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Today in History

79		The city of Pompeii is buried by eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
1512		Michelangelo's painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is exhibited for the first time.
1582		Maurice of Nassau, the son of William of Orange, becomes the governor of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht.
1755		A great earthquake at Lisbon, Portugal, kills over 50,000 people.
1765		The Stamp Act goes into effect in the British colonies.
1861		Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, 50 year-veteran and leader of the U.S. Army at the onset of the Civil War, retires. General George McClellan is appointed general-in-chief of the Union armies.
1866		Wild woman of the west Myra Maybelle Shirley marries James C. Reed in Collins County, Texas.
1869		Louis Riel seizes Fort Garry, Winnipeg, during the Red River Rebellion.
1911		Italian planes perform the first aerial bombing on Tanguira oasis in Libya.
1923		Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company buys the rights to manufacture Zeppelin dirigibles.
1924		Legendary Oklahoma marshal Bill Tilghman, 71, is gunned down by a drunk in Cromwell, Oklahoma.
1936		Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini announces the Rome-Berlin axis after Count Ciano's visit to Germany.
1936		The Rodeo Cowboy's Association is founded.
1943		American troops invade Bougainville in the Solomon Islands.
1945		John H. Johnson publishes the first issue of Ebony magazine.
1950		Two members of a Puerto Rican nationalist movement attempt to assassinate President Harry S Truman.
1951		Algerian National Liberation Front begins guerrilla warfare against the French.
1967		The first issue of Rolling Stone hits the streets.
1968		President Lyndon B. Johnson calls a halt to bombing in Vietnam, hoping this will lead to progress at the Paris peace talks.

Non Sequitur

Spice Up the Fall with Sandeman & Cider

Falling leaves, football games and spiced seasonal brews - all signs that autumn has arrived.
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This Explains LA Drivers

Legally Blind Man is Issued a New License without Taking a Test   Have you heard the one about the blind man who walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Santa Monica, took an eye test and left with a new driver's license?

OK, that's not 100% accurate. He didn't walk out with his new license; it arrived in the mail two weeks later.

The man, 72-year-old Mark Overland of Pacific Palisades, is legally blind, with 94% of his vision gone. When Overland first told me about his adventure, he said he didn't want anyone at the DMV to lose a job over this. But he felt like it was worth speaking up.

"I have concluded that changes need to be made in the DMV vision testing process," he said with graceful understatement.

Overland is a lawyer, and his concern about elderly and impaired drivers has a history to it. He was the defense attorney for George Russell Weller, the 86-year-old man who plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers' Market in 2003, leaving 10 people dead and 68 injured. Russell, who was convicted of vehicular manslaughter but didn't serve time because of failing health, said he had accidentally hit the gas instead of the brakes.

Handling the case made Overland give some thought to whether there should be stricter screening of drivers with health- or age-related problems.

"I see people getting into cars who have no business driving," Overland said. He gave the example of an elderly gent he saw inching along with a walker at the Bel-Air Bay Club. "He got into a big Buick and drove away."

Sometimes age has nothing to do with it. Reckless drivers can be young, old and in between.

But my Dad was one of those guys who could barely walk and still insisted on driving. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he claimed he was a better driver than 90% of the other people out there. I understood that he wanted to hold on to a degree of independence as his limitations mounted, but we were saved from having to pry the keys out of his hands only by his becoming so ill that driving was no longer a consideration.

Overland gave up driving 15 years ago because of his deteriorating vision. But he kept renewing his license by mail for the sake of having a valid ID. Five years ago, when he got a license renewal form, he noticed a portion that asked if he had any visual impairment that would affect his driving.

"I checked off 'yes.'"

The next line asked what that might be, and Overland wrote "retinitis pigmentosa." That's a progressive condition in which peripheral vision is lost. Overland has a narrow tunnel of vision, and can see pretty well within that field. But anything to the right or left, up or down, is lost to him. He was more than a little surprised then to get his license in the mail a couple of weeks later.

