Category Archives: Uncategorized

Perhaps in light of my previous post, in which I mentioned that discovering Clinton did not lead to disaster might lead some of the GOP base to wonder about their leaders, the refusal of GOP Senators to hold confirmation hearings of Merrick Garland for the SCOTUS is not quite as deeply bewildering as it may seem (although I may have mentioned this before, but think of it as confirmation). By most accounts, Garland is a solidly middle of the road judge with impeccable credentials and a record excelled by no one.

If the GOP Senators permit themselves to be seen rejecting someone who, frankly, is acceptable to the vast majority of Americans, then once again the castle in which the leaders of the GOP base have secreted themselves becomes a little less secure. The right-wing media has blitzed the GOP base with the message that the liberals, from Clinton to Pelosi to Obama, are untrustworthy and prone to extremist actions.

Garland is a nail in the coffin of that propaganda, one that the power-hungry leaders do not care to risk. Remember Trump at the announcement of Scalia’s passing? Did he express admiration for Scalia, or sadness at his passing?

The first thing out of his mouth way “Delay, delay, delay!” Don’t even let the liberals make their official case. Then the others at that debate echoed him.

And, ironically, it may be Trump who permits that nail to be driven into the coffin. His negative impact on the the chances of the general GOP selection of candidates in the Senate may give the Democrats the majority they need, and if the current rules on filibustering SCOTUS candidates permit the GOP to continue the ridiculous circus of blockading the nomination, these can be changed, as retiring Senator Harry Reid asserts in this Talking Points Memo story:

“I really do believe that I have set the Senate so when I leave, we’re going to be able to get judges done with a majority. It takes only a simple majority anymore. And, it’s clear to me that if the Republicans try to filibuster another circuit court judge, but especially a Supreme Court justice, I’ve told ’em how and I’ve done it, not just talking about it. I did it in changing the rules of the Senate. It’ll have to be done again,” Reid told TPM in a wide-ranging interview about his time in the Senate and his legacy.

“They mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion,” Reid said, snapping his fingers together. “So I’ve set that up. I feel very comfortable with that.”

Then the question becomes whether Clinton stays with Garland or moves to a different candidate – assuming she wins the Presidency. While progressives may groan at the thought of Garland or a similar candidate, such a candidate may have a substantial impact on the ongoing process of reform of the GOP, as advocated by noted conservative Bruce Bartlett, by disproving the lie. By exposing one of the longest living assertions from the right-wing media concerning their loyal opposition, the Democrats and Clinton will expose the GOP base, especially those with open minds and hearts, to a bit more truth – and the leadership may lose another fingernail as it clings to power.

But the lies and obfuscations will continue. Get the popcorn, because nothing stops the desperate. But let’s hope the Senate goes to the Democrats, because they appear to be far closer to sanity than the GOP.

Credit: Defensive Driver’s Discount

It occurred to me that some readers may not realize that “burning hydrogen,” i.e., the rapid oxidation of hydrogen, results in heat (which we can use for work) and the emission of H₂O, aka water. And while for most folks the thought of water dribbling from their cars’ exhaust pipes may evoke some laughter, it actually gives me pause. Minnesota, in January, with cars dribbling water. It’s not a good thought when it turns into black ice and leaves us all piled up in the ditches.

That image on the left is what evokes deep concern for seasoned Minnesotans. Bad enough when out walking, but hitting a patch of that at 55 MPH will lead to an experience outstripping a mere roller-coaster.

But perhaps that’s easily remedied. he says, remembering some very unfortunate black ice incidents. Maybe the water, fresh from the heat of oxidation, is warm enough not to freeze to the pavement.

A reader shares his own picture:

Thank you, that’s lovely. Another reader comments:

Just beautiful, Hue & Deb.

Deb took the hatchet to the garden today. Half the hostas are gone, the sage has been pushed back to its natural territory, the oregano has had its top taken off, and the irises were chopped flat. And on the weekend we took down the last of the tomato plants. The rear of the garage looks positively bare.

’tain’t beautiful no more! Beginning to look like we’re battening down the hatches for winter. Just looking at that rain coming in, I’m thinking that might be a foot of snow if it was a little colder. Will winter storms recapitulate our summer storms of this year? Only time will tell.

But the Dusty Miller has been spared so far. Charm will get you a far piece with Deb.

