A Lichtenberg figure

The result of a lightning strike.  I've blogged this topic before -

Lichtenberg figures,
The path lightning takes through a cow, and
Lightning coming,

- but the subject matter continues to fascinate me.

Reposted from 2012.

A lamp full of memories

Here's the owner's story, posted at Reddit:

The lamp is a glass jar full of all the things that my mom found in my pockets when doing my laundry as a child. I was born in 1986, and you can tell from a lot of the items in it.

It started off with mostly sticks, rocks, and marbles. But over time it ended up having all sorts of items ranging from Pogs, a Gameboy game (Super Mario Land), a Magic School Bus McDonald's toy, yo-yos, and Laser Quest scorecards. There are also plenty of sticks, springs, rubber-bands, and twist-ties because I went through a phase where I remember telling my parents I was going to build a robot with just those items.

I will admit that there are a few items in there from my early 20s too, as like any lazy college student, I let my mom wash my clothes while staying at home from college between semesters. And clearly, my mom was still collecting my things.

Growing up, whenever I left something in my pockets and put them in the dirty laundry, before she would wash things, she checked my pockets, and if she found anything, she put it in a glass jar on the top shelf in the laundry room. I remember as a kid, wishing soooo hard that I could get some of the items back, but it was forbidden to even go near the jar.

By the time I was old enough to be sneaky about it and get into it, I had just learned to accept that that was how it worked and I wouldn't get those things back.

Years went by and I had completely forgotten about it, until this last May. I got married, and at our rehearsal dinner, when my mom and dad stood up to give their thank you speech, my mom pulled a large gift bag out from under the table. She started by giving a short speech explaining that over the years she had collected stuff from my pockets, and it was in that moment that I thought, "I'm gonna get the jar!" I started tearing up before she had finished talking. When she did, I opened the bag and found that not only was I getting the jar, I was getting it back in the form of a lamp (and yes, she has sealed the top of the lamp to it so that I still CANNOT open it).

This has definitely been the best gift I've ever received.

What a wonderful and thoughtful personalized gift.  Closeup photos here.

Reposted from 2012.

A Dane makes fun of Norwegian swimming rules

Anders Lund Madsen is a professional comedian.  These supplemental notes from the uploader/subtitler:

The reason i didn't translate "Stuper" and "grunt" is because Anders is using them in the Danish sentence, and that is why there is an "Er" in the end of "stup."

The rule really means, "don't swim if you don't know how deep the water is."

Brygge = A pier (hope that is right)
Stupebrett = A Tipper

"Dytt" or "dyt" is a Danish slang word, that means hump... But in Norway it means push...

Since I'm half German (and half Norwegian), I particularly liked these lines:

"Get some friends!"
"But I'm German!"
"Then go online!"

Via Boing Boing. 

(Re-reposted from 2011, just for laughs).(and reposted for the 2025 swimming season)

This is apparently a Campanula chimera

For as long as I can remember we have had balloon flowers (Campanula) gracing our front flower gardens with intense color in late summer.  And for as long as I can remember those blossoms have been a deep violet color (very satisfying for a Minnesota Vikings fan living in Packers territory...)

The archived photo above shows the traditional color (with the characteristic "balloons" that precedc the opening of the blossom).

This year some of the campanula exhibited all-white blossoms, and then two plants revealed the pattern shown in the top photo.  These are not new plantings; all of our flowers are descendants of their predecessors because these plants are plolific self-seeders and IMO a joy for a lazy home gardener.

So my question to the readership here - is this a surprising development, and more importantly will the seeds from the plants with variegated flowers reproduce true next year, or will they revert back to a baseline all-violet or all-white?

Addendum:  Two readers have appended comments noting that this is not a "hybrid" as I at first thought, but rather a chimera.

A hack that gives you access to the FULL Netflix library

I think everyone knows that when you open Netflix, what you are shown is curated to your interests and viewing history.  So the home page affords you quick access to recent viewings, new releases, similar movies, and so on.  There is a search function for specific titles, but no apparent way to search for all the rom-coms or all the soccer movies.

Netflix has in its deep files about 5,000 movies, and there is a way to access detailed lists of movies by category using a list of codes.  

The codes reveal Netflix's complete organizational system. Instead of broad categories like "Action" or "Comedy," you get hyper-specific genres like "Martial Arts Movies" (code 8985) or "Classic Action & Adventure Films" (code 46576). Some categories contain hundreds of titles, while others might have just a handful of carefully curated selections.

What surprised me most was discovering content that never appeared in my regular browsing. Shows and movies that existed in Netflix's library but were essentially invisible due to the algorithm's assumptions about my preferences. It's like finding a hidden room in your own house.

Here are examples of how the categories are subdivided (links in the image are not clickable):

A complete list of the Netflix codes is here.\

Reconsidering tick risks

I want to share one photo from an interesting article about tick bites causing allergy to meat and dairy products (the alpha gal syndrome).  

