Lego illusions

Mighty Optical Illusions is an always interesting site to visit. Some of my favorite illusions at their site are there Lego illusions. They have a page which links to samples of optical illusions made out of Lego blocks that they have gathered.

However, while the illusions are fascinating, I can't help but wonder how many Dads swipe their kids Legos on Christmas morning so they can play M. C. Escher with them?

A Chistmas Mystery

First off, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to my fellow Yargbees and our readers.

Now, on to the mystery... my wife and I gave our son the statue pictured to the right as Christmas gift (as you can tell, nothing is too good for our boy).

It is a pig, with an apple on a little spring suspended above its back. It has a banner draped over it on which the following is written, "Make us one people united in praising you."

What that is all supposed to mean we don't know, nor does anybody we've shown it to have the slightest idea what it is about.

Does anybody out there have a notion or theory as to what it might mean?

An outcast among her geology friends

“I started getting on to wine and other stuff for a while, but I became an outcast among my geology friends,” said geologist Laura Webb of the University of Vermont. ”So I had to retrain myself to drink brew.”

Apparently Geologists are a bunch of beer drinking drunks. I confess, given that news, I'm liking them better than the humorless nags in Climatology. Wired Science has an article Why Geologists Love Beer which discusses their drink of choice and theorizes as to why it is so popular with them.

“Every other convention assumes that if you have a beer, your brain goes soft,” said Kathy Sullivan, who has been serving beer at the AGU meeting for 26 years. ”But not the geophysicists. They think if you have a beer, you can still learn things. So they do.”

Friday night beer sessions, called variously Friday Beer, Liquidus and who knows what else are common rituals in Geology Departments. Beer is also common at the end of the day during convention and seminars.

Theories have been put forward as to why beer is so popular, and so much of a part of the culture, with Geologists. The most popular is that field work is hot and tiring, and the work is often being done in areas with unsafe drinking water, and so it is the best thirst quencher.

“You have to think outside the box, you’ve got to release your inhibitions, and beer is one way to do that,” Saltus said. ”Anything that helps you get to that epiphany, that realization of what’s there in the rocks and not easy to see but there to spin a story from.”

Others argue that beer drinking aids science in that it frees up inhibitions and encourages conversation. A third theory believes it is just a tradition handed down from advisor to student for years.

By the way, I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure those are real Geologists hoisting tankards in the picture. Then again, maybe they're physicists. 

From Nosferatu to My Bloody Valentine 3-D

 

The website Honkiat has a post, Evolution of Horror Movie Poster Designs: 1922 – 2009, that uses over 50 movie posters to show their evolution over the past 90 years. My only quibble would be that they skipped the 1950s entirely, which is a shame because that era has such a strong graphical style.

At any rate, above I show the first and last of the posters in their sequence above. There are many more at Honkiat.

(via iheartchaos) 

I wonder how much this would cost us?

In legislative news today some House subcommittee or another approved a bill that would establish a playoff system for college football. The bill was sponsored by Joe Barton, R-Texas and Bobby Rush, D-Ill. It passed on a voice vote with only one 'nay' coming from John Barrow, D-Ga. Good for him.

Reacting to crticism that the bill was a completely frivolous waste of time Barrow, the subcommittee chairman said, "We can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Well, perhaps, but the question isn't about walking or gum chewing, it is about wasting time writing insane laws. If for no other reason, exactly when did creating playoff brackets become a Federal matter? At any rate, the bill has little chance of passing.

However, in my overheated imagination I began to wonder what would happen if it were to dawn on the present group of Congress Critters that once playoffs were mandated they would then need two or three new Departments to regulate the whole affair. A mere 10 or 20 billion dollars later and we would end up with office buildings stuffed full of brandy-new bureaucrats pushing pencils and suckling off the public teat.

Then I suppose they would have to tinker with the sport to make it more politically correct. Soon, just like in youth sports, all of the players would get trophies for participating, because egos must not be bruised.

Oh well, I don't watch college football anyways.

By the way, the picture are diagrams by Red Grange of his T-Formation from the Cool Collections of the University of Illinois library.

Utter insanity

The Wall Street Journal reports that, as expected, the EPA has just declared C02 to be a pollutant.

We have unelected bureaucrats making decisions that will impact the entire U.S. economy. Worse, we all know this was done so that Obama can strut around the collapsing Copenhagen Conference and act like a savior.

We know that in a week or so Obama will sign off on some sort of lunatic World Carbon tax to transfer Western money to Third World kleptocrats. The Senate would never agree to such absurdity, but I suppose a puffed up bureaucrat who knows best will be found.

A million here, a billion there, a trillion over yonder... step by foolish step these people are trying their best to impoverish me in my old age. Disgusting, absolutely disgusting.

How have we allowed this to come to this pass and what can we do about it?

The Sequel

My earlier post Weird Corner of the Internet featured people holding up album covers so that the pose and the cover art blend into a single illusion. Today's sequel features people blending in with their money. I guess you can never have too much of a good thing. Even though the ears on it are messed up I particularly like the Lincoln one.

 

 

More Money Faces.

