text:
30 April 2017
Remember to clean your clothes dryer vent
It's not sufficient to clean the lint trap screen on your appliance. We did that for 15 years, but still found the efficiency of the dryer decreasing, so we called in the services of a professional. The first thing he did was remove the contorted connector (above) that ran between the dryer and the wall conduit. The previous owner of the house had done this because the dryer vent outlet and the wall site were not in line horizontally or vertically. This segment was not occluded with lint, but it's inefficient and prone to collecting debris.
The replacement (not shown) is a short "transition vent" that runs diagonally; it will need to be detached in order to move the dryer out to clean the floor etc, but it's less likely to become plugged with lint.
The next step was to clean inside the dryer by removing the front panel.
I've highlighted with a red oval the problem he usually finds - an accumulation of dust and (in our case) cat hair. When home clothes dryers catch fire, THIS is the where the combustible material is typically located. And most importantly, this material is NOT derived from the clothes in the dryer - it gets sucked into the cabinet from the floor of the room.
Think about it. The dryer is going to heat and spin and blow air out its vent. To do that, it has to pull air in from somewhere. Not from outdoors, where the air might be subzero, but from behind itself and from the floor of the room. Even if you're careful about cleaning, over the years dust and debris will accumulate.
The next step was cleaning the conduit between the utility room and the outdoors. In our case, that conduit ran up the inside of the wall between the utility room and the garage, then horizontally between a crawlspace and the roof of the garage, then exited high on the outside wall.
Too high for me to access. I don't have a ladder that long, and if I did, I wouldn't go up except at gunpoint. He went up and removed the louvers that covered the vent. The louvers were twisted and didn't move freely. This happens because the exiting air is hot enough to warp the plastic slats of the louver (this risk is present on clothes-dryer vents, but not on ones for room-temp air such as bathroom vents). He reached in and dropped down to me a handful of what he found inside:
That's typical clothes lint - the stuff that works its way through the trap in the dryer.
The next step was to clean the entire conduit - probably 30-40 feet in length. On the internet I had read reports of homeowners claiming success in cleaning such vents by adapting the output of a leaf blower to the indoor end and blowing the ducts out. He explained that it's seldom that simple. The lint that exits sometimes carries some moisture and especially at bends or joins in the tubing it can accumulate in a consistency not unlike papier-mâché.
What professionals use (I didn't take a photo) is the air-duct equivalent of a Roto-Rooter for water drains. It's a flexible "snake" with brushes that rotate as it traverses the ducts. And as it goes through, vacuum is applied from the inside to suck out the material that is coating the duct.
Finally, he replaced the louver with an animal-exclusion cage (it lifts up for cleaning if lint accumulates). Our exit site did not contain a bird's nest or any evidence of animal invasion. Birds do sometimes nest in these sites if they are open (he had recently serviced the vents at an apartment complex where a dozen of the 30-40 vents had bird nests in them). Chipmunks and other small rodents will nest in these locations if the outlet is low on the wall. Bats are not a problem because they do not tolerate the heat.
We couldn't be happier with the result. The first load we ran dried in probably half the time that similar loads required in the past, so there will be a saving in electricity plus much less wear and tear on tumbling clothes, plus eliminating one potential risk for a house fire.
Finally, a shout-out to the crew:
They were highly efficient and totally professional. Their offices are on Odana Road in Madison, Wisconsin.
Addendum: There is a relevant current article on "Dryer Duct Safety" in Reuben Saltzman's incomparable home inspection blog.
28 April 2017
"The proboscis is an infolding of the body wall, and sits in the rhynchocoel when inactive. When muscles in the wall of the rhynchocoel compress the fluid in the rhynchocoel, the pressure makes the proboscis jump inside-out to attack the animal's prey along a canal called the rhynchodeum and through an orifice, the proboscis pore. The proboscis has a muscle which attaches to the back of the rhynchocoel, and which can stretch up to 30 times its inactive length and then retract the proboscis.
Some Anopla have branched proboscises which can be described as "a mass of sticky spaghetti". The animal then draws its prey into its mouth...
Although most are less than 20 centimetres (7.9 in) long, one specimen has been estimated at 54 metres (177 ft).
"Black market insulin" should not exist
As reported by NBC News:
clusterfuck debacle.
Gabriella is allergic to the kind of insulin her insurer covers at a $25 out-of-pocket cost. She can only take Apidra, but her insurance only covers 25 percent of the price, leaving the family to pay hundreds of dollars a month they can't afford.American healthcare is a total
So her mom has turned to the black market, trading for the medication with other families with diabetes she meets online, a tactic that regulators and health experts warn is a health risk...
The class of rapid-acting insulin Gabriella depends upon comes at a price — one that's risen 1,123 percent since 1996, according to data from Truven Health Analytics, even as more competitors have entered the market.
Her parents' insurer, West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA), considers Gabriella's insulin Apidra "Tier 3," which means the family has to pay 75 percent of the price. A copay-reduction card from drugmaker Sanofi would help some, but would still leave them to pay $270 for one vial, which would last them about a month...
Since they're not uninsured, the Corleys don't qualify for free insulin under Sanofi's patient assistance program...
As far as the industry is concerned, Humalog, Novolog, and Apidra are all equivalent insulins in terms of how they lower blood sugar levels. So whether or not your insurer covers it comes down to the deal they can cut.
But not every patient can use the drug their insurer has decided they can take, or afford the one they want to. Drugs' formulations vary. Some patients may have a reaction to the inactive ingredients or find that one kind works differently in their body, forcing them to relearn years of mental math performed at every mealtime.
Do you see the flame in this photo? Neither do the birds.
From the New York Times:
But that flare, burning off methane created by decomposing garbage, poses a potentially lethal threat to unsuspecting birds that pass through it. Larger birds have been found with singed wings, unable to fly or fend for themselves. Bird-watchers believe that smaller ones are simply incinerated...
Mr. Aberback said the authority had plans to capture methane at another of its landfills, but that was "not currently a viable option for the Kingsland Landfill flare."The Fish and Wildlife Service says the authority has already followed through on some of its suggestions, like removing a number of possible perches for birds around the flame. A local electric company has agreed to take out or retrofit power lines and other equipment to make them less attractive to migrating birds. Finding a way to make the flare visible to birds is among the other ideas officials say are being explored.
27 April 2017
Performance on a theremin
As discussed at NPR:
Some dogs are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos. There are corgos and clouds, fluffers and floofs, woofers and boofers. The chunky ones are thicc, and the thin ones are long bois. When they stick out their tongues, they're doing a mlem, a blep, a blop. They bork. They boof. Once in a while they do each other a frighten. And whether they're 10/10 or 12/10, they're all h*ckin' good boys and girls.
Are you picking up what I'm putting down? If not, you're probably not fluent in DoggoLingo, a language trend that's been gaining steam on the Internet in the past few years. The language most often accompanies a picture or a video of a dog and has spread to all major forms of social media...
Even Merriam-Webster is aware of terms like doggo and pupper. Though they have a long way to go before they're eligible for dictionary-entry — they need to be used in published, edited work over an extended period of time — they're definitely candidates.
New evidence supports/denies the "Solutrean hypothesis" - updated
The Solutrean hypothesis:
The Solutrean hypothesis is a controversial proposal that peoples from Europe may have been among the earliest settlers in the Americas, as evidenced by similarities in stone tool technology of the Solutrean culture from prehistoric Europe to that of the later Clovis tool-making culture found in the Americas. It was first proposed in 1998. Its key proponents include Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Bruce Bradley, of the University of Exeter.TYWKIWDBI had three posts on pre-Clovis finds last year, discussing skulls found in a Yucatan underwater cave, paleo-era tools on California's Channel Islands, and a pre-Clovis point found in a mastodon bone.
In this hypothesis, people associated with the Solutrean culture migrated from Ice Age Europe to North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for later Clovis technology found throughout North America. The hypothesis rests upon particular similarities in Solutrean and Clovis technology that have no known counterparts in Eastern Asia, Siberia or Beringia, areas from which or through which early Americans are known to have migrated.
Today the Washington Post and The Independent have articles about new findings on the Atlantic coast of North America that support the Solutrean hypothesis.