When Overland got his latest renewal notice a month ago, it instructed him to go to a DMV office for a written test and eye exam. He was curious to see what would happen if he didn't mention his disability, so he went to the DMV on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, with his daughter Courtney doing the driving. Overland thought briefly about entering the office with his white cane, but decided against it, and Courtney instead served as his guide.

Overland was called to the counter by a clerk and told to read the eye chart on the back wall.

"I'm looking around, and I can't find it because it's not in my line of vision," Overland said.

He located it quickly enough and was able to read most of the letters, but not all of them. The clerk then had him peer into a machine for another eye test. Overland began to read, but Courtney watched the clerk scrunch his face and ask her Dad:

"Sir, what are you reading?"

Overland was looking at something other than the eye chart, which he hadn't yet located. Redirecting his line of vision, he found the chart and did well enough to pass. He later aced the written test, left the building at his daughter's side, and his new license arrived in the mail two weeks later.

When I checked with the DMV, I found that anyone with retinitis pigmentosa is required to take a driving test, and if you fail, your license is revoked. DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez couldn't say why Overland wasn't ordered to take a test five years ago, when he wrote his condition on his renewal form.

She did say that in 2011, nearly 41,000 people were required to prove their ability to drive after concerns about their driving were reported by police, doctors, friends, neighbors or loved ones. The reasons cited included dementia, physical disabilities, vision loss, impairment due to alcohol or drugs, and just plain lousy driving. In the end, 38,256 of those reported last year had their licenses suspended or revoked.

Now that he's told his story, Mark Overland may be the next Californian to lose his license, but if his candor prevents an accident, he won't mind. If you know someone who may be an unsafe driver, you can anonymously make a request for a re-examination that is handled in confidence. The DMV may ask the driver for medical records, check with a doctor or require a driving test.

For more information, go to http://www.dmv.ca.gov and write "unsafe driver" in the search field.

Halloween-colored lobster caught off Massechusetts coast

The New England Aquarium says the 1-pound female lobster has an orange side and a black side, with the colors split perfectly down the middle.
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Gore, Bloomberg, Cuomo: Hurricane Sandy impacted by Climate Change

 

Democrats are talking climate change following Hurricane Sandy, but the repugican cabal remains gleefully ignorant.

While New York repugican mayor Bloomberg has at least mentioned the words “climate change,” he’s an unusual exception in today’s repugican cabal.For the rest of the repugican cabal, climate change doesn’t exist, and mentioning it will only hurt your chances of getting on Faux News.
The hard reality – whether the repugican cabal wants to admit it or not – is that climate change is having an impact on today’s weather. Even if we change our ways today, it will take a very long to have a positive impact. Making jokes about the dire situation, as repugicans do, is a disservice to the country and a slap in the face to the scientific community that has been raising the issue for years, including specific concerns about New York.
The repugicans don’t have to like Al Gore, but they certainly have to admit that he was right.  But they won’t.

Former Vice President Al Gore warned in a blog post today that Hurricane Sandy is a “disturbing sign of things to come” if the world doesn’t quit “dirty energy.”
At 1:21 p.m. ET, with large swaths of the Northeast still swimming in the storm’s mess, the Current TV founder and environmental activist published a statement asking the public to “heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis.”

More from Bloomberg and Cuomo:

“What’s clear is that the storms that we’ve experienced in the last year or so around this country and around the world are much more severe than before,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a briefing today. “Whether that’s global warming or what, I don’t know. But we’ll have to address those issues.”
N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, an early favorite in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, expressed similar concerns, quipping that New Yorkers “have a 100-year flood every two years now.”

What makes wind?

It can be a nice breeze, or a destructive storm, but either way wind is just moving air. And moving air is just moving molecules.
In an explainer for kids that's actually pretty helpful for grown-ups, too, Matt Shipman reminds us that the air around us isn't totally weightless. It weighs something, because molecules all weigh something:

They don't weigh very much (you couldn't put one on your bathroom scale), but their weight adds up, because there are a LOT of molecules in the air that makes up our atmosphere. All of that air is actually pretty heavy, so the air at the bottom of the atmosphere (like the air just above the ground) is getting pressed on by all of the air above it. That pressure pushes the air molecules at the bottom of the atmosphere a lot closer together than the air molecules at the top of the atmosphere.
And, because the air at the top of the atmosphere is pushing down on the air at the bottom of the atmosphere, the air molecules at the bottom REALLY want to spread out. So if there is an area where the air molecules are under high pressure (with a lot of weight pushing down), the air will spread out into areas that are under lower pressure (with less weight pushing down).

