it supports the lower back and is used by other castellers in the team as a foothold or handhold when climbing up the tower. This tasselled piece of cloth varies in length and width and depends on the casteller's position inside the tower and also on choice. The length of the sash ranges from 1.5 to 12 m, and usually is shorter for those higher up in the castell. Performing castellers usually go barefoot as to minimise injures upon each other as they climb to their position and also for sensitivity when balancing and to have better feel and hold each other.

The motto of Castellers is "Força, equilibri, valor i seny" (Strength, balance, courage and common sense).

Not a bad motto for life in general. More info here.

Camel thorn trees in Namibia

2012-05-26T10:05:00.003-05:00

The above image (via BoingBoing), by Frans Lanting was published by National Geographic about five years ago, and ever since has been fooling viewers into thinking it's a painting, rather than a photograph. The altered perspective of a telephoto lens positioning the trees against a sunset-illuminated giant sand dune is really quite startling. I had to search for a while to find a more prosaic view:

Credit Martin Heigan.

Other images here and here. The trees are sometimes described as being "petrified." I doubt whether that's technically correct; they certainly are desiccated.

"Mortal coil" explained

2012-05-26T09:48:00.000-05:00

I heard the phrase this past week, implicitly citing Hamlet's soliloquy -

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...

- but after having heard it a hundred times, I wondered about the origin. Here's the summary from Wikipedia, citing the OED:

Derived from 16th Century English, "coil" refers to tumults or troubles. Used idiomatically, the phrase means "the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life." "Coil" has an unusual etymological history. It was coined repeatedly; at one time people used it as a verb to mean "to cull," "to thrash," "to lay in rings or spirals," "to turn," "to mound hay" and "to stir." As a noun it has meant "a selection," "a spiral," "the breech of a gun," "a mound of hay", "a pen for hens", and "noisy disturbance, fuss, ado." It is in this last sense, which became popular in the 16th century, that Shakespeare used the word.

"Pirate" door hook

2012-05-26T09:35:00.002-05:00

Found at imgur; original artist credit unknown.

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" - George Jones

2012-05-26T09:32:00.002-05:00

YouTube link.

I understand that not everyone likes country music - at least not when they're sober. But this is a classic that I've just added to a CD of favorite music. The most extensive discussion of the artist and the song I could find was at Mix:

Born in 1931 in Saratoga, Texas, Jones was the youngest of eight children. During the Depression, his family was the kind of poor that no one born post-World War II can really imagine... In the late '60s, Jones met and fell in love with Tammy Wynette, who also became his third wife... By the time he met Wynette, Jones already had a serious drinking problem...

“In the 1970s, I was drunk the majority of the time,” Jones writes. “I had drunk heavily for years and had pitched benders that might last two or three days, but in the 1970s, I was drunk the majority of the time for half a decade... By the end of the decade, Jones was psychologically and physically a shadow of his former self; he was broke and alone, and his pitiable condition was being perpetuated by managers and pushers who were living off of what was left of him. It took a career record — this month's “Classic Track” — to help Jones begin to climb out of that hole...

One thing kind of funny about it was that the melody was so close to ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ [by Kris Kristofferson] that George kept singing the melody to ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night.’ He couldn't get that out of his head. That gave him a bit of a problem early on, and they took their time to get the narration just right.”...

The narration part of the song consists of four lines Jones speaks rather than sings: “She came to see him one last time/And we all wondered if she would/And it kept running through my mind/This time he's over her for good.” “Pretty simple, eh?” Jones asks in his book. “I couldn't get it. I had been able to sing while drunk all of my life. I'd fooled millions of people. But I could never speak without slurring when drunk. What we needed to complete that song was the narration, but Billy could never catch me sober enough to record four simple spoken lines. It took us about 18 months to record a song that was approximately three-minutes long.”...

“I went from a twenty-five-hundred-dollar act who promoters feared wouldn't show up to an act who earned twenty-five thousand dollars, plus a percentage of the gate receipts. That was big money for a country artist 16 years ago… To put it simply, I was back on top. Just that quickly. I don't want to belabor this comparison, but a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song.”

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” earned Jones a Grammy Award for Best Country Male Performance in 1980. It also resulted in CMA Awards for Best Male Vocalist of the Year in 1980 and 1981, and it was the Academy of Country Music Single of the Year and Song of the Year in 1980.

"All of us are multiracial"

2012-05-26T08:59:00.003-05:00

That's the delightfully concise and true take-away message from a report about the results of the Melungeon DNA Project, as summarized by the Associated Press and the Shreveport Times:

For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin. And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.

Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border. But it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry.

G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who has spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn't part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn't a new phenomenon. "All of us are multiracial," he said. "It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history."

Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery. They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee...

