Conservation Lab: Surprise!

The conservation team around the Natural History Museum of London’s century-old sunfish, which was stuffed with all kinds of odd materials. All photos in this section courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.

The conservation team around the Natural History Museum of London’s century-old sunfish, which was stuffed with all kinds of odd materials. All photos in this section courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.

Conservators at the Natural History Museum of London knew for some time that the giant sunfish in the collection would need to be treated: The ten-foot-tall creature’s stitched-up body was bursting at the seams, exposing the wheat straw that had been stuffed inside over a century ago. The fish was collected in Sydney Harbour by the zoologist Edward Ramsay on December 12, 1882, brought to London in 1883 for the International Fisheries Exhibition, and donated afterward to the museum.

[…]

In addition to 25 trash bags’ worth of straw, Allington-Jones and his team extracted all kinds of odds and ends that had been weighing down the fish: iron bars, floorboards, a broken chair from 1883, and a scrap of newspaper from the Sydney Morning Herald, dated January 26 of that year. The newspaper was crumpled up, but being conservators, they humidified and flattened it out. One article seems to be about the first-ever Ashes cricket tournament between Australia and England: “We hope the match will be played throughout in a spirit of generous rivalry, and that the struggle for the much coveted laurel will be a close and exciting one,” reads the Herald.

There are two more wonderful conservator surprises at The Creators Project, and lots more photos!

An Artificial Leaf.

Credit: TU Eindhoven / Bart van Overbeeke.

Credit: TU Eindhoven / Bart van Overbeeke.

This is wonderful, on the science and design fronts. A small artificial leaf, with very large potential.

Using sunlight to make chemical products has long been a dream of chemical engineers. The problem is that the available sunlight generates too little energy to kick off reactions. However, nature is able to do this. Antenna molecules in leaves capture energy from sunlight and collect it in the reaction centers of the leaf where enough solar energy is present for the chemical reactions of photosynthesis.

Light capture

The researchers used relatively new materials known as (LSC’s), which are able to capture sunlight in a similar way. Special light-sensitive molecules in these materials capture a large amount of the incoming light that they then convert into a specific color that is conducted to the edges via light conductivity. These LSCs are often used in combination with solar cells to boost the yield.

Thin channels

The researchers, led by Dr. Timothy Noël, incorporated very thin channels in a silicon rubber LSC through which a liquid can be pumped. In this way, they were able to bring the into contact with the molecules in the liquid with high enough intensity to generate chemical reactions.

While the reaction they chose serves as an initial example, the results surpassed all their expectations, and not only in the lab. “Even an experiment on a cloudy day demonstrated that the chemical production was 40 percent higher than in a similar experiment without LSC material,” says research leader Noël. “We still see plenty of possibilities for improvement. We now have a powerful tool at our disposal that enables the sustainable, sunlight-based production of valuable chemical products like drugs or crop protection agents.”

You can read more at Phys.org.

Goosestepping Along…

CREDIT: Fox News screengrab.

CREDIT: Fox News screengrab.

Gee, just one post ago, I was commenting on how the constitution will glaringly highlight the hypocrisy of conservatives. Didn’t take long for blowhard Bill O’Reilly to jump onto the white supremacy ship. And I just don’t want to think about all the small-minded conservatives who are going to drink the poison kool-aid with nary a thought.

On Tuesday night, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly embraced white nationalism, criticizing minorities and liberals for trying to strip power from “the white establishment.”

“The left wants power taken away from the white establishment,” O’Reilly said, “They want a profound change in the way America is run. Taking power away from the white precincts is the quickest way to do that.”

O’Reilly was reacting to renewed criticism of the Electoral College after Donald Trump was officially enshrined as president-elect. Trump won the Electoral College vote on Monday despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes. Clinton received 48.2 percent of the votes, compared to 46.1 percent for Trump.

[…]

“Newspapers like the New York Times and LA Times have editorialized to get rid of the Electoral College,” O’Reilly said. “They well know that neutralizing the largely white, rural areas in the Midwest and South will assure liberal politicians get power and keep it… the left sees white privilege as an oppressive force that must be done away with.”