Navajo on The Daily Kos has another excellent update on the pipeline activities / desecration of Indian sacred lands in North Dakota:

Last night on October 22, 2016, Dallas Goldtooth reported, via Facebook Live about the 83 arrests that happened yesterday near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation where American Indian Nations are resisting the construction of a four-state oil pipeline being constructed under the Missouri River, the water source for 17 million people. My detailed news timeline on Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) v. The Water Protectors can be read here if you need it. …

Various people on the ground reported night-before-last on Facebook that:

• Four semi-trucks worth of pipe were being delivered to the burial sites that were desecrated on Labor Day.
• Photos show them parked ON the desecrated grave sites with trucks. Cranes, pipes, and equipment are being delivered.
• Helicopters are overhead. [The ‘copters are constant, keeping the camps awake at night.]
• At least one new blockade is set up, facilitated by the national guard, north of camp, on highway 1806, just south of Fort Rice.
• Bi-plane is now circling.

These are all shots over the bow to incite our people to gather and force us to protect our ancestral burial sites.

It may be getting cold, but the coleus seems unfazed.

NASA published further information on the Plutonian features tentatively identified as clouds a few days ago:

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

[Alan Stern, principal investigator] said that Pluto’s complex, layered atmosphere is hazy and appears to be mostly free of clouds, but the team has spied a handful of potential clouds in images taken with New Horizons’ cameras. “If there are clouds, it would mean the weather on Pluto is even more complex than we imagined,” Stern said.

Meanwhile, the New Horizons space probe is not inactive, but is instead observing Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs):

Both Hubble and cameras on the New Horizons spacecraft have been aimed at KBOs over the past two years, with New Horizons taking advantage of its unique vantage point in the Kuiper Belt to observe nearly a dozen small worlds in this barely explored region. MU69 is actually the smallest KBO to have its color measured – and scientists have used that data to confirm the object is part of the so-called cold classical region of the Kuiper Belt, which is believed to contain some of the oldest, most prehistoric material in the solar system.

“The reddish color tells us the type of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 is,” said Amanda Zangari, a New Horizons post-doctoral researcher from Southwest Research Institute. “The data confirms that on New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons will be looking at one of the ancient building blocks of the planets.”

When it comes to election rigging, a reader has a comment:

Of course Trump doesn’t have a leg to stand on. But just minutes ago I heard a serious, long interview on MPR where they talked oh so gently to a woman who was a Trump supporter, who did not trust the media for information, who thought the voting was rigged. The MPR reporter missed the obvious question about how the government assures us the elections are fair, so that she could then say, well, the gov can’t be trusted. Which leads to, if she does not trust media and does not trust gov, where the hell does she get her information? She sounded “reasonable” in word choice and tone, but she was an idiot. And the media just keeps pandering to these people.

My impression is that they’ve been trained by the conservative media that if some institution isn’t one of a small collection of media, then it’s suspect. Here’s the thing – what will break the faith of a user of a particular website? I see the MPR reporter as being sort of stuck, because you can’t yell someone into sensibility as you see it – they have to find it themselves, or they’ll never have faith in the other side. All I can think is that as the divergence between the reporting and ideology from reality is the only thing that’ll do it, and even then those who are feeding on the lifeblood of the victims will do whatever they think they need to in order to retain the loyalties of those consumers.

Notice I word this so that it could apply to what might be considered to be liberal news sources as well – I firmly believe in digging at the foundations of beliefs, and this is something that should be done with any media, comparing what it reports with reality and ask whether they are congruent enough to trust as “best efforts.”

The scientist, about to get it from the queen cockroach.

The Nest (1988) explores the dangers of accelerating cockroach evolution through the application of survival pressures. Sounds like an intellectually stimulating tale that’ll educate while titillating, yes?

Don’t believe that shit.

Horrible special effects, mediocre, or worse, acting – although I liked the scientist for her impeccable coiffure in the midst of disaster and mild misanthropy, while my Arts Editor conceived a cautious liking for the exterminator – a bad, confusing plot – whatever happened to the lass with the monster headphones – and creatures that are not only developing resistance to cockroach poison, but have learned how to take over the bodies of their victims.

Cockroach-powered zombies, if you will.

Much like The Blob, their only real vulnerability is a good CO₂ fire extinguisher, but how you do that to an entire island boggles the mind. My Arts Editor took to moaning during our debut viewing.

Avoid, avoid, avoid!

Regarding the helicopters in sand pictures a reader writes:

Credit: Unknown, collected from an email.

Yikes. If there’s enough sand grains in the air to be doing that, think about what the turbine engines are sucking in — and they move at a much higher speed than those rotors.