Claims of Portuguese ancestry likely were a ruse they used in order to remain free and retain other privileges that came with being considered white, according to the study's authors...

Writing about his argument in a memoir published years later, Shepherd stated, "Our Southern high-bred people will never tolerate on equal terms any person who is even remotely tainted with negro blood, but they do not make the same objection to other brown or dark-skinned people, like the Spanish, the Cubans, the Italians, etc."...

In recent years, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry and has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S. — from New York to Louisiana. Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; North Carolina the Lumbees, Waccamaws and Haliwas and South Carolina the Redbones, Buckheads, Yellowhammers, Creels and others. In Louisiana, which somewhat resembled a Latin American nation with its racial mixing, there were Creoles of the Cane River region and the Redbones of western Louisiana, among others....

The study does not rule out the possibility of other races or ethnicities forming part of the Melungeon heritage, but none were detected among the 69 male lines and 8 female lines that were tested. Also, the study did not look for later racial mixing that might have occurred, for instance with Native Americans.

More at the Shreveport Times.

Photo credit: AP

"A Love Letter to Plywood"

2012-05-26T08:33:00.002-05:00

YouTube link, via The Dish.

Become an expert on the subject in seven minutes. Impress your colleagues at work and your friends at cocktail parties. But it will not help you pick up women.

Brought to you by the creator of the equally prosaic "How To Sweep."

I'm not a home "handyman" and haven't used a table saw since fifth grade shop class, so I'm curious about the phrase in the video "The table saw is a witch. A witch will take your finger." Is that rather oddly-phrased advice derived from the Hansel and Gretel story?

   "Let me feel your finger!" said the witch to Hansel every day to check if 
he was getting any fatter. Now, Gretel had brought her brother a chicken bone,
and when the witch went to touch his finger, Hansel held out the bone.

"The Meeting on the Turret Stairs" (1864) updated

2012-05-26T07:48:00.000-05:00

A very evocative painting, by Frederick William Burton.

‘The Meeting on the Turret Stairs’ is one of the better-known works of Frederic William Burton. The theme comes from a medieval Danish ballad which describes how Hellelil fell in love with Hildebrand, Prince of Engelland, one of her twelve personal guards. Her father orders his seven sons to kill him.
They stood at the door with spear and shield:
‘Up Lord Hildebrand! out and yield!’
He kissed me then mine eyes above:-
‘Say never my name, thou darling love’
Out of the door Lord Hildebrand sprang;
Around his head the sword he swang.
Hildebrand kills her father and six brothers before Hellelil intercedes to save the youngest. Hildebrand dies of his wounds and Hellelil herself dies shortly afterwards.

Burton did not choose a violent episode and instead freely interpreted the story, placing their farewell on the turret stairs and leaving the reason for it to the imagination. His invention of the kiss on the woman's outstretched arm and the lack of eye contact adds to the poignancy of the painting.

Explanatory text from the National Gallery of Ireland, via the Clare County Library and the Art Blog.

(BTW - interesting use of "swang" for the past tense.)

Addendum: A hat tip to "C," who notes that this painting has recently been voted "Ireland's Favorite Painting."

A public vote promoted by RTÉ’s competition to find the nation’s favourite painting over the past five weeks found that the Frederic William Burton piece, which hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, polled most preferences. One in five of those who voted (22 per cent) went for the romantic 19th century depiction of a young soldier stealing an illicit kiss from his beloved as they pass on a turret stair. Burton was from Corofin, Co Clare.

The other paintings in the competition are posted here.

Myriad*

2012-05-18T16:59:00.000-05:00

The number 10,000 has a certain resonance for me, since I grew up in Minnesota, where the state slogan was "Land of 10,000 lakes." Today it takes on a different significance, because this is the 10,000th post I've written for TYWKIWDBI.

This blog began a little over four years ago as an incidental activity; it has subsequently morphed into something more, but remains essentially one man's hobby (with the assistance of a websurfing spouse). I fluctuate between enthusiasm and burnout, and especially in the summer months with the competing demands of outdoor activities the needle swings toward the latter. I have the first out-of-town butterfly field trip coming up soon, plus logarithmically-increasing chores in the gardens and woods, and some other hobbies that need attention. And family.

So, I'm going to take another "blog-cation." Those who are desperate for TYWKIWDBI-type material should browse the "Archive" in the right sidebar by selecting a month before you first visited here, because the old posts are pretty much like the recent ones. Or pick a "category" from that right sidebar, open it, and scroll back a few pages. When I'm intoxicated, my favorites are the Video-music and Video-humor categories.

To celebrate this 10,000th post, I believe I'll take off for about... 10,000 minutes.

*Myriad (Ancient Greek: μύριος, μυριάδες (myrios, plural myriades), "numberless countless, infinite", is a classical Greek word for the number 10,000.

p.s. - I've closed the comments for this post.

