CAROLINA NATURALLY: Sep 30, 2015

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

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Today in History

1399		Richard II is deposed.
1568		Eric XIV, king of Sweden, is deposed after showing signs of madness.
1630		John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel
1703		The French, at Hochstadt in the War of the Spanish Succession, suffer only 1,000 casualties to the 11,000 of their opponents, the Austrians of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
1791		Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is performed for the first time in Vienna
1846		The first anesthetized tooth extraction is performed by Dr. William Morton in Charleston, Massachusetts.
1864		Confederate troops fail to retake Fort Harrison from the Union forces during the siege of Petersburg.
1911		Italy declares war on Turkey over control of Tripoli.
1918		Bulgaria pulls out of World War I.
1927		Babe Ruth hits his 60th homerun of the season off Tom Zachary in Yankee Stadium, New York City.
1935		George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess opens at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.
1938		Under German threats of war, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign an accord permitting Germany to take control of Sudetenland–a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking minority.
1939		The French Army is called back into France from its invasion of Germany. The attack, code named Operation Saar, only penetrated five miles.
1943		The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps becomes the Women’s Army Corps, a regular contingent of the U.S. Army with the same status as other army service corps.
1949		The Berlin Airlift is officially halted after 277,264 flights.
1950		U.N. forces cross the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea as they pursue the retreating North Korean Army.
1954		The first atomic-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is commissioned in Groton, Connecticut.
1954		NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.
1955		Actor and teen idol James Dean is killed in a car crash while driving his Porsche on his way to enter it into a race in Salinas, California.
1960		Fifteen African nations are admitted to the United Nations.
1962		U.S. Marshals escort James H. Meredith into the University of Mississippi; two die in the mob violence that follows.
1965		President Lyndon Johnson signs legislation that establishes the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities.
1965		The 30 September Movement unsuccessfully attempts coup against Indonesian government; an anti-communist purge in the aftermath results in over 500,000 deaths.
1966		Bechuanaland ceases to be a British protectorate and becomes the independent Republic of Botswana.
1972		Pro baseball great Roberto Clemente hits his 3,000th—and final—hit of his career.
1975		The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter makes its first flight.
1994		Aldwych tube station (originally Strand Station) of the London Underground transit system closes after 88 years.
1999		Japan’s second-worst nuclear accident occurs at a uranium processing facility in Tokai-mura, killing two technicians.
2009		Earthquakes in Sumatra kill more than 1,115 people.

High school student punches out bully who was attacking blind classmate

An apparent bully attacks a blind kid, who is saved by a classmate (Screenshot/YouTube)

High school student punches out bully who was attacking blind classmate

“Are you trying to fucking jump a blind kid, bro?” the student asks the attacker as he’s lying on the ground. He then warns him if he tries it again, “I will fuck you up.”

Woman With "The Perfect Bottom" Earns a Living Trying on Jeans

Pictured above is Natasha Wagner--or, more precisely, the part of her body that earns her hefty paychecks. 14 years ago, fashion consultants discovered that Wagner has the ideal butt for testing designs for jeans. She's 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wears a size 6. Her posterior represents the needs of a vast number of women who buy jeans in a wide variety of styles. When fashion designers want to see how their work looks on an ideal set of buttocks, they call Wagner. Vogue talked to designer Julien Jarmoune about Wagner's assets:

“Natasha has the perfect marriage of body types,” clarified Jarmoune. “Because if you fit with someone who is too curvy (tiny waist, big butt), or with someone who has a straight body (no hips), you are limiting yourself to just a certain body type. A jean that is fit on a straight body will never look good on someone who has curves. That’s why Natasha comes into play perfectly. She has the best of both worlds where she’s slim and she still has shape. Additionally, she has great legs that are the perfect length (she fits our standard 30-inch leg inseam flawlessly) so that our jeans will work for someone who is short or tall.”

But Wagner is much more than just her bottom. After doing this kind of work for 14 years, she's become an expert in jeans design:

Wagner, who owns more than 100 pairs of jeans herself, explained her “science of denim” further: “Once I had learned the jean terminology, I began to help designers flesh out details or catch things that may have been overlooked. They’re busy, they’re working on the current season plus a year ahead. I’m just focusing on fit and am able to point out specifics like if the back rise is pulling or if there’s bubbling or roping,” she said. Plus, she knows the jargon. “A lot of the time you’ll get what’s called ‘slippage’ on a jean, where the denim pulls and you can kind of see the weft in the garment. So I can recommend trying a different type of construction or a different side seam. I know how the body should look in the jean, so I’m able to tell them things like, ‘Kick out the back rise,’ or ‘Take a measurement from the top of the rise and add it to the bottom of the rise to give it a nicer butt shape and a lift.’ ”

At 500 Years Old, This Butcher Shop is Britain's Oldest Family-Owned Business

They're not precisely sure when their business was founded. But RJ Balson and Son has on file a business license granted in 1515. And for that entire 500-year period, this butcher shop in Bridport, Dorset, UK, has been owned and operated by the same family.
It's survived wars, both foreign and civil, plagues, and economic depressions. RJ Balson and Son has been in its current location only recently--just since the 19th Century. But it's always been serving meat to customers in Bridport. The Daily Telegraph reports:

On sale now is a mixture of novelty and old-fashioned fare. Packs of beef dripping share space with sliced chorizo. There is a freezer of game: some traditional, like venison and rabbit, some exotic, like bison, zebra, crocodile, ostrich and kangaroo.
When the business opened, the kangaroo hadn’t even been discovered. […]
From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, butcher numbers tumbled from 15,000 to around 6,000, a drop of 60 per cent, according to Meat Trades Journal, though in the last couple of years figures have stabilised.
Balson is clear that he can fight against the supermarkets. “The main thing is personal service. When you come in, you get a nice welcome, you say, 'how’s your mum?’, 'how’s your daughter?’ Most of the people who come in, we’ve served their parents before them, and their grandparents before that and they like to be asked.
"You’re not going to get that personal experience in a supermarket. Who wants to queue up for 20 minutes before you even get to the checkout?”
In any case, if a shop has outlived 23 monarchs and 52 prime ministers, it probably stands a fighting chance of surviving the rise and Tesco and Aldi.

