January 31, 2024

Here's wishing you and yours a happy, safe, and prosperous National Gorilla Suit Day* !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_suit#National_Gorilla_Suit_Day


* This statement is not meant to imply any promise, contract, or covenant on the part of the poster. Poster cannot be held legally liable for failure to achieve happiness, safety, or prosperity. If anything goes wrong it's your own damned fault.

December 18, 2023

Kinzinger: "A lot of my colleagues are going to have kids who are ashamed of their last names"

This is an excellent interview of Adam Kinzinger by anchor John Ono on the show "BookTV". Kinzinger comes across as really thoughtful and insightful, and a very nice, very sincere guy. If it had not been for the MAGAts I think he would have been on a fast track to the top leadership of the GOP. I could easily see him as a candidate for VP, or even President, if only the GOP had remained sane.

I strongly encourage everyone to watch this interview. He drops all kinds of interesting tidbits -- such as possibly running against Ted Cruz, and possibly becoming a Dem. Makes me want to run out and buy his book.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?531898-1/renegade

August 22, 2023

Something I didn't know existed -- potty coins.

Silver coins are soft enough to be sculpted by small hand tools, and some men made a pastime of modifying the faces and figures from the originals to something a little less dignified -- as in these depictions of Lady Liberty on the chamberpot.

?quality=80&version=1692053662

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_nickel

May 8, 2022

If doctors can't dispense abortion pills, and it becomes illegal to send them by mail ...

The only option left will be to purchase them at gun shows.

No license, no background check, no imposition on freedoms. Just a potentially lethal weapon purchased from a total stranger, perfectly within the law and right-wing "principles".

January 9, 2022

Even if you never use Windows hibernate mode you may be using several GB of HD to store hiberfil.sys

None of my desktops uses hibernate -- they are crunching numbers in the background 24/7. You may not need it even for laptops. Here's a link explaining the difference between hibernate and sleep, and how to free up that disk space:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/delete-hiberfil-sys-windows-10/

October 23, 2021

Bible story of Sodom revisited. Was it a meteor strike? (earthsky.org) {old news, but interesting}

Posted by EarthSky Voices
September 22, 2021

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. This article was co-authored by research collaborators archaeologist Phil Silvia, geophysicist Allen West, geologist Ted Bunch and space physicist Malcolm Lecompte. {I have linked to earthsky.org because the pix from the original article are no longer showing up}

By Christopher R. Moore, University of South Carolina
Bible story of Sodom?

On an ordinary day some 3,600 years ago, the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam [now identified with the Biblical city of Sodom] went about their daily business. They had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).

Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.

Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.

About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
***
Getting answers required nearly 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.

Here’s how we built up this picture of devastation in the past.
***
more: https://earthsky.org/human-world/bible-story-of-sodom-meteor-strike/?utm_source=EarthSky+News

https://theconversation.com/a-giant-space-rock-demolished-an-ancient-middle-eastern-city-and-everyone-in-it-possibly-inspiring-the-biblical-story-of-sodom-167678

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w (an earlier impact event)

October 4, 2021

Iron actually reacts very slowly with water -- it is the oxygen in the air which does the work.

Water accelerates the process, by complexing reversibly with the iron atoms. So, a water solution of a chelating agent, exposed to air, would likely help accelerate rusting in the same way. I'm pretty sure the instructions say to wash and wipe it off thoroughly when you're done, and for good reason.

Coating steel tools with oil is the traditional way to prevent rust. Good mineral oil will do the job, though some vegetable oils are traditionally used. Camellia oil, for example, has long been used in Japan, but apparently mineral oil is better. One thing to try is to add a few percent of clove oil, or more economically, witch hazel oil*, to the mineral oil to inhibit bacterial growth which can accelerate rusting, though only woodworkers usually go this far, to protect their very expensive and very sharp tools.

You can even use spray vegetable oil: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=16760


* NOT witch hazel extract, which contains water and alcohol ! I have a huge bottle of witch hazel oil which I bought for under $3 at the drugstore years back. It works as well as the much more expensive clove oil (which is favored by dentists, because it comes into contact with sensitive tissues, without any harm).

