It's Friday Fun Day!

A little bit of Friday Fun for April Fool's Day 2016

Even while being entertained, one should beware manipulation and continue to think critically.

The video, while charming, is a rear projection. It is not affected by anything in the front side of the box.

The 'industrial light' provided is dark, not lit, and even if it were lit, those are not the kind of shadows it would create.  People making the light swing are not making any difference to the projection whatsoever, yet people continue to move the light as if they were causing some kind of change.  It appears as if their participation in this art increased their emotional enjoyment, gave them a sense of creativity and even joy, as well.

Not precisely April Fool, but perhaps a pleasant but cautionary tale against being fooled.

I found that a thoughtful outcome of this art. I hope you do as well.

A botanical and historical Friday Fun Day

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima; Sunday will mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.  Both days are remarkable and memorable for the only example of intentional devastation employing atomic power as a weapon.

I'd like to share this uplifting piece from Upworthy:

It took 25 years for anyone to figure out this bonsai tree survived the Hiroshima bombing.

This Japanese white pine tree is almost 400 years old.
It lives in the U.S. National Arboretum as part of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, where it's the oldest tree in the collection.

It stands just a few feet tall and has carefully pruned piney branches extending from a short, mossy trunk.

Oh, yeah, and it survived the devastating Hiroshima bombing of 1945.

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, two American pilots dropped a 9,700-pound atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Within minutes, the entire city had been leveled. Some accounts say everything within a four-mile radius of the initial blast was incinerated almost instantly.
Except, it seems, for this now-390-year-old Japanese pine tree, which miraculously survived despite being just over two miles away from the center of the blast.
In 1976, the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., received the tree from Japanese bonsai master Masaru Yamaki in celebration of the American bicentennial.

It wasn't until 2001, 25 years later, when Yamaki's grandsons came to visit the tree in person, that officials learned of its amazing journey.
Read the rest here - it's fascinating.

And continuing with the hey-it's-Friday fun botanical theme, in a totally different direction, from Raw Story :

Was Shakespeare high when he wrote his plays?

State-of-the-art forensic technology from South Africa has been used to try and unravel the mystery of what was smoked in tobacco pipes found in the Stratford-upon-Avon garden of British playwright William Shakespeare.
Residue from clay tobacco pipes more than 400 years old from the playwright’s garden were analysed in Pretoria using a sophisticated technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

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Chemicals from pipe bowls and stems which had been excavated from Shakespeare’ garden and adjacent areas were identified and quantified during the forensic study. The artefacts for the study were on loan from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
The gas technique is very sensitive to residues that can be preserved in pipes even if they had been smoked 400 years ago.

What were they smoking

There were several kinds of tobacco in the 17th century, including the North American Nicotiana (from which we get nicotine), and cocaine (Erythroxylum), which is obtained from Peruvian coca leaves.
It has been claimed that Sir Francis Drake may have brought coca leaves to England after his visit to Peru, just as Sir Walter Raleigh had brought “tobacco leaves” (Nicotiana) from Virginia in North America.
In a recent issue of a magazine called Country Life, Mark Griffiths has stimulated great interest in John Gerard’s Herbal, published in 1597 as a botanical book which includes engraved images of several people in the frontispiece. One of them (cited as “The Fourth Man”) is identified by Griffiths as William Shakespeare, but this identification is questionable.
Possibly, the engraving represents Sir Francis Drake, who knew Gerard.
Gerard’s Herbal refers to various kinds of “tobacco” introduced to Europe by Drake and Raleigh in the days of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England.
There certainly is a link between Drake and plants from the New World, notably corn, the potato and “tobacco”. Furthermore, one can associate Raleigh with the introduction of “tobacco” to Europe from North America (notably in the context of the tobacco plant called Nicotiana, from Virginia and elsewhere).

What we found

There was unquestionable evidence for the smoking of coca leaves in early 17th century England, based on chemical evidence from two pipes in the Stratford-upon-Avon area.
Neither of the pipes with cocaine came from Shakepeare’s garden. But four of the pipes with cannabis did.
Results of this study (including 24 pipe fragments) indicated cannabis in eight samples, nicotine in at least one sample, and in two samples definite evidence for Peruvian cocaine from coca leaves.

Shakespeare may have been aware of the deleterious effects of cocaine as a strange compound. Possibly, he preferred cannabis as a weed with mind-stimulating properties.