My Arts Editor wondered if it was possible to coat the blades in something that won’t spark, but I opined that this would add to the weight of the vehicle – not a good idea.

The 2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Finalists are now available.

Hydrogen has been mooted about as a power source, attracting interest from various engineers (including rotary engine experts – rumor has it that their Wankel has been modified to successfully run on hydrogen), but it has a few problems, such as transportation and storage. One of the biggest problems has been refinement. Like fossil fuels, hydrogen isn’t easily available in ready-to-consume form, but instead must be refined from an impure form, typically methane (CH4). This takes a lot of heat, and results in the release of that carbon atom into the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. In fact, that makes it a non-starter.

NewScientist (8 October 2016) reports on the efforts of scientists to capture that carbon – and a breakthrough may have been achieved. Jon Cartwright reports:

After two years of trial and error, [Alberto Abánades and Carlo Rubbia, a Nobel Prize Winner, ] had what they thought was a viable reactor design: a vessel about the height and diameter of a hockey stick lined with quartz glass and stainless steel and filled with molten tin. Its external foil insulation made it look rather like a domestic hot water tank but it worked: they bubbled methane in at the bottom while raising the temperature of the tin up to 1000 °C, until hydrogen gas spouted continuously from the top.

But the real test was what it looked like inside. After two weeks, Abánades and colleagues switched off the reactor and peered in. Soot had indeed formed, but it had all floated neatly to the tin’s surface, where it could be scraped away like the slag in an ore refinery. “We could even have operated the reactor for a couple more days,” says Abánades. Last year, repeating the experiment at 1200 °C, the team managed to convert nearly 80 per cent of the methane they pumped in into hydrogen (International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol 41, p 8159).

Problems remain, such as supplying the power to heat it – but that may be resolvable without too much fuss. It’s an interesting advance towards a hydrogen future.

It suddenly occurred to me today that there’s a reason for panic among the GOP donors and high level administrative types in the RNC over the possible election of Clinton to the Presidency. It played out in my head in a fictional – but probable – conversation with a conservative friend in, say, four years, and basically consists of this line:

Say, she wasn’t so bad for the country.

Followed by various unprintables concerning Fox News, Limbaugh, and the others who predict disaster for the country if Clinton should become President. (I’ve actually already begun hearing of disenchantment with Fox News from a conservative friend or two. And with Limbaugh, but that’s an older phenomenon.)

I anticipate a redoubled effort to isolate GOP voters from the realities of the country as the years pass. Leaders hate to lose their leadership, and the current crop does tend to come without moral scruples.

The movie Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) is a story celebrating the strength of stories. Kubo is a boy with an ill mother, one eye, and a boatload of magic that appears to surprise no one. His other eye? Possessed by this grandfather, who wants them both. Allied with his grandfather are Kubo’s two aunts, flying about in wide brimmed hats and loaded for bear, with a haunting indifference affected by certain Chinese kung fu movies.

Kubo cares for his injured mother, who gives her life to slow down her sisters, those aunts.  He is instructed never to be without his monkey charm, later brought to dazzling life by his mother.  In the course of their story, they meet an ally encountered along the way, an amnesiac samurai who has been cursed to be a beetle.

And Kubo has powerful magic. Through the instrumentality of his shamisen, the origami paper he carries in his pack becomes flying birds, miniature samurai, a Chinese junk, even a fabulous fire breathing chicken, made at the request of an elderly villager who tells him that the comedy element it brings to his story of a brave warrior will help balance the story.

This advice-giving is echoed throughout the movie. It’s a serious movie, but it has humor as its leavening, and it brings individuality to the characters and spice to the story. Kubo excels in many aspects, but most important is that its core story, the place where everything begins, is a competently, even excellently-crafted story. In some respects this movie could even be viewed as a rebuke to the movie-making industry’s worst excesses, wherein the storyteller is not accorded the time and resources to build the magnificent story necessary to make the visual aspects of the story worthwhile.

The story is good and probably new to American audiences. As Kubo meets and overcomes various barriers, he learns from them; he internalizes those lessons to grow stronger, and perhaps a little wiser. By the time we reach the climactic penultimate scene, we may know what’s coming as the Moon-King makes his appearance, but we’re still anticipating it, and it won’t disappoint the traditionalist.