Deadly and Lucrative Kidnapping Business

ISIL's Deadly and Lucrative Kidnapping Business

Terrorist groups like ISIL have profited not only financially but also in propaganda terms from taking hostages. Can anything be done to stop the practice?

Mom buys coffee for women who insulted her to set example for 2-year-old

Mom buys coffee for women who insulted her to set example for 2-year-old: ‘She mimics everything I do’

Dianne Hoffmeyer was standing in line at a coffee shop minding her own business when two women behind her started lobbing insults about her looks, calling her a whale and making fun of her hair.

The State that Turns Pregnant Women Into Felons

The State that Turns Pregnant Women Into Felons

New York Cops Are Jailing Handymen For Carrying This Common Pocketknife

A half-century-old law, enacted to prohibit the kind of knives that Nazi Germany used to distribute to paratroopers, is instead being used to arrest ordinary workers who carry pocketknives to use on the job.

New Jersey Cop Threatens To Deport Latino Teenagers And Their Families ‘Like Texas’

"I'll make this shit fucking like Texas, bro."

Quick Hits

The Evolution of Human Brain

Stem Cell Research Hints at Evolution of Human Brain

The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of human evolution, the cortex...

Forensic Archaeology

Murdered Czars to Be Dug Up in New Probe

Russia is exhuming Tsar Nicholas and Alexandra as part of a re-investigation of the circumstances around the death and burial of the imperial family.

Mona Lisa's Bones Found?

Researchers continue their attempt to solve the mystery behind the identity of one of the world's most famous models.

New Method Studies Human Lateralization With Stone Tools

Researchers from the University of the Basque Country have developed a new method for determining if individual flint flakes were produced by right- or left-handed knappers. “We focus on the butt of the flake which is where part of the percussion platform has been preserved. The fractures that appear on the platform are oriented according to the direction of the impact made on it by the percussor. Once the direction of the impact is known, it is possible, with a high degree of reliability, to determine whether it was produced by the left hand or the right hand,” Eder Dominguez-Ballesteros said in a press release. Studying the origins and development of laterality, or the preference for one side of the body over another, helps scientists to understand the evolution of the organization of the human brain. Earlier methods of determining laterality required the study of more than one flake for comparison. For more, go to "Neanderthal Tool Time."

Stealth Dark Matter

New theory of stealth dark matter may explain universe’s missing mass

Lawrence Livermore scientists have come up with a new theory that may identify why dark matter has evaded direct detection in Earth-based experiments. A group of national particle physicists known as the Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence...

Some Lucky Ants Get the Job of Doing Nothing

In our fast-paced society, it's difficult to imagine a reality where somebody's job is to do nothing.According to University of Arizona researchers, however, laziness could be a specialization in and of itself for certain ants that live in a large colony. While observing five ant colonies over a three-week period, entomologists noticed that half of each colony's members were consistently doing nothing. That inactivity, researchers say, was not related to resting or circadian rhythms -- instead, it seems that some ants' job is simply to do that: nothing.
In a newly published paper, University of Arizona entomologist Anna Dornhaus and graduate student Daniel Charbonneau throw out several possible explanations for the purposefully lazy insects' behavior.

"The inactive ants could be reserve workers," Charbonneau posits in a news release. "It makes sense to have reserves to meet the peak of those fluctuations -- it's better to have too many workers during the down times than not enough during the peaks."
Lazy ants could also have stomachs full of food that they had previously gathered for other members of the colony. The so-called "living refrigerators" may regurgitate the food to feed their peers, a process known as trophallaxis.
Of course, some ants could just be lazy. Per the response-threshold model, Charbonneau explains, certain creatures may have higher thresholds "at which they will start doing work," leaving the lazy ants to put off working until their services are absolutely necessary.
Whatever the case, Charbonneau and Dornhaus say that they are continuing to explore the implications of the inattentive ants, particularly in the fields of computer science and robotics.
Charbonneau and Dornhaus' research is published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

PETA Sues To Give Monkey The Rights To Selfie Photos

In 2011, photographer David Slater was in Indonesia when a crested black macaque grabbed his camera and took some pictures, including this awesome selfie. It was a viral sensation. But who owns the copyright? Wikipedia argues that no one does. The war for the rights to this picture continue to this day, as now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed suit to grant the rights to the monkey, identified as 6-year-old Naruto.

Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued an updated compendium of its policies, including a section stipulating that it would register copyrights only for works produced by human beings. It specified that works produced by animals, whether a photo taken by a monkey or a mural painted by an elephant, would not qualify.
However, Jeffrey Kerr, a lawyer with PETA, said the copyright office policy "is only an opinion," and the U.S. Copyright Act itself does not contain language limiting copyrights to humans.

Slater said he is “very saddened” by PETA’s lawsuit.

Baby Elephant Tries to Intimidate Tourists

(Video Link)

Safari tourists drove through Kruger National Park in South Africa. They stopped to watch an elephant family. The baby wanted to act big and tough, like a full-grown elephant should. So he charged the tourists and trumpeted. Sorry, little guy. You'll have to grow up a bit more before you can scare the humans.