Read the full story at Carolina Parent

Stars ancient and modern?

This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the ...

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Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child presentation at the MIT Tech Review EmTech conference recounted an inspiring experiment in which illiterate Ethiopian village-kids were given solar-charging laptops in sealed boxes, and quickly taught themselves how to operate, then master, then hack, these devices, acquiring basic literacy and technological literacy at the same time. MIT Technology Review's David Talbot reports in a piece reprinted on Mashable.com:

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”
“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”
In an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start.”

Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves

MPAA tells court that Megaupload users shouldn't be allowed access to their own files

U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady in Virginia has scheduled a hearing to adjudicate a claim from Kyle Goodwin, a sports videographer in Ohio whose videos have been lost since the illegal raids in May on Megaupload, a file-locker service. The MPAA has asked to participate in the hearing in order to object, in principle, to the idea that the millions of Megaupload users who've had their files seized in the raid. More from CNet's Declan McCullagh:

The MPAA said today that while it takes no position on Goodwin's request to have his own copyrighted videos returned, it wants to participate in the hearing to describe "the overwhelming amount of infringement of the MPAA members' copyrighted work on MegaUpload." (The MPAA's six members are Paramount Pictures Corporation, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLC, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., and Warner Bros. Entertainment.)
To those Hollywood studios, MegaUpload and its flamboyant founder Kim Dotcom represent the darkest elements of Internet file-sharing. MPAA chairman Chris Dodd has dubbed it "the largest and most active criminally operated website" in the world, and MPAA vice president Michael P. O'Leary claims it's one of the most popular Internet sites "for streaming and downloading illicit copies."
"It makes little sense for the MPAA, or MegaUpload, or Carpathia, or even the government -- despite its actions otherwise -- to prevent third parties access to their legal property," Julie Samuels, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET this afternoon. "Not only does it harm those individual third parties, but it negatively impacts all cloud storage providers and customers, who, in order for the technology to work, need to be able to rely on access."

MPAA: Don't let MegaUpload users access their data

Celebratory gunfire leaves 25 dead at Saudi wedding

At least 25 people have died and 30 others were hurt in a fire at a wedding in eastern Saudi Arabia, officials say. Hundreds were inside the courtyard of a home in the village of Ain Badr, in the Abqaiq region, when the blaze began.

A high-voltage power line reportedly fell down and sent sparks flying after it was hit by celebratory gunfire. The power line is also believed to have touched a metal door at the only exit from the courtyard, causing the electrocution of many of the victims. Most of those killed and injured are reported to have been women.

Civil Defence chief Gen Abdullah Khsheiman as said a women-only marquee was set on fire.  Women are separated from men at weddings in Saudi Arabia in line with the kingdom's strict rules on gender segregation. Survivors have been taken to the Aramco and Central Abqaiq hospitals.

Civil Defence spokesman Col Mohammed al-Ajami said the governor of Eastern Province, Prince Mohammed bin Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, had ordered the authorities to investigate the incident. The Saudi authorities last month banned the shooting of firearms at weddings - a popular tradition in tribal areas of the kingdom. In July 1999, 76 people died in a similar incident in Eastern Province.

Would-be smugglers left Jeep on top of fence

Two would-be smugglers attempting to drive into Arizona from Mexico hit a roadblock when their Jeep got stuck on the border fence just after midnight on Tuesday. US Border Patrol agents from Yuma Sector's Yuma station foiled the smuggling attempt when agents came across a silver Jeep Cherokee that had become "high centered" at the top of a make-shift ramp.

Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Enrique Zarate said that agents have seen this type of activity in the Yuma Sector before, but that it is one of the more creative attempts. The two suspects fled into Mexico just as agents patrolling the Imperial Sand Dunes area arrived at the scene.