At the core of Stanford's case are stone tools recovered from five mid-Atlantic sites. Two sites lie on Chesapeake Bay islands, suggesting that the Solutreans settled Delmarva early on. Smithsonian research associate Darrin Lowery found blades, anvils and other tools found stuck in soil at least 20,000 years old [note only the soil can be reliably dated, not the artifacts themselves]...One major problem facing investigators is that early peoples would have lived on the coast next to the ocean - but sea levels have risen so far since that time that the original coast is perhaps 50 miles off the current shoreline and deep underwater. Caves and artifacts from those locations are difficult to find.
Further, the Eastern Shore blades strongly resemble those found at dozens of Solutrean sites from the Stone Age in Spain and France, Stanford says. "We can match each one of 18 styles up to the sites in Europe."..
Stone tools recovered from two other mid-Atlantic sites — Cactus Hills, Va., 45 miles south of Richmond, and Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in southern Pennsylvania — date to at least 16,000 years ago. Those tools, too, strongly resemble blades found in Europe...
"The reason people don't like the Solutrean idea is the ocean," he said. No Solutrean boats have been found. But given that people arrived in Australia some 60,000 years ago — and they didn't walk there — wood-frame and seal-skin boats were clearly possible, Stanford argues...
Addendum: I've updated this post (originally published in 2012) to add some items I've recently encountered - first, from Germany's Der Spiegel, reporting on DNA studies of North Americans:
Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy's [Clovis-era, found in Montana] origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy's ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.
Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas -- from the Alaska's Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes -- are descended from Montana boy's lineage.
Last week, the scientists published the results of sequencing the child's DNA in the scientific journal Nature. Late last year, the same team published the decoded genome of another early human: A juvenile buried near Lake Baikal in Siberia some 24,000 years ago. Their genomes showed surprising ancestral similarities.
This earned Willerslev's team an astounding publishing achievement in just 100 days: The decoding of the genomes of the oldest analyzed members of homo sapiens in both the Old and the New Worlds. This has allowed them to reconstruct the settlement of the Americas via the Beringia land bridge during the ice ages -- when what is now the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska was frozen over -- in greater detail than ever before.That report is discussed in a Reddit thread and summarized on the Wikipedia page, and at USA Today:
When researchers analyzed the Anzick child's DNA and compared it to the genomes of living Native Americans, they found that the boy's family members were the ancestors of multiple Central and South American groups, such as the Maya of Central America and the Karitiana people of Brazil. Willerslev estimates that roughly 80% of Native Americans are descended from the Anzick group, contradicting claims by other scholars that the Clovis people didn't leave much of a genetic legacy...I have accordingly inserted "/denies" after "supports" in the post's title.
The results overturn the idea that migrants who colonized the Americas after the Clovis people are the true ancestors to Native Americans. And the discovery "puts the final nail in the coffin" for the idea that the ancestors of Native Americans may have crossed to the New World from Europe, says study author Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
With the genetic data, the researchers can construct a rough narrative of the peopling of the New World. From Siberia, ancient people gradually crossed a now-vanished land bridge to Alaska. Some drifted south, giving rise to the Clovis people and colonizing the United States and Central and South America. Others stayed in the north and founded the lineage leading to the modern-day Cree and Athabascan peoples of northern North America. The study is published in this week's Nature.
Addendum: Reposted again, in part because this post has become one of the most-commented posts I've ever created for TYWKIWDBI, and I'd like to have the current generation of readers be aware of it. Mostly I wanted to add this infomation from a recent comment:
Just returned from a visit with Dr. Al Goodyear and his folks at "The Topper Site" in South Carolina. Documented, dated by the best available science, Pre-Clovis artifacts found at a Chert quarry have been robustly tested and are found to be 50,000 years old +. In fact, charcoal remnants so old that Radio Carbon dating is impossible found in the same layer have proven the case for human occupation at the site . It is ,in fact, a tool manufacturing site of the first magnitude, It is located on the banks of the Savannah River in S.C.. It is interesting to note that more Clovis and Pre-Clovis artifacts have now been found of the East coast of the U.S.A.than all of the rest of the country. I know not what this means, but it definitely means something. Dr. Goodyear will publish a definitive paper very soon, but his find (The Topper Site) has been visited and observed by many national and international academe professionals and many of the artifacts examined in situ and in the lab.We'll have to await that "definitive paper" for details; I suspect it will encounter substantial resistance during the peer-review process. The Wikipedia entry offers the standard counterarguments:
Goodyear, who began excavating the Topper site in the 1980s, believes that lithic objects at that level are rudimentary stone tools (and thus "artifacts"). Other archaeologists dispute this conclusion, suggesting that the objects are natural and not human-made. Other archaeologists also have challenged the radiocarbon dating of the carbonized remains at Topper...A recent article on the Topper site was posted in Charleston's Post and Courier.
"Unifacial flake tools found at the top of the soil layer holding artifacts said to be 50,000 years old." Provided by Keith McGraw/University of South Carolina
Addendum: A 2017 BBC article updates information about trans-Beringia migration, but doesn't address the question of Solutreans.
Addendum: Reposted yet once again to add a flurry of links regarding a new report describing evidence suggesting human habitation in North American an incredible 130,000 years ago.
The report was published in Nature (top-of-the-line in terms of peer review):
Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum). The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion...The key contentioius points: bones fractured fresh, bones fractured intentionally, tools found at the site, dating methodology.
230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago.
These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production.
Commentary at NBC News, BBC, The Guardian, The New Reddit Journal of Science.
If the findings are being correctly interpreted, this will require a massive, near-total revision of the history of human migration to the Americas.
I closed comments on this post long ago because of various contentious issues. I'll leave them closed for the present.
Addendum: The Atlantic has a superb article updating this subject and incorporating much new data.
25 April 2017
Subtleties of online shopping
Excerpts from an interesting article in this month's The Atlantic:
Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us...More at the link.
The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones Google recommends may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be, one study found. For shoppers, that means price—not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor—may become an increasingly unknowable thing...
Four researchers in Catalonia tried to answer the question with dummy computers that mimicked the web-browsing patterns of either "affluent" or "budget conscious" customers for a week. When the personae went "shopping," they weren't shown different prices for the same goods. They were shown different goods. The average price of the headphones suggested for the affluent personae was four times the price of those suggested for the budget-conscious personae. Another experiment demonstrated a more direct form of price discrimination: Computers with addresses in greater Boston were shown lower prices than those in more-remote parts of Massachusetts on identical goods...
Me IRL
There's a reason this series of cartoons is entitled "Real Life Adventures."
Habitat restoration exemplified
"Almost 50 years ago, fried chicken tycoon David Bamberger used his fortune to purchase 5,500 acres of overgrazed land in the Texas Hill Country. Planting grasses to soak in rains and fill hillside aquifers, Bamberger devoted the rest of his life to restoring the degraded landscape. Today, the land has been restored to its original habitat and boasts enormous biodiversity. Bamberger's model of land stewardship is now being replicated across the region and he is considered to be a visionary in land management and water conservation."This is worth several minutes of your time. Don't just skip over it.
"First water" explained
I was reading a Robert Frost poem in which he described something as being "of the first water." The reference:
I have heard the term applied to gemstones and extrapolated as above, but wasn't sure how the gemstone application arose. It turns out to be quite simple.I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.
The clarity of diamonds is assessed by their translucence; the more like water, the higher the quality. The 1753 edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia states "The first water in Diamonds means the greatest purity and perfection of their complexion, which ought to be that of the clearest drop of water. When Diamonds fall short of this perfection, they are said to be of the second or third water, &c. till the stone may be properly called a coloured one."
The comparison of diamonds with water dates back to at least the early 17th century, and Shakespeare alludes to it in Pericles, 1607.
Heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost,
Begin to part their fringes of bright gold.
The diamonds of a most praisèd water
Doth appear, to make the world twice rich.
Guilty as charged
It has been pointed out to me, probably on several occasions, that I should not type two spaces after a period. I've been doing this since my 10th-grade typing class, so I doubt I can change a 50+-year-old habit. Today I encountered this rant on the subject (which I typed using two spaces after periods):
The two-spaces-after-a-period construction is outmoded and has no place in modern communication. It's not a coincidence that many of my friends who still use two spaces work in finance and law—two decidedly old-school industries populated by people who grew up in the two-space heyday. The practice should be eradicated for good, especially in the digital communication age, when every device has proportional fonts. Design experts agree that using two spaces creates an unsightly amount of white space, and increases the chance you'll have a "river" snake its way through your paragraph. Worse, it makes a person look old and out of touch.Here is the same text typed using one space after the periods.
