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Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
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Deep in the woods ... !
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Tuesday, March 21, 2017
The Daily Drift
Deep in the woods ... !
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Today in History
| 630 | Heraclius restores the True Cross, which he has recaptured from the Persians. | |
| 1556 | Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is burned at the stake at Oxford after retracting the last of seven recantations that same day. | |
| 1617 | Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) dies of either small pox or pneumonia while in England with her husband, John Rolfe. | |
| 1788 | Almost the entire city of New Orleans, Louisiana, is destroyed by fire. | |
| 1806 | Lewis and Clark begin their trip home after an 8,000 mile trek of the Mississippi basin and the Pacific Coast. | |
| 1865 | The Battle of Bentonville, N.C. ends, marking the last Confederate attempt to stop Union General William Sherman. | |
| 1851 | Emperor Tu Duc orders that Christian priests are to put to death. | |
| 1858 | British forces in India lift the siege of Lucknow, ending the Indian Mutiny. | |
| 1906 | Ohio passes a law that prohibits hazing by fraternities. | |
| 1908 | Frenchman Henri Farman carries a passenger in a bi-plane for the first time. | |
| 1910 | The U.S. Senate grants ex-President Teddy Roosevelt an annual pension of $10,000. | |
| 1918 | The Germans launch the ‘Michael’ offensive, better remembered as the First Battle of the Somme. | |
| 1928 | President Calvin Coolidge presents the Congressional Medal of Honor to Charles Lindbergh, a captain in the US Army Air Corps Reserve, for making the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. On June 11, 1927, Lindbergh had received the first Distinguished Flying Cross ever awarded. | |
| 1939 | Singer Kate Smith records “God Bless America” for Victor Records. | |
| 1941 | The last Italian post in East Libya, North Africa, falls to the British. | |
| 1951 | Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall reports that the U.S. military has doubled to 2.9 million since the start of the Korean War. | |
| 1963 | Alcatraz Island, the federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California, closes. | |
| 1965 | The United States launches Ranger 9, last in a series of unmanned lunar explorations. | |
| 1971 | Two U.S. platoons in Vietnam refuse their orders to advance. | |
| 1975 | As North Vietnamese forces advance, Hue and other northern towns in South Vietnam are evacuated. | |
| 1980 | President Jimmy Carter announces to the U.S. Olympic Team that they will not participate in the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow as a boycott against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. | |
| 1984 | A Soviet submarine crashes into the USS Kitty Hawk off the coast of Japan. |
Why Chess Fans Hate the Movies
Chess errors come in a few different flavors, these experts say. The most common is what we’ll call the Bad Setup. When you set up a chessboard, you’re supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player’s right side is light-colored. (There’s even a mnemonic for this—“right is light.”) Next, when you array the pieces, the white queen goes on white, and the black queen goes on black. “When I teach six-year-old girls, I say ‘the queen’s shoes have to match her dress!’” says Klein.That's only the beginning of the grievances chess players have with movies. Read about quite a few others, some with video evidence, at Atlas Obscura.
Six-year-olds may get this, but filmmakers often do not. Along with The Seventh Seal, movies that suffer from Bad Setups include Blade Runner, Austin Powers, From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Shaft and What’s New Pussycat may not have much in common, but they do both feature backwards chessboards.
The Academy Where Butlers Are Born
Who knows? Graduates might end up running a household for a reclusive billionaire who fights crime in his off hours. Or an eccentric old lady with spoiled cats. Or a judge with a houseful of teenagers in California. Someone like that has no time to run a household themselves. Great Big Story takes us through the 10-week course that prepares new butlers for a career.
Detective X
Secret Crimefighter
Wilmer
Souder was a farm boy from southern Indiana who earned a PhD in physics
in 1916 and went to work in the materials lab at the the National
Bureau of Standards (later renamed the National Institute of Standards
and Technology). His specialty was precise measurements. By day, this
mild-mannered scientist made a name for himself for his studies of
dental fillings. But he was also an anonymous crimefighter known by the
mysterious named Detective X. Recently-uncovered notebooks revealed his
alter-ego and the many cases he worked on.Indeed, it seems that sometime early in Souder's career, someone called on the bureau to come up with a systematic way to do handwriting and typewriter analysis, probably to detect fraud. Souder, whose specialty was taking exacting measurements and making precise comparisons, was a perfect fit.Souder sounds like the inspiration for a comic book series! Read about Souder's secret work at National Geographic.
