CAROLINA NATURALLY: Dec 19, 2016

Monday, December 19, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

The 19th Xmas Tree ...!

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Today in History

1154		Henry II is crowned king of England.
1562		The French Wars of Religion between the Huguenots and the Catholics begins with the Battle of Dreux.
1793		French troops recapture Toulon from the British.
1862		Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest begins tearing up the railroads in Union generals Grant and Rosecrans rear, causing considerable delays in the movement of Union supplies.
1900		The French Parliament votes amnesty for everyone involved in the Dreyfus Affair.
1909		American socialist women denounce suffrage as a movement of the middle class.
1941		Japanese land on Hong Kong and clash with British troops.
1941		Adolf Hitler assumes the position of commander in chief of the German army.
1942		The British advance 40 miles into Burma in a drive to oust the Japanese from the colony.
1944		During the Battle of the Bulge, American troops begin pulling back from the twin Belgian cities of Krinkelt and Rocherath in front of the advancing German Army.
1945		Congress confirms Eleanor Roosevelt as U.S. delegate to the United Nations.
1950		The North Atlantic Council names General Dwight D. Eisenhower as supreme commander of Western European defense forces.
1959		Reputed to be the last civil war veteran, Walter Williams, dies at 117 in Houston.
1974		Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as vice president of the United states after a House of Representatives vote.
1982		Four bombs explode at South Africa’s only nuclear power station in Johannesburg.
1984		British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang sign an agreement that committed Britain to return Hong Kong to China in 1997 in return for terms guaranteeing a 50-year extension of its capitalist system. Hong Kong was leased by China to Great Britain in 1898 for 99 years.
1998		President Bill Clinton is impeached. The House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton was the second president in American history to be impeached.
2001		The highest barometric pressure ever recorded (1085.6 hPa, 32.06 inHg) occurs at Tosontsengel, Khovsgol, Mongolia.
2001		Rioting begins in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the country’s economic crisis.
2012		Park Geun-hye elected President of South Korea, the nation’s first female chief executive.

The 4 People (and One Animal) Who Made the World a Better Place In 2016

The 4 People (and One Animal) Who Made the World a Better Place In 2016

We still found inspiration in this downer of a year

"Person from Porlock" explained

The person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "Person from Porlock", "Man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity. Posted because I encountered the term while reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in which "the title character saves the world, in part by time-travelling from the present day to distract Coleridge from properly remembering his dream; if Coleridge had completed the poem an alien ghost would have 'encoded' certain information within the completed work that would have allowed him to make repairs to his spaceship in the past at the cost of wiping out all life on Earth."

You Might Be Breaking the Law Every Time You Warm Up Your Car

You Might Be Breaking the Law Every Time You Warm Up Your Car

The choice is yours: Commit a misdemeanor offense or become a human popsicle

Hooking Up with Another Woman for the First Time

7 Things No One Tells You About Hooking Up with Another Woman for the First Time

Consider this your crash course.

This Elderly Couple's Nude Photoshoot Is #RelationshipGoals

This Elderly Couple's Nude Photoshoot Is #RelationshipGoals

They’ve been together for more than 20 years.

Defy Age Using a 3,600-Year-Old Face Cream Recipe With a Deadly Ingredient

Stanley Jacobs is a plastic surgeon whose hobby is Egyptology. He's studied many an ancient document, but one called the Edwin Smith Papyrus spoke to him in particular. It's 5,000 years old, and describes the surgical procedures of Egypt at the time.

A plastic surgeon himself, he found that most of the cases were about “really good reconstruction after traumatic injury, of the nose, the neck, the spinal cord,” and that its techniques were surprisingly well thought out for a millennia-old book. What really intrigued him, though, was a recipe at the back of the book, titled “Transforming an Old Man Into a Youth.”

This section of the papyrus is a long and complicated set of instructions for making what is, essentially, a face cream. The original translator of the papyrus, the Egyptologist James Breasted, hadn’t been much impressed by it, writing that the recipe “proves to be nothing more than a face paste believed to be efficacious in removing wrinkles.”

As a doctor who spends a lot of time thinking about skin, beauty, and age, though, Jacobs wasn’t so quick to discount it. “I realized that if they’re that serious about their surgical treatments, they’re probably serious about this,” he says.

The face cream recipe was difficult to translate, because one ingredient was called by a word nobody seemed to know. But Jacobs keep looking, and the answers he got led to other questions, which led to a possible new/old way to care for skin. Read the story of Jacobs and the ancient face cream at Atlas Obscura.

One Freakish Event That Led to You and Ewe and Yew

Life arose on earth over three billion years ago, and for a long time, there were only one-celled organisms. These prokaryotes diverged and evolved in many ways, but making the leap from one cell to many cells (eukaryotes) was a paradigm shift that led to every living thing on earth that's big enough for us to see -including us. How did that happen? Before we could sequence genes, the prevailing theory was a gradual development as cells mutated, diverged, and evolved. However, recent genetic research has led credence to the idea that the first two-celled organism was a merger that only happened once.

The alternative—let’s call it the “sudden-origin” camp—is very different. It dispenses with slow, Darwinian progress and says that eukaryotes were born through the abrupt and dramatic union of two prokaryotes. One was a bacterium. The other was part of the other great lineage of prokaryotes: the archaea. (More about them later.) These two microbes look superficially alike, but they are as different in their biochemistry as PCs and Macs are in their operating systems. By merging, they created, in effect, the starting point for the first eukaryotes.

Bill Martin and Miklós Müller put forward one of the earliest versions of this idea in 1998. They called it the hydrogen hypothesis. It involved an ancient archaeon that, like many modern members, drew energy by bonding hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane. It partnered with a bacterium that produced hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which the archaeon could then use. Over time, they became inseparable, and the bacterium became a mitochondrion.

There are many variants of this hypothesis, which differ in the reasons for the merger and the exact identities of the archaeon and the bacterium that were involved. But they are all united by one critical feature setting them apart from the gradual-origin ideas: They all say that the host cell was still a bona fide prokaryote. It was an archaeon, through and through. It had not started to grow in size. It did not have a nucleus. It was not on the path to becoming a eukaryote; it set off down that path because it merged with a bacterium. As Martin puts it, “The inventions came later.”

The theory that an archaeon and a bacterium merged to make eukaryotes would give us a new tree of life that doesn't always fork. I couldn't help but picture this comic when reading about a singular event that changed everything. Ed Yong explains the developments that led to this idea at Nautilus.

And I Quote

5 ways you can help the homeless survive the 2016 polar vortex

Here are 5 ways you can help the homeless survive the 2016 polar vortex

When 'Slacktivism' Actually Works: 'Small Changes' DO Matter

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You can change the world with the right kind of online petition.

84% of Americans Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture

84% of Americans Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture—But Only Once They're Told What It Is

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St. Louis Is the Second Most Sinful City in the U.S. Guess we’re not trying hard enough!

Academic Witch Hunt Project Gets an F for Accuracy

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Simple Thinking is a Recipe for Disaster

Simple Thinking in a Complex World Is a Recipe for Disaster

Bad people are disgusting, bad actions are angering

A person’s character, more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We wanted to … Read more
Now you know why normal people react to wingnuts as they do.