Links for you to explore

2012-05-18T11:17:00.001-05:00

Because I just don't have time to present them as individual posts.

A "former FBI Special Agent and head of the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force Al Qaeda squad" says the TSA is useless. Not annoying - useless. A summary at BoingBoing, with links to the source material.

An explanation of how restaurant menus are designed to incorporate a variety of marketing tricks. "A box draws attention and, usually, orders..." The $115 platter is there to make everything else look cheaper.

"A proposed new time-keeping system tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years." "So we'll have a leap-neutron-second every 280 billion years? How am I supposed to write that into my software?"

A new LED light puts out more power than is put into it. Literally. It "produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent." The reason it isn't breaking the first law of thermodynamics is explained at Wired.

Another e-voting system goes down in flames. "Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server."

The best behind-the-back basketball pass I've seen all year.

Three hundred years ago, Sweden had a February 30th. The reason is explained at Widow's Weeds.

A man in Milwaukee tried to rob a bank. He was unsuccessful. "Found in the suspect's possession: "How to Be A Successful Criminal."

Some women report reaching orgasm or achieving sexual pleasure while working out at the gym. Details re the favorite type of equipment at Discover magazine.

A compilation of "All the nipples on view in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Safe for work, I guess.

An Easter egg hunt was cancelled because of "the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park."

"The 56-year-old man held his left leg against an electric saw in his home workshop and severed his foot just above the ankle." He also threw it in the oven so it couldn't be reattached.

A "bone luge" is a way to drink liquor out of a bone in a restaurant. In case you need a new way to drink liquor.

Drivers were once taught to hold a car's steering wheel in way to maximize control of the vehicle. Now the importance of where to place your hands is determined by the possibility that the airbag may inflate. Among the injuries the NHTSA reports from improper placement of the hands when an airbag deploys are amputations of fingers or entire hands, traumatic fractures and a particularly stomach-churning injury called "degloving." Got your hands in the right spot?

Lewis Lapham has written an insightful appraisal of the American health-care system in the latest edition of his Lapham's Quarterly. I can't do it justice with brief excerpts; those interested should read the five pages at the link.

Also at Lapham's Quarterly, a scary story about how force-feeding was used against suffragettes in 1910.

For every fan of American football. Video of Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford during a game in which he was "miked up" for sound. Cleveland takes a 24-3 lead. Stafford gets crushed with an injury to his shoulder. And then...

"A 93-year-old Florida grandmother has parked her car for good after driving 576,000 miles (927,000km) over 48 years at the wheel of one trusty vehicle."

A collection of photos of swallowtail butterflies of the world. Beautiful creatures.

Snow globes on a windowsill set fire to a man's couch.

Fourteen photos of gynandromorphs, mostly butterflies, but also birds. One half of the body is female, one half is male.

A video explains how to peel a head of garlic in ten seconds.

At the GOP convention in Florida, water guns will be banned. But real guns will be permitted.

A 125-year-old sturgeon was caught in Wisconsin. It was "bigger than a linebacker." And it was released after being tagged.

If you want to look up famous people who share your birthday, you know you can do so on Wikipedia. But for the birthdays of fictional characters there is an infographic at Flavorwire, via Neatorama.

According to Sentence First, the phrase "who to follow" is grammatically permissible.

Here is the archive of every Jeopardy question ever asked. Over 222,000 entries.

Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald helped one another's careers. "Ella Fitzgerald was not allowed to play at Mocambo (a Hollywood nightclub) because of her race." Marilyn made a call, and Ella said it changed her career.

Should obituaries of pets be in the newspaper? "Because they openly announce that a pet was part of a family, and bring legitimacy to mourning the pet as a family member, obituaries for animals push up against the definition of "family" in ways that may be quite upsetting for some people."

When the Pioneer spacecraft left the solar system, they began slowing down. No one has ever been able to explain why - until now.

Surveillance Self-Defense is a website that specializes in explaining how you can prevent yourself from being subject to surveillance.

There are lots of fossilized dinosaur footprints in Maryland. A man has made a hobby of collecting them. 20-pic photoessay at the link.

Retreaded tires can be dangerous. If that's not inherently apparent, read the link.

A BBC video shows poisonous sea snakes (kraits) hunting in packs. I would embed the impressive video if I could, but you can view it at the BBC, via Neatorama.

Bee colony collapse disorder linked to pesticides.

A cheerful story of a puppy rescued from a cholla cactus. With video.

Chess enthusiasts may be interested in 17th-century examples of the knight's tour.

CARCA is the acronym for the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Cat Association. "Our goals are to train and maintain a network of highly efficient avalanche search and rescue cat teams across Canada." My ailurophile wife suspects it's a spoof.

