HOBO SYMBOLS

BeyondTheMedspeak: How To Perform The Heimlich Maneuver On Yourself If You're Alone and Choking

Most people don't know this simple, potentially life-saving procedure.

Watch the videos above and below.

Now go practice.

If it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it hard enough.

Uproot Excavator

Wrote Mark Frauenfelder: 

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"Uproot Excavator" is a YouTube channel devoted entirely to one thing: tree stumps being yanked out of the ground by heavy equipment.

The arm of the excavator, fitted with a pincer-like attachment, clamps onto a stump, rips it out along with a massive clump of roots that must weigh serveral hundred pounds, shakes the dirt loose, and sets the whole thing aside next to a fresh crater in the earth.

That's it.

Hundreds of short videos, all basically variations on the same removal theme, over and over and over.

I find it weirdly hypnotic and deeply satisfying to watch.

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It occurs to me this is kind of a violent variation on an ASMR theme.

eBay flies under the radar but it's an excellent resource

eBay shopping tip: Don't be discouraged if the item you want isn't there or is priced too high.

I've found that the listings change daily and if you keep visiting on a regular basis more likely than not you will find exactly what you want at a reasonable price.

Example: the wonderful Snow Peak titanium folding fork pictured above and below has been unavailable in the U.S. for many years; a deep internet search found none online.

I looked on eBay: about a week into my daily visits, one showed up.

I use it every day, it's such a fantastic piece of industrial beauty.

The Best Rule of Thumb is a Thumb Rule

This reddit thread asks "What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life?"

The top-voted answer: "Use your hand span — thumb to pinky — as a built-in measuring tool. Once you measure it you will never forget it."

Even better: If you happen on a person who's unconscious, lift their legs in the air as you call for help, and keep them elevated until help arrives or the person comes to.

This shunts about a third of their circulating blood volume back to the heart and may prevent imminent cardiac arrest.

'Unbelievable Moments From Nature' — Narrated by David Attenborough

Uploaded to YouTube by BBC Earth last week.

Fair warning: three hours long.

Free, the way we like it.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

'Strange Stacked Stones Spotted on Mars' — Andy Goldsworthy, Call Your Office

No, it's not the artist's doppelgänger's work on the Red Planet but rather, according to scientists, it's more likely that what we're seeing is actually one rock that broke apart this way due to wind erosion or being exposed to flowing water on ancient Mars.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Separate The Cord From The Device

Notice how your printer's power cable can be detached from the printer. 

Notice that you can remove the power cable from your computer — be it a laptop or a desktop or a tower.

Why shouldn't this same modular principle be applied across the board to everything electrical?

Why should I have to fuss and fool around with keeping the cord out of my way when I clean my microwave or toaster oven?

For that matter, coffee bean grinders and kitchen mixers etc.

Why should I have to reach behind all the stuff on my kitchen counter to unplug these appliances when it would be so much easier to detach their power cables?

Kottke's Rolodex

Back in the day we called them blogrolls.

Wrote Kottke last year: "I added a new feature to the site: It's a list of websites and people that I follow — 'kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators.'"

Up top, the first 26 of 186.

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Full disclosure: I regularly read 7 of the 186.

Where is this?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Microwave Hack I Just Discovered After Many Decades

How is it that only last night, while thawing out a slice of wonderful super-dense Danish bread, did the penny drop such that I realized that I've been taking an unnecessary extra step all these years when using microwave ovens to thaw frozen things that require me to guesstimate how long I need to nuke them.

Simple hack short: Instead of hitting the STOP button, open the microwave's door — this stops the machine and opens the door with one gesture rather than two.

Doh!

Lagniappe: it's much easier to locate the large OPEN button — which is also outlined by its placement at the bottom of the front control panel — in the dark than have to guess at the whereabouts of the often flush and embedded small STOP button.

Two loaves of sliced Rugbrod Danish Grain Bread (top) cost $25.49.

VALIS v VANTA: 2 STRANGE ACRONYMS ENTER — NONE LEAVE

Everyone who's read Philip K. Dick's great 1981 novel "VALIS" knows that the title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.

Just kidding.

Nobody remembers that.