But there’s the general recognition that stories are composed of substories, and that they are as important as the primary. The beetle’s amnesia, and consequent loss of his personal story, is explicitly acknowledged as a lost story, and a deep personal loss for the beetle. Kubo himself does not exist through some family inheritance, but by working – he’s a story-teller, retelling the stories his mother has told him as she raises him. The movie echoes with the importance of stories to the culture of humanity.

Visually, the movie is a treat. A stop-action CGI movie, it appears as if everything is made of paper, and sometimes this approach is brought front and center.  A dream sequence involving the sea is palpably made up of sheets of linked paper, and of course Kubo’s musical origami is also tangibly paper. But it also functions as a double meaning, for those who know the difficulty of origami and compare it to the apparent ease Kubo has in creating his creatures using music; it leads us to wonder just how much practice was necessary for him to reach the level of mastery he has attained. We are allowed to see the magic of a constructed world, from the beauty of paper lamps as they transform into golden herons in flight, to a fearful overhead view of Kubo’s mother sacrificing herself in order to slow her malign sisters.

The music is well considered and presented, as are the voices, including rare appearances by George Takei of Star Trek fame, Ralph Fiennes and Brenda Vaccaro.

All this said, the movie is not perfect. At times the mouths move in very unnatural ways. My Arts Editor and I discussed the possibility that this was purposeful, but were unable to come to a conclusion. The behavior of Kubo in the final battle scene has a certain stereotypical quality to it, as if the visual artists had a deadline and, perhaps, couldn’t quite be as creative as necessary; I refer to the facial expressions as Kubo battles. Defiance is very good, of course, but we’ve seen it a thousand times. Something a little more intriguing would be nice.

I know I’ve harped on characters who exist for the plot, but in this case, even though they do, it’s their very nature to do so, so I didn’t actually mind it. And, in contrast, the villagers are living their lives as disaster overtakes them. The balance and contrast is actually a nice element.

But the story details could have used a little more creativity. Certainly this is context-sensitive. A plot twist used the first time is, assuming it’s effective, innovative; the tenth time, it’s just boring. And we do crave novelty. The movie often achieves novelty through the interplay of the monkey and the beetle, but when Kubo must face his grandfather alone, I found myself hoping that Kubo would not be the defiant youngster with a desperate edge, as all signs were pointing; I literally hoped that his grandfather would appear, expecting a cowed or defiant boy, and instead be met by, “Hello, grandfather. I’ve been hunting you.” When your opponent is stronger and smarter than you, then you must make them think themselves to death. (With apologies to C. J. Cherryh.) And, finally, I was not fully convinced of the plausibility of the motivations of the grandfather. It might have been better to leave those obscure, as in that of the antagonist of No Country For Old Men.

That said, the final scene, wherein the question of just what does one do with a defeated god, is quite creative (and unlikely to be reused). It is a lovely multilayered answer, playing with both the realities of such a situation, and handling it without resort to violence, and, again, a reference to the very nature of story-telling: lying in an attempt to expose a deeper truth (another apology, to V is for Vendetta this time, although I suspect the makers of that movie, or the author of the graphic novel source material, took it from somewhere else).

Strongly Recommended.

“Those everted lungs have gone toes up.” – Arts Editor

The visuals are atrocious. Here’s the original pic of the everted lungs. I’ll spare you the vision of toes up lungs.

Or maybe I’m mixing my metaphors with a razor blade. My wife sent me a collection of Amazon advertisements for wooden watches, which I can only hope is a little different from wooden nickels. Here’s my favorite (based entirely on looks) of the bunch.

But, as I mentioned to her, they look a little fragile. Given the condition of my current watch, made of metal and glass, I can’t help but wonder how many pieces this sort of watch would be in after a year.

After using digital watches for years, I find I favor the old analog dial faces more – they have a certain grace that digitals often lack. (Oh, and I always hated those watches with calculators built in. Hate hate hate.) I suppose you could make an argument that this is a responsible use of renewable materials, if in a tiny way. But then you’d risk being shouted down by those who would like to return to the old ways. The real old ways.

Go to bed at dusk, get up with the sun. When the sun’s directly overhead, eat lunch.

Not my style, though.

I happen to be wearing a Fossil watch myself. I wonder if they’ve put together a model that features a T-Rex as the hands? Or would that be jumping the shark?

(Functioning on maybe 4 hours sleep. If you can call this functioning…. but the visual of jumping a shark was in appalling bad taste and in no way will I be sharing it at this time.)

