The Waluta Yap

The exchange rate of stone money

...the coins were made of aragonite, a material that is not available on Yap, but had to be transported from the island of Palau, approximately 400 km away. The transportation of the material would have taken at least five days over the rough Pacific, and often took the lives of men. The value of the coin depended (and still does) on its diameter, but the number of sailors that were killed in its transportation also have an effect on the value. The more casualties, the more the coin was worth. There is certain logic in this.

(Thanks, Kirby!)

Geoduck Clams

People eat these things.

From Fisheries Canada: The geoduck (pronounced gooey duck) clam is a member of the Phylum Mollusca... Although a few individuals weigh up to 4.5 kg (10 lbs.), the average whole body wet weight is about 1kg. (2.2 lbs.) with an average shell length of about 195 mm (7 ¾ inches) (Harbo 1997). To the first-time observer, this clam could be considered as rather grotesque because its shell is not capable of encompassing the huge body.

From NOAA.GOV: The geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck) clam caught in Northwest Pacific waters, weighs an average three pounds and yields over a pound of flavorful meat.

Don't know about you, but I've got a sudden hankerin' for some geoduck!

Imaginary Parasites

NUSPA: National Unidentified Skin Parasites Association
People share stories about their parasites that look amazingly like pieces of lint, particles of dust, grains of salt, and eyelash hairs.

What's up with people who think they're infested with bugs?
Some debunkage from The Straight Dope.

Delusional Parasitosis
An informational page from UC Davis.

A Medical Mystery: Delusional Parasitosis
Newspaper story that's sympathetic to the problem (with a somewhat creepy picture). An alternative theory is that sufferers don't have actual parasites, but are afflicted with an unusual bacterial infection that mimics some of the parasite-like symptoms.

Morgellons Research Foundation
Some unpleasant pictures of Morgellons disease, a skin condition that mimics scabies and lice.

A google image search for Morgellons returns lots of pictures.

Online Museums; HMS Victory

Some miscellaneous links...

MoOM: Museum of Online Museums
Self explanatory name. I really liked the drafting pencil museum, because I recognized a few of the things from first year Engineering in 1985 (in those days, we used PENCILS to draw lines!) I was like "hey, I had one of those! And I had one of those too!" It made me feel special.
(via SportsFilter)

HMS Victory Cross Sections
Cross-sectional models of the British Warship HMS Victory.

Armed with 104 guns and a crew of 850 men, she served as the flagship of Lord Nelson until his death at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. She sustained extensive damage and never engaged in a battle again.

"One From The Church Village" tells me that the model is inaccurate in that the ballast at the time was iron ingots, not boulders.



In modern parlance, Napoleon was pwned in TBOT.

The Frogs of Titan

One of the apopheniacs over at Mars Rover Blog has discovered that Titan has FROGS and RAIN, and has put together a few animated gifs showing said FROGS and RAIN.

The Economist magazine said that some Nasa scientists were mumbling about chunks of ice floating by in the liquid methane. None of the scientists wanted to speculate publicly, but that's understandable for scientists in general, ever since they were beaten down for perpetrating the evolution hoax on the public.

Or, maybe the moving white specks are just JPEG compression artifacts. But since we may never know for sure, my vote goes for TITANIC (TITANIAN?) FROGS!!!

Here's an image showing a frog hopping (see arrow):


Here's a bigger image showing more specks: titan_anim28oi.gif

Classic Goalie Masks

Classic Masks
Goalie masks from the olden days of the NHL and WHA. Those were the good old days, when character and artistic expression (not to mention scariness) overrode safety concerns.

(This page is inexplicably google-related to AntiQuark.)

UPDATE: Here's a company that sells replica classic masks. The average cost is about $300 to $400 a pop. (Many thumbnails.)

History Re-Repeats Itself

Rudderless at 35000 feet.

After reading this article (copy here) on the rudder failures of the Airbus A310, it brought to mind this old article on the Beechcraft V-tail Bonanza, which had a habit of losing its tail in mid flight. To quote:

The V-tail has a very high rate of in-flight failures. Compared with the Model 33, which is the same aircraft with a conventional straight-tail, the V-tail has a fatal in-flight failure rate 24 times as high as the Straight tail Bonanza. In spite of this glaring statistic, Beech claimed that there was no problem with the V-tail, and for many years the public seemed to agree with Beech. However, the deaths from in-flight failures continued to mount. The V-tail Bonanza is a classic tale of a dangerous item, which because of its popularity continued to kill.

The turning point in the V-tail saga came when the friend of an influential person was killed...

The clubs devoted to Bonanza aircraft generally supported the company's position. However, in 1984 a personal friend of Donald L. Monday, president of the American Bonanza Society, was killed in a V-tail break-up. The American Bonanza Society was an organization that until this point had actively supported Beech's position. The death of Monday's friend, however, changed the relationship.

