CAROLINA NATURALLY: Jan 15, 2016

Friday, January 15, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of Carolina Naturally.

How a dog's mind works ...!

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Today in History

1624		Riots flare in Mexico when it is announced that all cults are to be closed.
1811		In a secret session, Congress plans to annex Spanish East Florida.
1865		Union troops capture Fort Fisher, North Carolina.
1913		The first telephone line between Berlin and New York is inaugurated.
1919		Peasants in Central Russia rise against the Bolsheviks.
1920		The Dry Law goes into effect in the United States. Selling liquor and beer becomes illegal.
1920		The United States approves a $150 million loan to Poland, Austria and Armenia to aid in their war with the Russian communists.
1927		The Dumbarton Bridge opens in San Francisco carrying the first auto traffic across the bay.
1929		The U.S. Senate ratifies the Kellogg-Briand anti-war pact.
1930		Amelia Earhart sets an aviation record for women at 171 mph in a Lockheed Vega.
1936		In London, Japan quits all naval disarmament talks after being denied equality.
1944		The U.S. Fifth Army successfully breaks the German Winter Line in Italy with the capture of Mount Trocchio.
1949		Chinese Communists occupy Tientsin after a 27-hour battle with Nationalist forces.
1965		Sir Winston Churchill suffers a severe stroke.
1967		Some 462 Yale faculty members call for an end to the bombing in North Vietnam.
1973		Nixon announces the suspension of offensive action by US troops in Vietnam.
1973		Four of six remaining Watergate defendants plead guilty.
1975		The Alvor Agreement is signed, ending the Angolan War of independence and granting the country independence from Portugal.
1976		Sara Jane Moore sentenced to life in prison for her failed attempt to assassinate Ford.
1991		UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw its forces from occupied Kuwait passes, setting the stage for Operation Desert Storm.
1991		Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II approves Australia instituting its own Victoria Cross honors system, the first county in the British Commonwealth permitted to do so.
1992		Slovenia and Croatia’s independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is recognized by the international community.
2001		Wikipedia goes online.

After Years of Proxy War, Saudi Arabia and Iran Are Finally Squaring Up in the Open

After Years of Proxy War, Saudi Arabia and Iran Are Finally Squaring Up in the Open

Why Are Americans So Pathetically Ignorant About Politics?

Why Are Americans So Pathetically Ignorant About Politics?

The likely voter model in that poll you’re reading about is probably garbage

Study: the likely voter model in that poll you’re reading about is probably garbage

Polls are more accurate when they verify that their respondents are actually registered and have voted before.

The Infrastructure Cure For The Economy

The Infrastructure Cure For The Economy

The economy suffers from lack of demand. How do you increase demand in an economy? With jobs that pay well. How do you get jobs to pay well? Maintain our infrastructure.

Strong Job Growth In 2015 Still Couldn’t Give Workers A Raise

Analysts had expected 200,000 jobs to be added.

Hiring surges as US economy adds 292,000 new jobs in December

45 Million Americans Live in Poverty

45 Million Americans Live in Poverty, but You Wouldn’t Know It From Watching 2016 Coverage

Can Statins Lower Sleep Apnea Risks?

New research suggests that statin use might help lower the considerable heart disease risk of people with obstructive sleep apnea

One Mom's Race to Legalize Medical Cannabis in Her State and Potentially Save Her Daughter's Life

One Mom's Race to Legalize Medical Cannabis in Her State and Potentially Save Her Daughter's Life

US urges people to eat less sugar ...

When Are You Really an Adult?

There are so many steps to becoming an adult, and they all take place at different times in one’s life. At what point do you really consider yourself an adult? Puberty is too early in modern society. Buying a house or having children doesn’t apply to everyone, at any age. And having a job or moving away from your family depends more on the current economy than one’s age. Defining when someone becomes an adult is like trying to pinpoint a certain drop of water in a moving river.

In fact, if you think of the transition to “adulthood” as a collection of markers—getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids—for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.
And yet these are still the venerated markers of adulthood today, and when people take too long to acquire them, or eschew them all together, it becomes a reason to lament that no one is a grown-up. While bemoaning the habits and values of the youths is the eternal right of the olds, many young adults do still feel like kids trying on their parents’ shoes.
“I think there is a really hard transition [between childhood and adulthood],” says Kelly Williams Brown, author of the book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, and its preceding blog, in which she gives tips for navigating adult life. “It’s not just hard for Millennials, I think it was hard for Gen X-ers, I think it was hard for Baby Boomers. All of a sudden you’re out in the world, and you have this insane array of options, but you don’t know which you should take. There’s all these things your mom and dad told you, presumably, and yet you’re living like a feral wolf, who doesn’t have toilet paper, who’s using Arby’s napkins instead.”

