Word for the day: mews

I have encountered the word "mews" many hundreds of times while reading British literature, sussed out that it was an arrangement of buildings, but never looked it up.   This week The Guardian featured "Mews-style homes for sale in England," so it was time to dig deeper.  One click at Wikipedia did the trick:

A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses in the early twentieth century. Mews are usually located in desirable residential areas, having been built to cater for the horses, coachmen and stable-servants of prosperous residents.

The word mews comes from the Royal Mews in London, England, a set of royal stables built 500 years ago on a former royal hawk mews. The term is now commonly used in English-speaking countries for city housing of a similar design....

Mews derives from the French muer, 'to moult', reflecting its original function to confine a hawk to a mews while it moulted.  William Shakespeare deploys to mew up to mean confine, coop up, or shut up in The Taming of the Shrew: "What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?" and also Richard III: "This day should Clarence closely be mewed up".

The rather modest-appearing one embedded at the top is listed at £8,950,000 because of its prime location in Marylebone and its surprisingly spacious interior.

Clever mashup of 150+ movie titles

 

Reposted from 2014 because even though the content is contrived, it's very clever and deserves a second viewing.  Every word of the dialogue is a movie title.

The sad slow death of the CDC

"A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website that previously said that vaccines do not cause autism walked back that statement, contradicting the agency’s previous efforts to fight misinformation about a connection between the two.

The agency’s webpage on vaccines and autism, updated on Wednesday, now repeats the skepticism that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has voiced about the safety of vaccines, though dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link.

A previous version of the webpage said that studies had shown “no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder.” It cited a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a C.D.C. study from 2013.

On Thursday, the live version of the page stated: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”"

How the tariffs have affected me

There has been a boatload of analysis, commentary, criticism, and speculation about the effects the new tariffs may or may not be having on the U.S. economy.  I thought I'd throw some actual data into the mix.

One of my retirement activities has been orchestrating the disposal of all the "stuff" I've accumulated during the past 7 decades.   This is what might reasonably be termed a "first world problem."

Books went years ago; Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr collections to eBay, various fiction, history, and science books to the library.  Clothes to Goodwill.  Rocks, minerals, crystals etc to neighborhood children.  High school and collegiate memorabilia to classmates.  Now I'm working on collectibles - stamps, comic books, baseball cards etc.  For these latter items, eBay is an excellent venue.

This summer I noticed a significant change in how the eBay sales were processing, and I began to track numbers.  For the first 125 lots I sold this year, these were the shipping destinations:

United States          72

United Kingdom    26

Australia/NZ          10

Canada                     8

Others                      9 (Estonia, Czech Repub, Sweden, Norway, Sri Lanka, Singapore)

The next 125 exhibited a markedly different pattern:

United States        114

United Kingdom      5

Canada                     2

Others                      4

At the end of July, sales to foreign buyers evaporated.  Instead of 40% going abroad, quite suddenly it was fewer than 10%.  The reason became apparent when I looked at the invoices eBay was sending to the foreign buyers (example embedded at top).  On a $35 purchase, but winning bidder was asked for $27 in shipping, tariffs, and taxes.  The VAT had always been there [this lot going to the UK], but in previous years and at the start of this year I was able to ship small lots of stamps in regular mailing envelopes for USD $1.75 and my sales (typically less than $40) were not subject to tariffs.   It was on July 30 of this year that the Trump-imposed tariffs were applied to "de minimus" items of modest monetary value.  And I presume what the buyers of my items are seeing are reciprocal tariffs imposed by their home countries?

I have corresponded with some of my (former) buyers in Scotland and elsewhere.  They are still interested in my material, but when they have to factor in the new "shipping" costs, my lots become unattractive.

I'm not suffering financially because for me this is discretionary hobby activity and basically a housecleaning operation, not a business.  But I will bet you there are lots of small businesses (especially home businesses and side hustles) in the U.S. who are seeing a similar phenomenon be more impactful on their bottom line.   I totally dismiss the claims of politicians that the U.S. economy is strong.  The stock market does continue to approach new all-time highs, but that's because of an irrational enthusiasm regarding the "magnificent severn" stocks (AAPL, GOOGL, TSLA, NVDA, META, MSFT, AMZN).   I will bet you a dollar to a dime that the weakness will show up not in the Dow or NASDAQ, but in the broad-based Russel 2000 index.