In other words: if the Airbus really does have a rudder problem, the next crash will have to kill someone who's a "higher-up" before anything gets done about it.


What a corporation would look like if it was a person.

On a related note, these articles remind me of the documentary The Corporation. In this film, the authors apply conventional psychological evaluations to the concept of the corporation, and discover that the corporation displays all the characteristics of a psychopath:

Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a "psychopath."

Racial Slurs

Origins of Racist Terms (or here)
Massive list of the etymology of racist terms. Never before has such a cesspool of virulent racism been so interesting. Little did I know that there are many slurs for Canadians. I've never heard them before, then again, I'm Canadian -- nobody would slur me, for they know I would pop a cap in their ass.

Here's an excerpt of the Canada-related slurs. I've censored some of them so I have less explaining to do next time I visit my mother...

Slur	Represents	Reasons/Origin
51st Stater	Canadians	Self-explanatory.
Angie	Canadians	English-speaking Canadians. Short for "Anglophone" and used in Quebec, especially for Anglophones in Quebec province itself.
Beaver-Beater	French- Canadians	Fur trade.
Canadian	Blacks	Used as a masked replacement for 'N*****.'
Cani****	Black	Canadians Combination of Canadian and N*****.
Cankee/Cankie	Canadians	Canadian-Yankee.
Canuck	Canadians	From Johnny Canuck, emerging in 1869 as a "younger, simpler cousin to America's Uncle Sam or Britain's John Bull." Reborn during World War II as Canada's 'defender from the Nazi menace.' Could only be a slur if you say it the right way.
Canucklehead	Canadians	Diminutive of Canuck.
Cheeser	Canadians	Used primarily in northern Washington State, refers to Canadians who cross the border to shop for big blocks of inexpensive American Cheese.
Coon Ass	Cajuns	French-Canadian Exiles who migrated to Louisiana. Fur traders. Originated during WW2 when the French soldiers heard the Cajun-French American forces speaking a very old version of the French language peppered with slang, they called them 'conasse', which translates roughly to mean 'cheap whore'. Of course the other non-Cajun members of the American forces heard this as "Coon Ass", and it stuck.
Eh-Holes	Canadians	Canadians are known for saying 'eh?' a lot.
Frostback	Canadians	A play on "wetback", altered to fit Canadians.
Hoser	Canadians	From western-Canadian practice of stealing gas with a siphon, ending up with a mouthful of gasoline. Suggests low intelligence. On the Canadian TV show SCTV, "Bob and Doug McKenzie" always called each other Hosers.
Ice N*****	Canadians	Canadian Blacks. It's cold in Canada. Coined by comedian Scott Thompson from the Kids in the Hall.
Iceback	Canadians	Another take on frozen Wetback. See Frostback.
Maple Leaf N*****	Canadians	Their flag has a maple leaf on it.
Moosef*****	Canadians	Tom Green, a Canadian, mocked sexual contact with a moose on his television show.
Newfie	Canadians	Newfoundlanders. Some of the people from Newfoundland are considered to be less intelligent.
Nigloo	Blacks	In northern Canada, it refers to Blacks living way up north in the cold with the Eskimos.
Puckhead	Canadians	For their love of hockey.
Rubberhead	Canadians	Heads bounce off ice in hockey games.
Seal-F*****	Canadians	Extension of sheep-f*****, roo-f*****, etc.
Snowback	Canadians	Play on 'wet-back'.

Escherizer; Sphere Eversion; Perspective

Some links from the Geometry Junkyard...

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Escherization
Researchers create an automated system that will take an arbitrary image and "Escherize" it so it tiles the plane.

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The Optiverse
Six-minute video (with a two-minute "hilights" reel) showing a new way to turn a sphere inside out, complete with dystopian ambience-music and breathless narration.

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Six Point Perspective

The sixth (South) point is missing from five point perspective drawings. Within five point we get half, or a hemisphere, of the visual world around us. To get the rest of the picture, the the whole picture that is, you must add that last vanishing point. You would have to turn around and look at the room BEHIND you to see the rest of the room and to find that last point.

Smart Rocks (?)

AFRL Propulsion Directorate: Video Archive
Don't you hate it when you find a video that's intriguing, and you'd like to learn more, but you can't find any info about it anywhere? Well, here's some more of that.

From what I've gleaned from google, these are "smart rocks" from Reagan-era Star Wars research. These are test videos of smallish (basketball sized?) rocket powered things that hover around a bit and do some maneuvers. One of them, the Boeing ACAT, looks like it was retrofitted for planetary exploration. It lands and poops out a robotic hexapod that walks away. (More info at Chronology of Missile Defense Tests.)

boeing_acat.mov
boeing_leap.mov
martinmarietta_scit.mov
rocketdyne_asat.mov

Space 1999 Eagle Restoration

Eagle One: A Complete Restoration
Step-by-step explanation of the cleaning, fixing and restoration of an original Eagle model from the Space 1999 series. The models really took a beating during filming. They were cracked from impacts, charred from pyrotechnics, full of concrete dust, and repainted multiple times to hide scars.