The notebooks show that over the years, Souder worked on all kinds of cases brought to the bureau by the Post Office, the Department of the Treasury, and various other government bodies. In addition to appearing in court as an expert witness, he helped pioneer some of the techniques used in modern forensics in America.
He used a recently invented microscope for comparing bullets to see if they might have come from the same gun. He advised the founder of the FBI's forensic lab. For the Lindbergh case, he analyzed the handwriting on the ransom notes and compared them to suspects' writing, finding a match with Bruno Hauptmann, who was eventually convicted and executed.
Sicilian Archbishop Banned the Mafia from Becoming Godfathers
In the movie The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone said that "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man."
But
recently, an archbishop in Sicily has given the real world mafia an
unmistakeable "Sicilian message" by banning them from becoming real
godfathers and participating in baptisms.
"The mafia has always taken the term godfather from the Church to give its bosses an air of religious respectability," Archbishop Michele Pennisi said as reported by the BBC, "Whereas in fact, the two worlds are completely incompatible."
Pennisi, a vocal anti-mafia critic, decreed that anyone convicted of "dishonorable crimes" is banned from acting as a godparent.
"The mafia has always taken the term godfather from the Church to give its bosses an air of religious respectability," Archbishop Michele Pennisi said as reported by the BBC, "Whereas in fact, the two worlds are completely incompatible."
Pennisi, a vocal anti-mafia critic, decreed that anyone convicted of "dishonorable crimes" is banned from acting as a godparent.
Information Avoidance
How People Select Their Own Reality
We
live in an unprecedented “age of information,” but we use very little
of it. Dieters prefer not to look at the calories in their tasty
dessert, people at high risk for disease avoid screenings … Read more
In case of wingnuts it is a total denial of reality itself not just their "own" reality.
I don’t feel welcome in Dumbass Trump’s AmeriKKKa
Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s leading
scientists, has said he no longer feels welcome in the United States
under Dumbass Trump’s junta.
Dumbass Trump Sycophant Threatens To Slaughter Black People
“We’re done with Black Lives Matter…we’re going to start cleaning it up.” This guy needs to be locked up!
Sticking Around
The La Brea Tar Pits
How much do you know about the Angelenos of the Pleistocene?
FANCY TAR?
Hancock
Park, an affluent area of Los Angeles, is well known for its celebrity
sightings, million-dollar homes, and the famous Hollywood sign in the
distance. But some of the neighborhood’s “residents” are even cooler.
World-famous fossils—like the extinct dire wolf, saber-toothed tiger,
and Columbia mammoth—are among the millions of specimens that have been
excavated from the La Brea tar pits. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in
the Miracle Mile, the tar pits contain one of the richest deposits of
late Pleistocene era (the last ice age) fossils in North America. The
fossils date from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, and more than three
million of them—including plants, mammals, birds, lizards, and
insects—have been excavated since paleontologists first began digging
there in the early 1900s.
The tar pits on display today were once excavation sites where workers dug for asphalt or scientists dug for fossils. Over the years, humans dug more than 100 pits throughout Hancock Park, but most of them have been refilled with dirt, debris, asphalt, and water. About 13 tar pits remain—the largest, called the Lake Pit, measures 28 square feet and is approximately 14 feet deep.
STICKY, GOOEY DEATH TRAPS
The La Brea tar pits formed thousands of years ago, when gas and oil
beneath the ground came under pressure. The molten mixture pushed up
through vents in the earth’s crust. Once it reached the surface, the oil
pooled in natural depressions aboveground. The lighter part of the
pooling oil evaporated—left behind was a heavy, sticky oil. Then rain
and underground springs added water, forming ponds and lakes on top of
the oil and creating what we now call the tar pits.
Hancock
Park, an affluent area of Los Angeles, is well known for its celebrity
sightings, million-dollar homes, and the famous Hollywood sign in the
distance. But some of the neighborhood’s “residents” are even cooler.
World-famous fossils—like the extinct dire wolf, saber-toothed tiger,
and Columbia mammoth—are among the millions of specimens that have been
excavated from the La Brea tar pits. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in
the Miracle Mile, the tar pits contain one of the richest deposits of
late Pleistocene era (the last ice age) fossils in North America. The
fossils date from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, and more than three
million of them—including plants, mammals, birds, lizards, and
insects—have been excavated since paleontologists first began digging
there in the early 1900s. The tar pits on display today were once excavation sites where workers dug for asphalt or scientists dug for fossils. Over the years, humans dug more than 100 pits throughout Hancock Park, but most of them have been refilled with dirt, debris, asphalt, and water. About 13 tar pits remain—the largest, called the Lake Pit, measures 28 square feet and is approximately 14 feet deep.
