The Daily Drift

Editorial Comment: The severe weather skipped by us again yesterday. It is supposed to clear up today.

Go ahead tilt away ...!

 

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Today is - May Day

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We would like to welcome our newest readers in:

Saint Martin

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Africa 

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The Pacific

North Ryde, Fortitude Valley and Sydney, Australia

Mandlauyong City, Philippines

Today In History

May 1

408		Theodosius II succeeds to the throne of Constantinople.
1308		King Albert is murdered by his nephew John, because he refused his share of the Habsburg lands.
1486		Christopher Columbus convinces Queen Isabella to fund expedition to the West Indies.
1805		The state of Virginia passes a law requiring all freed slaves to leave the state, or risk either imprisonment or deportation.
1863		The Battle of Chancellorsville begins as Union Gen. Joe Hooker starts his three-pronged attack against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
1867		Reconstruction in the South begins with black voter registration.
1877		President Ruthoford B. Hayes withdraws all Federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.
1898		The U.S. Navy under Dewey defeats the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines.
1915		The luxury liner Lusitania leaves New York Harbor for a voyage to Europe.
1927		Adolf Hitler holds his first Nazi meeting in Berlin.
1931		The Empire State Building opens in New York.
1934		The Philippine legislature accepts a U.S. proposal for independence.
1937		President Franklin Roosevelt signs an act of neutrality, keeping the United States out of World War II.
1941		The film Citizen Kane–directed and starring Orson Welles–opens in New York.
1944		The Messerschmitt Me 262, the first combat jet, makes its first flight.
1945		Martin Bormann, private secretary to Adolf Hitler, escapes the Fuehrerbunker as the Red Army advances on Berlin.
1948		North Korea is established.
1950		Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry called Annie Allen.
1960		Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane is shot down over Russia.
1961		Fidel Castro announces there will be no more elections in Cuba.
1968		In the second day of battle, U.S. Marines, with the support of naval fire, continue their attack on a North Vietnamese Division at Dai Do.
1970		Students from Kent State University riot in downtown Kent, Ohio, in protest of the American invasion of Cambodia.
1986		The Tass News Agency reports the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.
2011		Osama Bin Laden is killed in Abbottabad Pakistan by US Navy SEALS in Operation Neptune Spear.

Non Sequitur

The Victorian Inventor Of The Wheelie

A hundred years before the rise of extreme sports, stunt bikers took big risks and drew bigger crowds. Although he's largely forgotten today, Daniel J. Canary was one of the best.

In 1897, one of the top stunt bicyclists in the United States called Canary 'the father of us all.' Canary performed amazing feats on the high-wheel, but when he got his hands on the newly-invented 'safety bicycle,' the father of the bikes we know today, he did even more: he invented the wheelie.

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OK, all you 'X-Games' aficionados here's your founding father!

A Carbonized Loaf Of Bread From Pompeii

The city was vacuum sealed so fast everything sat were it was on that fateful day in 79CE

Schutzstaffel

V-2: The Rocket Fueled by the Nazi War Machine

V-2: The Rocket Fueled by the Nazi War Machine

The unexpected spinoffs from the weaponized rocket technology from World War Two ultimately led to the more peaceful space launch applications we have today.

Random Celebrity Photos

Jayne Mansfield, late 1950s

Pre-code movies worth watching

At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has a list of films from the 1920s and 30s — prior to the widespread adoption of the Hollywood Production Code and its morality guidelines — that are actually worth tracking down through Amazon, Netflix, and other sources.

Most of the movies made during this era have been lost, and not all of those that survived are timeless classics. Studios were still figuring out what worked in a talking picture and what didn’t, so there’s lots of problems with pacing — some movies waste several minutes on dead air in scenes that would have been cut entirely just a few years later. Serious technical issues dog the crop from 1928-1930, too; there’s one film where every time you see a character holding a piece of paper, it’s soaking wet because at the time there was no other way to keep from picking up every crackle and rustle of a dry sheet of paper with the microphones. So there are more than a few pre-Code films that have been deservedly forgotten.