You can read the rest here.  Personally simply finding pipes with this residue lacks the rigorous provenance that is necessary to assert that Shakespeare owned or used these pipes, as distinct from someone else, much less that at the time he wrote he was under any influence or inspiration than what was naturally occurring inside his head.  But this certainly does shed some interesting lights on what was customary back in ye olde 16th century.

Friday Fun Day - HILLARY-OUS

Conservatives are far too willing and even eager to believe things which are factually false, silly, and usually mean-spirited.  It is sad, but it is also SO stupid that it is unintentionally funny.

The right wing fringe craziest thing I've heard this week -- the claim that Hillary Clinton is a Satanist, and protesters are now believing they are somehow striking terror in her because of some sort of exorcism protesting. 

A little context: versions of this have been around for a long time.   They appear to depend on an ephemeral link between Saul Alinsky, a prominent agnostic, dedicating a book to Lucifer -- in whom he did not believe as a reality, but as a symbol of rebellion.

Multiple authorities on his life and work describe him as having been brought up by devoutly religious orthodox Jews, and holding a sense of identity as Jewish as a result of experiencing rampant anti-semitism in his life, but as being personally agnostic (agnosticism - believing religious claims are unknown and unknowable).  Some people believe that anyone who is not an active believer is an atheist, but that is not correct; there are differences between agnosticism and atheism.

By whatever words, Saul Alinsky was not a believer in an actual Satan, and not a worshipper of any such entity.  However since prominent conservative William F. Buckley claimed in a Playboy interview back in 1972 that Alinsky was "very close to being an organizational genius", he's become the boogeyman of the right about whom many factually inaccurate and hysterical things are claimed -- and then used to attempt to tar others with a too-broad brush.

Back in 2011 this sums it up from Patheos:

Saul Alinsky, SATAN WORSHIPPER!

March 10, 2011 by Mark Shea 1 Comment

…is an urban legend.
Just for the sake of clarity, Alinsky was not a “quasi-satanist”. He was an old school Comsymp lefty rabble rouser. His dedication of Rules for Radicals to Lucifer was as much “satanism” as eating devil’s food cake is a blasphemous sacrament offered to the prince of darkness. He was an atheist who liked sticking it to the man and who naturally sided with rebels in any fight. Lucifer is the biggest rebel of them all, so he offered a tongue in cheek encomium to Old Scratch. The urban legend that he was a serious devil worshipper is pure pseudoknowledge.

To conclude from that Alinsky was a Satanist is foolish on the face of it; to conclude that Hillary Clinton is an Satanist because she wrote a college paper critical of Alinsky is just bonkers.  And yet this appears to be disseminated from a variety of sources which conservatives trust to be reliable and authoritative.  And it appears to be consistent that conservatives do not themselves ever fact check reliably, or bother to think logically and clearly; instead they succumb to the worst excesses of propagnda.

From Yahoo!answers.com:

Is Hilary Clinton a satanist?
My Pastor tells me that this is so

This iteration, some of this is from the silly Youtube video about a secret term paper (secret here translates as 'not actually secret' and not leaked); and for the record, Hillary Clinton has been a Methodist for ages.

The ridiculous right, the fringies, are very serious while the rest of us laugh at them.  Especially the religious right has serious problems with a form of delusional thinking that appears to operate as mental illness and wild superstition.

Here is one of the latest going around now for a while:




Then there was this really funny comment on Right Wing News from some yobbo who thinks he scared Hillary Clinton into running away and hiding, like scaring off a vampire by waving a cross at them or relying on garlic.

Christopher John Rozell
July 29 at 11:07pm

CJR- She ran in that building because my sign exposing her Satanic ways scared her half to death! They even put my quote in there and my name Christopher John Rozell! Heck yeah, talk about making a stand and a difference! That's how you be a True patriot and defend this great nation of the United States of America We The People! http://www.stargazette.com/story/news/local/2015/07/29/hillary-clinton-visits-corning/30848243/

Here is what the coverage of the crazies actually wrote, and it certainly was not an endorsement of  this nutjob as clear, cogent political discourse or discussion:

One group of protesters arrived before 4:30 p.m. with signs — one saying “Hillary Clinton is Satanic / I have Proof!” and “GOD Bless AMERICA.”

“I used to be a Hillary Clinton supporter until I researched and educated myself on her,” Christopher John Rozell of Painted Post said.