And this recent quote I find particularly baffling:

"The Federal Reserve is facing a difficult situation as the US economy shows strong growth and high productivity, yet hiring has significantly slowed... This divergence complicates decisions on whether to cool or boost the economy [via interest rates], with concerns about a potential jobless expansion despite investments in AI..."

Rising unemployment DESPITE AI?  Correct me if I'm wrong (please.  I'm no expert on such matters), but my understanding was that one of the major powers of AI was to improve efficiency by having the bots do the work formerly done by humans.  I would think decreased unemployment would be expected, not a surprise.

Those who understand these sorts of things, please chime in with comments.  

Related:  A recent Bloomberg article is entitled Boomers Are Passing Down Fortunes — And Way, Way Too Much Stuff.  "As the $90 trillion Great Wealth Transfer begins, millennials and Gen X aren’t just inheriting money. They’re being buried under an avalanche of baseball cards, fine china and collections of all sorts..."  True that.

Clever tee shirt

Offered on Facebook by Echos of Antiquity.

About those pennies... (updated) (again)

Pennies are in the news today because Donald Trump has ordered that their production be terminated immediately.  That's fine, and is something I have advocated back in 2011 and predicted would happen "soon" back in 2012, when Canada eliminated their pennies.

Just to clarify the details regarding the cost and savings:

"Mint operations are funded through the Mint Public Enterprise Fund (PEF), 31 U.S.C. § 5136. The Mint generates revenue through the sale of circulating coins to the Federal Reserve Banks (FRB), numismatic products to the public, and bullion coins to authorized purchasers. All circulating and numismatic operating expenses, along with capital investments incurred for the Mint’s operations and programs, are paid out of the PEF. By law, all funds in the PEF are available without fiscal year limitation. Revenues determined to be in excess of the amount required by the PEF are transferred to the United States Treasury General Fund."

The mint makes money (both literally and figuratively).  Any current losses from producing pennies are overshadowed by profits from paper dollars, commemorative coins, proof sets, etc.

The embedded image is of a penny on the planet Mars.

Reposted to add some new information from Bloomberg:

Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.

The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins...

“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”

Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.

“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”

Reposted from earlier this year to add some excerpts from a sometimes-humorous article in The Atlantic:

What is the United States going to do with all the pennies—all the pennies in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and the coin purses of children, and Big Gulp cups full of pennies; all the pennies that are just lying around wherever—following the abrupt announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop minting them, effective immediately?

The answer appears to be nothing at all. There is no plan...

It is my miserable fate to possess more miscellaneous information about U.S. one-cent coins than, possibly, any other person on this planet. This is not a boast. The information I command is data no one without a neurodevelopmental disorder would ever yearn to know; it is a body of knowledge with no practical use for anyone. I contracted this condition last year, as I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture...

Another thing I learned daily over the course of my reporting: No one cares about pennies... There were logical reasons not to care: 300 billion pennies—all of them still and indefinitely legal currency—constitute approximately zero percent of the total money supply of the United States (0.0 percent if rounding to one decimal place). The millions of dollars the government loses by paying more than three cents to manufacture one-cent coins represents an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent of the government’s several-trillion-dollar budget...

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

Effectively, they are trash—trash that Americans pay the government (via taxes) to manufacture, at a loss, and then foist back on us..

Then I realized they weren’t going to do anything about the vaults, because there was no plan at all to do anything except stop making pennies... This isn’t how it usually works when a smoothly running country elects to retire some portion of its currency... To date, the Canadian Mint has recycled more than 15,000 tons of pennies, redeemed by the public for their face value. Recycling the metal from Canadian pennies (mainly copper and steel) helped offset the cost of trucking billions of unwanted pennies across the nation. And, of course, it kept the coins out of landfills...

But it’s unclear if anyone would bother recycling U.S. pennies, which, although copper-plated, are made mostly of zinc. Recycled zinc is worth only about a quarter of recycled copper; nearly 1 million tons of copper are recycled in the U.S. each year, versus only about 165,000 tons of zinc. On top of this, a Canadian Mint official told me, copper and zinc are “very hard” to separate.

Personally I hadn't realized the impracticality or impossibility of recycling a copper/zinc mixture.  But the older copper pennies will still have "melt value" (assuming it's now legal to melt them).

When a penny was "... thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar"

The full phrase, as I encountered it* read as follows:

He sent in his expense account: "for himself & Servant, totaling one hundred and ten dollars and thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar."

The expense account was by a Lieutenant Armstrong, who led an exploration westward to the Mississippi in 1790.