Likewise, the few who've read Sam Abughali's "VANTA," published last month (on April 13, for those who insist on more precision), will recall that it stands for Virtual Adaptive Neural Transfer Array.

Doesn't matter.

What does matter is the bizarro concordance between Abughali's novel and the name of my beloved calico cat, VANTA.

I mean, come on: I named my cat in September 2022 after adopting her as a three-month old kitten from an animal shelter.

I chose the name because of my fascination with Vantablack.

But I digress.

Who knows how long the author of "VANTA" was working on his novel, and when he named his time machine VANTA?

What matters is that he did.

Our lives intersected then and there, or at least they were on track to do so.

I've long contended that coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality.

This latest incident has done nothing to alter that belief.

Easy peasy way to untie a knot

I uploaded this hack to YouTube three years ago and every now and then someone thanks me for it.

Makes my day!

Theatrical Releases You Can Stream or Rent at Home

Finally.

An excellent addition to my video toolkit.

Many of the 35 titles currently listed are on various watchlists I maintain across the zillion streaming services.

This IMDB page updates and merges them: "Modified 2 days ago."

BeyondTheMedspeak: The Dirty Little Secret Behind [So-Called] Evidence-Based Medicine

Since forever I've been reading seemingly authoritative papers and articles from the Cochrane Reviews et al lauding "Evidence-Based Medicine" as the gold standard for evaluating treatments/drugs/testing etc.

There's only one problem with these: they're often authored by people who've never gotten their hands dirty, as it were, doing basic science — whether it be laboratory-based or clinical — that's reported in the scientific literature.

These grand panjandrums haven't a clue how shot through with arbitrary choices and decisions are the final data reported by the scientists writing the articles.

I know this for a fact because I was one of those scientists for many years, publishing dozens of papers in the premier journals of anesthesiology over decades.

You could look it up.

But I digress.

The "sausage," as it were — the raw data which form the basis of all such papers — gets cleaned up by necessity, because it's a hot mess in its initial state as individual data points.

But in the end the data reported are not objective but, rather, subjective, choices: there's far too much noise to generate a signal without processing.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

The Listening Museum

From the website: "36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped. From IBM Model M (1985) to Topre to thocky modern customs. Click any card, type on your real keyboard, hear it as if it were on your desk."

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

In Praise of Australian-Based Thrillers

Watching "The Code" last night, I was struck by the barren magnificence of the Australian terrain in which most of the 2014 six-part espionage thriller (Season 1; six-part Season 2 aired in 2016) is set.

As I thought about it, the superb six-part 2016 political thriller "Secret City" came to mind: it too was set in Australia.

Though not a spy thriller, "The Dry" — an excellent 2020 mystery thriller also set in Australia — takes us out back as does its equally gripping 2024 sequel, "Force of Nature: The Dry 2."

Then there's Taron Egerton's unforgettable crazed character in pursuit of the great Charlize Theron's solo hiker in the Outback in "Apex," just released on Netflix.

Note: "The Code" Season 1 is available on Prime Video; Season 2 is on YouTube

'Yonder' — Lisa Russ Spaar

 

Saturday afternoon at the movies: 'They Live'

YouTube description:

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Master of fright, John Carpenter directs this entertaining and darkly humorous 1988 horror film.

Roddy Piper plays Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker who stumbles upon a special pair of sunglasses that reveal an awesome global secret — the ruling elite of the world are actually aliens in disguise, their aim being to keep humans in a state of mindless consumerism. 

Wearing the glasses, Nada is able to see the secret messages behind all advertising, and he is capable of discerning which normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the campaign to keep humans subdued.

Now, the battle is on to free the human race from this secret, subliminal tyranny! 

Good fun filled with genuine chills and scares and a bitingly satirical assault on our consumer culture, "They Live" is one of Carpenter's finest achievements.

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Free, the way we like it.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

'What Makes a Hacker' — Steve Wozniak

Here are the Woz's defining characteristics of a hacker, from his July 11, 2004 keynote address at the Fifth HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) gathering in New York City:

• A sense of humor

• The ability to derive pleasure from jokes and the unexpected

• A tendency to strive for internal rather than external rewards

This just goes to show that being a hacker need not require great computer skills: in fact, you don't need any!