The two-spaces-after-a-period construction is outmoded and has no place in modern communication. It's not a coincidence that many of my friends who still use two spaces work in finance and law—two decidedly old-school industries populated by people who grew up in the two-space heyday. The practice should be eradicated for good, especially in the digital communication age, when every device has proportional fonts. Design experts agree that using two spaces creates an unsightly amount of white space, and increases the chance you'll have a "river" snake its way through your paragraph. Worse, it makes a person look old and out of touch.
Today is April 25
From Miss Congeniality, via.
23 April 2017
"Slime videos" explained
A tip of the blogging hat to the elves at No Such Thing As A Fish for explaining in a recent podcast how "slime" is now a "thing". I found a detailed explanation in a column at nymag. Herewith some excerpts:
Slime, if you haven't encountered it on any of your social feeds — or at a child's birthday party — is a strange, mushy semi-solid that can be made easily with Elmer's glue, borax, and water, plus a mess of strange sequins, colored dye, and commentary. Slime is so popular as a craft project among teens and preteens that stores are struggling to keep Elmer's glue on the shelves...Here is a sample video:
Slime videos are part science, part meditation, and part art form. They're also a business. Slime creators have hundreds of thousands of followers, and sell their slime on Etsy for money. @Slime.Bun, one of my favorites, has more than 200,000 followers; @slimequeeens has almost 700,000. It's an industry dominated by teens who started making their own slime just because they loved it — and starting selling it to enable their habit. Alyssa J., a 15-year-old slime creator whose mother preferred that she keep her last name secret for privacy reasons, just started her slime account in August 2016. She says she saw tutorials on Pinterest, and that it "just looked fun," so she decided to start an account herself. Alyssa's account, @craftyslimecreator, now has 431,000 followers...
For Donna Boyd, a 17-year-old from Harrisburg, Virginia, slime is therapeutic. She's never purchased slime, or made it herself. She just watches hundreds of videos from her five favorite accounts over and over again. "It honestly just makes me happy and de-stresses me," Donna told me. "I suffer from anxiety, and slime videos help me a lot during panic attacks." She says she gets lost in them after watching a few, going into a kind of meditative state. One teen I spoke to, Rachel M., told me she spends "at least 15 hours a week" just watching slime videos and playing with slime. She has only bought two slimes herself, but she loves them and says, "I need them."..
"It doesn't matter what it's used for," Alyssa told me near the end of our interview, dragging out "used" so that it sounded like the most absurd request in the world for a giggly, blue goo to have a purpose. "It's just slime. Get it?"
BTW, the company that makes Elmer's Glue is private. You can't buy stock in it. I checked.
Addendum: Global slime craze sparks safety warnings after borax blamed for burns.
"How Western civilization could collapse"
Excerpts from an interesting longread at the BBC:
The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we'd eventually face total societal collapse...Whenever I read about the end of civilization, I am reminded of this classic passage from Hitchhiker:
...there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom...
That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour...
According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one of the most important lessons from Rome's fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception. By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the Empire in...
Whether in the US, UK or elsewhere, the more dissatisfied and afraid people become, Homer-Dixon says, the more of a tendency they have to cling to their in-group identity – whether religious, racial or national. Denial, including of the emerging prospect of societal collapse itself, will be widespread, as will rejection of evidence-based fact. If people admit that problems exist at all, they will assign blame for those problems to everyone outside of their in-group, building up resentment. "You're setting up the psychological and social prerequisites for mass violence," Homer-Dixon says. When localised violence finally does break out, or another country or group decides to invade, collapse will be difficult to avoid...
P.A. VOICE: We are currently awaiting the loading of our compliment of small, lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment, and hygiene during the flight, which will be of two hours duration. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits… again.
AUTOPILOT: There has been a delay. The passengers are kept in temporary suspended animation for their comfort and convenience. Coffee and biscuits are served every ten years, after which passengers are returned to suspended animation for their comfort and convenience. Departure will take place when flight stores are complete. We apologise for the delay.
FORD: Delay? Have you seen the world outside this ship? It's a wasteland. A desert. Civilisation's been and gone. It's over. There are no lemon-soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere.
AUTOPILOT: The statistical likelihood is that other civilisations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. 'Till then, there will be a short delay. Please return to your seats.
Therapy dogs waitiing to see their children
Photo taken at an Italian children's hospital. Via Reddit.
The dangers of kohl eyeliner
Kohl served multiple roles in Egyptian antiquity. Egyptians of all social classes applied the eyeliner daily in veneration of the deities, satisfying both religious obligations and beautifying desires. Wearing the glossiest, highest quality kohl denoted one's upper class status in society while the less wealthy adulterated their kohl with fire soot. Before the advent of Ray-Bans, it was applied liberally around the eyes to reduce the sun's glare, to repel flies and to provide cooling relief from the heat. It also trapped errant dust and dirt, a simple remedy to curb the desert's regular assaults on the body...There is more information about the toxicity at NPR:
Kohl is predominantly composed of the mineral galena, a dark, metallic lead-based product that is also known by the chemical name lead sulfide (PbS). The mineral would be crushed and mixed with several other ingredients such as ground pearls, rubies and emeralds, silver and gold leaves, frankincense, coral, and medicinal herbs such as saffron, fennel, and neem...
A 240-fold increase in NO production was sparked by the presence of lead ions, a bona fide tsunami of molecules flooding surrounding cells to respond to invading bacteria. This intense biochemical interaction suggests that kohl was more than just a beautifying cosmetic and the forefather of sunglasses, but also an important antibacterial ointment...
Kohl is still used today in North Africa and Central Asia, despite its considerable toxicity.
Two Afghan children now living in Albuquerque developed very high levels of lead in their blood because of eye makeup, health workers reported Thursday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The family had just emigrated from Afghanistan as refugees. And they brought the traditional eyeliner, called kajal, with them...
When health workers tested the kajal in the family's home, the eyeliner turned out to be 54 percent lead. That's 540,000 parts per million, or 27,000 times the cap set by the Food and Drug Administration for color additives in makeup.
Lead is a neurotoxin. And it's especially harmful to babies and young children. Even small amounts can damage developing brains and cause permanent problems.
Tilly Lockey and her bionic arm
The above video shows her first attempts to use the new arm; In the longer video below she tells her story:
More details at the Meningitis Research Foundation.
"He's at home" was the term for a Nantucket dildo - updated
A long and quite interesting article at Literary Hub traces one writer's journey to document the use of dildos by the wives of Nantucket whalers.
On Nantucket, 80-year-old Connie Congdon and I sat in her dim living room looking at the 120-year-old plaster dildo that a mason had found in her chimney...Much more at Literary Hub. Well worth the read for those interested in the subject matter.
In the box were the other antiques the mason had found with the dildo: six charred envelopes from the 1890s addressed to Captain James B. Coffin; letters from the same James B. Coffin to Grover Cleveland and Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Dehl; a dirty and frayed shirt collar; a pipe that still smelled of tobacco when I fit my nose in the bowl; and a green glass laudanum bottle. These items must have been hidden in the chimney by James's wife, Martha "Mattie" Coffin, sometime between when the letters were dated and when she died in 1928. The fireplace was later sealed up, and a closet was built in front of it...
She unwrapped the stony phallus from its pink tissue paper and handed it to me. It was heavier than it looked. The head had been painted wild-berry red. The shaft was off-white and touched with light brown stains. Through the center was a hole no thicker than a straw, as if it had been skewered for drying. Saw marks streaked the cross section of the flat base, and it had been circumcised with whittling scrapes. "No mistaking what it is," Connie said, as I turned it in my hand...
She bent at the waist, snapped on the flashlight, and peered up the chimney. "Up there," she said, motioning me to kneel down beside her. "It was on the flue shelf." I craned my neck. Her light swept over the chimney's charred innards. The damper ledge where the dildo had been hidden was an arm's length away...
Nantucket wives were dubbed "Cape Horn widows," because their husbands might be gone for eight years. In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab tells his first mate, Starbuck, that of the past forty years of "making war on the horrors of the deep" he'd only been ashore three, leaving only "one dent in [his] marriage pillow." "[W]ife?" Ahab rages, "wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!" The dildos, called "he's-at-homes" in some books on the history of the Yankee whale fishery, were meant to be some insurance of fidelity for a husband who was rarely present.