A story in Spiegel Online reports on new investigations about the art work and personal life of Albrecht Dürer. "In 1517, he ventured a detailed depiction of a scrotum -- a pioneering act in the West. Some of Dürer's drawings are so suggestive that researchers kept them secret for years and locked them away in the closet. One example is the drawing "Youth with Executioner." It shows an executioner, armed with a sword, who is stroking a half-naked young man, who voluptuously acquiesces. Other sketches also show naked men's bodies."

The etymology and history of first names.

Cigarette cards were erotic photographs inserted in cigarette packs. A gallery of them is posted at Marinni's Livejournal blog (in Russian). Probably not safe for work, depending on where you work. And for those of you who used to buy Playboy for the articles, here is the English translation of the site's content.

The Great Pyramid's secret doors are still being investigated.

Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch. Self-explanatory.

A Slate column details the history of buttermilk. It's not the same product your grandparents enjoyed.

Canada has an alternate currency ("Canadian Tire money") that you should know about if you're planning to visit Canada, in case you encounter some.

A delightful story: "Gac Filipaj, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, completed his Classics degree with honors after balancing classes with a fulltime custodial job for the past 12 years." He has now graduated from Columbia University while working there full time.

A man in Kentucky was arrested for leaving his son in the car while he went into a bar to drink. His son is seventeen years old.

A woman's pants caught on fire after she picked up some rocks and put them in her pocket. It sounds totally implausible until you read the explanation offered by "jl" in the comments.

Enough. Got to get outside.

A VERY unusual ocean creature - updated again

2012-05-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

YouTube link.

This is a real creature. At the Reddit thread, after some preliminary speculation that it was a plastic sheet or other debris, or perhaps the placenta of a whale, it was identified as a Deepstaria enigmatica. It's a cnidarian. You learn something every day. I am repeatedly gobsmacked to discover the amazing creatures we share this planet with.

Addendum: Here are two relevant comments from the thread at BoingBoing, one from Jonathan -

I didn’t initially think it was a jellyfish either, but around 4:46 in the video you get to see the mouth on its long, pendulous manubrium hanging from the center. From the base of the mouth, you can see the extensions of the gut radiating symmetrically outwards, where they meet the gonads (the white masses). This is a great diagnostic to identify it as a jellyfish, whatever the shape of the bell.

- and from Jellywatch:

Deepstaria is not that rare, but is large (more than a meter diameter), so rarely seen intact. In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate and it even turns inside-out. Normally they just hang out like a balloon.

And finally, a hat tip to Robb for finding a report on this video at RT which includes screencaps of the creature (useful in case the video is taken down again).

Second addendum: The video embedded at the top is interesting, in part because of its ambiguity. But that ambiguity arises because the creature is being pummeled by outwash from the ROV engines, rather than behaving in a normal manner. In response to this video, Steve Haddock, a research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, has posted a proper discussion of Deepstaria and its near relatives. Beautifully filmed, and intelligently narrated --

YouTube link

With a hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing for the via.

Antheraea polyphemus

2012-05-17T10:45:00.002-05:00

Last week I received an email from a good friend and fellow lepidoptera enthusiast, who asked if I would like to have some cocoons of the Polyphemus moth. I hesitated only a few milliseconds before replying in the affirmative, and several hours later was at her home, where she presented me with a grocery bag whose contents are depicted above, spread out on paper on our dining-area table.

Last summer my friend had raised Polyphemus caterpillars; in the autumn they had pupated by spinning cocoons amid the oak leaves they were feeding on. The cocoons are well camouflaged and are not easy to see in the photo above, but here's a good example -

The caterpillars pull some oak leaves together, then spin the cocoon. They overwintered during sub-zero days here in Wisconsin, and during this mid-spring day began their eclosion (emergence). I didn't photograph the process, because unlike with butterflies I couldn't tell when it would happen.

The cocoon is surprisingly firm, since the silk is glued together with a material that hardens; to get out, the adult moth secretes a digestive enzyme that melts a hole in the tip of the cocoon. The moth emerges in a "compressed" form with the wings tiny. He/she then seeks a surface from which to hang while the wings are inflated. This one is somehow managing to climb a plastic sheet (!) and is shown from the back -

- and from the side. From the lateral view you can see the distended abdomen which contains the body fluids that are pumped into the wings for inflation and which in the female contain the hundreds of eggs (already formed) which she will oviposit as soon as a male fertilizes them.

I didn't want to disturb the moth at this point in the process. The others I moved to a terrarium, where this one emerged and clung to an oak twig during this process.

The end result is an absolutely gorgeous creature - and a huge one (for an insect). I didn't think to take a photo with one on my hand, but if I had, the wingspan would have covered my palm. The one pictured below is resting on the railing of our screen porch, which is where we kept them while they emerged. This one is a male, identifiable by the elaborate structure of the antennae, which he uses to detect pheromones released by the females.