In Woz's hacker world there's plenty of room for a TechnoDolt©®™.

I've never met Steve Wozniak; I've never spoken with Steve Wozniak, though I have seen him on TV.

Way back in 2005 he did post a comment on bookofjoe — that was among the top 10 things that happened to me in 2005.

Maybe top 3.

Primal Space — Ewan Cunningham

From Dense Discovery:

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Scottish creator Ewan Cunningham's Primal Space started as a hobby in 2018 and has grown into one of YouTube's most compelling sci-edu channels.

A meticulously animated archive of engineering, science, and history stories.

Videos mostly come in under 10 minutes and pack in a density of fascinating, well-structured storytelling that makes it very easy to fall down a rabbit hole.

Experts' Experts: Scotch Whisky

I'm not a Scotch whisky drinker: I've had perhaps 10 such drinks in my entire life.

Nevertheless, the subject has always interested me, and so when I happened on "Scotch: A Golden Dream" on Apple TV, I watched it.

Fascinating.

The documentary ambles along interviewing master distillers, "noses," writers, and workers in various areas of Scotch production, along with Scottish farmers who grow the barley, wheat, and rye that form the basis of Scotch.

Here are the most useful and interesting — sometimes surprising — things I learned from the film:

• Most experts prefer younger whisky — 6-10 years old, perhaps up to 18 — to much older vintages. They find the sweetness of the young oak barrels preferable to the dominating power of older wood. 

• Nosing whisky in a glass will tell you far more about it than tasting it.

• If you're nosing a flight or series of Scotch whiskies, you will find that without added water, the nose and sense of smell become slightly anesthetized by the 40% alcohol in bottled Scotch.

• In Scotland water is always added to single malt whisky: it dilutes the alcohol, reducing the burn and allowing other properties to reveal themselves.

• On a molecular level, aroma molecules share more chemical likenesses with alcohol than they do with water. As such, they tend to bind with alcohol. Adding water frees up more of the aroma molecules to evaporate into the taster's nose. Appreciation of flavors happens at least as much in the nose as on the tongue.

• Two teaspoons of water in 1.5 oz. of Scotch are the sweet spot for most.

• Older Scotch is rarer because most of it is bottled young. Then more is lost by evaporation, the so-called "angels' share." Thus, you're paying more for its scarcity. 

• Older Scotch, aged 20/30/40 or more years, may have taken up too much flavor from the aging barrels; thus it might be dry, bitter, or woody as a result of being overaged.

FunFact: the director of "Scotch: The Golden Dream" is... wait for it... Andrew Peat.

You could look it up.

Magnetic Paint — Make Any Wall or Surface Magnetic

Steel yourself.

From websites:

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Magnetize-It! magnetic paint & primer is a grey acrylic latex water-based paint that turns any wall into a magnet-receptive surface.

Apply top coat of any color without lessening magnetic function.

A great alternative to cluttered refrigerators, ugly pushpin holes, and tape marks.

Useful for:

• School classrooms

• Home workshop

• Planning board

• Bulletin board

• Art projects

• Dorm room

• Photo walls

• Work walls

• Play areas

• Office

• Gym

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Half-quart (16 oz.): $14.93.

Treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City — in 3D

[Armor of Henry II, King of France (reigned 1547-1559)]

From Colossal: "In the age of the internet, we're fortunate to have virtual access to museum collections around the world, thanks to objects in the public domain and programs like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Initiative. Thanks to the Met's continued emphasis on imaging, we can now experience every detail in 3-D renderings of over 140 significant objects in its holdings."

Helpful Hints from joe-eeze: How to stir

We don't need no education.

Robert L. Wolke, the Washington Post's longtime "Food 101" columnist, addressed this topic.

Q. I've been told you should always stir with a spoon's rounded side down, rather than holding the spoon vertically. Is this true? If so, why?

A. If the spoon is large and held vertically, vigorous stirring might slop some liquid over the rim and out of the pot. But if the spoon is held horizontally with the curve down, it will sail smoothly through the liquid, creating a whirlpool effect that enhances efficient mixing.

[photo via Julie Appleton]