A collection of random humor for your enjoyment. For more humor, search for “humor” or “funny” in search block on my home page. Thanks!
Filed under Humor and Observations
Published March 05, 2013
Associated Press
The High Arctic camel on Ellesmere Island during the Pliocene warm period, about 3.5 million years ago. The camels lived in a boreal-type forest that included larch trees; the depiction is based on records of plant fossils found at nearby fossil deposits. (Julius Csotonyi)
The fossil bones of the High Arctic Camel laid out in Dr. Rybczynski’s lab at the Canadian Museum of Nature. The fossil evidence consists of about 30 bone fragments, which together form part of a limb bone of a Pliocene camel. (Martin Lipman, Canadian Museum of Nature)
View of Camp 2 at the Fyles Leaf Bed Site on Ellesmere Island, near Strathcona Fiord. Across the valley lay exposed tilted Devonian-era beds, partially obscured by low-lying cloud. (Martin Lipman, Canadian Museum of Nature)
A fragment of the camel fossil lying in situ on the Fyles Leaf Bed site. The fossil looks very similar to wood. The fossil evidence consists of about 30 bone fragments, which together form part of a limb bone of a Pliocene camel.Found on Ellesmere Island, this is the northernmost discovery of camels in the Arctic, about 1,200 km further north than the Yukon camel.The fossil record from this area shows the camel lived about 3.5 million years ago, when the region supported a boreal-type forest.Ellesmere Island..”Fyles Leaf Bed site” refers to an exposure located about 9 km Southwest of the Beaver Pond site near Strathcona Fiord. The section was visited previously by John Fyles (Geological Survey of Canada), and briefly in 1992 by Fyles and Richard Harington. In 1992 they prospected for about 2 hours. The first detailed stratigraphic work on the site was by Adam Csank (supervised by Jim Basinger) as part of his M.Sc. thesis (2006). At the time Adam measured 40 m of section, but in 2008 John Gosse determined that the Tertiary section was 90 m in thickness. (Martin Lipman, Canadian Museum of Nature)
About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island’s west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
“Larch-dominated, lots of wetlands, peat,” said Rybczynski, lead author of a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Nearby fossil sites have yielded evidence of ancient bears, horses, deer, badgers and frogs. The average yearly temperature would have been about 32 Fahrenheit.
“If you were standing in it and watching the camel, it would have the feel of a boreal-type forest.”
The Arctic camel was 30 percent larger than modern camels, she said. Her best guess is it was one-humped.
Although native camels are now only found in Africa and Asia, scientists have long believed the species actually developed in North America and later died out. Camel remains have been previously found in the Yukon.
What makes Rybczynski’s find special is not only how far north it was found, but its state of preservation.
The 30 fragments found in the sand and pebbles of the tundra were mummified, not fossilized. So despite their age, the pieces preserved tiny fragments of collagen within them, a common type of protein found in bones.
Analyzing that protein not only proved the fragments were from camels, but from a type of camel that is much more closely related to the modern version than the Yukon camel. Out of the dozens of camel species that once roamed North America, the type Rybczynski found was one of the most likely to have crossed the Bering land bridge and colonized the deserts.
“This is the one that’s tied to the ancestry of modern camels,” she said.
Filed under Animals, Humor and Observations
Dieselpunk is in the Era of Diesel, roughly 1900 to 1949, or WW1 and WW2 science fiction. Steampunk is the Age of Steam, usually 1800 to 1899. There is always some crossover. Cyberpunk is future sci-fi, while sci-fi set in current setting is typically referred to as “urban fantasy.” Here are some more pictures of Dieselpunk. If you wish to see prior posts, please type “dieselpunk” into the search block on the Home page of this blog site. Pardon if I duplicated a few. Enjoy!
Filed under Humor and Observations
First, a history lesson. The Korean War, police action, or whatever you wish to call it, never ended. That is right, a cease-fire was called, but the war never was ended. My brother was stationed in Korea in the Army and they would occasionally come under fire, even in the late 1970s when he was over there. I was in the US Air Force from 1984 to 1990 and each year participated in Operation Team Spirit. Joint exercises to coordinate the South Korean and American military in case of renewal of hostilities with North Korea. We have had these exercises for over 60 years now. So, if you think what we are doing is new and provocative, it is not. Most people living on the planet were not here in we first started joint exercises, including Kim Jong Un, the new leader.