That said, Ortberg offers up a nice accounting of the ones you should check out, arranged in categories such as "Worth Watching For Any Reason", "If You Want To Get Into Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Racial Dynamics", "Worth It For the Titles Alone", and "If You Want To Take A Deeply Uncomfortable Journey To Another Time" (which hits all the fun horrible things of the past not covered by the racial dynamics category).

Viola Smith plays drums on "Snake Charmer" (1939)

[Video Link] I like her kit!

Viola Smith (born November 29, 1912) is an American drummer best known for her work in orchestras, swing bands, and popular music in the 1930s and 1940s. She was one of the first professional female drummers."

Art Fakes That Fooled (Almost) Everyone

Art Fakes That Fooled (Almost) Everyone

Millions of dollars and the admiration of the art world can be had by a talent artist willing to sign someone else's name.

Ziggy

Spain launches hunt for Quixote writer Cervantes

Scientists will start scanning Monday with a radar the floor of a Madrid convent where they hope to find the body of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, author of "Don Quixote".

Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes by Juan de Jáuregui, 1600

They said on Friday they were ready to begin searching in the Convent of Trinitarians to identify the writer, who died in poverty despite creating one of the landmarks of Western literature.
Cervantes is recorded as having died on April 22, 1616 and been buried a day later in the church of the red-brick convent, but the precise spot is now unknown.
"We have marked out an area to search. It seems logical that if he was indeed buried there, it was below the floor of the church," said Francisco Etxeberria, a forensic anthropologist.
"The radar cannot tell you whether it is the body of the writer, but it can indicate the place of burial," said the expert leading the first phase of the search, Luis Avial.
"The geo-radar can tell us that location... then comes the delicate work" by archaeologists and forensic scientists to exhume the body and identify it, he told a news conference.
Etxeberria said the searchers would also scan parts of the walls and the sacristy, in the floor of which there is a padlocked door thought to lead down to a crypt.
The work of scanning, exhuming and analysing any remains found is due to last months, he added.
Another expert involved in the search, historian Fernando de Pardo, put the estimated cost of the project at about 100,000 euros ($138,000) overall.
If Cervantes's remains are identified there, it is planned that he "remain buried in the church, but with a plaque that says he is there", de Pardo added.
Born near Madrid in 1547, Cervantes has been dubbed the father of the modern novel for "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha", published in two parts in 1605 and 1615.
The convent is still inhabited by nuns and has been designated part of Madrid's cultural heritage since 1921, complicating any effort to excavate in blind pursuit of Cervantes' remains.
"Finding the tomb of Cervantes would mean paying a very important debt to the Prince of Letters in Spain," Jose Francisco Garcia, Madrid city hall's director of cultural heritage, said last month.

Keeping it all in perspective.

Blood in Gourd Didn't Belong to Louis XVI

Blood in Gourd Didn't Belong to Louis XVI

New genetic evidence casts further doubt on the authenticity of a grisly French relic: a gourd long believed to be stained with the blood of Louis XVI.

Lost 1800s Shipwreck Found Near Golden Gate Bridge

Lost 1800s Shipwreck Found Near Golden Gate Bridge

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the discovery of the remains of the SS City of Chester, a passenger steamer that went down in 1888 near the Golden Gate in San Francisco.

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The oldest known selfie. (1839)

 

Robert Cornelius took this photo outside the store his family owned. It became famous for being the first self portrait or as its commonly now known, a "selfie."

City's Mysterious Fate Explained by Flood

City's Mysterious Fate Explained by Flood

The mysterious abandonment of Cahokia may be linked to a massive Mississippi River flood 1,800 years ago.

The Lost Empire That Ruled The Silk Road

Today, the city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan is relatively remote, known mostly for its magnificent medieval ruins. But over a millennium ago, it was one of the richest cities on the infamous trade route known as the Silk Road. Back in the 600s CE, that route was called simply 'the road to Samarkand.'