But why "ninetieths" of a dollar?  I thought I knew early American coinage reasonably well, but I had never encountered this type of accounting.  I reached for an old copy of Yeoman's Red Book to review the early pennies and large cents and could find nothing relevant, nor was there anything in the continental currency section about cents or pence being 90 to the dollar.

So, back to the web, which promptly yielded the images above, which are of course not coins, but rather -

...small change bills of credit payable in specie issued by the Bank of North America in Philadelphia. This was one of several fractional currencies printed to carry on commerce during the "Copper panic" when the price of copper dropped dramatically and copper half penny coins were either not accepted by merchants or only accepted at far below their denominated value. The notes were printed by Benjamin Bache in Philadelphia on paper supplied by Benjamin Franklin that had a marbled border along the top of the sheet.

But why a 90:1 ratio rather than 100 pennies to the dollar?  I found part of the answer at the West Jersey History Project:

Mr. Adams, in his report on the subject of weights and measures, made in 1820, remarks: "It is now nearly thirty years since our new moneys of account, our coins and our mint, have been established. The dollar, under its new stamp, has preserved it name and circulation. The cent has become tolerably familiarized to the tongue, wherever it has been made, by circulation, familiar to the hand. But ask a tradesman or shopkeeper in any of our cities what is a dime, or a mill, and the chances are four in five that he will not understand your question. But go to New York and offer in payment the Spanish coin, the unit of the Spanish piece of eight, and the shop or market man will take it for a shilling. Carry it to Boston or Richmond, and you shall be told that it is not a shilling but a ninepence. Bring it to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or the city of Washington, and you shall find it recognized for an eleven penny bit, and if you ask how that can be, you shall learn that the dollar being of ninety pence, the eighth part of it is nearer to eleven than any other number; and pursuing still further the arithmetic of popular denominations, you will find that half of eleven is five, or at least, that half of the eleven penny bit is the fipenny bit, which fipenny bit at Richmond, shrinks to four pence half penny, and at New York swells to six pence." 

Here is the topic mentioned in The Bankers Magazine, via Google Books during a discussion of the history of the word "dollar":

So, at the time Lieutenant Armstrong submitted his expense account to the government, "the dollar in Pennsylvania equalled seven shillings and sixpence, and the penny was the one-ninetieth of a dollar."

For those who want to pursue this more fully, I think the best discussion I found this morning is in this pdf file entitled State "Currencies" and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar", but it's over 50 pages long and football games are starting shortly, so all I can offer is this screencap:

What a mess it must have been for the early colonists and Americans to cope with currencies and money. 

* in Undaunted Courage; Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen Ambrose (an excellent book, btw, of which I've only read a couple chapters and on which I'll have more to say later.)

Reposted from 2012

Sorting pennies in the dark

I am recurrently amazed at the wonderful logic and math puzzles posted at Futility Closet.   

"You’re in a pitch-dark room. On a table before you are 12 pennies. You know that 5 are heads up and 7 are tails up, but you don’t know which are which. By moving and flipping the coins you must produce two piles with an equal number of heads in each pile. How can you do this without seeing the coins?"

I was not able to solve this on my own and had to peek at the answer.  Even after seeing the answer, it took me a long time to comprehend why it works.

Reposted from 2010 because I found it while looking for something else and still couldn't solve it on my own.

Arm of man who fell off a bicycle

Note that not only are the radius and ulna broken, but the metal plates inside the bones (from repair of previous fractures) are bent at a 90 degree angle.  The victim explains:

Was on a nice leisurely bike ride - shoe laces got stuck on my bike pedal and wrapped around multiple times over. Fell off as I was braking to get them unstuck. I never want to get on a bike again 😫

Embedded image cropped for size and emphasis from the original at Reddit, via Neatorama, where the appropriate advice is offered: "Always double tie your shoes before riding a bike, and tuck the ends into the shoe."

United Airlines claims a "window seat" does not necessarily need to have a window

"In August, United and Delta Air Lines were sued by passengers in two separate but similar suits. Both airlines were accused of unfairly charging extra for some window seats without warning that there wasn't actually a window there.

United filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.

"The use of the word 'window' in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view," the airline's lawyers wrote.

"Rather, the word 'window' identifies the position of the seat—i.e., next to the wall of the main body of the aircraft," they added.

I'll defer any commentary on this absurdity.