What is the big fuss about? NOTHING.  Here is the real deal about the supposedly secret paper Hillary Clinton wrote back in college, demonstrating knee-jerking that would qualify as an audition for the Rockettes:

In fact, however, the thesis had been unlocked after the Clintons left the White House in 2001 and is available for reading at the Wellesley College archives. In 2005, msnbc.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman sent his journalism class from Boston University to read the thesis and write articles about it; one of the students, Rick Heller, posted his article online in December 2005.  The thesis is also available through inter-library loan on microfilm, a method reporter Dorian Davis used when he obtained it in January 2007, and sent it to Noonan and to Clinton critic Amanda Carpenter at Human Events, who wrote a piece on it in March. Although publishing the thesis violates copyright,  it can nevertheless be found on various websites.
The suppression of the thesis from 1993 to 2001 at the request of the Clinton White House was documented in March 2007 by reporter Dedman, who read the thesis at the Wellesley library and interviewed Rodham's thesis adviser. Dedman found that the thesis did not disclose Rodham's own views much. A Boston Globe assessment found the thesis nuanced, and said that "While [Rodham] defends Alinsky, she is also dispassionate, disappointed, and amused by his divisive methods and dogmatic ideology."  Rodham's former professor and thesis adviser Alan Schechter told msnbc.com that "There Is Only The Fight . . ." was a good thesis, and that its suppression by the Clinton White House "was a stupid political decision, obviously, at the time."

Was it a stupid decision?  Or just setting up the crazies for a little ridicule?  I'm inclined to think it was more the latter than the former.

Of course, other right wing nut crazies claim Hillary Clinton is an illuminati witch, the anti-Christ, or possibly a man.

Again from Yahoo!'s special corner for crazy people:

Is Hillary Clinton A Man?

I have heard rumors that Hillary Clinton is actually a man, and that his/her lover...is tv's, Cokie Roberts. Is this true?

Friday Fun Day

The perfect Latino response, humor,  to Donald Trump and right wing anti-Latino bigotry, the Trump pinata.  Pinatas are typically filled with candy; it would be more fitting if this kind of pinata was filled with nuts.  The likenesses are amazing, and apparently these are extremely popular.  Las Angeles and other locations with large Latino populations have been producing these pinatas in quantity.

Bloom County creator Berke Breathed is back after 25 years, with his own crack at the living cartoon that is Trump, both in the cartoon strip, and below.  Karma for the unfounded harassment of President Obama by birther Trump.

From If you Only News:

OPEN LETTER TO FUTURE PRESIDENT TRUMP: We and America call upon you to produce lab evidence proving NO shared DNA between your head fur and your family Lhasa Apso, Goldy Tinkles. If such documentation is thus provided, the Really Loaded Friends of Bloom County will deliver a check for $2 million dollars to your known favorite charity. We wouldn’t joke about this.

Friday Fun-day - Trump Your Cat

Funniest thing I've seen so far in the 2016 election cycle.

From instagram:

trumpyourcat

Donald Purrump

1.Brush your cat 2.Form the hair you brushed into a toupee 3.Place toupee on cat 4.Share & tag @trumpyourcat, DM, or #trumpyourcat >^.~.^<


and they have a presence on face book as well

It's Friday - end of the week fun day

and along with the cartoon fun, enjoy a little Friday science geek, appropriately following the declaration of more candidates for the conservative candidacy for president.  This is applicable for multiple reasons, ranging from how this demonstrates evolution where right wing candidates have repudiated and denied evolution science, and because of the right wing nut move here and abroad to keep Europe (and apparently by extension, America) for Europeans, culturally, linguistically and yes, racially.  Our conservative candidates ALL believe some people are white because that's how Jesus made us, and that Santa Claus is white, too.  

Conservatives, and especially conservative candidates, are, in these areas as in most things, wrong on all counts.

From Science Magazine

Common European traits like pale skin evolved relatively recently in central and southern Europe.
How Europeans evolved white skin

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.
The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe about 4500 years ago.
Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.
First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.
When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.
But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.
Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.
The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago, according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.
Surprisingly, the team found no immune genes under intense selection, which is counter to hypotheses that diseases would have increased after the development of agriculture.
The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis, said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk. “What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”
Anthropological geneticist George Perry, also of Penn State, notes that the work reveals how an individual’s genetic potential is shaped by their diet and adaptation to their habitat. “We’re getting a much more detailed picture now of how selection works.”