October 1, 2021

Bachman's Warbler has gone to join Dick Davenport ....

http://creagrus.home.montereybay.com/CAtop10chases2-DR.html

Fauna and flora declared extinct

It’s a rare move for wildlife officials to give up hope on a plant or animal, but US government scientists say they've exhausted efforts to find these 23 species.
Page 1 of 5
Species Where found Last confirmed sighting
Shampoo Bachman's warbler Florida, South Carolina Shampoo 1988
Shampoo Bridled white-eye Guam (Western Pacific) 1983
Shampoo Ivory-billed woodpecker Southeastern U.S. Shampoo 1944
Shampoo Kauai akialoa Hawaii Shampoo 1969
Shampoo Kauai nukupuu Hawaii Shampoo 1899
Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-science-animals-wildlife-fish-b6e61676548a1d7b2f81a6512cbed7a7

November 2, 2020

What's the Real Origin of "OK"? (Mental Floss) {not exactly LBN}

BY Arika Okrent
April 11, 2013

"OK" is the all-purpose American expression that became an all-purpose English expression that became an all-purpose expression in dozens of other languages. It can be an enthusiastic cheer (A parking spot! OK!), an unenthusiastic "meh" (How was the movie? It was…OK.), a way to draw attention to a topic shift (OK. Here's the next thing we need to do), or a number of other really useful things. It's amazing that we ever got along without it at all. But we did. Until 1839.

There may be more stories about the origin of "OK" than there are uses for it: it comes from the Haitian port "Aux Cayes," from Louisiana French au quai, from a Puerto Rican rum labeled "Aux Quais," from German alles korrekt or Ober-Kommando, from Chocktaw okeh, from Scots och aye, from Wolof waw kay, from Greek olla kalla, from Latin omnes korrecta. Other stories attribute it to bakers stamping their initials on biscuits, or shipbuilders marking wood for "outer keel," or Civil War soldiers carrying signs for "zero killed."

The truth about OK, as Allan Metcalf, the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, puts it, is that it was "born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839." This is not just Metcalf's opinion or a half remembered story he once heard, as most OK stories are. His book is based in the thorough scholarship of Allen Walker Read, a Columbia professor who for years scoured historical sources for evidence about OK, and published his findings in a series of journal articles in 1963 to 1964.

It started with a joke

OK, here's the story. On Saturday, March 23, 1839, the editor of the Boston Morning Post published a humorous article about a satirical organization called the "Anti-Bell Ringing Society " in which he wrote:

The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

It wasn't as strange as it might seem for the author to coin OK as an abbreviation for "all correct." There was a fashion then for playful abbreviations like i.s.b.d (it shall be done), r.t.b.s (remains to be seen), and s.p. (small potatoes). They were the early ancestors of OMG, LOL, and tl;dr. A twist on the trend was to base the abbreviations on alternate spellings or misspellings, so "no go" was k.g. (know go) and "all right" was o.w. (oll write). So it wasn't so surprising for someone come up with o.k. for oll korrect. What is surprising is that it ended up sticking around for so long while the other abbreviations faded away.
***
more: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/50042/whats-real-origin-ok

October 12, 2020

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet {Drug interactions ! } (Atlas Obscura)

by Dan Nosowitz October 6, 2020

In 1989, David Bailey, a researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario. Follow-up testing confirmed his findings, and today there is not really any doubt that he was correct. “The hard part about it was that most people didn’t believe our data, because it was so unexpected,” he says. “A food had never been shown to produce a drug interaction like this, as large as this, ever.”
***
Eventually, with Bailey leading the effort, the mechanism became clear. The human body has mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This can take over 12 hours.

This rather suddenly takes away one of the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing.
***
Despite this, the Food and Drug Administration does not place warnings on many of the drugs known to have adverse interactions with grapefruit. Lipitor and Xanax have warnings about this in the official FDA recommendations, which you can find online and are generally provided with every prescription. But Zoloft, Viagra, Adderall, and others do not. “Currently, there is not enough clinical evidence to require Zoloft, Viagra, or Adderall to have a grapefruit juice interaction listed on the drug label,” wrote an FDA representative in an email.
***
more: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and-drug-interactions