Samarkand's culture was a hybrid of Iranian and Chinese influences, its religion a mix of Zoroastrianism and other traditions, and it belonged to a now-vanished ethnic group called the Sogdians.

40 Rare And Important Archaeological Finds Of All time

The past can be both shocking and familiar. It's common to say that human nature never changes - but it's still possible for archaeology to surprise us, by pulling things from the ground which transform our conception of the past.

Retro Photos

Drive in ... you don't really see them anymore

Monk Parts

Parts of an 800-year-old monk have been found.  The embedded image shows his femurs protruding from an eroding cliff in South Wales.

Shakespeare's Beehive

Analysis of newly discovered dictionary that Shakespeare owned and annotated

Here's a review of Shakespeare's Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light, a newly published analysis of a recently discovered Elizabethan dictionary that Shakespeare used for his plays, and which he heavily annotated. The dictionary, "An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionary," written by John Baret in 1580, came to light in an Internet auction, Beehive's authors make a compelling case for this book having been annotated by Shakespeare himself. They proceed to analyze Shakespeare's annotations in light of his works. It looks fascinating, and as with all great works of scholarship, there are dirty parts:

“ But perhaps the most remarkable annotation in our copy of Baret, relatable to Romeo and Juliet, is the added word vagina at the definition of Scabberd, which itself was given a mute slash. ”
Koppelman and Wechsler discuss the occurrence of scabberd and sheath or sheathed in Shakespeare. Juliet’s last speech, “ . . . O happy dagger / This is thy sheath, there rust and let me dye ” is specifically linked by A.D. Nuttall to the common anatomical meaning, “ Her language is sexual. ” While the OED records the first usage of vagina as an anatomical word in English only in 1682, Lewis and Short trace the anatomical meaning to Plautus. T.W. Baldwin and other scholars offer clear evidence that Plautus formed part of the Elizabethan curriculum ; Koppelman and Wechsler cite a line in Pseudolus that translates “ Not fitting into thy sheath soldier ? ”
Sir Thomas Browne wrote “ What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. ” Koppelman and Wechsler give the briefest of notes on the nineteenth century provenance of the book. Lady Georgiana Fullerton was a novelist and philanthropist, and a granddaughter of the fifth duke of Devonshire. “ All the dukes of Devonshire were men of letters and collectors of books ”, writes W.Y. Fletcher in English Book Collectors (1902). The Cavendish family were wealthy and prominent since Tudor times despite exile and debt. It is entirely plausible that this copy of the Alvearie once formed part of a large library — how better for a book to survive than among ten thousand others ? — and once it might even have been known to be Shakespeare’s own copy, until that knowledge was lost or the book was moved from one shelf to another. It may never be possible to trace the full history of the ownership of the Alvearie ; but the linguistic evidence is strong enough to convince all but the most wilful and perverse doubters.

Shakespeare's Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light

Interpreting 'Physick'

The Familiar And Foreign Eighteenth-Century Body

Our eighteenth-century forbears weren't stupid when it came to the art of healing. In the absence of key pieces of information - for examples, germ theory - they developed a model of the body, health, and healing that was fundamentally logical. Some treatments worked, and many didn’t, but there was a method to the apparent madness.

Video series about medieval lives

Medical historian Holly Tucker recommends checking out Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage and Death — a BBC series about personal lives in the Middle Ages

Daily Comic Relief

Neanderthals Had Shallow Gene Pool

Neanderthals Had Shallow Gene Pool, Study Says

The first detailed picture of genetic variation among Neanderthals indicates they may have lived in small, isolated groups that had little contact with each other.

Humans May Have Left Africa Earlier Than Thought

Humans May Have Left Africa Earlier Than Thought

Modern humans may have dispersed in more than one wave of migration out of Africa, and they may have done so earlier than scientists had long thought.