Hypocrisy, writ large and flaming, right there. The shameless dirty tactics and gerrymandering the republicans indulged in this election, to block people of colour from voting, and finding ways to conveniently lose those votes, why that was perfectly okay, yessir! There’s never any wrong as long as it’s amoral conservatives doing it, then it’s just dandy, fine, and of course it isn’t an unethical, illegal, sleazy thing to do, oh no. I’ll let The Cursing Hedgehog express my feelings about this one:

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Full story at Think Progress.

Oh, The Constitution.

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The Constitution. My feelings about it? Fuck the constitution. That superannuated paen to the rich and the immoral should have been scrapped long ago, and been replaced with something progressive and relevant. The very worst of people worship that ragged document, twisting it to support evil ideologies and actions; much like people with their holy books of myths (for the hard of thinking, yes, that includes the bible). Gun fondlers adore it, as do all manner of right wingers. Republicans routinely mouth off about their constitution love, and how great and grand it is, etc. It isn’t grand. It isn’t great. It’s a document of its times, put together in the flush of a successful genocide, by wealthy, bloodthirsty men, who weren’t overly concerned with moral or ethical behaviour. You can, of course, see the appeal to republicans, but more than anything else right now, the constitution highlights the abject hypocrisy of all conservatives.

Republicans are always the first to scream “constitution!” whenever there’s something proposed which they don’t like, and they are always the first to search for the tiniest of constitutional violations in the case of someone they find appalling, like President Obama. The conservatives went lunatic fringe, searching for anything which could constitute a violation, so they could oust him from office. Now, the pres-elect will be violating the constitution in the same manner he violated a very long line of women, but who wants to bet the republicans will be zealously pursuing those violations with an aim to impeach? I don’t imagine I’ll have any takers on that bet. I’d be willing to say they are going to find every gorram excuse in the book to absolve Donny in all the violations, and with that, they will demonstrate how little they actually care about that supposedly hallowed document.

What kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president — and then does it again 16 years later?

What kind of nation retains an electoral process that was originally designed to inflate the influence of slaveholders?

What kind of nation permits its Congress to write a time bomb into law that periodically forces rival factions into a game of chicken that could wreck the world economy?

What kind of nation fights a civil war over the question of whether people of African descent are people or property, and then looks the other way when the loser ignores the resolution of that war? What kind of nation waits until 1965 to guarantee black people’s right to vote?

Americans speak of our Constitution as if it were a religious text. To label a law “unconstitutional” is not simply to say that it violates some procedural rule or legal technicality, it is to label it fundamentally unAmerican. To do so is to question the values of any lawmaker despicable enough to support such a law, and to suggest that those values are at odds with who we are as a nation.

But our Constitution has not served us nearly as well as we would have been served by other systems adopted by our peer nations. Nor has it lived up to the expectations of its drafters.

Now, our country is facing a man of superlative ignorance. A racist. An admitted sexual assaulter of women. A man poised to violate the Constitution the very instant he takes the oath of office. A man who openly encouraged Russia’s efforts to usher him into the White House. A man who owes his election to the underhanded efforts of deep state actors within our nation’s internal police agency. A man who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. And the Constitution has placed this man in the White House.

The Constitution gave Donald Trump command of the world’s most powerful military and an nuclear arsenal that can eradicate all life on Earth. It let him name a racist as our nation’s top enforcer of its laws. It let him use his office to sell hotel rooms to foreign diplomats. The Electoral College has voted. Trump will be our next president. This is what the Constitution hath wrought.

It did this because our Constitution remains the product of a compromise with moral monsters who believed that human beings could be owned as property. It did this because our Constitution offers no guarantee, or even much in the way of likelihood, that the men and women elected to lead the country will share the preferences of the nation as a whole. It did this because our Constitution fosters voter ignorance. It did this because our Constitution can be gamed — and was gamed quite successfully by the Republican Party.

Emphasis mine. And right there is exactly what the constitution means to conservatives: a means to get their way, to make sure fascism comes marching in, wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible. Nothing is sacred to conservatives, nothing at all. Well, no, a couple of things are sacred to conservatives: the state of their wallet, and the power to oppress and destroy other people.

The full story is at Think Progress, a highly recommended read.

ETA: It seems that even those republicans who might have spoken out are now too overcome by fear to do so. Ain’t fascism fun?