The Atlantic looks at the transition to adulthood in many dimensions: physical maturity, intellectual capability, legal status, those markers we often use, and the changes in society that make them less useful in determining what adulthood really is. When did you start to consider yourself really an adult? Or have you?

Pretty Girls Get Better Grades

Attractiveness Does Affect Women’s Scores — But Not Men’s

Teen brutally stabs store clerk to death in second attack on Sikhs in Fresno in a week

High school cancels basketball season after players charged with rape over brutal pool cue hazing incident

Police officer with suspect in handcuffs (Shutterstock.com)

High school cancels basketball season after players charged with rape over brutal pool cue hazing incident

A Tennessee school superintendent has canceled the remainder of the season for the Ooltewah high school boys’ basketball team after a freshman player said he was raped by teammates.

Cop Arrested Twice for Assaulting Women, Stayed a Cop and Was Just Arrested a Third Time

Cop Arrested Twice for Assaulting Women, Stayed a Cop and Was Just Arrested a Third Time

Woman stole phone from man with trousers around ankles in amorous alleyway encounter

A man with his trousers around his ankles had his mobile phone stolen by a woman after they got ‘amorous’ in an alleyway. Police said she ‘ran off laughing’, leaving him undressed in Manchester city center. A theft investigation is now underway after the incident was reported to police by the victim, who had met the woman earlier in a nearby bar.
A police spokesman said: “We are highlighting the incident not to further embarrass the victim, but as a reminder to others. Even in the height of passion, it’s important to keep an eye on your valuables.” The man, who hasn’t been named, called police himself to report the theft. He told officers that they ended up in an alleyway off Portland Street in the early hours of Sunday.

Police said he remembered that his mobile phone was inside one of the pockets of his trousers. He reported being ‘intimate’ with the woman in the alley, with his trousers pulled down, when she ran off laughing, the spokesman added. He then discovered that his mobile phone was missing, and told police that he suspected her of stealing it.

In a Tweet, GMP’s Manchester city centre division issued a warning. Officers said: “Beware; Victim reports met woman in bar, ends up in alley getting amorous & while trousers round ankles she ran off with his phone laughing.” No arrests have been made as yet. No further details or descriptions have been released.

Drunk man found passed out in car while utilizing penis pump led police on chase

A motorist found passed out at an intersection in York County, Pennsylvania, while "utilizing" a penis pump fled from officers, prompting a brief chase, according to charging documents. Chad Michael Kagen, 39, of Springettsbury Township, faces a second-degree misdemeanor charge of fleeing or attempting to elude police according to court records.

He has not yet been arraigned and has a preliminary hearing set for Jan. 28, records state. It's the second time in 18 months that he's been accused of causing a police chase. Township officers were called to the intersection shortly after 5am on Dec. 13 for a report of a man slumped over the steering wheel, police said. The first officer on scene found Kagen passed out in the driver's seat of a borrowed Volkswagen Touareg, with a penis pump in operation, charging documents state.
The driver-side window was down, and the officer could smell a strong odor of alcohol, after which it took him "several minutes of yelling" to wake Kagen, documents state. Kagen turned off the SUV's ignition after being told to do so, and said he was on his way home from a York City bar, police said. "(Kagen's) speech was slurred and his eyes were glassy and bloodshot," charging documents state. As other officers arrived, Kagen "slowly reached for the ignition button and turned the vehicle back on," according to documents.
He was ordered to turn off the vehicle, but instead he put the Touareg in drive and took off at a high rate of speed, police said. Police gave chase with lights and sirens activated but lost sight of the vehicle. They filed the fleeing-or-eluding charge on Dec. 22. But they did not file a drunken-driving charge. Springettsbury Township Police Lt. Todd King said that's because Kagen's blood-alcohol level wasn't tested. "Without having him available to test, we could not charge him with a DUI," King said.

Flea-bitten empire ...

Flea-bitten empire: How the Romans left parasites, feces and disease in their wake

What did the Romans ever do for us? The surprising answer turns out to be lice, fleas, bed bugs, bacterial infections from contamination with human feces, and 25 foot-long tapeworms, a misery spread across the empire by the Roman passion for fermented fish sauce.