If you think it can’t happen, just look at the Iran-Iraq War, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and Chechnya, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing in Africa. It can happen. The saber rattling is to be taken seriously as Kim Jong Un has been raised in total isolation as a foolish sociopath. While his country starves, he creates nuclear weapons and buys his wife he married when she was 16, expensive designer outfits and Dior handbags worth over $1,200 a piece. Just some background to ponder while considering the story reposted below:
Published March 11, 2013
Associated Press
March 9, 2013: The guided-missile destroyers USS Lassen (DDG 82), arrives to participate in the annual joint military exercises, dubbed Key Resolve, between the South Korean and United States. (AP)
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korean state media said Monday that Pyongyang had carried through with a threat to cancel the 60-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War, as it and South Korea staged dueling war games amid threatening rhetoric that has risen to the highest level since North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island in 2010.
Enraged over the South’s joint military drills with the United States and recent U.N. sanctions, Pyongyang has piled threat on top of threat, including vows to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. Seoul has responded with tough talk of its own and has placed its troops on high alert.
The North Korean government made no formal announcement Monday on its repeated threats to scrap the armistice, but the country’s main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reported that the armistice was nullified Monday as Pyongyang had earlier announced it would.
The North followed through on another promise Monday, shutting down a Red Cross hotline that the North and South used for general communication and to discuss aid shipments and separated families’ reunions.
The 11-day military drills that started Monday involve 10,000 South Korean and about 3,000 American troops. Those coincide with two months of separate U.S.-South Korean field exercises that began March 1.
The drills are held annually, and this year, according to South Korean media, the “Key Resolve” drill rehearses different scenarios for a possible conflict on the Korean peninsula using computer-simulated exercises. The U.S. and South Korean troops will be used to test the scenarios.
Also continuing are large-scale North Korean drills that Seoul says involve the army, navy and air force. The South Korean defense ministry said there have been no military activities it considers suspicious.
The North has threatened to nullify the armistice several times in times of tension with the outside world, and in 1996 the country sent hundreds of armed troops into a border village. The troops later withdrew.
Despite the heightened tension, there were signs of business as usual Monday.
The two Koreas continue to have at least two working channels of communication between their militaries and aviation authorities.
One of those hotlines was used Monday to give hundreds of South Koreans approval to enter North Korea to go to work. Their jobs are at the only remaining operational symbol of joint inter-Korean cooperation, the Kaesong industrial complex. It is operated in North Korea with South Korean money and knowhow and a mostly North Korean work force.
The North Korean rhetoric escalated as the U.N. Security Council last week approved a new round of sanctions over Pyongyang’s latest nuclear weapons test Feb. 12.
Analysts said that much of the bellicosity is meant to shore up loyalty among citizens and the military for North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong Un.
“This is part of their brinksmanship,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based expert on North Korea with the International Crisis Group think tank. “It’s an effort to signal their resolve, to show they are willing to take greater risks, with the expectation that everyone else caves in and gives them what they want.”
Part of what North Korea wants is a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War, instead of the armistice that leaves the peninsula still technically in a state of war. It also wants security guarantees and other concessions, direct talks with Washington, recognition as a nuclear weapons state and the removal of 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.
Pinkston said there is little chance of fighting breaking out while war games are being conducted, but he added that he expects North Korea to follow through with a somewhat mysterious promise to respond at a time and place of its own choosing.
North Korea was responsible for an artillery attack that killed four South Koreans in 2010. A South Korean-led international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship that same year, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang denies sinking the ship.
Among other threats in the past week, North Korea has warned Seoul of a nuclear war on the divided peninsula and said it was cancelling nonaggression pacts.
South Korean and U.S. officials have been closely monitoring Pyongyang’s actions and parsing its recent rhetoric, which has been more warlike than usual.
One analyst said Kaesong’s continued operations show that North Korea’s cutting of the Red Cross communication channel was symbolic. More than 840 South Koreans were set to cross the border Monday to Kaesong, which provides a badly-needed flow of hard currency to a country where many face food shortages, according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry.