The incident is currently under investigation. US Border Patrol seized both the Jeep and ramp equipment after removing the car from the approximately 14-foot-high fence. According to Zarate, Jeeps have been known to smuggle anything from narcotics to humans near the Yuma Sector.

YouTube link.

He said at this time it is not clear what the Jeep was carrying, but that "anything that fits would be fair game for smuggling purposes." "We [US Border Patrol] want to let the American public know that this isn't the first smuggling attempt we've stopped, and that we are out here 24/7 making sure the American border is secure," Zarate said.

Dutch government scraps "weed cards" - foreigners will still be able to smoke weed in Amsterdam's "coffee shops"

The new Dutch government has scrapped plans to issue "weed passes" to permanent Dutch residents, and require these passes in order to purchase cannabis products in Amsterdam's famed marijuana "coffee shops." Other cities will be free to ban foreigners from their own cannabis coffee shops, should they choose, but the national government will not impose this upon them.

Incoming Dutch government ditches 'weed pass' plan

Top medical innovations treat headaches, diabetes

by Debra Sherman

The best medical innovations for next year include an almond-size device implanted in the mouth to relieve severe headaches and a handheld scanner resembling a blow dryer that detects skin cancer, the Cleveland Clinic said on Wednesday.

The clinic's annual list of the best medical innovations for 2013 includes better mammography technology and new drugs to treat advanced prostate cancer.

Leading the 2013 list for innovations is an old procedure that has a new use due to findings in a recent study. Physicians and researchers at the clinic voted weight-loss surgery as the top medical innovation, not for its effectiveness in reducing obesity, but for its ability to control Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease.

Over the years, bariatric surgeons noticed that the procedure would often rid obese patients of Type 2 diabetes before they even left the hospital.
Dr. Philip Schauer, head of the Cleveland Clinic's Bariatric and Metabolic Institute, led a study examining this phenomenon, and the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published the results earlier this year.

"Bariatric surgery has been around for a while," Cleveland Clinic Chief Wellness Officer Dr. Michael Roizen said in an interview. "The reason it was chosen as the top innovation is because Medicare has broadened its indication for payment, and Medicaid in many states follows Medicare. A lot of the other (private) insurance companies started covering it, so it's much more accessible."

The criteria that insurers use to cover the surgery has been broadened because of its effectiveness in controlling Type 2 diabetes, he said.
The number of people affected by diabetes has tripled over the past 30 years to more than 20 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 90 percent of those cases are Type 2, a condition in which the body does not produce enough insulin or the cells ignore the insulin.
Doctors and researchers at the Cleveland Clinic voted for what they thought were the biggest, most significant innovations from the 250 ideas submitted from their colleagues. Roizen said one of the main criteria for getting on the list is the number of people that the product or procedure can potentially help.
For that reason, a device that helps relieve headaches, the second-most common ailment after the cold, was second on the clinic's list.
The miniaturized device - invented at the Cleveland Clinic and spun off into a separate, private company called Autonomic Technologies Inc - is implanted in the upper gum above the second molar to treat cluster and migraine headaches. A lead tip of the implant is placed near specific nerves behind the bridge of the nose.
When the patient feels the headache coming on, a remote control device is placed on the outside of the cheek, and the device delivers stimulation to those nerves, blocking pain.
The implant is available in Europe, but not in the United States. The company needs to do more studies to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said Dr. Frank Papay, department chair of the clinic's Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Institute and a consultant to Autonomic Technologies.
A handheld device used to detect melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, was also on the list.

"Up until now, we've counted on our eyes," Dr. Allison Vidimos, who chairs the clinic's dermatology department, told Reuters. "This device offers an objective look underneath the skin using a special spectrum of light."