I can't close without including a link to the famous poem(s) "There Once Was a Man From Nantucket."
Reposted from 2015 to add this report of a similar item being auctioned in Ireland:
Lot 475 is a Victorian-era sex toy – an uncannily lifelike-looking phallus, intricately carved from ivory. Sandwiched in the brochure between a pair of antique miniature portraits and a set of decanter labels, the item is described in the brochure as an "antique carved ivory ladies companion in scarlet lined leather upholstered carry box with inset bevelled glass panel".Further details at Irish Times, via The Guardian.
"It is a beautiful piece, which comes from one of the well-known Anglo-Irish families," says auctioneer Damien Matthews..."This was a very enlightened family, and this would have been a very loving gift from a husband to wife. You can see that because the level of detail is incredible, down to the folds of the skin. There's a heart carved at the base of it, where her finger would have been, and a receptacle in which she could keep a lock of his hair."...The man did return, and the box was subsequently custom-made in Ireland. "The leather box is Irish. She would have got the box carved for it – there's a stamp on the lock with the name of an Irish locksmith," Matthews says...Matthews says there has been considerable interest in the piece, and that it could go to a museum of erotica, to a collector of antique ivory or Victorian art. The guide price is set at €500-€800.
21 April 2017
Divertimento #125
The 125th linkdump becomes the first "gifdump".
Deep-frying rice vermicelli noodles.
Avalanche rescue dog having fun.
Gorilla vs. Canada goose. You can guess who wins.
Local sports hero.
Vietnamese SWAT team tactical training.
A group of wild turkeys marching in a circle around a dead cat.
The "master of disguise" is not the one you expect.
Dog and rabbit are BFF.
The Pope getting a pizza delivered to his vehicle.
When a video camera's shutter speed synchronizes with a helicopter's rotors, the resulting video is unnerving.
Baby bottle robot prototype - unsuccessful.
Unsuccessful attempt at bank robbery.
Windy day. This one went viral last week. She holds on to her tablet like a champ.
"Living the dream."
Kinetic wood sculpture.
Tree stump removal.
Hot water and Skittles.
A dog swimming with a breaststroke, not a dogpaddle.
This woman not only counts money faster than you, but faster than you can even imagine.
Fluid dynamics of a drip-free wine-bottle lip.
An astronaut aboard the ISS demonstrates the Dzhanibekov Effect.
This was labeled "bubble gum" but it's probably slime (about which more later this week).
Lightning striking a car.
Rescuers offer a King Cobra water (note the size of this magnificent creature).
Donald Trump signs his "energy independence Executive Order."
A man tries to kick a dog. Karma ensues.
Girl annoys dog at beach. Karma ensues.
Every dot in this video moves in a straight line only.
A little bird is ecstatic about receiving pats.
Kingfisher breaching after a successful dive (the minnow can be seen wiggling in his gullet).
This is a "power broom." Very cool.
A high-definition night vision camera looks like daylight until you realize the stars are visible.
I can't describe this remarkable baseball play. Just watch.
Throw a lighted cigarette butt in a hole in the sidewalk. WCGW ?
A "deceased spirit" is set free at a funeral. WCGW?
HMB while I skimboard across a pool. WCGW?
Red panda vs. rock. We'll call it a tie.
Bow down before the awesome power of a crocodile's tail.
Add water to compressed soil.
Polyox is a self-siphoning gel.
Donald Trump being reminded to be patriotic.
Hydrophobic sand.
A runaway tire.
What to do when a baby elephant has a stuffy nose.
The Daily Show interviews a man on the street re Obama's role in 9/11.
The smile of a Syrian girl who survived a suicide bombing.
This is an armadillo's defense. And this is the feline version of the same thing.
I found the pix in the subreddit on Unstirred Paint. (There seems to be subreddit for everything).
19 April 2017
Seraphine (2009)
I encountered this trailer for Seraphine while watching the DVD of A Man Called Ove and decided to give it a try. Here's the blurb:
Based on a true story, SÉRAPHINE centers on Séraphine de Senlis (Moreau), a simple and profoundly devout housekeeper whose brilliantly colorful canvases adorn some of the most famous galleries in the world. German art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde (The Lives of Others Ulrich Tukur) - the first Picasso buyer and champion of naïve primitive painter Le Douanier Rousseau - discovers her paintings while she is working for him as a maid in the beautiful countryside of Senlis near Paris. A moving and unexpected relationship develops between the avant-garde art dealer and the visionary outsider artist. Martin Provost's fictionalized and poignant portrait of Séraphine is a testament to creativity and the resilience of one womans spirit.That's an accurate summary. It's not a cheerful movie, but it is extremely well acted and filmed, scoring 89% on Rotten Tomatoes; it received these César Awards in 2009:
- Won: Best Actress – Leading Role (Yolande Moreau)
- Won: Best Cinematography (Laurent Brunet)
- Won: Best Costume Design (Madeline Fontaine)
- Won: Best Film
- Won: Best Music Written for a Film (Michael Galasso)
- Won: Best Production Design (Thierry François)
- Won: Best Writing – Original (Marc Abdelnour and Martin Provost)
18 April 2017
Photo (and title) credit to this PoliticalHumor subreddit post.
17 April 2017
It's sad that this is basically true
Source (where you can click through all the Dilbert cartoons).
Canine freestyle
This is better than some of the ones I've seen presented at Crofts. I can't begin to imagine the countless hours these two have spent together developing this routine.
Via Neatorama.
Normal child's skull (with some overlying bone dissected away) to show the relationship of the baby teeth to the unemerged adult teeth.
Image cropped for size from the original via.
The Zanclean flood
According to this model, water from the Atlantic Ocean refilled the cut-off inland seas through the modern-day Strait of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean Basin flooded mostly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years. Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at times greater than ten metres per day (thirty feet per day). Based on the erosion features preserved until modern times under the Pliocene sediment, these authors estimate that water rushed down a drop of more than 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) with a discharge of up to 2×108 m3/s (7.1×109 cu ft/s), about 1,000 times that of the present day Amazon River. Studies of the underground structures at the Gibraltar Strait show that the flooding channel descended in a rather gradual way toward the bottom of the basin rather than forming a steep waterfall.Related: flooding of the Black Sea basin.
Not all scientific studies have agreed with the catastrophistic interpretation of this event. Some researchers have estimated that the reinstallment of a "normal" Mediterranean Sea basin following the Messinian "Lago Mare" episode took place in a much more gradual way, taking as long as 10,000 years.
I do hope someone invents time travel soon, because I'd like to go back and watch this.
Beware of buglers
At common law, "burglary" was the crime of breaking into a house at night with intent to commit a felony. These days the time and type of building usually don't matter... Say it. Burglar. The verb form is "burgle," or "burglarize,"... the adverb used to be "burglarily" (e.g. "evill disposed person or persons, attempting to murder, rob, or burglarily to breake mansion houses" (1533)), which was bad enough, but the modern form seems to be "burglariously..."Image cropped for size from the original at Crossing The Bar.
A "bugler," of course, is one who bugles. "Bugle" is also French, although that word apparently comes from back when the noise was made with the horn of a wild ox (bugle, in French)... But the OED just blew my mind by telling me that there's no such word as "buglery." Surely "buglery" is the art of playing the bugle? Nope, not there. One can certainly "bugle," or engage in "bugling.".. But at least as far as the OED is concerned, "buglery" is not a word.
Questioning the Passover story
From the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an op-ed piece questions whether Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt, and whether the Passover story is a myth.
"Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all...Addendum: A tip of the blogging cap to reader Drabkikker for finding this relevant Wikipedia page.
...one of the biggest events of the Jewish calendar is predicated upon reminding the next generation every year of how the Egyptians were our cruel slave-masters, in a bondage that likely never happened... I'm talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.
It is remarkable that Egyptian records make no mention of the sudden migration of what would have been nearly a quarter of their population... Furthermore, there is no evidence in Israel that shows a sudden influx of people from another culture at that time.
...let us enjoy our Seder and read the story by all means, but also remind those at the table who may forget that it is just a metaphor, and that there is no ancient animosity between Israelites and Egyptians. Because, if we want to re-establish that elusive peace with Egypt that so many worked so hard to build, we're all going to have to let go of our prejudices."