What interested me the most was this image and its caption, noting the minute size of immature ticks (presumably nymphs) and the comment that "bites from even the tiniest specimen seem to be a risk."  I've always relied on inspection and removal of ticks acquired while hiking, but I don't think I could reliably detect nymphs as small as chiggers.

Stop doomscrolling for a couple minutes...

... and listen to this woman telling you about her ducks.  Via Neatorama.

Is the United Kingdom recruiting police from the United States?

Chilling details from the report in The Guardian:

A man who had returned home from his allotment with a trug of vegetables and gardening tools strapped to his belt was arrested by armed police, after a member of the public said they had seen “a man wearing khaki clothing and in possession of a knife”.

Samuel Rowe, 35, who works as a technical manager at a theatre, had come back from his allotment in Manchester earlier this month and decided to trim his hedge with one of his tools, a Japanese garden sickle, when police turned up on his doorstep...

The tools he had on his belt, he said, were a Niwaki Hori Hori gardening trowel in a canvas sheath, and an Ice Bear Japanese gardener’s sickle.

When he was arrested, Rowe said, the officer pulled the trowel out of its sheath, and said: “That’s not a garden tool.”

“I said it is, because it was in the Niwaki-branded pouch that you get at garden centres,” Rowe said...

Rowe said police had questioned him on whether he was “planning on doing something” with the tools, and he said he was also asked to explain what an allotment was.

“[I had] to explain in very basic terms what an allotment is to this guy,” he said. “So it didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that I was going to be let off.”..

Rowe said he was interviewed without legal representation as officers had been unable to reach a solicitor, and after spending several hours in custody he said he accepted a caution so he would be released...

“I shouldn’t have been arrested by armed officers. I want my caution removed, and then I’d like my gardening tools back. And if I got that, I might even like an apology off them, but I know the chances of that are next to nothing.”

FFS.

Deciphering urban disaster codes

 

We've all seen on television news the Xs spray-painted on houses as signals to searchers and rescuers.  I didn't know until now that there is specific information coded into each quadrant.  Image via the informed discussion at the whatisit subreddit.  More information at TruePrepper and Southern Spaces.

Rubik's Cube world champion, 2025

I found some decent commentary at this nextfuckinglevel subreddit thread.

MAID in Canada

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients...

The patient lay in a hospital bed, her sister next to her, holding her hand. Usmani asked her a final time if she was sure; she said she was. He administered 10 milligrams of midazolam, a fast-acting sedative, then 40 milligrams of lidocaine to numb the vein in preparation for the 1,000 milligrams of propofol, which would induce a deep coma. Finally he injected 200 milligrams of a paralytic agent called rocuronium, which would bring an end to breathing, ultimately causing the heart to stop.

But approaching death as a procedure, as something to be scheduled over Outlook, took some getting used to. In Canada, it is no longer a novel and remarkable event. As of 2023, the last year for which data are available, some 60,300 Canadians had been legally helped to their death by clinicians. In Quebec, more than 7 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia—the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world...

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside...

Way more information in the longread at The Atlantic.  Don't base your judgment just on my brief excerpts.  The source article details the history of the development of the law and the controversies around it.  Several years ago I listened to a superb podcast, probably from This American Life, about travel to Switzerland to obtain professional assisted suicide.  Can't find the link right now.

Excerpts from "These Precious Days"

Three years ago I expressed my delight in reading Ann Patchett's The Dutch House.  This year I finally got around to reading her 2021 collection of essays "These Precious Days."  Herewith some excerpts, anecdotes, and memorable passages...

"I wondered how my teachers had given me so much encouragement, and decided they'd pushed me along not because I wass talented but because I had no backup plan.  I needed to be a writer because I didn't know how to be anything else..." (230)

"I'd been afraid I'd somehow been given a life I hadn't deserved, but that's ridiculous.  We don't deserve anything - not the suffering and not the golden light.  It just comes." (240)

"Jack Leggett, the director of the [Iowa Writers' Workshop], said on our first day when all the workshop students were together, "Take a good look around.  You will become lifelong friends with some of the people in this room.  You will have sex with some of them.  You may well marry someone in this room, and then you will probably divorce them."  Jack had been at Iowa a long time and he knew what he was talking about.  All of those predictions came true." (257)

They said their daughter, to whom they had read since birth, was not a comfortable reader. They had bought her The Secret Garden, they had bought her Anne of Green Gables, they had gotten nowhere. “What can we do?” they asked... and to my own astonishment, I knew the answer because I had seen it played out time and again. I told them to bring her into the store, give her a copy of Captain Underpants, and let her sit on one of the filthy dog beds with a shop dog in her lap and read the book to the dog. They brought their daughter to the store the next night and she read to a very old dog who worked in our store. I cannot tell you how much this thrilled me... I’m sorry I made my students back in Iowa read Madame Bovary. Don’t get me wrong, I love Madame Bovary, but these were not literature majors. These were kids who may have had one shot in college to feel thrilled and engaged by reading and I’m fairly sure I blew it for them. " (269)

