Does your cat walk all over your desk? It’s’ nothing new, cats have been walking all over humans since, like, forever as this photo from Emir O. Filipovic of the University of Sarajevo’s History Department shows. Emir was working on a 15th century manuscript when he ran across this medieval cat paw prints: Link – via The Weasel King
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Medieval Cat Paw Prints
Dr. Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University grades exams so that the highest scoring exam receives a 100% grade and all others fall below on a curve. It wasn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario , but his exams are hard. Fröhlich’s students devised a cunning plan to all get A grades. It involved boycotting the exam: Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich. This approach, Fröhlich said, is the “most predictable and consistent way” of comparing students’ work to their peers’, and it worked well. At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is. As the semester ended in December, students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A. Dr. Fröhlich abided by his grading policy and gave all students A grades, as well as congratulating them on their cooperative spirit: Fröhlich took a surprisingly philosophical view of his students’ machinations, crediting their collaborative spirit. “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done,” he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible. Link -via The Volokh Conspiracy | Image: Paramount Pictures
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Clever Students Use Game Theory to Get Perfect Scores on an Exam
There’s Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, and of course, Florida Man. Florida Man is in the news constantly, with headlines enshrined in a Twitter feed dedicated to “the world’s worst superhero.” Link -via Metafilter
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Florida Man: the World’s Worst Superhero
The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbuktu, Mali, holds a collection of 30,000 of the world’s most precious ancient manuscripts. Or it did until recently. On January 23rd, al-Qaida-linked extremists, who invaded Timbuktu almost a year ago, ransacked the library and set it on fire. The fire raged for eight days straight. What the extremists did not know was that only about 2,000 of the hand-written documents had been moved to the new library building. However, they didn’t bother searching the old building, where an elderly man named Abba Alhadi has spent 40 of his 72 years on earth taking care of rare manuscripts. The illiterate old man, who walks with a cane and looks like a character from the Bible, was the perfect foil for the Islamists. They wrongly assumed that the city’s European-educated elite would be the ones trying to save the manuscripts, he said. So last August, Alhadi began stuffing the thousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks. At night, he loaded the millet sacks onto the type of trolley used to cart boxes of vegetables to the market. He pushed them across town and piled them into a lorry and onto the backs of motorcycles, which drove them to the banks of the Niger River. From there, they floated down to the central Malian town of Mopti in a pinasse, a narrow, canoe-like boat. Then cars drove them from Mopti, the first government-controlled town, to Mali’s capital, Bamako, over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from here. “I have spent my life protecting these manuscripts. This has been my life’s work. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer protect them here,” said Alhadi. “It hurt me deeply to see them go, but I took strength knowing that they were being sent to a safe place.” It took two weeks in all to spirit out the bulk of the collection, around 28,000 texts housed in the old building covering the subjects of theology, astronomy, geography and more. The 2,000 documents that were in the new library were digitized, so the information survives even if the parchment does not. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: AP/Harouna Traore)
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People of Timbuktu save Manuscripts from Invaders
( YouTube link ) A new skit from the Muppets of Sesame Street spoof the TV show Downton Abbey . Steak and kidney pie, anyone? -via Tastefully Offensive
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Upside Downton Abbey
Sometimes the double helix likes to mix it up! Scientists at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, have found that DNA at the end of chromosomes actually have a very different structure: instead of double-stranded, they have four strands. Balasubramanian’s group has been pursuing a four-stranded version of the molecule that scientists have produced in the test tube now for a number of years. It is called the G-quadruplex. The “G” refers to guanine, one of the four chemical groups, or “bases”, that hold DNA together and which encode our genetic information (the others being adenine, cytosine, and thymine). The G-quadruplex seems to form in DNA where guanine exists in substantial quantities. Jonathan Amos of BBC has the post: Link
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Quadruple DNA Helix
Silicon Valley’s startup corporate culture is noted for its downscale fashion and manners: flip-flops, office games and casual decor. If that’s the norm, how do you handle casual Fridays? How do you impress others as a nonconformist? By dressing up formally, often with bowties and a tophats: The trappings of a nonconformist workplace were on display recently at the headquarters of a startup here named Pulse: There was the foosball table, the containers of free M&Ms, the bottle of whiskey on top of the fridge. And the guys standing around in suits and ties. It was Friday, after all, and to truly defy conformity at some tech outfits on that day of the week, one must not wear jeans or flip-flops. Pulse employees were practicing “Formal Friday,” dressing in their Sunday best. “It is kind of flipped…because we’re super casual the entire week,” says Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Pulse, a startup that makes a news-organizing app. “You want to break the monotony.” Watch a video at the link, then go buy a bolo tie for next Friday. Because bolo ties are cool. Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Spark Fun Electronics
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Startup Companies Replace “Casual Fridays” with “Formal Fridays”
Today is New Year’s Day, which simply means the earth has completed another journey around the sun. But how in the world do we know how long that takes? To answer the question, Phil Plat has “taken a simple concept like ‘years’ and turned it into a horrifying nightmare of nerdery and math.” Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion? Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by billions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a “sidereal year” (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take? Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million = 31,415,926 seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty dang close). But how many days is that? Well, that’s a second complication. A “day” is how long it takes the Earth to rotate once, but we’re back to that measurement problem again. But hey, we used the stars once, let’s do it again! You stand on the Earth and define a day as the time it takes for a star to go from directly overhead to directly overhead again: a sidereal day. That takes 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds = 86,164 seconds. But wait a second (a sidereal second?)—shouldn’t that be exactly equal to 24 hours? What happened to those 3 minutes and 56 seconds? I was afraid you’d ask that—but this turns out to be important. And that’s only the beginning of the explanation of where we get the concepts and the measurements for a “day” and a “year.” Read the rest at Bad Astronomy. Link ( Image credit: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA )
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What Does a “New Year” Really Mean?