Honduras to make archaeological dig for mysterious 'White City'

A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the World

Leang Jarie, or “Cave of Fingers,” in the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia has long been known for the stenciled handprints on the walls. But it was only announced in 2014 that the actual age of the paintings there and in other caves on Sulawesi were determined to be at least 35,400 years. That would make them among the oldest art in the world, and opens up many questions about the evolution and dispersal of humans around the world. The method used to date the paintings is fascinating. Archaeologist and geochemist Maxime Aubert knew that analyzing radioactive decay would give a date to inorganic material that carbon dating can’t.

Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wanted to date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks in trace amounts. Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these two elements in a sample reveals its age; the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample. The technique, known as uranium series dating, was used to determine that zircon crystals from Western Australia were more than four billion years old, proving Earth’s minimum age. But it can also date newer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively as speleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock.

Aubert got a chance to analyze the cave paintings on Sulawesi, which were partially covered by speleothems (called popcorn). As they formed on top of the images, they have to be younger than the paintings themselves.

Aubert spent a week the next summer touring the region by motorbike. He took samples from five paintings partly covered by popcorn, each time using a diamond-tipped drill to cut a small square out of the rock, about 1.5 centimeters across and a few millimeters deep.
Back in Australia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers before separating out the uranium and thorium in each one. “You collect the powder, then remove another layer, then collect the powder,” Aubert says. “You’re trying to get as close as possible to the paint layer.” Then he drove from Wollongong to Canberra to analyze his samples using the mass spectrometer, sleeping in his van outside the lab so he could work as many hours as possible, to minimize the number of days he needed on the expensive machine. Unable to get funding for the project, he had to pay for his flight to Sulawesi—and for the analysis—himself. “I was totally broke,“ he says.
The very first age Aubert calculated was for a hand stencil from the Cave of Fingers. “I thought, ‘Oh, shit,’” he says. “So I calculated it again.” Then he called Brumm.
“I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying,” Brumm recalls. “He blurted out, ‘35,000!’ I was stunned. I said, are you sure? I had the feeling immediately that this was going to be big.”

The dating method is just one small part of an article at Smithsonian magazine about the Indonesian cave paintings. Take a tour to the caves themselves, and learn why their age is so important to our understanding of human history.

The Human Epoch

The Human Epoch: What We'll Leave Behind

In 1 million years, the epoch that we are now living in will likely be characterized by animal and plant remains, along with a strange mess of industrial pollutants.

This Wall Protects the Village from Avalanches

Flateyri is a fishing village of 300 people in northwestern Iceland. In 1995, it was devastated by an avalanche from the neighboring mountain of Kollahvilft that killed 20 people. This was the second deadly avalanche that year in Iceland. Another one in a different village killed 16 people. That's a lot for a nation of 300,000 people.
So the Icelanders decided to do something about the avalanche menace. For Flateyri, the country built an enormous earthen wall to shield it from snow. The wedge cuts into a flood of snow, driving it away from the village and into the ocean. Amusing Planet describes it:

In 1998, a special A-shaped earthen dam was built up the mountain to protect Flateyri from future avalanches. The structure consist of two deflecting dams that form a wedge or A-shaped structure in the mountain side. There is a small catching dam that extends between the two deflecting dams in the lowermost part. The walls are 600 meters long and 15-20 meters tall, while the catching dam is 10 meters high and 350 meters long.

The design worked, saving the village from another avalanche the next year:

Only a year after the dam was completed, in February of 1999, a large avalanche from the mountain came crashing down into the eastern side of the dam and went into the sea. The village was saved. The next winter, in March, another huge avalanche from the mountain slammed into the western wall and the village was protected again. Other smaller avalanches have occurred regularly, and each time the protection wall has deflected the snow safely away from the village.

The Calypso Sails Anew

There are a lot more microplastics in the oceans than we thought

Dog born without front legs that hops like a kangaroo has become local celebrity

Born without her front legs and abandoned on the street by her original owners, Estrella, a one-and-a-half-year-old dog, has not let her disability hold her back.

Adopted by a couple running an animal shelter in the small town of Tinga Maria in Peru, Estrella has gained celebrity status by hopping around like a kangaroo.
An increasing number of visitors have been to the shelter since her arrival. This has enabled the shelter to raise funds and take in more abandoned animals.

YouTube link.

Ivan Escobar and his wife Elva Carhuaz say they found Estrella when she was six months old. The couple hope that Estrella will serve as an example to families who abandon their animals because of birth defects.

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