musical organs, Lusitana, Nata de coco, quantum and teleportation, Yankee geological products, pergola.

A while back, Nate B. kindly sent along this fascinating clip of M.J.'s song Smooth Criminal played on a barrel (grinder) organ. Anyhow, this song gets a strange amount of play on ATL radio stations (in the normal, non-organ form) as i hear it at least once a week. Barrel organs are distinct from steam organs (calliopes), as the former is a bellows driven primarily by a crank, and the latter by, of course, steam going through whistles, though both instruments can be played by musical rolls. Conversely, a hurdy-gurdy is essentially a fiddle with a crank-driven wheel substituted for the bow, explained/played here. Okay?

Woke up the other day with Stromae's terrific Ave Cesarina in my head, which is a song about Cesarina Evora, a singer from Cape Verde (known also for performing barefoot). Cape Verde, because shamefully i had to look this up, is off the coast of Senegal, and was settled by the Portuguese, which makes a lusophone country. 'Luso-', in this case, is derived from Lusitania, "Hispania Lusitana was an ancient Iberian Roman province including approximately all of modern Portugal south of the Douro river and part of modern Spain", to reference wikipedia. Curiously, the Portuguese Empire is considered the first global empire, stimulated in large part by the efforts of the Portuguese duke aptly named Henry the Navigator and the control of ports in South America and Africa. 

Nata de coco is a product made from the fermentation of coconut water with Acetobacter xylinum, resulting in a translucent, chewy/stringy mass that is actually tastier than it sounds (as is the case with most fermented products). It is frequently served sweetened as a dessert, and is apparently high in dietary fiber.

A recent discussion with a co-worker began innocently enough with the question, "Why isn't teleportation a thing yet?" This became philosophical fast, with the breakdown of teleportation basically consisting of being scanned down to the atomic level, then recreated elsewhere (from this, "Samuel Braunstein made this point quite clear when he noted that if teleportation were possible today, the transmission of information about an entire human being would take about 100 million centuries, about the age of the universe. ‘It would be faster to walk,’ he said"), leading to the question regarding the 'divine spark' of human consciousness - things evolved into a discussion of quantum entanglement ("An entangled system is defined to be one whose quantum state cannot be factored as a product of states of its local constituents, that is to say, they are not individual particles but are an inseparable whole. If entangled, one constituent cannot be fully described without considering the other(s). Note that the state of a composite system is always expressible as a sum, or superposition, of products of states of local constituents; it is entangled if this sum necessarily has more than one term", thanks wikipedia), and the idea that to be teleported, one has to essentially die to re-appear elsewhere, or potentially exist in a duplicated state, referencing this interesting discussion. This arced over to another discussion of the situation illustrated by the Ship the Theseus, essentially, how much of something can be replaced before it is another thing entirely? Personally, i've wished before that there was more than one of me (that would share a brain), so i could be in multiple places at once, but acknowledge that this would get pretty confusing after a while. Also, shout out to the Calvin and Hobbes duplicator.

Two things about the curious geological products of the US' upper Northeast. One, Herkimer diamonds are water-clear, faceted, doubly terminated (read, "pointy on both ends") pieces of quartz that are nearly as hard as diamonds, and first found near Herkimer County in New York (and later found in places like Arizona, Afganistan and Tibet). These formed in cavities in dolostones, which accounts for their nice shape. Two, Goshen stone is a varibly-colored mica schist (sheets of stone used for pavers) found primarily in New England. A notable story associated with this is the discovery of 24 million tons on land belonging to former Dodgers' pitcher Matt White. It's a heartwarming story; "in 2003, White purchased 50 acres (200,000 m²) of mountain real estate in Cummington, Massachusetts from his aunt for $50,000, giving her the money she needed to enter a nursing home. His original intention was to build his home, but he found the land to be too hard. When he called a surveyor out to inspect the land, the surveyor found that the land was solid Goshen stone, a type of mica schist estimated to be about 400 million years old. Estimates have placed the low estimate of the find at 24 million tons. At current prices (he has been selling the stone for over $100/ton), it is estimated to be worth around $2.5 billion, minus extraction costs".  Way to help out your aunt there, Mr. White.

Finally, my brother and sister-in-law are building a pergola in their backyard. Growing up in South Texas, i was unfamiliar with the term 'pergola' (as is the rest of my family apart from my sibs), and various discussions about the nouns 'pergola' versus 'arbor' ensued. Finally, i took to google. The difference between these two is that an arbor is typically a smaller tunnel, while a pergola is a larger structure incorporating a porch with a roof (not to be confused with a trellis, which can form a wall/top to the other two, but mostly is just a structure on which to support growing plant vines).