Menna A. Farouk of Al Monitor reports on two women drummers in Egypt who are working on creating an all-women drum band in Cairo, Egypt – and in the process nudging society along:

Donia Sami and Rania Omar started the first female drumming band in Egypt to challenge Egyptian society’s stereotypes and encourage more Egyptian women to take up their art.

“Art is for everyone,” Donia, 21, told Al-Monitor. “Playing any instrument is a right of every woman on earth, especially if she is passionate about it,” added the young drummer, who began to play at the age of 16 and is also studying acting and directing.

In Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, banging on drums has usually been associated with men rather than women, and performances by female drummers are seen by conservative societies as abnormal and shameful. Some people also believe that women cannot be drummers because the art requires physical strength, stamina and endurance.

“We want to change this social stereotype and let society know that women can be and do whatever they want to be and do,” Donia said.

As I enjoy a good drumming, I looked them up. Here is their Facebook page where a couple of drumming videos are to be found.

But around some stars it gets odder. Nevermind the common stories about the planets with liquid iron – that’s just heat. NewScientist (8 October 2016) reports on malformed stars and their attendant planets’ behavior:

Earth’s tilt gives our planet its seasons. But hot, massive “early-type” stars can spin almost 100 times faster than the sun, creating a midriff bulge. The gas around the star’s equator is then further from its centre, so it cools more than other parts of the star’s surface, while the poles remain hot and dense.

John Ahlers at the University of Idaho in Moscow wondered how this might change the seasons on an orbiting planet. If its orbit is angled, it would be directly over the star’s chilled equator twice in each orbit, and would have two summers and two winters a year.

Ahlers found that difference could mean the planet’s surface would oscillate rapidly between a boiling hellscape and a frozen tundra (arxiv.org/abs/1609.07106).

Altair, as seen from Mt. Wilson Observatory
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/Steve Golden

To some extent, it’s simply the thought that being closer to star’s surface actually results in a cooler disposition for the planet. And I wonder how the bulge impacts the orbital dynamics of the hypothetical planet.

In 2001, NASA/JPL provided a description of the star Altair, giving us an idea of the conditions of a midriff bulge:

Altair is a perfect example — it rotates at least once every 10.4 hours, and the new Palomar observations reveal the diameter at its equator is at least 14 percent greater than at its poles. For a star that spins slowly, this effect is miniscule. For example, our Sun rotates once every 30 days and has an equator only .001 percent greater in diameter than its poles.

By measuring Altair’s size at separate positions along its edge, van Belle and his colleagues determined that Altair rotates at a speed of at least 210 kilometers per second (470,000 miles per hour) at the equator. Future studies may pin down the speed more precisely.

For those who are interested, the speed of light (c) is 6.706×10⁸.MPH, so Altair’s equatorial velocity at its surface is nowhere near c.

And I’ll tell you, searching on stars midriff bulge returns some mighty odd images.

And, in fact, they look almost as robust as they did a month ago.

However, the Chief Tomato Picker says it’s just about time to yank them out of the ground.

And then repair the holes where the hooks were actually torn OUT of the garage by the voracious beasties.

J. Henry Fair‘s photography focuses on social justice issues. Here’s just one pic.

This outlet pipe is at the bottom of a giant waste impoundment in Florida, and forms a stream that joins the water table.

Here’s some more.

An East Coast favorite; living in Minnesota, I’d never heard of it ’til today.

Cruller:

A traditional cruller (or twister) is a fried pastry often made from a rectangle of dough, with a cut made in the middle that allows it to be pulled over and through itself producing twists in the sides of the pastry. Crullers have been described as resembling “a small, braided torpedo”^[1] and having been “a staple of the New England diet since the Pilgrims’ day”. [Wikipedia]

From “Why You Can’t Resist the Office Doughnuts,” by Tamar Haspel (Discover Magazine, November 2016):

I’ve been there. I remember afternoon meetings when there was no earthly reason I should be hungry, staring down the damn cruller. The meetings were long. I stood no chance. I am Pavlov’s dog. We’re all Pavlov’s dogs.

I’d look awful with big, floppy ears. Can I be Pavlov’s cat, instead?

… didn’t affect me personally. Certainly this blog is so minute that hardly anyone reads it. I didn’t notice any impact on any of the sites I used yesterday.

… that is, personally, not yet.

CNN/Money has a report this morning on the instrumentality of the attack:

Security firm Flashpoint said it believes that digital video recorders and webcams in people’s homes were taken over by malware and then, without owners’ knowledge, used to help execute the massive cyberattack.

Hundreds of thousands of devices appear to have have been infected with the malware.