“If South Koreans don’t go to work at Kaesong, North Korea will suffer” financially, said analyst Hong Hyun-ik at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea. “If North Korea really intends to start a war with South Korea, it could have taken South Koreans at Kaesong hostage.”
Under newly inaugurated President Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s Defense Ministry, which often brushes off North Korean threats, has looked to send a message of strength in response to the latest comments from Pyongyang.
The ministry has warned that the North’s government would “evaporate from the face of the Earth” if it ever used a nuclear weapon. The White House also said the U.S. is fully capable of defending itself against a North Korean ballistic attack.
On Monday, Park told a Cabinet Council meeting that South Korea should strongly respond to any provocation by North Korea. But she also said Seoul should move ahead with her campaign promise to build up trust with the North.
North Korea has said the U.S. mainland is within the range of its long-range missiles, and an army general told a Pyongyang rally last week that the military is ready to fire a long-range nuclear-armed missile to turn Washington into a “sea of fire.”
While outside scientists are still trying to determine specifics, the North’s rocket test in December and third atomic bomb test last month may have pushed the country a step closer to acquiring the ability to hit the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction. Analysts, however, say Pyongyang is still years away from acquiring the smaller, lighter nuclear warheads needed for a credible nuclear missile program.
But there are still worries about a smaller conflict, and analysts have said that more missile and nuclear tests are possible reactions from North Korea.
North Korea has a variety of missiles and other weapons capable of striking South Korea. Both the warship sinking and island shelling in 2010 occurred near a western sea boundary between the Koreas that North Korea fiercely disputes. It has been a recurring flashpoint between the rivals that has seen three other bloody naval skirmishes since 1999.
Last week, Kim Jong Un visited two islands just north of the sea boundary and ordered troops there to open fire immediately if a single enemy shell is fired on North Korean waters.
Kim was also quoted as saying his military is fully ready to fight an “all-out war” and that he will order a “just, great advance for national unification” if the enemy makes even a slight provocation, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
Filed under Humor and Observations, Uncategorized
Published March 11, 2013
Associated Press
March 10, 2013: A a group of cardiologists lead by Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, USA, show the mummy Hatiay (New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, 1550 to 1295 BCE) as it is returned to its display back in the Antiquities Museaum in Cairo after it underwent a CT scanning. (AP)
March 10, 2013: The sarcophagus of the mummy Hatiay (New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, 1550 to 1295 BCE) is closed after the mummy underwent a CT scanning, in Cairo, Egypt. (AP Photo/Dr. Michael Miyamoto)
March 10, 2013: Egyptologists prepare the mummy Hatiay (New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, 1550 to 1295 BCE) for CT scanning in Cairo, Egypt, which later demonstrated evidence of extensive vascular disease. (AP Photo/Dr. Michael Miyamoto)
March 10, 2013: The mummy Hatiay (New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, 1550 to 1295 BCE) gets a CT scan in Cairo, Egypt, where it was found to have evidence of extensive vascular disease. (AP Photo/Dr. Michael Miyamoto)
Researchers say that suggests heart disease may be more a natural part of human aging rather than being directly tied to contemporary risk factors like smoking, eating fatty foods and not exercising.
‘Heart disease has been stalking mankind for over 4,000 years.’
– Dr. Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City
CT scans of 137 mummies showed evidence of atherosclerosis, or hardened arteries, in one third of those examined, including those from ancient people believed to have healthy lifestyles. Atherosclerosis causes heart attacks and strokes. More than half of the mummies were from Egypt while the rest were from Peru, southwest America and the Aleutian islands in Alaska. The mummies were from about 3800 B.C. to 1900 A.D.
“Heart disease has been stalking mankind for over 4,000 years all over the globe,” said Dr. Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City and the paper’s lead author.
The mummies with clogged arteries were older at the time of their death, around 43 versus 32 for those without the condition. In most cases, scientists couldn’t say whether the heart disease killed them.
The study results were announced Sunday at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in San Francisco and simultaneously published online in the journal Lancet.
Thompson said he was surprised to see hardened arteries even in people like the ancient Aleutians who were presumed to have a healthy lifestyle as hunter-gatherers.
“I think it’s fair to say people should feel less guilty about getting heart disease in modern times,” he said. “We may have oversold the idea that a healthy lifestyle can completely eliminate your risk.”