This view is particularly interesting because it shows that the four "spots" on the wings are actually translucent membranes. I'm not sure if that translucency offers any functional advantage, but the large spots on the hindwing are presumed by humans to serve as false "eyes" to startle or confuse potential predators.

Here's another freshly-emerged moth (I think a female with smaller antennae), resting on the carpet of the screen porch.

The morning after the first ones emerged, I took one across the street to show to neighbor children, who were enthralled. They took turns holding the giant silkmoth in their hands (it took two flattened child-size hands to hold one). As we talked about the moths (and how they have no mouthparts and thus cannot feed and will die in a couple days), the sun warmed the moth they were holding, and after a few prelimary flaps on their hands it gradually lifted itself into the air, then circled us at a low altitude, then soared over a housetop seeking a resting place until it would be time for its nocturnal search for a mate.

The name Polyphemus was applied to these moths in reference to a character from Greek mythology. The legendary Polyphemus was a giant, a son of Poseidon, who had one eye and was one of the Cyclopes.

For more on the legend of the Cyclops, scroll down to the next post, or click here.

And for a discussion of how to retrieve the silk from the moth cocoons, keep scrolling, or click here.

Cyclops - did the legend originate with a fossil ?

2012-05-16T11:15:00.000-05:00

In Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, a cyclops was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of its forehead. The classical plural is cyclopes [you learn something every day...]. The name is widely thought to mean "circle-eyed".

Given their penchant for blacksmithing, many scholars believe the legend of the Cyclopes' single eye arose from an actual practice of blacksmiths wearing an eyepatch over one eye to prevent flying sparks from blinding them in both eyes...

There is another possible origin of the legend:

...prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls – about twice the size of a human skull – that may have been found by the Greeks on Crete and Sicily... the large, central nasal cavity (for the trunk) in the skull might have been interpreted as a large single eye-socket. Given the inexperience of the locals with living elephants, they were unlikely to recognize the skull for what it actually was...

Text from Wikipedia (skull photo color-adjusted). The image is "Marcel Marien, L'introuvable, 1937. Glass, acrylic glass, 11 x 27 x 18 cm. Coll. Sylvio Perlstein, Antwerp © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010," posted at ArtDaily as an example of a surreal art object. Via Uncertain Times.

Reposted from 2011 to accompany several new posts on Polyphemus.

How to make silk

2012-05-16T11:06:00.006-05:00

Photos from an interesting article at Wormspit, delineating how to make silk from the cocoons of silkmoths (in this case, Polyphemus). Above is a bowl of empty cocoons from which the moth has emerged. They do so by dissolving a hole in the end (for commercial mass production the moths are - unfortunately - killed before they emerge, so that the resultant silk strands are unbroken and longer).

The photoessay at the link shows a number of stages for cleaning the cocoons of adherent leaves and debris. The next step is the stovetop -

- where the cocoons are cooked to remove the "gum" the larva uses to make the silk strands stick together. When this process is complete, one is left with a mass of tangled fibers, which can be untangled more easily after fabric softener is applied.

The "untangling" is probably the most difficult part. As with many other fibers, the process involved is carding:

More intermediate steps at the link, then after the carding comes the spinning -

- described at the link as follows:

The short bits and noils are caught in the teeth of the carder. I card these together with the shorter fibers to make a very light rolag. This spins up into a much lumpier, but still usable, yarn... I made just a couple of quick samples with the silk. On the left is the fine yarn - about a 2/50's or so. The combed fibers are easy to use to spin a very fine, even shiny yarn. On the right is the noil yarn, made from the rolag.

Fascinating, and some new words for me to look up - but not today, because I'm in a hurry to get outdoors on a glorious spring day.

The remarkable Phantom Corsair (1938)

2012-05-16T10:42:00.003-05:00

The Phantom Corsair is a prototype automobile built in 1938. It is a six-passenger coupé that was designed by Rust Heinz of the H. J. Heinz family...

The Phantom Corsair's steel-and-aluminum body measured just 57 in (140 cm) in height and incorporated fully skirted wheels and completely flush fenders while forgoing running boards. The car also lacked door handles, as the doors were instead opened electrically using push-buttons located on the exterior and the instrument panel...

The Lycoming 80º V8-powered Cord chassis also featured front-wheel drive and an electrically operated four-speed automatic gearbox, as well as fully independent suspension and adjustable shock absorbers...

The body measured an impressive 237 in (600 cm) long and 76.5 in (194 cm) wide, enough to accommodate four people in the front row, including one person to the left of the driver. The back seats could only hold two passengers, however, in large part because of space limitations posed by on-board beverage cabinets. Though weighing a hefty 4,600 lb (2,100 kg), the Phantom Corsair could achieve speeds of up to 115 mph (185 km/h) because of its modified, naturally aspirated 190 bhp Lycoming engine as well as its aerodynamic shape.