It compares moles and other marks on the patient's skin with a large database containing information on all types of melanoma. It also rates the risk.
"All dermatologists fear missing melanomas," Vidimos said. "The cure rate can be close to 100 percent if caught early."
Vidimos said using a device, manufactured by Mela Sciences Inc and approved by FDA last year for use by trained dermatologists, helped prevent unnecessary biopsies. The Mela scanner is also approved in Europe.
Verisante Technology Inc also makes a scanning device, which is approved in Canada, Europe and Australia. It has applied for U.S. approval, the company said.
Also on the list is a new type of mammography, called breast tomosynthesis. This technology provides greater detail of the image than the standard mammography, which renders a two-dimensional image.
For the patient, it may seem like there's no difference. "You still have the squish," said Dr. Alice Rim, the Cleveland Clinic's section head of diagnostic radiology. But the images produced by the new technology show the breast in slices, for more visible detail.
"With two-dimensional mammography, there are shadows, so it can be like a polar bear running around in a snowstorm," Rim said. "This eliminates the shadows, allowing increased detection and fewer call backs (for a second mammography)."

Other devices that made the list include mass spectrometry that allows microbiology laboratories to identify the type of bacteria in infections sooner and with more specificity, a new modular stent graft to treat complex aortic aneurysms, and a laser for cataract surgery.

Novel drugs to treat advanced prostate cancer were on the clinic's list because of their ability to halt the progress of the disease by blocking testosterone receptors.

A new technique to repair and regenerate damaged lungs, called ex vivo lung perfusion, is on the list. Experts say as many as 40 percent of previously rejected donor lungs may now be suitable for transplantation after undergoing this novel "lung washing."

The procedure involves placing donor lungs into a bubble-like chamber connected to a cardiopulmonary pump and ventilator. Over four to six hours, the lungs are repaired as special fluids are forced through the blood vessels. Nutrients are used to recondition the lungs as they inflate and deflate.

The final item on the list is neither a procedure, a drug nor a device, but healthcare programs that use incentives to encourage people to take better care of themselves.

For example, the Medicare Better Health Rewards Program Act of 2012 provides incentive payments to Medicare participants who voluntarily establish and maintain better health.

"We are seeing efforts to avoid rationing of healthcare and seeing programs with incentives built in if people maintain their health," Roizen said. "This can radically change the cost of care.

"We're seeing this more in big companies, the GE's and J&J's of the world. All companies are looking at how much they are spending on healthcare, and they are looking at ways they can reduce spending without rationing."

Everyone in the pool! Water workouts just as good as on land

Biking, running and walking are all good for you. But the strain can be tough if you’re overweight, have arthritis ...

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How Much Caffeine Would It Take To Kill You?

A wrongful-death lawsuit filed last week against the makers of Monster energy drinks claims that a 14-year-old girl drank two 24-ounce cans of Monster in the day before she unexpectedly died late in 2011. The coroner's report described 'caffeine toxicity' as contributing to her death. Just what does it take to ingest a lethal dose of caffeine?

The Top 10 Mistakes Of Beginning Photographers

While the instant feedback gives the impression that digital photography is easy, there are some things you need to know. Here are some very common beginner mistakes.

Was an actor "snuffed" on stage in 1549?

Exemplaria published a fascinating article in 1998.  Here's part of the abstract:

Shadowy as its source is now, there exists a medieval tale of theatrical representation that seems almost impossible to believe. It prompted a series of engaged electronic queries and communications on the PERFORM discussion group 1 and also (independently) a dose of skepticism from theorist Richard Schechner, who hastened to emphasize the vast ideological difference between imitation and reality.Did an on-stage execution really take place in 1549 in the city of Tournai or not?

According to somewhat questionable evidence about a biblical drama performed in Tournai, the “actor” playing Judith actually beheaded a convicted murderer who had briefly assumed the “role” of Holofernes long enough to be killed during the “play” to thunderous ap- plause. In his work on the history of French theater in Belgium, Frederic Faber scrupulously reconstructs the festive circumstances of this incident associated with the royal entry of Philip II. [see text image at top]

The source article is long (34 pages), and I can't even begin to do it justice with excerpts,  It addresses the (unsolved) question of whether this reported execution in a public theater was real, or legendary, or whether it was "staged."  Surprisingly (to me) medieval artists had the capacity to perform impressive "special effects" -

An excellent read - especially for Halloween.  Here's the link again: Medieval Snuff Drama, via Medievalists.net.