Thompson said there could be unknown factors that contributed to the mummies’ narrowed arteries. He said the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in underground caves in modern-day Colorado and Utah, used fire for heat and cooking, producing a lot of smoke.
“They were breathing in a lot of smoke and that could have had the same effect as cigarettes,” he said.
Previous studies have found evidence of heart disease in Egyptian mummies, but the Lancet paper is the largest survey so far
and the first to include mummies elsewhere in the world.
Dr. Frank Ruehli of the University of Zurich, who runs the Swiss Mummy Project, said it was clear atherosclerosis was notably present in antiquity and agreed there might be a genetic predisposition to the disease.
“Humans seem to have a particular vulnerability (to heart disease) and it will be interesting to see what genes are involved,” he said. Ruehli was not connected to the study. “This is a piece in the puzzle that may tell us something important about the evolution of disease.”
Other experts warned against reading too much into the mummy data.
Dr. Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said calcified arteries could also be caused by other ailments including endocrine disorders and that it was impossible to tell from the CT scans if the types of calcium deposits in the mummies were the kind that would have sparked a heart attack or stroke.
“It’s a fascinating study but I’m not sure we can say atherosclerosis is an inevitable part of aging,” he said, citing the numerous studies that have showed strong links between lifestyle factors and heart disease.
Researcher Thompson advised people to live as healthy a lifestyle as possible, noting that the risk of heart disease could be reduced with good eating habits, not smoking and exercising. “We don’t have to end up like the mummies,” he said.
Filed under Humor and Observations
The progression of comet Pan-STARRS across the night sky in March 2013 is shown in this NASA graphic. (SCIENCE@NASA)
The path of Comet C/2011 L4 (Pan-STARRS) over the next month. (STARRY NIGHT SOFTWARE)
Close-up of comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS as seen from Mount Dale, Western Australia. (ASTRONOMY EDUCATION SERVICES/GINGIN OBSERVATORY)
On Sunday (March 10), the Comet Pan-STARRS is expected to make its closest approach to the sun, potentially making the comet shine even more brilliantly when it appears at twilight low in the western sky, weather permitting. But stargazers will need a bit of preparation (not to mention a clear sky) to see the comet.
“There is a catch to viewing Comet Pan-STARRS,” Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NASA’s near-Earth object hunting NEOWISE mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Thursday (March 7). “This one is not that bright and is going to be low on the western horizon, so you’ll need a relatively unobstructed view to the southwest at twilight and, of course, some good comet-watching weather.”
On Sunday, Comet Pan-STARRS will pass about 28 million miles from the sun during its close approach. The comet made its closest pass with the Earth on Tuesday (March 5) when it flew by at about 102 million miles from the planet. [How to see the comet]
“It will appear in the west at sunset, from around the 8th to the 13th of March 2013, and will be visible to the naked eye up to the end of the month: Comet Pan-STARRS C/2011 L4 will traverse Cetus, Pisces, Pegasus and Andromeda,” Paris Observatory officials wrote in a statement Thursday, as the comet entered the Northern Hemisphere’s evening sky after months of being visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
Comet Pan-STARRS, which has the official designation C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS), was discovered in June 2011 by astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (or PANSTARRS) telescope in Hawaii. The comet made its way into the inner solar system from the Oort cloud — a group of icy bodies orbiting the sun in a region that extends from just beyond the orbit of Neptune out to a distance of 93 trillion miles.
While Pan-STARRS may start dimming after Sunday, that doesn’t mean that comet observers should put away their binoculars yet. On March 12 and 13, the comet will appear close to the moon, possibly even silhouetting it according to SPACE.com stargazing columnist Geoff Gaherty, an astronomer with the Starry Night Education night sky software company.
There are even comet sighting opportunities in April.
On April 3, the comet should be in the same part of the sky as the Andromeda Galaxy. Although the comet won’t still be visible with the naked eye, stargazers with telescopes could still get a nice view of the comet and galaxy, Gaherty explained.
Pan-STARRS has already put on a show for stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere. It is one of several comets in the night sky expected to dazzle observers this year. Last month, amateur astronomers managed to photograph Pan-STARRS and another celestial wanderer — Comet Lemmon — at the same time to document rare photos of two comets together in the night sky.