Rust Heinz planned to put the Phantom Corsair, which cost approximately $24,000 to produce in 1938 (equivalent to about $370,000 in 2010), into limited production at an estimated selling price of $12,500. However, Heinz's death in a car accident in July 1939 ended those plans, leaving the prototype Corsair as the only one ever built. The Phantom Corsair now resides in the National Automobile Museum (also known as The Harrah Collection) in Reno, Nevada.

Only two passengers in back because of the on-board beverage cabinets!!

Text from Wikipedia, via Reddit. Photo via Conceptcarz, where there is a gallery of about 30 images.

Genetic risks from sperm bank sperm

2012-05-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

A column at the New York Times relates the story of an infertile couple who used sperm from a sperm bank, and whose child turned out to have cystic fibrosis. That unfortunate outcome happened by chance (she was an unknown carrier, as was the donor), but it highlights one aspect of sperm banks:

Sadly, the Kretchmars’ experience is not unique. In households across the country, children conceived with donated sperm are struggling with serious genetic conditions inherited from men they have never met. The illnesses include heart defects, spinal muscular atrophy and neurofibromatosis type 1, among many others...

Donated eggs pose a risk as well, but the threat of genetic harm from sperm donation is arguably much greater. Sperm donors are no more likely to carry genetic diseases than anybody else, but they can father a far greater number of children: 50, 100 or even 150, each a potential inheritor of flawed genes...

By some estimates, there are more than a million children in this country conceived with donated sperm or eggs. The Food and Drug Administration requires that sperm donors be tested for communicable diseases, but there is no federal requirement that sperm banks screen for genetic diseases. Some of the betters ones do anyway...

A lack of regulatory record-keeping also makes it difficult for sperm banks to warn related families, or even donors, when a genetic illness is discovered in one or more children. And donor families are not required to report births or illnesses to the sperm banks. Since the clinic has no way to know a donor’s sperm is flawed, it may continue to be sold long after problems have surfaced.

Pamela Callum, a genetic counselor at California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, recently discovered that a donor to the bank had passed on the gene for neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1, to five children... a registry might help prevent the spread of genetic diseases among donor children by providing a way for parents to report children’s illnesses to their sperm banks, thus allowing banks to weed out donors who may be carriers.

"Cow shoes" and bicycle tracks

2012-05-16T10:28:00.000-05:00

The shoes have been featured at Kottke, BoingBoing, Neatorama, and a dozen more places in recent days, most of which reprint text from a 1922 newspaper article describing a method used by moonshiners to avoid detection:

The cow shoe is a strip of metal to which is tacked a wooden block carved to resemble the hoof of a cow, which may be strapped to the human foot. A man shod with a pair of them would leave a trail resembling that of a cow.
The shoe found was picked up near Port Tampa where a still was located some time ago. It will be sent to the prohibition department at Washington. Officers believe the inventor got his idea from a Sherlock Holmes story in which the villain shod his horse with shoes the imprint of which resembled those of a cow's hoof.

The Holmes story was "The Adventure of the Priory School." I had to look up the context:

There is one other small point upon which I desire some light. This fellow Hayes had shod his horses with shoes which counterfeited the tracks of cows. Was it from Mr. Wilder that he learned so extraordinary a device?"

The Duke stood in thought for a moment, with a look of intense surprise on his face. Then he opened a door and showed us into a large room furnished as a museum. He led the way to a glass case in a corner, and pointed to the inscription.

"These shoes," it ran, "were dug up in the moat of Holdernesse Hall. They are for the use of horses, but they are shaped below with a cloven foot of iron, so as to throw pursuers off the track. They are supposed to have belonged to some of the marauding Barons of Holdernesse in the Middle Ages."

But while searching that, I found an example of a Holmes deduction that was inaccurate. This from The Urban Country Bicycle Blog:

The idea that the direction taken by a bicycle can be determined by observing the crossing of the tire tracks was first put forward by Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Priory School."

The premise was challenged and disproved by his readers almost straight away. The back tire crosses the path of the front the same way no matter which way the bicycle is oriented. The only way to tell which way a bicycle was going by its tracks is to follow them to the bicycle.

Doyle admitted that the idea had come to him as an inspiration while writing the story, rather than by actual observation, and that he had made a rare silly error. It is easy to be fooled into thinking it true by other clues giving a reason to presume the direction, such as which side of the street the tracks are on, or by finding the bicycle.

Photo credit: Library of Congress.

No third party in the foreseeable future

2012-05-16T10:05:00.001-05:00

From a column by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

The nascent third-party movement called Americans Elect assembled a dream team of prospective presidential nominees: Mike Bloomberg! Colin Powell! Chris Christie! Mitch Daniels! Condi Rice! Rick Santorum! Hillary Clinton!