"Sooki got her pilot's license before she learned to drive," Karl told me. "Whenever I came to an intersection I would look to the right, the left, then up and down." (333)

"Death was there on those long sunny days.  Death was the river that ran underground always.  It was just that we had piled up so much junk to keep from hearing it." (367)

"We will never know all the things other people worry about." (386)

Several of those excerpts come from the title essay, which describes Patchett's friendship with Sooki Raphael during the COVID epidemic and Sooki's battle with pancreatic cancer.  If you only have time to read one or two essays, that would be the best, along with "How to Practice," an essay about decluttering and downsizing.

Readers familiar with Ann Patchett's writings are welcome to leave thoughts and recommendations in the Comments.

Is there an error in this Constable painting?

The painting is "Wivenhoe Park" by John Constable, currently in the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

I first saw this painting about 30 years ago in a print that was on the wall of the office of a colleague of mine at the University of Kentucky.  After looking at the painting for a while, I initially concluded that the artist (world famous for his landscape portrayals) must have made an error in depicting the scene.  Nobody else seemed interested in the apparent anomaly, and I lost track of the painting (not knowing its title) until I encountered it again this past week.

I invite you to explore the image (it should enlarge to wallpaper size with a click) to see if you find anything that appears internally inconsistent in the content.

Wivenhoe Park is a real, not an imaginary, place - a country estate in Essex.  Two seemingly contradictory aspects of the painting have puzzled me.  Left center of the image there is a bridge spanning the watercourse:

The flow of the water is clearly from the left of the painting toward the right.  Now look downstream to where two fishermen are working their net:

This is presumably a gill net of some sort, spanning the watercourse from shore to shore, held up by cork floats.  They are presumably lifting it in segments to harvest any fish that have become entrapped.

But... the curvature of the net would be consistent with water flowing from the right of the picture toward the left, not left-to-right as the bridge at the left would indicate. 

It's a curious mistake for a landscape artist to make - especially an artist as skilled as Constable, and especially when drawing from life rather than from imagination.  I decided that for a painting as large and complex as this one, he must have made preparatory sketches and that his sketch of the fishermen must have been made from the opposite shore, then incorporated into the landscape "backwards."  I thought I found confirmation in this comment from an analysis at the V&A:

The artist rearranged the landscape to create a more harmonious image. For example, the lake and house would not have been visible in the same view in real life.

So perhaps a sort of "compositional error."  I considered other possibilities.  I found the location of Google Maps and zoomed in to confirm that the watercourse in the painting is remote from the sea, so the bowing of the fishing nets is not the result of tidal flow.

But now a different apparent anomaly bothered me.  The Google map confirmed that this isn't a rushing river.  It's not even a decent-sized creek.  In fact if you look at the pipe passing through the dam under the bridge, the flow is almost negligible.  So why is the net bowed?  It clearly goes from shore to shore, not in a huge circle.

The answer came when I tracked down one of Constable's sketches in the archives of the Victoria and Albert:

Now it's as clear as day.  The net is being dragged by 4-5 people on each shore (in retrospect they are visible on the far shore in the final painting).   I note also that the V&A entitles this sketch "Fishing with a net on the lake in Wivenhoe Park."  Not a river or stream - just a manmade lake (large pond, really) prettified by a wealthy landowner employing a landscape architect:

In order to evoke a sense of the picturesque the architect Woods introduced an arch and bridge specifically designed to look old...

End of story?  Sort of.  At least in terms of the faithfulness of the representation, Constable has been vindicated, and my original concerns are "much ado about nothing."

But now I'm interested in something else.  My (incorrect) impression from the painting was that it portrayed two fishermen as incidental elements in a landscape. Now the activity appears to be way more than a recreational pastime. This is a large crew - a dozen grown men dragging a lake for fish. On a private estate. These are hired hands - a crew assembled for this purpose.

This painting was commissioned by the Rebow family, so Constable incorporated aspects that would be important to the family - including their eleven-year-old daughter Mary driving a donkey cart on the hillside to the left (inset right).

The dragging of the lake must also be important, and I would therefore conclude that the harvest of the fish was significant (important enough to employ all the gardeners on the estate and maybe some hired hands as well.)

Which brings me to my final point (at last, and the reason for posting this long-winded entry in the first place) - aquaculture as a likely practice on English country estates.