Basketball court adapted to available space
"This is the ancient site of Dubrovnik's metal forge, re-discovered by archeologists only about a decade ago. Before then this corner of the city had been a pile of construction rubble and ruins. The basketball court is actually the rooftop of a climate-controlled museum that has preserved the entire excavated site. See that sunken door on the right side of the court? That's the museum entrance. Walk in there and a Croatian archeology doctorate candidate will lead you on an hour-long guided tour through the catwalks suspended over the dig site.
I was there last summer with my girlfriend and two friends of ours and we decided to check out the museum out of curiosity, ended up being one of the most interesting parts of the whole trip. The ancient metalworks were extensive and the guide did a great job of explaining via his broken English exactly how each step of the process worked."
"We went on this tour too and it was excellent. The guide said he doesn't get many folks through the door because it is well hidden, so if you see this thread, go visit!... name of museum is The Foundry Museum (Gornji Ugao)."
A gallery of photos in the museum is here. Photos and comments from the discussion thread at the MildlyInteresting subreddit.
The "mamas" and the "papas"
"Before I knew anything about language acquisition, I assumed that babies making these utterances were referring to their parents. But this interpretation is backwards: mama/papa words just happen to be the easiest word-like sounds for babies to make. The sounds came first – as experiments in vocalization – and parents adopted them as pet names for themselves."Presented at Sentence First in a post introducing a new crowdsourced language project (details at the links).
Movie scenes filmed in Iceland
A surprising number of well-known movies.
Field trip, 1947
Post-War Field Trips
Minneapolis school children from Hay and Willard Elementary schools, as well as a South St. Paul group, wait at the Great Northern railroad station to board a train for St. Paul. Schools around the city have started taking field trips again after ceasing during war-time. As many as 450 children a day are touring farms, trains, zoos, industries, and historic sites.
-- Minneapolis Morning Tribune, April 25, 1947
From the Stuff About Minneapolis tumblr.
I have fond memories of field trips from my childhood, when a day spent touring a factory was deemed as important to education as a day in a classroom. I think it's important for young children to see - in person, not on film - a working assembly line, an animal barn, a railroad train etc etc etc.
I don't know to what extent such trips are undertaken nowadays (readers...?). I would concede that it must be a headache for a businessperson to host dozens of unrestrained fourth-graders, but I think if such ventures are not taken, a learning experience is omitted.
Are leggings trousers?
According to the Oxford Dictionaries, yes.
We define leggings as 'tight-fitting stretch trousers, typically worn by women or girls'.Photo credit: American Eagle Outfitters.
A key concept in a dictionary entry is the 'genus term' – the part of the definition which answers the question 'what type of thing is it?'. The genus term is a broader category into which the word being defined fits, and can be used to place closely related words into groups, or semantic categories. Our entry for leggings, therefore, uses the genus term 'trousers', firmly placing them in that group alongside jeans, cords, and culottes. And they certainly seem to fit our definition of trousers: 'an outer garment covering the body from the waist to the ankles, with a separate part for each leg'.
Some critics however, have an issue with leggings as an 'outer garment'.... (more at the link)
Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
I'll meet you over at the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Image via No Brash Festivity.
"Dog-whistle editing" explained
For the English majors reading this blog...
English, in its superabundance, has many multiples of words and phrases that overlap contentiously in meaning. These confusables are the bread and butter of usage manuals: imply and infer, disinterested and uninterested, careen and career, defuse and diffuse, convince and persuade, militate and mitigate, refute and reject, and flaunt and flout.The discussion continues at Sentence First.
Some of these pairs are worth distinguishing; others are not. Part of editing well – and writing well – is knowing which distinctions to preserve and which to disregard. Examining over versus more than, John E. McIntyre refers to dog-whistle editing: 'the observance of nuances that only copy editors can hear, and thus a waste of time'.
Knowing the difference between flaunt and flout is not, for now, a waste of time. But the prospects are not promising. In a post at Language Log yesterday, Geoffrey Pullum says it 'may be a lost cause' – a gloomy diagnosis prompted by a BBC Radio 4 report that referred to politicians who were 'supposed to impose party discipline, rather than flaunt it'. It should have been flout.
To recap: flaunt means to show off or display ostentatiously. One flaunts wealth or fancy clothes. Flout means to brazenly disobey or disregard. One flouts the law by openly ignoring it. The two are often confused: partly, we can assume, because they're spelled similarly.
13 April 2017
A modern equivalent of death by crucifixion
This unfortunate lethal accident was reported in the Washington Post:
Judith Permar drove to a clothing drop-off box at about 2 a.m... According to police, she stood on the stepladder so she could reach the top of the box. She rummaged through the donated items, even taking some out... After allegedly removing several bags filled with clothes and shoes, she slipped as the stepladder collapsed, her arm catching in the door...For practical purposes, the cause of death listed by the coroner is adequate, but the pathophysiology of this lady's death is considerably more interesting. Neither minor fractures nor freezing temperatures would kill her in six hours. For a deeper understanding we need to look at the cardiovascular and pulmonary implications of her situation.
The fall broke her arms and wrists, which were trapped in the box. Her feet, meanwhile, didn't quite touch the ground, leaving her hanging. There she dangled until 8:30 the next morning, when she was finally found. Bags were scattered around her, and the Hummer's engine was still running.
The temperature had dropped to 21 degrees that night, according to Weather Underground. Permar was pronounced dead at the scene. The county coroner James F. Kelley listed the cause of death as blunt force trauma and hypothermia.
EMTs are trained to recognize and treat suspension trauma, which typically happens to construction workers in harnesses. The Journal of Emergency Medical Services and the United States Department of Labor webpages have detailed explanations of the cardiovascular aspects - intravascular fluid pooling in unsupported legs, leading to impaired cardiac output and cerebral hypoperfusion. Special harnesses that support one leg (as in the embedded image at right) may be lifesaving.
I'm going to focus instead on the pulmonary problems of unsupported suspension. Notice the worker in the suspended harness has support at the pelvis; the abdominal viscera remain in approximately normal position, as does the diaphragm, and ventilatory gas exchange can proceed normally.
Now let's look at historic crucifixion. This lady's death was not crucifixion, because there was no "crux" (cross), but her cause of death may well have been similar to that experienced by Christian martyrs.
Crucifixion was not principally designed as a method of execution; there are faster and simpler methods to achieve that end. Rather it was intended to be slowly lethal, thus incorporating torture as punishment and shame as part of a prolonged public display. The component of suffering is implicit in our modern use of the derived word "excruciating."
In a normal breathing cycle, inhalation requires active motion by the diaphragm, while exhalation is passive. When a person is suspended, the dependence of the body moves the chest wall toward a full inspiratory position; exhalation then becomes an active rather than a passive process, requiring lifting the body by pushing with the feet and lifting with the arms, a process made more painful by
the nailing of the feet.
To prolong the crucifixion for perhaps days until inanition and dehydration develop, support for the lower body needs to be supplied with a crude seat (a sedile or sedulum) affixed to the cross, and/or a small plaform to support the feet (nails through the feet would serve the same function). This feature is evident in some artistic portrayals of crucifixion, where the knees are shown to be flexed (embed at the right: a crux simplex without crossbar).
If the authorities (or bystanders) wished to offer a modicum of mercy and effect a more rapid death to end the suffering, one means to do so was to deliver a blow that would break the legs below the knees (crurifragium or skelokopia).
There is a lot more to discuss regarding positional asphyxia. It is relevant to deaths that occur during restraint by law enforcement officers, to deaths in nursing homes when elderly persons become entangled in bedclothes and bedrails, to "Santa Claus" deaths of burglars entrapped in chimneys, and to the deaths of beached whales and thousands of participants at the battle of Agincourt. Later.
Grand mal seizure in a snake
The snake is a Black Racer, photographed in Naples, Florida by the sister of reader Ron Rizzo, who forwarded it to us to share. During the first half of this brief video the snake exhibits only some purposeless writhing on the side of a road. Then it launches into full-blown grand mal seizure activity, which according to the photographer was a pre-terminal event.
Any animal with a brain is susceptible to motor seizures, which are a manifestation of uncontrolled electrical activity in the neurons. If I had to guess at an etiology, the roadside occurrence would suggest to me that the snake had previously incurred head trauma from a passing vehicle, which eventually led to cerebral edema or intracranial bleeding. Alternatively it may have encountered a poison or a neurotoxic venom. In any case, it's a interesting activity to observe.