Our Bravest Embedded Reporter

Chris Mathews reports from behind enemy lines

Gobble, gobble, gobble

Have a good Thanksgiving

The man behind the curtain

From Bore Patch

The Piltdown Man walks

A lot of the posting about the CRU document hack revolves around how it will play in the press. There is a certain amount of cynicism that, because of the investment in AGW, the press and politicians tied to its cause will ignore or explain away the documents as best as possible. While I have no doubt that is true, I don't think it matters. What really matters is how the Climatologists and other Science Departments view it.

In 1908 the first fragments of the Piltdown Man skull were reportedly found. By 1912 the news of the discovery reached the popular press. While scientists outside of Britain were at first skeptical of the find, many were converted when, in 1917 it was announced that Piltdown II had been discovered.

The Piltdown skulls were of course hoaxes. They were a combination of fragments of a medieval man's skull, a orangutan's jawbone and chimpanzee teeth. However, the hoax wasn't unmasked until 1953. Prior to that date other hominid skulls had to fit into a sequence that included Piltdown man, and that resulted in a highly distorted family tree for modern man and his ancestors.

The revelation of the hoax badly damaged the reputation of the science of Anthropology. I remember sitting in Anthropology classes in the 1970s where the Piltdown hoax still cast its shadow -- there was a definite stress that the digs had to be done scrupulously, and the findings judged carefully, to avoid another such embarrassment.   

I think the leaked documents are absolutely devastating, not only to the AGW theory, but to the reputation and credibility of  Climatology in general. If the emails detailing the filtering of data to get the desired results hold up, and I expect what will turn out to be ludicrous computer programs and shaky primary data turn out to be true, then it will mean that the reputation of Climatologists as serious scientists has been brought into question and found wanting.

It is hard for me to imagine that climate scientists felt comfortable walking onto campuses Monday morning after word of the hacked documents spread. It is not what is reported in the press that will matter as much as how their peers view the scandal. It is that censure that matters. They have a lot of work ahead of them to repair the reputation of their discipline, and that reputation will not be repaired by spinning more alarm out of vapor in the Sunday supplements.

If nothing else, it is not often the Social Scientists can laugh at how sloppy a so-called hard science is with its facts.

Helloooo visitors from Free Republic. Thanks for dropping by.

The climate has changed.

What if They use Email Proxies Instead

As you may have heard, a hacker has released data implicating CRU as less than straightforward about AGW. Our own Charlie Martin has a piece up on PJM. The reputation of the Hockey Team could suffer as a result. I have plotted the hypothetical relationship between reading the hacked emails and Hockey Team's reputation. As more emails are read, the reputation plummets.




But what if the Hockey Team were to run some filters on the data and instead create email proxies. These proxies have the advantage of getting rid of unwanted noise. Maybe it would look like this.



Gee, it's not so bad after all. A reputation Hockey Stick, the more you read, they better it looks.

The forgotten Theater of the American Revolution

On May 8th, 1781, a shell penetrated the magazine in the Queen’s Redoubt. The explosion of the magazine killed nearly 100 English defenders of the fort. The Queen's Redoubt was one of the three strong points that the British had built for the defense of Pensacola against  a Spanish attack. After the explosion, the Spanish were quick to attack and occupy the position.

Campbell, the English commander, soon surrendered Pensacola to Bernardo de Galvez (pictured). With that surrender, the British lost their last foothold in Western Florida and were cleared from the Gulf of Mexico.

Although often forgotten, the Spanish declared war on England as well as France during the American Revolution. However, due to their American colonies, they did not recognize the United States. None the less, her contribution was important. Spain blockaded Gibraltar and caused the English to send much of its fleet to aide in its defense. Spain and England were also involved in a series of clashes throughout the Caribbean. In fact, the last battle of the American revolution was not fought at Yorktown, but in the Bahamas.

However, from the view point of the nascent United States, there is little doubt that clearing the English from West Florida and Louisiana was of critical significance. Had the English retained a toe hold on the Gulf, it is possible they would have eventually seized control of New Orleans. Had that happened the western boundary of U.S. expansion may have ended up being the Mississippi River. Who knows, maybe it would have been Jackson getting chopped to pieces as he was assaulting the entrenched British defenders of New Orleans in 1814.

Lafayette and Comte de Grasse have received their due in the history books. This post is a reminder of the forgotten Bernardo de Galvez. It can be argued that, in its own way, his victory at Pensacola was as important as Yorktown.

Social Justice delivered via a fist

Yoani Sánchez, runs the blog Generation Y which is on our blog roll. If you haven't followed our link to her site and read her you should. She lives in Havana and gives a fascinating look at the everyday internals of the Worker's Paradise.

Yesterday she and other dissident Cuban bloggers were detained by Cuban authorities and roughed up. From babalú (the comments in the thread give even more detail):  

"Ernesto, I have just spoken to Yoani. She is now back home. She has bruising around one eye. She has been verbally and physically assaulted. Orlando was too. 'This is as far as you're getting!' was repeatedly shouted at them inside a patrol car. She was placed head over heels and subjected to karate blows. She is very nervous. I am too."