There was only one problem: None of these candidates wanted the nomination. Neither did the other “draft” candidates who received support on the Americans Elect Web site, including Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Howard Dean, Donald Trump, Al Gore, Sarah Palin and David Petraeus.

Americans Elect had taken care of just about everything a third-party candidate would need. It spent about $35 million on marketing, technology and ballot access. As of Tuesday it had won a place on the November ballot in 28 states (and it still expects to be on the ballot in all 50 by Aug. 1). It had attracted 3.5 million people to its Web site. But what it couldn’t — or hasn’t yet been able to — do is persuade a plausible candidate to submit himself or herself to the ravages of a presidential run.

“We’ve had hundreds of [candidate] briefings,” Kahlil Byrd, the group’s chief executive, told me on Tuesday. “We have met with current and former governors, current and former senators, university presidents, think tanks, mayors of large cities and people who have been running Fortune 300 companies.”

But the main objection Byrd heard from these would-be candidates: “Do I want to put myself and my family through what it takes?” Looking at the prospect of running, Byrd said, candidates saw only negative ads and attack politics. Among would-be candidates, there was fear and loathing of “the permanent and negative campaign.”..

Americans Elect says it will announce its next steps on Thursday. But, really, the group already delivered on what it set out to do. The lack of takers suggests the political system is farther gone than the reformers realized.

LiDAR imaging of prehistoric earthworks

2012-05-15T08:20:00.002-05:00

LiDAR is the acronym for Light Detection and Ranging, a powerful technology that uses laser light for mapping and analysis. At the top is a LiDAR aerial image of the Marching Bear Group of earthworks at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa. Below is a more conventional depiction of one of the bear effigy mounds, using standard photography and outlining the earthwork with limestone.

The National Park Service website has an article comparing "traditional mapping" (surveying and sketching) vs. aerial photography (embed right, which also shows an eagle mound and the tip of a linear mound at the edge of the bear mound group) vs. LiDAR. I've also seen effective imaging produced by taking an extended-exposure photo at dusk, while having knowledgeable people walk around mounds with flashlights to "paint" the features with light.

For those with an interest in this LiDAR as an archaeological tool, the best article I've seen was posted by the Ohio Archaeological Council; it discusses the value of LiDAR in studying some of the Hopewell Mounds in Ohio.

A couple months ago an article at The Guardian explained how LiDAR could be used to map the Amazon forests in incredible detail.

Think you understand the difference between "inpatient" and "outpatient?" Think again.

2012-05-15T07:54:00.003-05:00

From an eye-opening op-ed column in the Chicago Tribune's Business section:

If you find yourself in a hospital for more than a few hours, make sure you find out if you have been admitted for inpatient care or if you are merely considered an outpatient under what is called "observation care."

If you haven't been admitted to the hospital, the costs you may have to pay out of pocket for medical services and drugs could be considerable. You could also be denied Medicare coverage for follow-up nursing care.

Patients getting emergency department services, observation services, outpatient surgery, lab tests or X-rays, but for whom the doctor hasn't written an order of admission, are considered outpatients even if they spend the night. Even if you stay in the hospital for a few days, don't assume you have been admitted. Ask about your status!

Why are hospitals doing this? In November 2010, the American Hospital Association warned that changes in policy by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "are causing hospitals to place patients in observation status for more than 48 hours instead of admitting them."

The most unpleasant surprise for non-admitted patients is the cost of drugs. Susan Jaffe of Kaiser Health News recently documented examples of patients charged much more for common drugs than they would have paid at a local pharmacy. A patient in Boca Raton, Fla., for instance, was charged $71 for a blood pressure pill for which her neighborhood pharmacy charges 16 cents...

Naturally, an emergency patient isn't thinking about hospital status. However, being an inpatient can mean significant savings to you. So you should ask your doctor to see that you are admitted. In addition, do not hesitate to ask your insurer for assistance in appeals if you believe that the bill you received is incorrect.

More at the source, where there are several relevant links to Medicare resources. If you or any of your family are likely to be admitted to a hospital, it may be financially very important to you to understand the difference between "observation care" and "admission." I think understanding the details isn't necessary - just knowing that sleeping overnight in the hospital doesn't necessarily mean you're an "inpatient."

This will be of interest only to readers in the United States. Those of you from other countries probably don't have to worry about this kind of administrative b*llshit.

The world's oldest running automobile

2012-05-15T07:42:00.001-05:00

Recently sold at auction for $4.6 million, this is an 1884 De Dion Bouton Et Trapardoux Dos-A-Dos Steam Runabout.

It is steam-powered, achieved speeds of 38 mph, was a veteran of four London-to-Brighton runs, and participated in the world's first auto race in 1887.