Later this year, another comet from the Oort Cloud could be the brightest comet to pass by the Earth in a generation. Comet ISON is expected to outshine every comet in recent memory when it makes its closest swing by the sun late November.
Filed under Humor and Observations, Uncategorized
By Megan Gannon
Published March 10, 2013
LiveScience
Researchers say this crystal found at the Alderney shipwreck near the Channel Islands could prove fabled Viking sunstones really did exist. (© Alderney Museum)
Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used special crystals to find their way under less-than-sunny skies. Though none of these so-called “sunstones” have ever been found at Viking archaeological sites, a crystal uncovered in a British shipwreck could help prove they did indeed exist.
The crystal was found amongst the wreckage of the Alderney, an Elizabethan warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592. The stone was discovered less than 3 feet from a pair of navigation dividers, suggesting it may have been kept with the ship’s other navigational tools, according to the research team headed by scientists at the University of Rennes in France.
If you were to look at someone’s face through a clear chunk of Icelandic spar, you would see two faces.
A chemical analysis confirmed that the stone was Icelandic Spar, or calcite crystal, believed to be the Vikings’ mineral of choice for their fabled sunstones, mentioned in the 13th-century Viking saga of Saint Olaf.
Today, the Alderney crystal would be useless for navigation, because it has been abraded by sand and clouded by magnesium salts. But in better days, such a stone would have bent light in a helpful way for seafarers.
Because of the rhombohedral shape of calcite crystals, “they refract or polarize light in such a way to create a double image,” Mike Harrison, coordinator of the Alderney Maritime Trust, told LiveScience. This means that if you were to look at someone’s face through a clear chunk of Icelandic spar, you would see two faces. But if the crystal is held in just the right position, the double image becomes a single image and you know the crystal is pointing east-west, Harrison said.
These refractive powers remain even in low light when it’s foggy or cloudy or when twilight has come. In a previous study, the researchers proved they could use Icelandic spar to orient themselves within a few degrees of the sun, even after the sun had dipped below the horizon.
European seafarers had not fully figured out magnetic compasses for navigation until the end of 16th century. The researchers say the crystal might have been used on board the Elizabethan ship to help correct for errors with a magnetic compass.
“In particular, at twilight when the sun is no longer observable being below the horizon, and the stars still not observable, this optical device could provide the mariners with an absolute reference in such situation,” the researchers wrote online this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
No such crystals have been found yet at Viking sites. The team notes that archaeologists are unlikely to find complete crystals as part of a group of grave goods, since the Vikings often cremated their dead.
But recent excavations turned up the first calcite fragment at a Viking settlement, “proving some people in the Viking Age were employing Iceland spar crystals,” the researchers wrote.
Filed under Humor and Observations
Fun Fridays – May 11, 2012
Word Trivia
“Stewardesses” and “reverberated” are the two longest (and commonly used) words (12 letters each) that can be typed with only the left hand.
“lollipop” is the longest word typed with your right hand.
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.
The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.
The words ‘racecar,’ ‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.” (a e i o u)
Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
The only city whose name can be spelled completely with vowels is Aiea, Hawaii.
[Editor’s Note: I did in fact live in Aiea for many years during a six year stint in Hawaii on the island of Oahu. My wife and I had a terrible time getting mail. All of our friends and family could not believe we lived in a place with only four vowels and no consonents – A I E A. Pronounced “EYE -A- Uh” The most common misspelling was ALEA. They just randomly put an L in for the Aiea. Curious folks my wonder where Aiea is located. It is between Honolulu and Pearl Ridge. We lived in a ten story apartment complex across the street from Aiea Chop Suey and Speedy’s Supermarket. Aloha Stadium (home to the Aloha Bowl, the Hula Bowl, and The Pro Bowl and to the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warrior all played there. From our lanai (balcony) we would look out over all of Pearl Harbor. The Arizona Memorial was right in front of us.]
Filed under Uncategorized, Writing
In some areas, the weather outside is pretty frightful. And since you’ve no place to go but outside to shovel, get cozy and read about snow removal in the good old days.