IMHO, the Eagle was the real star of the show. It was like a super-versatile piece of space-aged construction equipment. (It should have been painted orange, actually.) All the parts were modular, and could be interchanged. It was also made of titanium, long before titanium was cool.

I downloaded and watched a few episodes recently using WinMX. In hindsight, everything about that show sucked, except the Eagles.

No Hacking Logo

This image now graces the front page the coding guidelines where I work. It's not intended to mean hacking in the criminal sense, but more in the sense of a hackjob that produces wretched code. Since this logo came into being, crappy code at our company has gone down by 38.5%. Special thanks go out to my autistically gifted cow-orker J'ohn!

Speaking of coding standards, I just worked my way through a Big Client's standard the other day. We're expected to follow it. If I could describe the theme of the document in one sentence it would be "Hungarian notation is our saviour." It's a hyperdetailed 20 pager describing how you shall name variables, where you shall put spaces, how you shall indent your braces... I think the word "shall" is used 200 times in that document. It's odd to read, how often do you hear the word "shall" in everyday life? Maybe they got a lawyer to write it.

One thing that's conspicuously missing is any mention of C's assert function. (I actually searched, and it wasn't there.) Saturating your code with asserts WILL make a difference in code quality. The asserts won't magically make your code better, but if the code's crappy, it won't run for very long; it'll repeatedly crash and produce terse error messages of what went wrong (which is what asserts do). Asserts will force you to improve the quality of your code.

Besides, whenever a big software failure happens, how often do you hear the official reason being, "oh, one of our developers used 4-space tabs instead of 8-space tabs." Never.

Leopard Geckos

Here's a good looking animal. It's like the cat of the reptile kingdom. Look at the pretty pictures! (Google image search). I'd get one of these if I didn't think my kid would use it as a stretch-toy. (Gecko Fact Sheet).

Stepanov Archive

The Collected Papers of Alexander A. Stepanov

Papers, class notes, and source code from the inventor of the STL (Standard Template Library) for C++.

(via Lambda the Ultimate)

HTML Entity Viewer

html_entity_viewer.html: Browse through the 65000 HTML Unicode entities, 1000 characters at a time. Hover over a character to see its code. (JavaScript, tested for Mozilla, IE and Firefox.)

Myth of the Samurai Sword

Email from "One From the Church Village":

An interesting bit of info, paraphrased from this page:

http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/MAlies.htm

We all know that the Japanese refined their swordmaking skills to an incredible degree. But WHY did they do so? For one reason, they didn't use contemporary industrial practices (necessitating a high degree of hand-craftsmanship). Also, they had to import almost all of their iron...and the stuff they got was usually poor quality. So, they had to fold the steel umpteen times, just to impart a decent amount of carbon into it.

This helps explain why swords were so treasured and revered. They were hard to get, took forever to make, and cost a fortune!

The guy also goes on to say that the katana is overrated. The Damascus swords were possibly better...they had to penetrate heavy armor, and generally survive a lot more battering. They were not as finely and laboriously made...because they didn't need to be. The starting iron was of a higher quality, and the forging techniques were more advanced. Also, Western weapons were constantly evolving, unlike the swords in the culturally static Japan.

The guy concludes with, "Therefore, the unilateral claim that the katana is the best sword ever is not just an overstatement, but an untruth. It fails to take into consideration the immensely complex factors that go into weapons technology and application."

Yay, the West!

(Thanks, Kirby!)

Robotwisdom is Back

What the hell! After a one-year-plus hiatus it looks like Jorn Barger's robot wisdom blog is back in business. Barger was one of the original bloggers (maybe the first) and he coined the now ubiquitous term "weblog."

There was a panic in the blogosphere when he stopped posting in 2003... he had to come out of hiding to reassure everyone that he was OK, but just didn't feel like blogging anymore.

From the dates of the links, it appears that he restarted in mid-Feb this year.

All I can say is, wow.

The Soroban / Abacus Handbook

A Lego Abacus.

The Soroban / Abacus Handbook is a how-to guide for basic and advanced abacus techniques. The abacus was originally designed for addition and subtraction, but you can also do multiplication, division, square roots and negative numbers (although not painlessly).

The abacus is the complement of the slide rule; it's good at addition but not multiplication, whereas the slide rule is good at multiplication but not addition.

Some slide rules "solved" this problem by having an addiator, a mechanical abacus-like device, attached to the back (examples here and here.)

I don't have an abacus yet (there aren't too many on eBay) but maybe I'll get the Abacus Book & Abacus at Amazon. It seems like a good deal.

In the meantime, I'll have to rig up a two-digit beginner's abacus using some Cheerios and drinking straws. (Or donuts and pepperoni sticks, depending on how hungy I am at the time...)