"Desert varnish" explained
Most readers are familiar with the existence of "desert varnish" - a hard encrustation that develops on rocks exposed to the elements in a dry desert. I had always assumed that the process was a slow oxidation of surface minerals, so a hat tip to reader David Laidlaw for sending me a link that explains that the process is a microbiological one.
Desert varnish is a thin coating (patina) of manganese, iron and clays on the surface of sun-baked boulders. Its origin has intrigued naturalists since the time of Charles Darwin. According to the classic paper by Ronald I. Dorn and Theodore M. Oberlander (Science Volume 213, 1981), desert varnish is formed by colonies of... bacteria living on the rock surface for thousands of years. The bacteria absorb trace amounts of manganese and iron from the atmosphere and precipitate it as a black layer of manganese oxide or reddish iron oxide on the rock surfaces...Image via Wikipedia.
Several genera of bacteria are known to produce desert varnish, including [the extremophiles] Metallogenium and Pedomicrobium... the remarkable hardness of desert varnish, which is almost as hard as quartz (nearly 7 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness)... perhaps 10,000 years are required for a complete varnish coating to form in the deserts of the southwestern United States... For thousands of years Native Americans have used desert varnish for their rock carvings.
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Drury back to the Avs? Not as impossible as you might think
Things could start happening real soon around the Avs and other NHL teams when it comes to some dealing. The NHL startes a trade freeze from Dec. 19-27, so don't be surprised at a few deals going down before then.
Here's one thing I'm hearing from people in the know: The Rangers are so intent on getting Mats Sundin that they may well trade Chris Drury to make room. The Rangers will need to clear some significant salary to allow for Mats' inclusion, and Drury has three more years and $21.5 million left on his contract after this season.
But he also has a no-movement clause to his deal, meaning any kind of trade or demotion to the minors or put through the waiver wire would need his approval first.
The thing about no-trade clauses is, though: Once a player realizes a team wants to trade him, they almost always waive it, provided they get to go to a place they want. Nobody wants to stay around on a team that really would rather trade him.
And if Drury allowed himself to be sent though waivers first and then traded to another team, the Rangers can get half of his salary off their books. The team getting Drury not only gets him, but much of his salary paid by someone else.
Drury's cap-average hit to a payroll, however, is $7.050 million.
The Avs have roughly five million in cap space right now – partly because of Joe Sakic's long-term injury. So maybe if you get a Drury to waive his no-movement clause to come to Colorado and get the Rangers to pay half his salary this year after going through re-entry waivers, you could fit him in – although you'd probably have to move more salary too.
Of the few teams Drury would consider playing for, I'm sure the Avs would be one of them. He always liked Denver and won a Cup here. I've heard San Jose would want him bad though, too.
But maybe if you're Francois Giguere and looking to not only bolster your second line a lot better, and make a nice news splash, you make a real run at Drury. Maybe you sell off some other assets to help ease the payroll too. Ruslan Salei and/or Brett Clark, anyone?
Salei being a healthy scratch tonight definitely got some conspiracy theorists going about him.


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By now, you're probably aware of all the hubbub surrounding Yale law professor Ian Ayres' letter to more than 6,000 retirement plan sponsors, suggesting that they may be violating their fiduciary duty by overcharging their participants (See Melanie Waddell of ThinkAdvisor's news article, "Yale Professor's Fiduciary Threat Has Retirement Execs Fuming").
My first thought upon reading Melanie's story (and a sampling of the myriad others which fill many Google search pages) was to wonder whether the good professor can get away with it. That's particularly an issue considering that Professor Ayres' research report, which backs up his claims, won't even be released until next spring. The retirement plan industry is calling the move "harassment," and it sounds kind of libelous to me. But he is a law professor, so let's assume he knows the law in situations like this.
My second thought is: What a brilliant PR move! And it couldn't have come at a better time. Currently, Phyllis Borzi and the DOL are meeting their stiffest resistance yet to expanding advisors' fiduciary responsibilities to participants in retirement plans: Two new SEC commissioners, two new bills that could slow down or derail the DOL, and troubling new cost benefit data to consider (see Melanie Waddell's August Investment Advisor column, "Fiduciary Stumbling Blocks Surface").
Just when things at the DOL seem to have reached a turning point, along comes Professor Ayres—and suddenly the conversation in the media has shifted to "Why are 401(k) plans overcharging their participants?" It's the kind of publicity that politicians can't ignore, and may even contain a head's up for many RIAs.
A quick look down the Google list shows most major media outlets are covering the story, including: CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR, USA Today, Forbes, Money, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Kiplinger, and MarketWatch, to name a few. More importantly, the Ayres story has drawn renewed attention to a number of "watchdog groups" that have been trying to blow the whistle on 401(k) fees for years, without much traction.
From mountains of collected data, there seems to be two stories that the "sound bite" media have focused on. The first is that most all 401(k)s offer a menu of mutual funds with expense ratios of 127% (the reported 401(k) average), while index ETFs historically deliver about the same performance for 5 to 10 bps. Not surprisingly, the nuances of the decades-long debate over managed vs. indexed portfolios have escaped the media's attention.
Of more substance is the data that seems to have originated with a research group called Demos, which tallied up the various costs associated with 401(k)s (including administrative fees, 12(b)1 fees, mutual fund management and expense fees, transaction costs, wrap fees, consulting services and revenue sharing). According to the group, the combined costs over decades can reduce portfolio returns by up to a third, or some "$278,000 over the working lifetime of 'higher-income' earners."
(A few years back, an article by Mary Beth Franklin in Kiplinger's ran the numbers, concluding, "…if the fees were 1.5% annually, the average net return would be reduced from 7.0% to 5.5%. Over 30 years, the additional charges whittle the account balance by nearly 25%.)
For many years, I've felt that 401(k) fees were outrageous but I never bothered to do the calculations. I never dreamed that they'd reduce returns up to 25% or 33% of a portfolio. Even if these figures are off by 50%, they're still ridiculous. In fact, if these projections are anywhere close to right, it raises the question of whether the tax deferment was worth it in the first place, doesn't it?
In turn, that raises the question of whether fiduciary RIAs today can, in good conscience, recommend that their clients put money into their retirement accounts. (How many advisors actually get the cost figures from clients' plans and run the calculation?)
So far, in addition to calling Ayres' mailing "harassment," the pension industry has had two responses, both of which may be more revealing than the professor's data. The first is that Ayres' not-yet-released data is based on 2009 filings, and are therefore "outdated." Perhaps. But Ayres' letter merely suggested that plans "might" be overcharging their clients. If retirement plans have stopped overcharging—or never were overcharging—you'd think they'd welcome the opportunity to demonstrate this to their clients.
The second response is that "higher fees are warranted by higher levels of service and/or performance." Again, maybe so. But also again, it seems as if this would be easily demonstrated to plan participants. After all, that's how the free market works: I get to decide whether I want to drive a Hyundai or a Ferrari, not the Ferrari dealer.
There's no denying that 401(k) costs are higher—often much higher—than comparable taxable investment accounts. Maybe sometimes they are worth it. How do we know? The best way is to let plan participants see what all of the costs are, what benefits they get, and vote with their retirement dollars.
It looks to me as if Ayres may have given Phyllis Borzi and the DOL a fighting chance to make that happen.


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text:
Engineering or asset information?
2015 February 04, 09:00 CEST
How technology, regulation and efficiency requirements transform technical knowledge management
AUTHOR: Valentijn de Leeuw, Vice President, ARC Advisory Group
The Vision That Triggered Transformation
In 2005, Thomas Tauchnitz of Sanofi-Aventis, a leading pharmaceutical company published an article in a German edition of Automation Technology in Practice, titled 'It's time for an Integration of the Process Design, Engineering and Plant operation processes'. The article consists of a vision and strategy for implementation the concept using computer software. Dr. Tauchnitz explains three basic requirements shall be respected: every information is generated and maintained at only one location, existing knowledge is reused where possible and the software tools stay interfaced while the production plant is in operation.
Tauchnitz sketches the workflow from process design using process simulation software, the transfer of the resulting process information to an computer-aided engineering tool (CAE), common to all engineering disciplines involved in front-end and detail engineering. He explains how modular engineering - concept known since many years – should be implemented: standardised modules comprising all its functions are built, maintained and instantiated for a particular engineering task. As an example a reactor module would contain temperature and pressure measurement and control, valves for material transfer, level control, safety equipment and automation, stirring etc. The corresponding equipment lists, design documentation, safety procedures, testing and qualification procedures would be part of the template as well. Instead of engineering every new equipment, replacement, modernisation or repair action from scratch, the engineer would only deal with adaptation, and integration in a larger system and have more time for optimisation of the design and improvement and maintenance of the modules.