For a good stretch of American history, getting rid of snow was of no great concern. In fact, people actually wanted it around. While this might blow the minds of modern Northeasterners and Midwesterners, keep in mind that these were the days of the horse-drawn vehicle, not the Prius. To improve travel in winter conditions, horse carts and coaches traded their wheels in for ski-like runners. With those things on, the more packed snow on the roads, the better! Historian and weather geek Eric Sloane wrote that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, “snow was never a threat” to road travel, “but rather it was an asset.”
To keep roads in optimal snowy condition, many municipalities employed a “snow warden” to pack and flatten the snow with a crude vehicle called a snow roller—essentially a giant, wide wheel weighed down with rocks and pulled by oxen or horses. A far cry from the winter road work we see today, it was more like maintaining a ski slope or smoothing out an ice rink. Stranger still, snow wardens actually had to install snow on the pathways of covered bridges so that travel would not be interrupted.
Photo Courtesy Schwartz Boiler Shop
By the mid 1800s, several different inventors had patented their own versions of a horse-drawn snow plow meant for clearing alleys and residential streets that saw more foot traffic than carriages. In 1862, Milwaukee became the first major municipality to try one out, and it was a hit. Over the next few years, the plows hit the streets in cities throughout the Snow Belt.
But horse-drawn plows didn’t stand a chance against the Blizzard of 1888, which bludgeoned the East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay up to Maine. After three days, some places were buried in up to 50 inches of snow, and high winds caused drifts up to 40 feet tall to form. The plow-pulling horses, like everyone else, had no choice but to stay inside and wait for the snow to melt. Cities in the region learned a valuable lesson about preparation, and the following year many implemented measures like hiring more plows and giving them assigned routes, and sending the plows out to start clearing the roads in the early stages of the storm.
The Jull Centrifugal Snow Plough. Photo Courtesy of Made In Canada
Around the same time, on the other side of the country, the rotary snowplow—or as we know it, the snow blower—was getting its start in an unlikely place far removed from the suburban driveways where they’re now normally seen. In the Canadian West, railroad men were having a hard time keeping their tracks clear of snow. The railroad snowplows used back east and on the prairies were the wedge-shaped cow-catcher type that pushed the snow to the sides of the track, and they just didn’t work in the deep, heavy snow of the western mountains.
J.W. Elliott, a Toronto dentist, had been tinkering with a plow design he thought might work well on a train. His plow had a rotary engine that drove a wheel rimmed with flat blades. As the plow went down the track, snow collected in a housing on the plow and then got funneled up to the blades, which tossed the snow out through an opening at the top of the housing. The railroads passed on it, but Elliot persisted. He hooked up with inventor Orange Jull to improve the design and commission a full-scale working model. The next winter, they convinced the Canadian Pacific Railroad to road-test the new plow on its line near Toronto. The plow cleared the track easily, tossing snow as far as 200 feet out of the way, and the railroad managers were impressed enough to buy eight plows and put them to work. Over the few decades, snowblowers got cheaper, smaller, and easier to use, with truck-mounted models and, eventually, human-powered ones for home use hitting the market.
Photo Courtesy of the National Archives of Norway
As automobiles replaced horses and carriages on the roads of the U.S., the snow problem got flipped on its head. It wouldn’t be enough to clear the alleys and pack down the snow on the main roads anymore. Cars required dry, safe streets. Motorized salt spreaders were introduced, but they often didn’t do enough, and urban sprawl meant most cities were just too big for horse-drawn plows to clean all the streets. In the early 1920s, Norwegian brothers Hans and Even Overaasen and New Yorker Carl Frink independently came up with designs for car-mounted snow plows. These were, apparenty the perfect solution to the modern snow problem, and the company Frink started is still producing plows today.
As for the snow removal tool the average Joe is most familiar with, 100-plus patents have been granted for snow shovel designs since the 1870s. One of the first designs that hit upon the “scrape and scoop” combo was invented in 1889 by—get this—a woman named Lydia Fairweather.
Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/32006/scenes-history-snow-removal#ixzz2NIgAvxQe
–brought to you by mental_floss!
Filed under Humor and Observations
By Owen Jarus
Published February 28, 2013
LiveScience
The unwrapped shoe bundle showing the two pairs of children’s shoes and the adult isolate. (© 2005 Franco M. Giani – Milano – Italy)
More than 2,000 years ago, at a time when Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of kings of Greek descent, someone, perhaps a group of people, hid away some of the most valuable possessions they had — their shoes.