ETA: It’s begun, let’s write special laws, and Donny can just pardon people as he goes along!

Fuck every single person who has brought us to this, and fuck all those who will stand by silently, letting it happen.

Backing Black Business.

CREDIT: iStock.

CREDIT: iStock.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) just launched a database of black businesses to support, with the goal of “[building] long-term economic power for Black communities.”

On Monday, the organization unveiled backingblackbusiness.com, an interactive map and directory of online stores where customers can purchase food, health and beauty supplies, entertainment, and lifestyle goods — all from retailers owned by black people. The site also includes nonprofits, and allows business owners to add themselves to the database.

The full article is at Think Progress.

I clicked over to backingblackbusiness.com, and while I’m not in LA or NY, plenty of business owners have online shops, and after perusing a few (I got completely caught up in Loving Anvil, and am plotting on when I can spend money there) I don’t think I’ll have any problems at all, supporting black businesses. The site is brand new, so a bit rough, but there’s a lot to explore!

Word Wednesday.

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Agathokakological.

adjective ag·a·tho·kak·o·log·i·cal \¦a-gə-(ˌ)thō-ˌka-kə-¦lä-ji-kəl\

Composed of both good and evil. From Ancient Greek ἀγαθός(agathós, good) and κακός(kakós, bad).

There may be an opposite fault; for indeed upon the agathokakological globe there are opposite qualities always to be found in parallel degrees, north and south of the equator.– Robert Southey, The Doctor, Etc.

Merry Christmas! You’re Fired.

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General Motors: GM announced Monday that it will lay off 1,300 workers at a Detroit plant. The workers make the Chevy Volt, in addition to the Chevy Impala and Buick LaCrosse.

Those job cuts are in addition to 2,000 other GM (GM) employees who will lose their jobs within a month.

Boeing: Layoffs are nothing new for Boeing in 2016 — the company has already fired thousands as demand for jumbo jets slumps. But Boeing (BA) told employees Monday it will continue to cut jobs at its commercial airplane unit in 2017, citing fierce competition with rival Airbus and a drop in new orders.

Airbus also told its labor unions in November that it was cutting around 1,200 jobs.

GoPro: The action camera company announced plans last month to lay off 200 workers. That comes after it laid off more than 100 employees in January.

Many of the latest job cuts come as GoPro (GPRO, Tech30) plans to shut down its entertainment unit. That group was responsible for featuring videos shot on GoPro’s action cameras.

Xerox: The company is splitting in two before the end of the year, and company President Jeff Jacobson says layoffs are coming — even though the point of the split was to stem the company’s sales slide.

He declined to say how many will be let go, but the 39,000 employees at Xerox’s (XRX) legacy copier business are most likely to be impacted.

Caterpillar: After laying off 10,000 employees last fall, Caterpillar (CAT) said last week that it will issue another round of pink slips.

The construction giant didn’t say how many jobs will be cut, but it said it will try to place as many as possible in new jobs at the company. A post-recession rebound has proved difficult for Caterpillar. Its forecast for the coming year is pretty dour.

The Limited: The clothing store told all 248 employees at its Ohio home office that their jobs are in jeopardy. Earlier this month, the company said on an earnings call that it is looking for cash to keep the company alive, and it might have to shutter stores.

Ho Ho Fucking Ho. And people think Trump is going to magically fix this? The man who handed Carrier millions upon millions so they can automate people out of their jobs? Dream on, as you fall into poverty.

More bad news here: Trump ignores Indiana factory relocating to Mexico.

Via CNN.

Tebori Cats.

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Kazuaki Horitomo is a California-based Japanese artist who combines two of his great passions – tattoos and cats – into one. As an illustrator and tattoo artist, Horitomo is steeped in the Japanese tradition of tebori (a technique of tattooing by hand) and his illustrations reflect that. Some of our favorites works are the humorous and surreal depictions of cats performing tebori on other cats.

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Horitomo’s brand Monmon Cats derives its name from monmon, the old slang word in Japanese for tattoos. Horitomo currently works at State of Grace Tattoo in San Jose. But if tattooing isn’t your thing, you can also pick up his book, or buy prints from his shop. Or you can just follow him on Instagram.

Via Spoon & Tamago, where you can see much more! Now I want to tattoo one of the cats with rats.