Genomic diversity differs between Stone-Age Scandinavian foragers and farmers

An international team led by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University reports a breakthrough on understanding the demographic history of Stone-Age humans.A genomic analysis of eleven Stone-Age human remains from Scandinavia revealed that expanding Stone-age farmers assimilated local hunter-gatherers and that the hunter-gatherers were historically in lower numbers than the farmers. The study is published, ahead of print, in the journal Science.
Genomic diversity and admixture differs for Stone-Age Scandinavian foragers and farmers

This image shows osteologists Ove och Evy Persson at Ajvide, Gotland, Sweden, 1983. The skeleton from a young woman dated to 2700 BC

The transition between a hunting-gathering lifestyle and a farming lifestyle has been debated for a century. As scientists learned to work with DNA from ancient human material, a complete new way to learn about the people in that period opened up. But even so, prehistoric population structure associated with the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in Europe remains poorly understood.
"For many of the most interesting questions, DNA-information from people today just doesn't cut it, the best way to learn about ancient history is to analyze direct data -- despite the challenges," says Dr. Pontus Skoglund of Uppsala University, now at Harvard University, and one of the lead authors of the study.
"We have generated genomic data from the largest number of ancient individuals" says Dr. Helena Malmström of Uppsala University and one of the lead authors. "The eleven Stone-Age human remains were between 5,000 and 7,000 years old and associated with hunter-gatherer or farmer life-styles" says Helena Malmström.
Anders Götherström, who led the Stockholm University team, is satisfied with the amount of DNA that they could retrieve.
"Not only were we able to generate DNA from several individuals, but we did get a lot of it. In some cases we got the equivalent of draft genomes. A population genomic study on this level with a material of this age has never been done before as far as I know."
The material used in the study is from mainland Scandinavia as well as from the Baltic island Gotland, and it comprises of hunter-gatherers from various time periods as well as early farmers.
Professor Mattias Jakobsson, who led the Uppsala University team, is intrigued by the results.
"Stone-Age hunter-gatherers had much lower genetic diversity than farmers. This suggests that Stone-Age foraging groups were in low numbers compared to farmers," says Mattias Jakobsson.
Jan Storå at Stockholm University shares Mattias' fascination.
"The low variation in the hunter gatherers may be related to oscillating living conditions likely affecting the population sizes of hunter-gatherers. One of the additional exciting results is the association of the Mesolithic individual to both the roughly contemporaneous individual from Spain but also the association to the Neolithic hunter-gatherers."
The study confirms that Stone-Age hunter-gatherers and farmers were genetically distinct and that migration spread farming practices across Europe, but the team was able to go even further by demonstrating that the Neolithic farmers had substantial admixture from hunter-gatherers. Surprisingly, the hunter-gatherers from the Baltic Sea displayed no evidence of introgression from farmers.
"We see clear evidence that people from hunter-gatherer groups were incorporated into farming groups as they expanded across Europe," says Pontus Skoglund. "This might be clues towards something that happened also when agriculture spread in other parts of the world."
"The asymmetric gene-flow shows that the farming groups assimilated hunter-gatherer groups, at least partly," says Mattias Jakobsson. "When we compare Scandinavian to central European farming groups that lived at about the same time, we see greater levels of hunter-gatherer gene-flow into the Scandinavian farming groups."
This study is part of the recently initiated "Atlas project" -- a large-scale genomic investigation of ancient human remains in Scandinavia led by Stockholm and Uppsala Universities and funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Swedish Research Council. The present study brings the first results from the project.
"We have only begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge that this project may bring us in the future" says Anders Götherström.

Coming Tomorrow

Coming Tomorrow

• The Mystery Of Bizarre Duck-Like Ocean Sound Solved
• Apple maps Discovers The 'Loch Ness Monster'
• 'Animal Architecture'
• Animals With Bigger Brains Have More Self Control

And more ...

This snow owl is our Animal Picture, for today.