Concurrent or Collaborative Engineering?
Today several intelligent CAE systems provide the possibility for several disciplines during plant engineering to work on the same equipment, from their own perspective and using their own typical way of viewing their work: process flow diagrams (PFD) for process engineers, piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) for automation engineers, isometrics for piping, etc.
When several engineers work on the same item, this type of tool helps in maintaining the integrity of the engineering data. For example if a process engineer changes the maximum temperature or flow rate in a tube, then the pump that should displace this fluid should have specifications that can handle these maxima, and if it cannot, the tool will create alerts for the pump specification. Similarly the pipe diameter should be able to handle the flow rate, and so on. Beyond handling rules, these systems can also handle authoring workflows, including submission, review and validation statuses for changes.
While for engineering procurement and construction companies (EPC's), concurrent engineering may have been a standard practice since the beginning of the use of CAE tools, in some owner-operator (OO) companies a sequential engineering was the norm. Enabling multiple disciplines to work on the same design item has economical, organisational and social implications.
Social and Cultural Aspects
When introducing concurrent engineering, or collaborative sequential engineering using a single engineering data repository, people need to become familiar with new processes and technology. What could be more challenging is that they are required to share their information, their ways of working, and their rationales for making decisions. They sometimes have to learn to collaborate, which includes listening to other's opinions, defining agreed upon on rules and responsibilities for the different contributors, negotiating, collaborative problem solving and resolving conflict constructively. This transformation can create some disturbances, as people have to leave their comfort zones. It can create conflicts and fail, if it is not properly managed. The engineering managers, who are ultimately responsible for a successful change need to have people and change management skills. They can be assisted by change consultants, but for a sustainable implementation they will need to acquire these skills to coach their collaborators long after the change has been implemented. This is not optional, because not only the work climate, but also the productivity depend on it.
The people in an organisation behave according to collective beliefs and rules. In teams these are called norms, for the organisation it is referred to as culture. Some of these rules and beliefs are implicit, that is, they are not explicitly stated although they are operational; some may be unconscious and several may be conflicting with the formal rules and principles of the company. Changing culture successfully requires discovering the reality and making it explicit, then creating a vision that bridges the business objectives and the collective needs, and gradually implementing a new culture and sustaining it. A handbook or a training can help with this, but it requires the leaders to meet with people, listening to their ideas and concerns, explaining, acting on their feedback, involving them in work design, and recognising their efforts in making the change happen.
Organisational and Economic Impact
Although intelligent CAE may enable concurrent engineering, not all engineering organisations use it. ARC did an informal study a few years ago among subsectors of the process industries, ranging from large continuous petrochemicals to pharmaceutical manufacturing on several continents. The survey indicated that around half of CAE users are organised for a fair or high degree of concurrent engineering, but that a third prefers to use sequential engineering. The purpose of several engineering disciplines working concurrently on the same design item is to shorten project time. However users agree that this increases error and iterations that ultimately increases the total effort. EPC's may not have the choice when under great time pressure, but for OO's conceptual engineering design is not on the critical path, and can afford to have longer project duration to save engineering effort. An economic optimisation that balances project cost with value from earlier operational readiness would probably show an optimum at an intermediate degree of concurrent engineering. Users indicated during the same survey that increased engineering productivity of 5 up to 50 percent can be achieved, related to time gains and increased data accuracy, depending on the degree of concurrent engineering used, however this comes at the cost of a significant investment in modular engineering and workflow modeling (see below).
Concurrent and collaborative engineering may cause small detail adjustments to workflows, and definition of responsibilities of individuals that may also surface as frictions on a human level (see above) but technically the organisation would not be affected in a major way.
Modular Engineering and Modular Process Technology
Reuse of information and knowledge is a way of increasing engineering efficiency. The second 'Tauchnitz principle' to reusing knowledge as much as possible (see page 1) implies standardisation on proven modular designs. These are ready to use engineering information for process units or sections, composed of process equipment, instruments, control, piping, pumps, mechanical agitation, etc. An engineer picks such a unit or process section, rather than have to re-engineer the sections, and can concentrate on the performance of the process. When standard modules are lacking, documentation should describe solutions for the engineering task that have been used. Challenges related to modular engineering are the considerable investment in creating the modules. For OO's this is an investment that can pay off over time but for EPC's this could be uneconomical unless the EPC can standardise on a single tool and has the capability to export designs to the CAE tools their clients prescribe.
The F3 Factory project, financed by some 25 companies and the EU, and comprising seven industrial case studies, ran from 2009 until 2013, with the goal to overcome the disadvantages of large-scale continuous processing (high capital investment and rigidity) and small scale-batch processing (inefficiency) and combine the respective advantages by introducing efficiency to multi-purpose, multi-product facilities; and flexibility to world-size continuous facilities. Research objectives included:
- Provide more compact and less costly process designs that lower environmental impact to support 'process intensification'
- Develop standardised, modular, plug-and-play chemical production equipment capable of handling many chemical processes
- Develop engineering methodologies for intensified processes
The idea is that, to scale up production capacity, a manufacturer needs only to add standardised, small-sized units; rather than engineering a larger plant. This reduces engineering cost and time, and reduces equipment cost even further because larger series of equipment can be built. The concept requires a new engineering approach that optimises the process within the constraints of a choice of standard modules, rather than tailoring equipment to the process.
The trend is to produce smaller quantities, introducing gradual improvements in product and process and responding flexibly to market demands. This provides the potential to exploit the flexibility of a plant designed for a range of operating conditions, and thus for designing equipment to fit an expected range, rather than a single optimum. The use of adaptive production optimisation and quality management systems in line with the latest FDA cGMP guidelines will be favorable in these conditions since they will absorb process modifications and variability in processing conditions when some or all of the end-product remains identical.
The use of the modular production concept would eliminate a range of engineering and validation tasks, since varying production rates can be handled by adapting the number of production lines required to produce the required quantities. Similar projects have been done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the USA in collaboration with manufacturers.
Industrial Internet of Things initiatives such as Industrie 4.0, or the Industrial Internet Consortium, have led the industry, in particular the sector producing by batches, to think about how to implement reconfigurable production lines that can respond to varying demands and constraints. This requires new concepts and standards to integrate equipment ad-hoc and in close to real time, including their automation and operations management software components. Modular engineering approaches discussed above, greatly facilitate the engineering of modular process technology and we expect the usage of modular engineering to increase sharply in the near and mid-term future. The batch-oriented industries will be the first ones to adopt the approach, and we expect that also large continuous processing companies will start thinking about rationalising their engineering, construction and operational paradigms and applying these concepts.
e-Qualification and e-Compliance
There is more to Dr. Tauchnitz' vision. The analysis of risks related to the process and the equipment on the product quality, should be reflected in requirement specification, testing and qualification plans. This analysis can be done systematically based on information in the CAE tool, and its workflow can be fully automated in such a system. Test and qualification results can be linked to equipment requirements via the risk analysis and so the process reaching from specification to compliance can be executed in a paperless manner, and can be built efficiently as an extension to intelligent CAE systems. Some providers are pioneering this approach with visionary companies today, creating significant benefits from efficiency and accuracy. ARC expects that this functionality will become mainstream soon, as the compliance pressure for all industries increases constantly, and companies need to respond to this pressure by creating additional efficiency.
Integrated Engineering
The Integration of the Process Design, Engineering and Plant operation processes and third Tauchnitz principle: 'the software tools stay interfaced while the production plant is in operation' have also major implications, both for EPC's and OO's.
During design and build phases our customers tell us that the exchanges between EPC and OO have become more frequent and intense over the past years. OO's want to stay on top of choices made by the EPC during the design trajectory, review progress and co-manage and co-own the work. More and more these exchanges use common intelligent CAE tools that enable parties to share, visualise and discuss design work. Even more significantly, the so-called handover from EPC to OO at commissioning happens more and more in electronic formats. The traditional paper documentation was cumbersome and time consuming to discover and master, and close to impossible to keep up to date. Today more and more OO's want an electronic, intelligent asset information data set, reflecting the 'as-built' situation, to be able to keep it up to date during the plant's life cycle. This is not only efficient from a resource point of view, but it is also more and more a regulatory requirement to be able to produce up to date asset documentation, and demonstrate compliance.