The Top 10 Ghost Towns

Whether they come with ghosts or are just creepy abandoned communities, we love ghost towns -and there are plenty of them you can visit! National Geographic's Intelligent Travel blog has a list from the National Geographic book Secret Journeys of a Lifetime of ten famous ghost towns, with instructions for visiting and links to local information. From Colorado to Namibia, each of these empty towns has a story behind it. More

Prehistoric town found in Europe

Prehistoric town found in Europe

Archaeologists in north-east Bulgaria unearth what they believe to be the oldest prehistoric town found to date in Europe.

• Ancient sites spotted from space
• DNA tests on 'Richard III' bones

The Ladies of Téviec

Téviec or Théviec is an island situated to the west of the isthmus of the peninsula of Quiberon, near Saint-Pierre-Quiberon in Brittany, France. The island is an important archaeological site due to its occupation during the Mesolithic period. Many archaeological finds have been made dating back to over 6,700 years before the present day, including the remains of over 20 people. One of the most remarkable finds was that of the grave of two young women who had apparently died violently but had received an elaborate burial under a "roof" of antlers, their bodies decorated with jewelry made from shells...

In another grave, the skeletons of two women aged 25–35, dubbed the "ladies of Téviec", were found with signs of violence on both. One had sustained five blows to the head, two of which would have been fatal, and had received at least one arrow shot between the eyes. The other had also traces of injuries. However, this diagnosis is disputed by some archaeologists, who have suggested that the weight of earth above the grave may have been responsible for damaging the skeletons.


The bodies had been buried with great care in a pit that was partly dug into the ground and covered over with debris from the midden. They had been protected by a roof made of antlers and provided with a number of grave goods including pieces of flint and boar bones, and jewellery made of sea shells drilled and assembled into necklaces, bracelets and ringlets for the legs. The grave assemblage was excavated from the site in one piece and is now on display at the museum of prehistory in Toulouse, where its restoration in 2010 earned a national award.

Cloth seals

Cloth seals, although small and not much to look at, can give us fascinating insights into the Medieval and Post Medieval cloth trade, which was so important to economies of the period. This lead seal, SOM-B424B7, is of a form typical in England and some adjacent areas of the continent. It is formed of a row of four disks with tabs between. The row was bent in half over the edge of the cloth and a projecting point on one of the small outer disks went through the cloth then through a hole on the other outer disk before being stamped flat to rivet the ends together and to the cloth. The small disks appear plain apart from the raised circle from flattening the rivet...

Seals were attached to cloth at several stages of production. Personal seals might be added by the weaver and dyer, guild seals might also be added to show the quality of the work had been checked and it was of a required length and seals were added to show various taxes has been paid...

 Here are some later-era cloth seals, recovered from the wreck of an East Indiaman in 1805:

A 12-Year-Old Uses Dungeons & Dragons Monsters for Scientific Research

Psychologist Alan Kingstone of the University of British Columbia wanted to investigate why people (and animals like dogs, dolphins, and monkeys) automatically look where other people are looking.
There are two hypothesis: the first is that the gaze-copying behavior is because we're naturally drawn to people's eyes, whereas the second is that we're drawn to faces. But how could Alan distinguish the two? After all, our eyes are on our faces and there's nothing he could do about it.
Enter his 12-year-old son Julian Levy, who came up with a brilliant solution: just use monsters from Dungeons & Dragons!
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science explains:

One evening, Kingstone was explaining these two hypotheses to Julian over dinner. “A colleague had said that dissociating the two ideas — eyes vs. centre of head — would be impossible because the eyes of humans are in the centre of the head,” Kingstone said. “I told Julian that when people say something is impossible, they sometimes tell you more about themselves than anything.”
Julian agreed. He thought it would be easy to discriminate between the two ideas: just use the Monster Manual. This book will be delightfully familiar to a certain brand of geek. It’s the Bible of fictional beasties that accompanied the popular dice-rolling role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Regularly updated, it bursts with great visuals and bizarrely detailed accounts of unnatural history. It has differently colored dragons, undead, beholders… I think one edition had a were-badger. Parts of this blog are essentially a non-fictional version of the Monster Manual.
Levy knew that the Manual contained many nightmarish monsters whose eyes are not on their faces. If people still looked at the eyes of these creatures, it would answer the question. Kingstone loved the idea. He persuaded Julian’s teacher to give him some time away from school to test his ideas for himself, and she agreed.