STICKY, GOOEY DEATH TRAPS
The water on the tar pits’ surface was especially attractive to thirsty animals, and during the warm spring and summer, the thick oil underneath was especially sticky. Animals that ventured into to the pits couldn’t escape. Often predators chased their prey into the pits and got stuck too. Paleontologists once found a large bison fossil surrounded by a pack of fossilized wolves. The dead animals eventually sank completely, and their bones and teeth turned brown from the oil. But otherwise, they were almost perfectly preserved for more than 30,000 years.
THOSE STRANGE CATTLE BONES
Hundreds of years ago, local Native Americans used the thick oil at the tar pits as waterproof caulking for their baskets and canoes. When the Spanish arrived in the 18th century, they used it to waterproof their houses. In 1828 the tar pits were part of a Mexican land grant called Rancho de la Brea (brea means “tar” in Spanish). When the United States took over California in 1848, the area was part of the deal, and ultimately, it came into the possession of lawyer and surveyor Henry Hancock and his family. The Hancocks sold the oil from the tar pits, and their workmen often found fossils, which they assumed to be the bones of unlucky cattle. It wasn’t until 1875 that a geologist identified a collection of bones as belonging to a saber-tooth tiger that had been extinct for 10,000 years.
By
1906 a paleontologist from UC Berkeley named John C. Merriam was busily
excavating fossils from Rancho de la Brea. He published a paper on his
findings and listed so many different types of prehistoric animals that
the tar pits became a focus of study for paleontologists around the
world. In 1913 fossils from the La Brea pools went on display at the
newly opened Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, and
three years later, the Hancock family donated the tar pits to Los
Angeles County. Scientists have been studying them ever since.
PALEONTOLOGY IS THE PITS
PALEONTOLOGY IS THE PITS
So
many fossils have been discovered at the La Brea tar pits that
scientists call the last 300,000 years of the Pleistocene era the
“Rancholabrean land mammal age.” Thanks to the sticky pits, we now know
that, during the ice age, creatures like saber-tooth cats, mammoths,
long-horned bison, horses, bears, wolves…even camels and lions once
prowled what is now Wilshire Boulevard. In 2006 workers were digging up
ground along Wilshire Boulevard to enlarge a parking lot when they found
Zed, a Columbian mammoth skeleton that was 80 percent complete, resting
in what used to be a riverbed. Work on the parking lot was halted to
allow the creature (and his 10-foot tusks) to be excavated.But it’s not just the exotic animal fossils that excite scientists. Tiny bugs, with their wings still attached, have been preserved in the oil. And the partial skeleton of an 18-to 25-year-old woman shows that humans were living in L.A. more than 9,000 years ago. The skeleton from the tar pits is known as “La Brea Woman,” and she’s earned the distinction of being “the oldest Californian.”
Plant
fossils are also important. The oldest La Brea fossil is a piece of
wood that dates back 40,000 years. By examining the plant material (even
pollen has been preserved in the oil), scientists are able to tell
that, during the last ice age, Los Angeles was cooler and moister than
it is now. Redwoods that prefer the foggy climate of the Northern
California coast once thrived in Hancock Park.
IT’S ALIIIIVE!
Of course, what all these great discoveries of La Brea have in common is that they’re dead. Very few things actually live in the tar pits—there is an insect called the oil fly that lays its larvae there. But in 2007, environmental scientists at UC Riverside found another living creature where it wasn’t expected.
IT’S ALIIIIVE!
Of course, what all these great discoveries of La Brea have in common is that they’re dead. Very few things actually live in the tar pits—there is an insect called the oil fly that lays its larvae there. But in 2007, environmental scientists at UC Riverside found another living creature where it wasn’t expected.
The
researchers were studying the large bubbles of methane that appear on
the tar pits’ surface. They took samples of oil from the pools and
looked to see if they could find any bacteria that might be creating the
methane. To their surprise, they found more than 200 types of
as-yet-undiscovered bacteria living in the oil. These bacteria were
eating the oil and excreting methane gas that bubbled up to the pits’
surface. One of the bacteria is related to a type that survives 50 miles
above the surface of the earth, where ultraviolet rays sterilize almost
everything else. Another resembles bacteria that can withstand high
levels of radiation. Scientists hope these bacteria will help them
understand how life can exist in extreme environments, including those
on other planets. Researchers also hope that studying the oil-munching
bacteria may lead to their use in cleaning up oil spills. And so it
seems that even after decades of excavation at the tar pits, scientists
still never know what they’ll dig up next.
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