A clever Chinese worker smuggled the note above into a Halloween decoration which was later bought at a K-Mart store in Oregon, and the woman who discovered the note felt compelled to share it with the world. Whether this note is a fake or not is still being debated, but Sophie Richardson from the Human Rights Watch claims: We’re in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this…. I think it is fair to say the conditions described in the letter certainly conform to what we know about conditions in…labor camps…. If this thing is the real deal, that’s somebody saying, “Please help me, please know about me, please react.” That’s our job. Link –via 22Words
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Lady Finds Chinese Worker’s Plea For Help Inside Product Bought At K-Mart
There’s something deeply polarizing about eggnog. People either love it or hate it and of those that love it, even they are usually at opposing sides when it comes to homemade nog versus the commercial variety. Whether you love it have drank gallons of it this year or hate it and gag at the very thought of it, here is a little trivia about the milky treat. Image Via texascooking [Flickr] What the Heck is A Nog Anyway? The true origin of the drink is hotly debated, as is the reason for its name. Some, including Alton Brown explain that “nog” was a 17 th century slang for a strong beer brewed in East Anglia, England. Others say that the name was a combination of the words “egg” and “grog,” a term for a drink made with rum. When the words are put together to form “eggngrog,” it’s easy to see where “eggnog” would come from. As for the origin of the drink, it is believed to have come from posset, a medieval drink made with warm milk, booze and spices. One thing’s for sure though, before the drink came to America, it was popular with British aristocrats –but they called it an Egg Flip. Its Patriotic Roots in the New World In England, only the rich could afford the fresh eggs and milk required to make “egg flips,” but when the drink crossed the Atlantic, it soared in popularity as practically every American had access to these fresh ingredients and some kind of hard alcohol. Perhaps the biggest difference between the American eggnog and the British predecessor though is that brandy and sherry were the most common alcohols used in England, but these two items were heavily taxed in America so the locals instead turned to rum –which was particularly cheap thanks to a close trade association with the Caribbean. When the Revolutionary War made it more difficult for the colonists to find rum, they instead turned to using bourbon in its place –which is the most common alcohol used in eggnogs today. George Washington was a huge proponent of the creamy mixture and helped cement it into the nation’s history. In fact, he kept eggnog on hand all year long. Of course, his was not just any eggnog. White House records show that his recipe included rum, rye, whiskey, sherry and brandy. Need more proof of how important eggnog was in our fledgling nation? Look no further than the Eggnog Riot of 1926. It all started when some students at the West Point Military Academy, where alcohol was prohibited, smuggled some whiskey into their barracks to make eggnog for their Christmas party. As officials started to crack down on some of the drunk cadets, other drunken revelers started smashing and burning property at the school. By the time the riot was over, twenty cadets and one enlisted soldier were court-martialed. Amongst the many rioters, though he wasn’t court-martialed, was the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Image Via indigo_jones [Flickr] About the Drink Itself Eggnog is essentially a milk and egg custard and the base is almost identical to ice cream –except that the traditional alcoholic varieties have too much alcohol to freeze. Those that cook their eggnog before serving it actually make a real custard. While the CDC says that you should always cook your eggnog prior to consumption in order to kill off any possible salmonella contamination, Alton Brown claims that if your mix contains at least 20% alcohol, is kept below 40 degrees and sits for at least a month, the alcohol will kill off any bacteria. The alcohol also managed to keep the milk from going sour and if you don’t cook the eggnog, it takes at least a month for the flavor to really develop. Alton Brown has a great booze-heavy recipe on Mental Floss if you want to make some of your own at home. Want the traditional eggnog flavor without alcohol and the risk of salmonella poisoning? Then try using the new pasteurized eggs available at most grocery stores. They’re pasteurized at a steady, low temperature to kill of bacteria without cooking the eggs themselves. Old School or New School As for the commercial varieties, there is a reason why real eggnog fans will always badmouth the store stuff. Under U.S. law, commercial eggnogs only need to contain at least 1% of a drink’s final weight to be made from egg yolk solids. If you buy the cheaper alternative “eggnog flavored milk,” it only has to have .5% egg yolk solids. Other than that, commercial eggnog can also contain milk, sugar, modified milk ingredients, glucose-fructose, water, carrageenan, guar gum, natural and artificial flavorings, spices, monoglycerides and colorings. Image Via chotda [Flickr] Need an Alternative? You lactose intolerant eggnog fans are in good company and people have been working for a long time to develop something you can drink without worry. In fact, nondairy eggnogs have been around at least since 1899, when Almeda Lambert printed a recipe for eggnog in her Guide for Nut Cookery that featured a drink made from coconut cream, eggs and sugar. I hope all you eggnog fans enjoyed this article, but before you celebrate too much, you’d better head to the store and grab a few more cartons –or get to mixing up some of your own, before it heads away for the season. Sources: Wikipedia #1 and #2 and Mental Floss #1 , and #2
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The Eggheaded, Noggin-Filling Story of Eggnog