Introducing Torx screws

I may be introducing the subject only to myself if this item is well-known.  I encountered it in a reasonably concise Wirecutter article:

"Pros swear by Torx-head screws, an all-around better alternative to the formerly ubiquitous but flawed, finicky Phillips head... The cross-headed design of the Phillips screw is notoriously slippery and easy to damage. That’s why most of the rest of the world moved on from Phillips screws years ago, if they even adopted this miserable standard in the first place.

This isn’t a problem with Torx because the star-shaped head provides much better grip and stability... And all that extra contact between the screw and the drill bit makes it much less likely that you’ll strip the head (or ruin your bit) even if you’re blasting your tools at full speed... [the embed shows a Torx compared to a Phillips with a stripped center]

... there aren’t many credible technical or legal excuses to keep using Phillips screws. The patents on Torx (and other Phillips-beating standards, including square drive) expired decades ago, so anyone can manufacture the bits and screws...

An impact driver looks like a stubby drill, but it sinks screws into wood and other materials at breathtaking speed. (Even basic power tool starter packs usually come with one now.) That tool’s efficiency is often wasted on wobbly, damage-prone Phillips screws, so it makes sense to pair an impact driver’s extra power with a snugger standard like Torx.

For those interested in greater detail, the Wikipedia entry has information on the Torx' history, physics, and subtypes.

Excellent advice not to "future-trip"

There is a very interesting article in the September issue of The Atlantic.  "My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods" is written by the daughter of Fred Walecki, who crafted instruments and provided advice to the greatest musicians of 1960s California.  Here are the introductory paragraphs:

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium... My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles....

I'm not posting this for the music of the 1960s, which I love (please go to the link to continue reading, if you share that interest).  I'm posting this to share one bit of advice that Fred Walecki offered his grown-up daughter:

"When I was 18, I got a bad concussion that took me out of college for my first semester. My doctor didn’t want me to fly home for a while, so I called Dad one night from the other side of the country, panicked that my brain would never return to normal. 

“What are you looking at right now?” he asked. Pine trees, I said. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outside. “What’s the temperature like where you are?” It’s nice. Cool but not cold. It was early fall in the Northeast, a new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air smell like?” Wood chips. 

“I know it’s hard, but your only job right now is to stay in this moment and not future-trip. In this moment right now, the one God is giving you, the air smells nice, the temperature is good, you’re somewhere beautiful.”"

Excellent advice, in my opinion, and worth sharing via the blog.

Word for the day: lagniappe

“We picked up one excellent word – a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – ‘Lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. […] When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – ‘Give me something for lagniappe.’ The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root; […]”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

I recently sent an incidental small gift to a friend in New Orleans.  He replied with thanks for the "lagniappe," so of course I had to look that up.  Here are the essentials, courtesy of Wiktionary:

Definition: (chiefly Louisiana, Mississippi, Trinidad and Tobago) An extra or unexpected gift or benefit, such as that given to customers when they purchase something. 

Synonyms: (chiefly Southern US) brotus, (South Africa) pasella, (Ireland) tilly

Etymology: From Cajun French lagniappe, from Spanish la ñapa, a variant of yapa (“small gift or additional quantity given to a valued customer”), from Quechua yapa (“addition, increase, supplement; lagniappe”), yapay (“to add, to increase”).

I thought that might be my first English word of Quechua origin, but a quick check reveals there are many more, including ayahuasca, cocaine, guano, jerk/jerky, pampas, pique, poncho, puma, quinine, quinoa, vicuna, and the place names Andes, Chile, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, and Peru.

A video review of the butterflies of Wisconsin

Wisconsin Butterflies is the definitive online resource for reporting sightings across the state.

Last year's video is here.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

 

Those interested can read more about the event and the song.  Reposted again from 2015 to add illustrations of some of the ways ships sink in the Great Lakes -

Three more examples are illustrated here.

Reposted for the third time to add this video recording of a similar ship (a Ukranian freighter) actually splitting in the Black Sea:

The relevant action occurs in the first minute; there is a second segment showing the ship sinking.

Addendum:  PBS Wisconsin has a video presentation of a public lecture on The Storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And reposted for the final time because today marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking.  Somewhere I hae seen a discussion of the phrase "The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead" being scientifically true because at depth the water is too cold for bacteria to generate decomposition gases to lift the corpse and/or because the hydrostatic pressure at depth prevents the bubble formation.

And I'll add a link to the lyrics, because they are hard to discern in the embedded video.