This is a bad situation for her and her compatriots. Considering Obama's Honduran adventure we can expect very little useful comment or action from our government. All we can do is make noise so the Cuban authorities know they are being watched. Please contact who you can, and spread the word about this situation. Their courage requires us to at least try to make sure they are not beaten and intimidated in the shadows. 

For a little background, here is an article on the Cuban Blogging community.

Nine eggs sold

"Some wind in the morning, then nice sunny weather. Ground has dried up somewhat. In the evening violent wind & a few drops of rain. The wind actually blew the roof off the small henhouse. Enormous flocks of starlings, some tens of thousands at a time, going over with a noise that sounds like heavy rain. The leaves are mostly down now. Elder leaves just coming down. As I remember it the elms are being stripped much earlier this year than most.

Transplanted the gooseberry bushes. Trust I haven’t damaged them. One or two still had green or greenish leaves, & others were so deep in the ground I had to damage their roots considerably getting them up. The soil there (this end of the garden) is in places pure clay at only 1 foot below the surface. Dug some of this out & lightened the ground as well as possible with sand & turf-mould. Then limed the ground between the bushes & dug in, also pruned the bushes a little. Hope this wind will not blow them all loose again. Added another sack of leaves. [Total on facing page: 3¹/₂.]

9 eggs (probably some of these laid yesterday). Sold 30 @ 4/- a score."

The above quote is George Orwell's diary entry on November 5th, 1939. The Orwell Prize has been posting Orwell's diary entries a day at a time. Each day he writes of nothing but the weather, his gardening and the eggs his hens produce. Soil, fertilizer, rain and eggs -- mundane things that would seem to be of little interest to today's reader.

November 5th, 1939 was in the midst of the Phony War. Germany had invaded and overran Poland and was preparing its attack on France, Belgium and Holland. In fact, while Orwell tended to his garden in England,  General von Brauchitsch was reporting to Hitler on the state of the Germany Army as the Fuhrer considered the starting date for his planned Western Offensive.

During those days Orwell must have felt dread over what he saw on the horizon. With hindsight we know his dread was not misplaced. However, the diary gives no sense of what he thought as he read the day's paper or listened to the news on the radio. He gives no sample of the discussions, fears and hopes that people would have expressed as war loomed ever nearer. Instead, in that diary, he narrowed his world to his garden. It must have been a therapy to him, a quiet corner of his world, a bit of peace to hold onto during the steady drip of disheartening news. 

Eleven soldiers dead today in Fort Hood. The killer was likely just a lunatic. It is just as likely that he wrapped his lunacy in jihadist politics. Is the violence in Fort Hood today a fragment of war brought to our soil, or is it just another side of the pathology that drives serial killers? I don't know, but I have a deepening pessimism, a deepening unease that these times may also be a time of Phony War.

Many years ago I read a translation of a fragment of a Sumerian inscription. It has stuck in my head ever since. Today it seems appropriate: "Look thou about thee and see that all men are fools."

A Passing

The guitarist Peter Bocking has passed away. I wasn't familiar with his musical work. In the blogosphere he was known as PeterUK. The link has a tribute page for him. A fiery and smart commenter.

Duet with one guitar

Cecilia Siqueira and Fernando Lima play a duet using one guitar.

Via neatorama

Piper's fight

A friend of mine has a Granddaughter named Piper. She has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes mucous to build up in her body, particularly in her lungs. There is no cure for cystic fibrosis.

Three times a day, for 30 minutes at a time, Piper has to use an airway clearing device called a vest as treatment. It helps loosen mucous in her lungs, which helps keep her airways clear and reduces her chances of hospitalization.

From her eyes, it looks like Piper is smiling behind her mask in the picture.

However, Piper and her parents have a lot to be concerned about. She needs a new vest which costs $15,000. Her insurance will not pay for one, and so her parents are trying to raise money to buy her a new vest. Please visit Piper's Fight if you would like to donate or for more information. Portions of any donation will go towards the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

If you run another blog feel free to post to her story. Piper deserves all the people she can get in her corner.

The gaping hole in my childhood

Oh man, my childhood microscope, chemistry set, plastic Babbage's machine, short wave radio, all of it -- even my brother's toy steam engine -- pale in comparison to the wonder known as the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab.

It included: a U-239 Geiger radiation counter, an electroscope to measure radioactivity of different substances, a spinthariscope to watch "live" radioactive disintegration, a Wilson Cloud Chamber to see paths of electrons & alpha particles at 10k mps, three very low-level radioactive sources (Alpha, Beta, Gamma), four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, Nuclear Spheres (used to visual build models of molecules), the book "Prospecting for Uranium", the "Gilbert Atomic Energy Manual", the comic book "Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom" and three "Winchester" Batteries (size "C").

A Geiger counter, radioactive samples, a "Dagwood Splits the Atom" comic book and Nuclear Spheres? Yowza! Can you imagine the look on a modern Helicopter Mom's face if her kid unwrapped a present and found that inside?

Details and more pictures can be found at orau.org and American Memorabilia.