After a lot of searching I found this book -

- not in my local library, but available fulltext online here.  Herewith some excerpts:

This book is being published in order to highlight a little-known aspect of animal husbandry in former times, namely the keeping, storing and cultivation of crucian carp (Carassius carassius ), carp (Cyprinus carpio), tench (Tinca tinca) and other cyprinids in man-made ponds... The construction of fishponds began across Europe, and increased rapidly during the twelfth and thirteenth century. At that time, fishponds were constructed on estates belonging to bishops, monasteries and royalty across England... The balance of evidence now indicates that fishponds were introduced into Britain after the Norman Conquest (1066) as a secular aristocratic initiative rather than a monastic innovation... The abundance of literary references to fishponds shows that their possession, along with mills, dovecotes and deer parks, was one of the privyleges of manorial landholders, a badge of rank as much as a practical utility... Many royal castles, palaces, manor-houses and hunting-lodges were equipped with fishponds... An account book for 1632–6 kept by the Duke of Suffolk’s estate steward records the cleaning-out of the Lulworth Castle fishponds at a cost of £9 4s 8d and the purchase of a ‘trammell nett’ (a long, narrow fishing-net held vertically in the water by floats and sinkers, consisting of two walls of large-meshed netting, between which a narrow-meshed net was loosely hung) for catching the fish... The fishing of Stonehead Lake in 1793 produced 2,000 carp ‘of large dimensions’, including one 8 kg specimen... By the 1740s the geometrically-shaped ponds associated with formal gardens were passing out of fashion. Some were abandoned, others altered, as revolutionary ideas of ‘landscape’ gardening encouraged the creation of larger lakes of more ‘natural’ appearance... Yet some advocates of agricultural improvement were still promoting fishponds as a contribution to the farming economy into the early nineteenth century... Frensham Great Pond was still emptied every five years for fishing-out as late as 1858...

Constable completed Wivenhoe Park in 1816, so apparently aquaculture was still a going concern at that estate.  I wonder if such efforts were revived during the relative scarcities of WWII.  I'd especially like to hear any input from British readers of this blog regarding this subject.

You learn something every day.

Reposted from 8 years ago for a new generation of readers.

Presidential security - then and now

"The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that watchful and malignant treason did not sooner take that precious life which he seemed to hold so lightly. He had an almost morbid dislike for an escort, or guard, and daily exposed himself to the deadly aim of an assassin. A cavalry guard was once placed at the gates of the White House for a while, and he said, privately, that he “worried until he got rid of it.” On more than one occasion the writer has gone through the streets of Washington at a late hour of the night with the president, without escort, or even the company of a servant, walking all the way, going and returning.

Considering the many open and secret threats to take his life, it is not surprising that Mr. Lincoln had many thoughts about his coming to a sudden and violent end. He once said that he felt the force of the expression “to take one’s life in his hand,” but that he would not like to face death suddenly. He said that he thought himself a great coward physically, and was sure that he should make a poor soldier, for, unless there was something in the excitement of a battle, he was sure that he would drop his gun and run at the first symptom of danger. That was said sportively, and he added, “Moral cowardice is something which I think I never had.” 

- From “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” which appeared in the July 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine. (Reposted in the June 2025 issue)

This is a "parking ramp"

I never gave a thought to the terminology until I encourntered an article in the Star Tribune which notes that Minnesotans and some adjacent Midwesterners are unique in applying the term to what others consider to be a "parking garage."

Google Trends, which tracks searches of specific terms, ranks Minnesota first in the nation for "parking ramp" searches. It was followed by Iowa and Wisconsin. Parking "garage" is more evenly distributed across the country, but Minnesota ranks 46th.

I looked at the linked dataset.  For the 3-state area, the term "parking ramp" was used 100K times - more than the rest of the country combined.  The reason why the regionalism exists is unclear:

The earliest parking facilities, most in dense Northeastern cities, were enclosed buildings where cars were carried up and down by elevators — no ramps involved — so "garage" made sense.

"We never had these garages here," said Bill Lindeke, an urban geographer, writer and U instructor who has written on this subject. So the earliest parking facilities were designed with ramps...

The term "garage" initially applied to below-ground facilities here, Drew said, with "ramp" referring to above-ground structures. Most above-ground ramps in Minnesota have open-air designs with partial walls, he noted, because they are cheaper to build and operate, not requiring ventilation or sprinklers...

Also, he said, around 1970 builders around the country started designing structures that were entirely made of ramps — driving lanes sloped at about 5 degrees with parking on either side. These caught on because they packed more cars into a smaller space...

Minnesotans aren't the only people with a quirky term for these structures, however.

People in other areas around the country say "parking structure" (on the West Coast) and "parking deck" (in the Southeast), Drew said. "Parking terrace" is a term that is "apparently used only in Utah," according to the book "The High Cost of Free Parking" by University of California professor Donald Shoup.

Perhaps the most fun term is "parkade," a favorite in Canada that sounds like a place you'd go for entertainment.