The result is a paper lovingly titled "Monsters are people too" - You can read all about it here, or let Ed summarize the findings for you over at his blog: here

A case report on lycanthropy

Just in time for Halloween, Sci Curious blogs about a case report, published in a peer-reviewed research journal, covering the strange story of a patient with lycanthropy — which is, to say, a bad case of werewolfitis. Lycanthropy as a Culture-Bound Syndrome: A Case Report and Review of the Literature was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice. And it was published this year.
Yes, in 2012. That's because the technical, medical definition of lycanthropy had nothing to do with physically transforming into a creature of the night. It's a mental thing, where patients believe they have transformed into some kind of animal, even though they are still demonstrably human. According to Sci Curious, the animals involved in lycanthropy include everything from the obvious (wolf) to the unintentionally hilarious (bee, gerbil).

In their survey of the literature, the authors of this study found many more incidences of people who believed they had been transformed into animals, and which resolved after psychiatric treatment. But what interested the authors of this study were WHAT people generally believed they had turned into. While some people believed they had been turned into gerbils or cows, a surprising number believed they had been turned into wolves, and, as with the case with this woman, snakes.
The authors believe that this is because of what different cultures associate with...evil. Many of the people with lycanthropy believed firmly that the devil had done this to them, and of course the devil would turn them into a beast that is usually considered EVIL. Like wolves, which have been associated with Satan since the middle ages, or snakes, which go all the way back to Genesis (and, as the authors note, the Ms. A was a very devout religious woman). So the authors suggest that the idea of werewolves might arise from people suffering from lycanthropy, and believing that they had been transformed into the evil thing which they most feared.
...But it doesn't really explain the gerbil.

Read the full story at the Neurotic Physiology blog

Mermaid Syndrome is Real

Humans can be born with their legs fused together like a mermaid. 

This 16-year-old girl is one of those humans.  

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Animal House

Power Your Home With Pets

Hurrican Sandy has caused a lot of power outages. The vast majority of Americans have their power supplied by utility companies. Nonetheless, there are those who go off the grid, turn to alternative energy, or combine the two. There are a lot of ways to power your house by alternative means. Even your pets can deliver the power. Figure out how many pets it would take to power your house for a day.

Brazilian drug gang issues death order on sniffer dog

Drug bosses in Rio de Janeiro have issued a 'death order' against a sniffer dog named Boss. The Labrador is wanted by the Brazilian gang in the violent Manguinhos slum after sniffing out more than 660 pounds of cannabis hiding inside a false wall. Police patrolling the favela in the north of the city intercepted a radio message from the trafficking kingpin with an order to "target brownie" – a reference to the dog's color.

Five-year-old Boss is the most feared amongst the 68 sniffer dogs who help police find drugs in Rio's vast slums, police said. The gangsters recently tried to throw him off the scent by hiding a batch of drugs next to an open sewage drain, but the Labrador still managed to lead officers to them despite the pungent smell.

Major Vitor Valle, from Rio's military police dog squad, said Boss will continue to work in the slum but will now be protected by nine policemen. He said it was the first time one of their dogs has received a death threat from the powerful drugs factions. "Since 1955, when the dog squad was first formed, have we had a case like this. We haven't even had a dog injured during police operations," he said.

He said Boss has always been an "excellent" sniffer dog. "He's become a target because of the amount of the traffickers' drugs he's helped seize. We see this as a normal situation. Every one of us is at risk who are working against drugs trafficking. A dog can also be threatened, especially as our dogs have helped find more than 1.5 tonnes of drugs in the last year. It won't stop us, or him, doing our work."

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