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Twiddle poop

Koettke mentions Francis Grose’s Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue published in 1811. A few samples:

FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.

COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.

TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.

TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.

ROUND ROBIN. A mode of signing remonstrances practised by sailors on board the king’s ships, wherein their names are written in a circle, so that it cannot be discovered who first signed it, or was, in other words, the ringleader.

Posted in It's life.


Magnetic twisters

Very impressive views of the Sun.

Posted in It's life.


Little angels

The NYT’s Green Blog writes about a South American stingless bee:

Made up of more than 600 species, each of which makes its own version of honey, this tribe of bees lives throughout the world’s tropics. Like honeybees, they are social and form colonies with a queen and workers, many of which collect nectar from various flowers before bringing it back home to churn painstakingly into honey. Their foraging transfers pollen from one bloom to another, a service that many plants — and agriculture as we know it — could not survive without.

Their honey is drinkable rather than spoonable because it contains more water. The story at the link above is interesting and tells that there isn’t much knowledge about how to harness this bee for commercial use.

Posted in Ag, Animal World.


John Glenn

I remember the day. I was in fifth grade when John Glenn made his historic trip. My teacher, Mrs. Snyder, occasionally showed us the progress of the spaceflight with her arm and hand making a partial semicirFcle as the commentary was broadcast via the school’s intercom system.

On second thought, that was seventh grade. Mrs. Snyder was two years earlier when someone went into space and came back to Earth without circling the globe. Time to visit Mr. Google.

Posted in It's life.


Manufacturing jobs

Robert Reich capsulates some political season boasting this way:

Mitt Romney says he’ll “work to bring manufacturing back” to America by being tough on China, which he describes as “stealing jobs” by keeping value of its currency artificially low and thereby making its exports cheaper.

Rick Santorum promises to “fight for American manufacturing” by eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturers and allowing corporations to bring their foreign profits back to American tax free as long as they use the money to build new factories.

President Obama has also been pushing a manufacturing agenda. Last month the president unveiled a six-point plan to eliminate tax incentives for companies to move offshore and create new lures for them to bring jobs home. “Our goal,” he says, is to “create opportunities for hard-working Americans to start making stuff again.”

But Reich says it ain’t gonna happen because of this:

But American manufacturing won’t be coming back. Although 404,000 manufacturing jobs have been added since January 2010, that still leaves us with 5.5 million fewer factory jobs today than in July 2000 – and 12 million fewer than in 1990. The long-term trend is fewer and fewer factory jobs.

Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs because the old assembly line has been replaced by numerically-controlled machine tools and robotics. Manufacturing is going high-tech.

The goal, he says, should be to create good jobs for those without college degrees, manufacturing or otherwise. American corporations are doing well, but the American worker isn’t sharing in the bounty.

Posted in Econo.


Overtime loss

Morenci gave league-leading Summerfield all it could handle but lost by a point in overtime after missing a couple of free throws.

Posted in It's life.


Crazy from your cat

A Czech researcher says a parasite in cat feces can make you crazy. The article starts off this way: “Jaroslav Flegr is no kook.”

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Posted in Animal World.


Milking it

The Wooster Collective passed this interesting graffiti along.

Posted in It's life.


More like China

David Sirota ponders the future of American manufacturing. The change in America is that wages are declining:

Now that this consensus is finally out in the open, the real question for America is simple: Do we accept an economic competition that asks us to emulate China?

If our answer is yes, then we should support current state legislative proposals to reduce child labor protections; back federal legislation to eliminate all environmental, wage and workplace safety laws; and applaud corporations that crush unions and further reduce wages in America. We should also probably encourage our fellow countrymen to follow Apple Inc.’s Chinese workforce by simply accepting $17-a-day paychecks, 12-hour workdays and six-day workweeks. Indeed, if we accept this race-to-the-bottom style of competition, then we’re basically saying Chicago should look more like Chengdu; our heartland should look more like the poverty-stricken interior of China; and 21st century America should look more like late-19th century America.

Posted in Econo.


Birth has gone viral

This article explains how we all owe our lives to a virus:

In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.

The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.

What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.

Read on, about monkeys, mice and rabbits.

Posted in It's life.