Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Fresh Principle, Bob Dylan/Ketch Secor and writing credits, mosquito blood meals, cyanoacrylates, and 'camera'

In case you missed it like i did, here is Archimedes' Eureka moment redone in the manner of the Will Smith, cleverly called the Fresh Principle.

The World Cup continues! Turns out, a maraca-type instrument called a caxirola has been sanctioned as the official instrument of the 2014 World Cup, seeing as the vuvuzela has been banned.

The Old Crow Medicine Show song Wagon Wheel has been surprisingly popular, even hitting mainstream radio as performed by Darius Rucker. The interesting backstory is that in the song originated as a sketch in 1973 by Bob Dylan, with the melody and chorus played during a recording session and never finished (and apparently attributed by Dylan to Arthur Crudup). Ketch Secor and Chris Fuqua of OCMS picked up the song in their teens and finished it, and it was released in 2004 to very broad acclaim with joint writing credits shared between Dylan and Secor (no, dudes, that song is EVERYWHERE). On the newest OCMS album (here via NPR's first listen), something similar occurred in the song Sweet Amarillo, in that an unfinished song sketch ("sweet Amarillo, you stole my pillow and you ruined my mind"? What?) from that same Dylan session was later completed by Secor and the guys from OCMS. My main beef here is that the man has a dreadful accent when saying both Amarillo and Llano Estacado. (Apologies, it's bothering me quite a bit. Please don't spit the words, dude.) Also from NPR, Kelly AT linked an article documenting a case of 'beat deafness', wherein a patient cannot clap/dance in a synchronized fashion to music.

The mosquitoes have been pretty bad this year. i've posted before regarding factors which will enhance your attractiveness to mosquitoes (type 'O' blood and emission of carbon dioxide), but it was a point of contention at a recent bonfire that female mosquitoes require a blood meal for egg production. i got the order slightly wrong; female mosquitoes require the proteins found in blood meals for egg production, not after the eggs are generated, but the point still holds - both male and female mosquitoes are to blame, as females wouldn't go after blood if reproduction wasn't the goal. Curiously, from a recent NYTimes article, " In recent research tracking human DNA in mosquito blood meals in Thailand, Dr. Harrington found that some people were consistently bitten over and over, while others never were. No clear patterns of age or gender emerged, she said.  ". i'm sorry, guys.

In recent events, i found a good instructable for DIY skin sutures in case of deep lacerations. Two close friends would not let me use said instructable, vetoing in favor of  liquid bandage (skin glue). The glue holds, but not as well as i'd like. i made the comment the other day that you CAN use actual superglue on lacerations, as done during the Vietnam war, but it does contain a few less desirable ingredients than skin glue - the common adhesive is cyanoacrylate. Also, if you're looking for cringe-worthy comments, i suggest checking out this commentary section. If you cut off a finger, please get yourself to the emergency room and let a professional reattach it.

Today i learned that the word 'camara' means 'vaulted room' in latin. Its current use stems from 18th century device called a camera obscura, or " "dark chamber" (a black box with a lens that could project images of external objects), contrasted with camera lucida (Latin for "light chamber"), which uses prisms to produce on paper beneath the instrument an image, which can be traced ", from this dictionary entry.

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