It was a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. Using the malware, hackers were able to flood a website with so much traffic that it impaired normal service.

We don’t have a webcam, but we do own and use a TIVO. so I now wonder if I was part of that instrumentality.

But you know what? It seems to me that, in the future, I will be part of the instrumentality. Involuntarily, but still will be stained with some of the guilt, because I will have provided the equipment, however unwillingly for an attack that compromises, at best, the livelihood of some people; at worst, people might die if an attack on a critical piece of physical infrastructure is successful.

Prototype of the Internet of Things. Image collected by the author in Faith, South Dakota, ca. 2012. Last seen headed east.

Do you know why I think this is nearly inevitable?

The predicted Internet of Things.

As we build this network creature, as it were, built of computers and refrigerators and DVRs and cars, we’re building a creature which is already cancerous, a servant that may knife us in the back at some point – or disappear without warning, without permission, at critical moments.

I face the future with a certain prickling along the base of the neck –

For all the promises in the world, my Arts Editor and I agree that some promises simply cannot be fulfilled. The United States may be the most influential country in the world, but some forces are larger than it, from population densities to wage differentials. When I hear someone like Trump telling us he’s going to fix everything, I just shake my head and wonder just how the hell he thinks he’ll get it. Nor can I have much faith in even more believable promises from either side.

As this blog post from Cracked makes clear, many small towns are in despair as sources of jobs are moving to other locations. I am conflicted concerning these problems, having reactions of varying worthiness:

• They assumed little or no change and never prepared for it in a world that is changing unceasingly;
• Preparing for change is a difficult challenge, and if you’re raising a family, damn near impossible for most folks;
• Shouldn’t we be protecting families?
• To a libertarian this is creative destruction, which they celebrate as the path to improvement and wealth;
• Yet I see no wealth for these victims;
• Who do not base their life on capitalism, the home of creative destruction, but on the community and the family.

But I am reminded there is some help out there. Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor provides an example, as reported by MPR:

Taylor and a group of investors are spending millions of dollars to convert a former beef plant into a hog processing facility, Prime Pork. They plan to open by January.

Nearly all the equipment is brand new, said plant manager Wayne Kies. Robots will do some of the butchering, including a robotic arm designed to remove ribs.

The plant will process more than 6,000 hogs a day, which makes it a medium-sized operation.

“We want to produce a quality, consistent product,” Kies said.

Taylor said his involvement with the Windom [Minnesota] facility grew out of his earlier research into opportunities in the meat business. When tough times in the beef processing industry forced a plant in Windom to close last year, Taylor was interested.

While I do not subscribe to the old acorn that the government doesn’t create jobs, I do doubt that it can save the small towns of America. Nor can billionaires – but several solutions together may do the trick. Such as UBI – would it help preserve small town America, or simply lengthen their agony?

chyron:

In the television industry, a lower third is a graphic overlay placed in the title-safe lower area of the screen, though not necessarily the entire lower third of it, as the name suggests. …

Lower thirds are also often known as “CG” or captions, and sometimes chyrons in North America, due to the popularity of Chyron Corporation‘s Chiron Icharacter generator, an early digital solution developed in the 1970s for rendering lower thirds. [Wikipedia]

Learn something new everyday. I suspect there’s a word for words like chyron, not to mention g**g1e, but I don’t recall what that might be offhand.

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com covers some wildly divergent parenting styles world-over:

One thing that sets American parents apart from the rest of the world is their widespread belief that parenting has no script. Every parent forges their own path while raising kids, prioritizing current child-rearing strategies gathered from friends, websites, and books, rather than asking their own mothers for advice. Modern ideas are viewed as the optimal way to position children for achievement in the future.

This contrasts greatly with other countries, who have highly scripted versions of parenthood. Parents understand that there is an accepted way of raising kids and they do it without questioning. While it may sound restrictive, some experts say it’s helpful and makes parents feel less out of control, confused, and overwhelmed.

“You don’t see the handwringing in other places around the world,” says Christine Gross-Loh, author of Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us. “People understand that there is a way to do things.” (via Ideas.TED)

Katherine then gives a sampling of parenting traditions. One of the more subtly different is this:

… young children in Denmark are often left outside in their strollers, wide awake, while parents shop or dine indoors — an act that would strike horror into American hearts, either for fear of kidnapping, arrest for negligence, or the child being traumatized by abandonment.

How people handle the most common of tasks can vary so wildly, and it’s fascinating.