From the point on that the plant starts up for the first time after being built or revamped, at least two distinct, complementary activities use asset information. Engineering uses plant information to plan for changes or improvements such as debottlenecking, heat integration, quality improvements or other projects. Simultaneously, maintenance uses the data to trouble shoot, repair, order spare parts, and so on. If asset information is not maintained during operation and maintenance of the plant, its accuracy gradually degrades over time, and when engineering need to start a project they loose precious months in discovering what the actual state of asset is, rather then working on the engineering task. A major benefit of using intelligent CAE tools is therefore their usage across the plant lifecycle, and the integration of engineering, operations and maintenance processes using a single, up-to-date asset information data. Hence, engineering and asset information become indistinguishable and 'as-built' information is transformed into 'as-maintained' information.
Processes and work design need to be adapted, to make sure that engineering and plant changes are captured in the CAE or Asset Information repository. Also here a culture change is necessary, along the lines of what was described above for engineering organisations.
Based on client testimonials, we believe that users can gain several man-months of engineering and maintenance time per plant. Benefits related to safety incidents and emergency situations are more difficult to quantify. In major accidents the availability and quality of information to base decisions have proven to play a critical role in making correct decisions and reducing damage, injuries and fatalities. The opportunity cost alone of production stops related to asset information will easily justify the effort of implementing integrated engineering.
Interoperability With Control and Other Systems
But this is not all. Dr. Tauchnitz pushed the vision further by stating that a generic model for DCS and PLC programming should be part of the CAE tool. Via a universal interface the programs could be exported to various automation brands, and be compiled within the equipment, with the goal of reusing standardised programming modules within different types of equipment. The author also extends his concept to configuration of production systems, such as MES or Operations Management.
Both for EPC's and OO's this creates major time savings in engineering control systems. For OO's, during the operate-maintain phases of the plant, the benefit would be even more important. OO's generally use several control system brands and could benefit from a uniform engineering approach for multiple brands. As control systems are updated and changed in the field, a challenge arises in keeping the asset/engineering information accurate. The user organisation NAMUR (www.namur.net) has responded to this challenge by defining a standard data format for exchange between process control systems (PCS) and CAE tools (NAMUR Recommendation NE 150, published in October 2014). Dr. Tauchnitz recently reported about a set of demonstrators implementing this data exchange format for a DCS tag, between four CAE systems (Aucotec, Bentley, ESP, Siemens) and three PCS systems (ABB, Siemens, Yokogawa). This opens a highway of possibilities and benefits for users and system vendors alike. The initial momentum used to create the demonstrators should be maintained. Users should require their full implementation by an even larger number of vendors, and its usage should pay off for users in terms of engineering efficiency, for CAE vendors by an increased market size, and by PCS vendors, because of a more favorable life cycle cost.
The interoperability with MES or Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), is still a dream for the future, as is also a bidirectional exchange with process simulation. If those subjects would be pursued, another wealth of benefits would be in reach. The work on the bidirectional interface between CAE tools and PCS shows that what was regarded as unlikely can become reality very quickly, when vision, interpersonal skills and multi-party cooperation coincide. The same is true for interoperability between CAE and MOM or process simulation.
Finally, Thomas Tauchnitz develops the vision for enterprise-wide standardisation and implementation, reduction of the number of systems and interfaces, organisation for centralised maintenance and support and promoting company wide knowledge management. This aspect of the vision has not received much attention yet, but from experience and client case studies on implementation of MOM applications, we know that this approach decreases the total cost of ownership of an application, and thereby shortens payback periods, and increases net added value. We therefore strongly recommend paying attention to this point.
Up-to-date, accurate, easy to access engineering and asset information during the full plant life cycle brings significant engineering efficiency benefits for EPC's and OO's, that users of these systems estimate to be between 5 and 50%, depending on their initial efficiency and the degree of concurrent engineering. Users were spread across various process industry subsectors ranging from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals.
Intelligent CAE systems enable concurrent and collaborative engineering. Engineering efficiencies are obtained because of an accurate, up-to-date, data repository that all engineering have access to at any point in time. These systems help maintaining engineering information integrity.
Concurrent engineering reduces project duration but diminish the engineering efficiency gains. Every company or organisation should determine its optimum ratio of concurrent versus sequential engineering.
The 'as-built' (or 'as-revamped') asset information can be maintained in intelligent CAE systems, that become an 'as-maintained' asset information repository, that both engineering, operations and maintenance use and update, to make optimal decisions. This so called 'integrated engineering' practice increases operational efficiency and safety. ARC estimates that companies will several up to several man months engineering time per plant per year..
Major efficiency gains would be obtained when users would stimulate CAE and PCS vendors to implement the recently published standard NE 150 for bidirectional data exchange between the two types of systems.
Standardisation on systems, methodologies, modular engineering and processes, reduces the total cost of ownership, increases productivity, and reduces training costs.
Bio: Valentijn de Leeus, Vice President, ARC Advisory Group
Valentijn is an independent expert-evaluator of research projects for the European Commission in information technology and communication, social sustainability and worker attractiveness in manufacturing domains. Valentijn holds a PhD of technical sciences from Delft University of Technology (NL) in cooperation with Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris and IFP and also holds a Masters in Chemistry from Utrecht State University located in The Netherlands. Founded in 1986, ARC Advisory Group is the leading technology research and advisory firm for industry and infrastructure.


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text:
Panhard #15 (1904)
Led first three laps of the 1904 Vanderbilt Cup Race
Make: Panhard
Year: 1904
Mechanician: E. Artent
Horsepower: 90
Finish Place: 12
Average Speed:
#15 Panhard (France) driven by George Teste. 90 HP. Finished 12th. Led race after first 3 laps. Ignition problems on Bethpage Road during lap 4.
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1 large bowl chopped rib tip ,about 2 pounds
3 liter water
2 carrot,peeled and cut 2 inch
1 large onion,peeled and cut quarter
4 nos potato,peeled and cut quarter,prefer Idaho potatoes.
sea salt to taste
1 tbsp whole white pepper,crushed or
1 tbsp white pepper powder*optional*
1 stalk cilantro,washed and chopped
1:Prepare medium stock pot with water at high heat.When water rolling boil,place rib tip into the water for 2 minutes to remove the fats and blood from the rib.Remove the rib tip from stock pot and let it run under cold water until clear.
2:Heat water in stock pot at high heat,add in rib tip,ginger,crushed whole pepper ,potatoes,carrot and onion,covered.When the stock and ingredients are rolling boiling reduce heat to medium high,covered.Let's the soup simmer at 30 minutes.
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What to Know About Ports
In many cases, chemo will be administered through a small needle inserted in a vein in your hand or lower arm. And sometimes, it is given through a port, an implanted device that allows drugs to be given intravenously (through an IV) without repeated needle sticks. It's a small, round disc made of plastic or metal that's surgically inserted under the skin, usually in the upper chest. The port becomes the point of entry for all your chemo infusions. It also allows your nurse to draw blood at any time during your treatments.
How is the port implanted?
Getting a port requires a surgery that typically takes less than one hour. While you're under anesthesia, a surgeon or interventional radiologist will make an incision on your chest and lower neck so that the port can be placed inside the body.
Pros to a port
- Comfort; all drugs can be given through the port so you'll no longer require needles
- Drugs can be administered slowly, which helps minimize side effects
- Lower chance that chemo meds will leak into your tissue, causing itching, redness and other skin problems
- No special provisions needed when getting wet, e.g. bathing or swimming
- Blood and platelet transfusions can be easily administered
Cons to a port
- Requires surgery to implant the port
- Risk of infection, bruising and blood clots
- May cause a temporary abnormal heart rhythm
- Temporary tenderness after surgery
How is the port removed?
When it's no longer needed (when you've gone into remission), your doctor or nurse will remove the port. It's generally a painless procedure, and local anesthesia is only sometimes required. A small incision will be made over the port location and the port will be pulled out. The wound will be stitched and covered. You may temporarily feel a bit tender where the port was removed.
Call your healthcare provider immediately if…
- you develop a fever
- you notice any redness, swelling or pain
- there is any drainage around your port