It got 20 miles on a tank of water.

Via Jalopnik, Autoblog, and First Time User.

Cultivated pearls - by the handful

2012-05-15T07:30:00.003-05:00

A worker sorts artificially cultivated freshwater pearls at a pearl production factory in Zhuji, Zhejiang province, Sept. 6, 2011. Zhuji aims to become an international production and distribution hub for artificially cultivated freshwater pearls. The city... now supplies... 30 percent of the global market with pearl products. (Lang Lang/Reuters).

From a photoessay about daily life in China at The Big Picture.

Morpho butterflies have ears on their wings

2012-05-14T11:29:00.000-05:00

Scientists thought butterflies were deaf until 1912 when the first butterfly ears were identified. Only in the past decade or so have researchers examined the anatomy and physiology of butterfly ears, which they are finding to be quite diverse and present in several butterfly species.

The latest discovery was made with the blue morpho butterfly (Morpho peleides), which dazzles with its bright-blue wing coloration when it flits about in its native Central and South America... In the new study, Kathleen Lucas of the University of Bristol in England and her colleagues were interested in the odd-looking hearing membrane that sits at the base of the blue morpho's wing. The tympanal membrane, as it is called, is oval-shaped with a dome at its center that kind of resembles the yolk at the center of a fried egg, Lucas said...

Taken together, the vibrational and nerve recordings suggest this butterfly can distinguish between different pitches, though further research is needed to confirm this ability.

Text from Live Science (more info there and at the J. Exp. Biol. publication). Photo via animals, animals, animals (original source uncredited). A macro view of the ear structure is posted at MSNBC.

Henry VIII's astronomical clock at Hampton Palace

2012-05-14T11:19:00.003-05:00

YouTube link.

The clock shows not only the time and date, but also information re tides and horoscopes. Note that it also depicts the sun revolving around the earth. The filming of the video is a little annoying (tilted Hampton Court, unnecessary zooming), but the pre-Copernican part was something I hadn't thought of before.

Islamic views of evolution

2012-05-14T10:57:00.002-05:00

Selected passages from the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

Islamic views on evolution are diverse, ranging from theistic evolution to creationism. Muslims believe in a God as the Creator, as explained in the Qur'an. Throughout history some Muslim thinkers have proposed and accepted elements of the theory of evolution, while believing in the supremacy of God in the process. In modern times, some Muslims have rejected evolution, and teaching it is banned in some countries. The main schism between Islam and evolution is in the Adamic descent of human beings, a concept which modern biological anthropology rejects as mythology...

The Qur'an does not contain a complete chronology of creation. It declares variously that it took "six ayums" to create the "seven heavens [or firmaments] and earth" An 'ayum' is defined as a stage, or a relative quantity of time rather than a 24 hour period...

Certain verses in the Qur'an are claimed by Muslims to be compatible with the expansion of the universe, Big Bang and Big Crunch theories...

The Mu'tazili scientist and philosopher al-Jahiz (c. 776-869) was the first of the Muslim biologists and philosophers to develop an early theory of evolution. He speculated on the influence of the environment on animals, considered the effects of the environment on the likelihood of an animal to survive, and first described the struggle for existence, a precursor to natural selection. Al-Jahiz's ideas on the struggle for existence in the Book of Animals have been summarized as follows:
"Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring."...
In the 13th century, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi explains how the elements evolved into minerals, then plants, then animals, and then humans. Tusi then goes on to explain how hereditary variability was an important factor for biological evolution of living things:
"The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures. [...] The bodies are changing as a result of the internal and external interactions." ...
Evolutionary biology is included in the high-school curricula of most Muslim countries. Science foundations of 14 Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt, recently signed a statement by the Interacademy Panel (IAP, a global network of science academies), in support of the teaching of evolution, including human evolution. Little is known about general societal views of evolution in Muslim countries.

A 2007 study of religious patterns found that only 8% of Egyptians, 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks agree that Darwin's theory is probably or most certainly true, and a 2006 survey reported that about 25% of Turkish adults agreed that human beings evolved from earlier animal species. In contrast, the 2007 study found that only 28% of Kazakhs thought that evolution is false. According to Salman Hameed, writing in the journal Science, there exists a contradictory attitude towards evolution in the Muslim world. While Muslims accept science as fully compatible with Islam, and most accept microevolution, very few Muslims accept the macroevolution as held by scientists, especially human evolution.

I find it interesting to see "Darwinian" theories expressed a millennium before Darwin. This post is of necessity a rather perfunctory summary of a complex subject, so feel free to add comments. And see also "The Qur’an & Space Science" at The Turbid Blog.

Here's a relevant prior post [I really need to find some way to get LinkWithin working so I don't have to keep doing this by hand].