Seven shoes were deposited in a jar in an Egyptian temple in Luxor, three pairs and a single one. Two pairs were originally worn by children and were only about 7 inches long. Using palm fiber string, the child shoes were tied together within the single shoe (it was larger and meant for an adult) and put in the jar. Another pair of shoes, more than 9 inches long that had been worn by a limping adult, was also inserted in the jar.
The shoe-filled jar, along with two other jars, had been “deliberately placed in a small space between two mudbrick walls,” writes archaeologist Angelo Sesana in a report published in the journal Memnonia.
Whoever deposited the shoes never returned to collect them, and they were forgotten, until now. [See Photos of the Ancient Egyptian Shoes]
‘The shoes were in pristine condition and still supple upon discovery.’
– André Veldmeijer, an expert in ancient Egyptian footwear
In 2004, an Italian archaeological expedition team, led by Sesana, rediscovered the shoes. The archaeologists gave André Veldmeijer, an expert in ancient Egyptian footwear, access to photographs that show the finds.
“The find is extraordinary as the shoes were in pristine condition and still supple upon discovery,” writes Veldmeijer in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Unfortunately after being unearthed the shoes became brittle and “extremely fragile,” he added.
Pricey shoes
Veldmeijer’s analysis suggests the shoes may have been foreign-made and were “relatively expensive.” Sandals were the more common footwear in Egypt and that the style and quality of these seven shoes was such that “everybody would look at you,” and “it would give you much more status because you had these expensive pair of shoes,” said Veldmeijer, assistant director for Egyptology of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo.
The date of the shoes is based on the jar they were found in and the other two jars, as well as the stratigraphy, or layering of sediments, of the area. It may be possible in the future to carbon date the shoes to confirm their age.
Why they were left in the temple in antiquity and not retrieved is a mystery. “There’s no reason to store them without having the intention of getting them back at some point,” Veldmeijer said in an interview with LiveScience, adding that there could have been some kind of unrest that forced the owners of the shoes to deposit them and flee hastily. The temple itself predates the shoes by more than 1,000 years and was originally built for pharaoh Amenhotep II (1424-1398 B.C.).
Design discoveries
Veldmeijer made a number of shoe design discoveries. He found that the people who wore the seven shoes would have tied them using what researchers call “tailed toggles.” Leather strips at the top of the shoes would form knots that would be passed through openings to close the shoes. After they were closed a long strip of leather would have hung down, decoratively, at either side. The shoes are made out of leather, which is likely bovine.
Most surprising was that the isolated shoe had what shoemakers call a “rand,” a device that until now was thought to have been first used in medieval Europe. A rand is a folded leather strip that would go between the sole of the shoe and the upper part, reinforcing the stitching as the “the upper is very prone to tear apart at the stitch holes,” he explained. The device would’ve been useful in muddy weather when shoes are under pressure, as it makes the seam much more resistant to water.
In the dry (and generally not muddy) climate of ancient Egypt, he said that it’s a surprising innovation and seems to indicate the seven shoes were constructed somewhere abroad.
Health discoveries
The shoes also provided insight into the health of the people wearing them. In the case of the isolated shoe, he found a “semi-circular protruding area” that could be a sign of a condition called Hallux Valgus, more popularly known as a bunion. [The 9 Most Bizarre Medical Conditions]
“In this condition, the big toe starts to deviate inward towards the other toes,” Veldmeijer writes in the journal article. “Although hereditary, it can also develop as a result of close fitting shoes, although other scholars dispute this ….”
Another curious find came from the pair of adult shoes. He found that the left shoe had more patches and evidence of repair than the shoe on the right. “The shoe was exposed to unequal pressure,” he said, showing that the person who wore it “walked with a limp, otherwise the wear would have been far more equal.”
Still, despite their medical problems, and the wear and tear on the shoes, the people who wore them were careful to keep up with repairs, Veldmeijer said. They did not throw them away like modern-day Westerners tend to do with old running shoes.
“These shoes were highly prized commodities.”
Veldmeijer hopes to have the opportunity to examine the shoes, now under the care of the Ministry of State for Antiquities, firsthand.
Filed under Humor and Observations
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 