Today I Learned #2: Gone for a Wiki Walk

[AmazonQueen]

Today I learned that regular expressions are evil! Well, some of them.

I thought it was going to be about facial expressions or perhaps popular phrases with unPC origins. Instead it was about something that makes my head hurt.

 

[Morty]

TIL that bananas, pumpkins and avocados are all berries...and that strawberries (amongst others) aren't!

 

[Samson]

TIL that 10% of the world's pagers are in use by Britain's national health service.

 

[Morty]

TIL that Stonehenge isn't a henge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henge#:~:text=Etymology,extant external bank as well.

 

[H4run]

TIL Persona 4 is on steam, dang, no discount, should I wait or buy it ASAP, I rarely play game lately I don't want this to be a waste of money, but there was a time I even consider buying a console just to play Persona.

 

[Takhisis]

Doesn't Steam have regular sales? Soon it should be time for a July4th/northern summer sale.

 

[Synobun]

Yes, the Steam Summer Sale starts next week probably.

If Persona 4 just got added to the store, though, it might not get discounted. I think there's some rule about needing to be in the store for at least a month or something before it can participate. Or maybe that's a cooldown between sales. I'm not sure. Wait and find out.

 

[Takhisis]

If Persona 4 just got added to the store, though, it might not get discounted. I think there's some rule about needing to be in the store for at least a month or something before it can participate.

Then wait for the midsummer sale.

 

[Synobun]

Then wait for the midsummer sale.

Not sure Steam has one of those. It might. They've upped the yearly sales. If no midsummer sale, there'll be a Halloween one.

 

[H4run]

Yes, the Steam Summer Sale starts next week probably.

If Persona 4 just got added to the store, though, it might not get discounted. I think there's some rule about needing to be in the store for at least a month or something before it can participate. Or maybe that's a cooldown between sales. I'm not sure. Wait and find out.

Mean, I'm gonna buy it, like,

Today

 

[AmazonQueen]

Learned a little about Medgar Evers tonight.
Evers was a friend of James Baldwin and a civil rights activist who was murdered in 1963. His murderer was convicted at his 3rd trial in 1994.

 

[Takhisis]

TIL volcanic activity has been linked to the fall of the Roman Republic

Ancient Rome Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away.
Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands.

Chaos and conflict roiled the Mediterranean in the first century B.C. Against a backdrop of famine, disease and the assassinations of Julius Caesar and other political leaders, the Roman Republic collapsed, and the Roman Empire rose in its place. Tumultuous social unrest no doubt contributed to that transition — politics can unhinge a society. But so can something arguably more powerful.

Scientists on Monday announced evidence that a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.

Spoiler :

In recent years, geoscientists, historians and archaeologists have joined forces to investigate the societal impacts of large volcanic eruptions. They rely on an amalgam of records — including ice cores, historical chronicles and climate modeling — to pinpoint how volcanism affected civilizations ranging from the Roman Republic to Ptolemaic Egypt to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

There’s nuance to this kind of work, said Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University who has studied the falls of Egyptian dynasties. “It’s not ‘a volcano erupts and a society goes to hell.’” But the challenge is worth it, he said. “We hope in the end that we get better history out of it, but also a better understanding of what’s happening to the Earth right now.”

snipped picture 1: A sample ice core for use in analyzing the fallout from the Okmok eruption of 43 B.C.

Roughly 1,500 volcanoes are potentially active right now, meaning that they’ve erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. While scientists today have sophisticated tools to monitor volcanoes, the vast majority of historical eruptions have gone unrecorded, at least by modern scientific instruments. Sussing out those eruptions requires patience and ingenuity, and a willingness to manage a lot of ice.

At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it’s not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit “cold room.” Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.

Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it’s exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs.

“They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion,” Dr. McConnell said.

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,” said Michael Sigl, a chemist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who collaborates with Dr. McConnell. “It carries the composition of the rocks.”

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

Dr. McConnell and his collaborators recently analyzed six ice cores drilled in the Arctic. In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,” said Jessica Clark, a historian of the Roman Republic at Florida State University who was not involved in the research.

Gill Plunkett, a paleoecologist at Queen’s University Belfast, set out sleuthing. After extracting 35 pieces of tephra from the ice, she pored over the rock chemistry of likely volcanic suspects. Nicaragua’s Apoyeque. Italy’s Mount Etna. Russia’s Shiveluch.

But it was Okmok, a volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, that turned out to be the best match, at least on paper. Sealing the deal would require testing two tephra samples — one from the ice and one from Okmok — on the same instrument.

Dr. Plunkett arranged for a tephra handoff at a conference in Dublin. A colleague from the Alaska Volcano Observatory, Kristi Wallace, packed four bags of Okmok tephra in her carry-on luggage. The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

snipped picture: Okmok erupting in July 2008 on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,” said Jessica Ball, a volcanologist at the California Volcano Observatory, who was not involved in the research.

There’s good evidence that the Northern Hemisphere was colder than normal around 43 B.C. Trees across Europe grew more slowly that year, and a pine forest in North America experienced an unusually early autumn freeze. Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It was bloody cold,” Dr. McConnell said.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

These cold, wet conditions would have almost certainly decimated crops, Dr. McConnell and his colleagues said. Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,” said Dr. McConnell, who published the team’s results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Karen Holmberg, an archaeologist at New York University who studies volcanic events and was not involved in the research, said she found the study “compelling and persuasive.”

Unfortunately, the archaeological record doesn’t often record volcanic eruptions, she said, except in cases of very nearby eruptions when there’s a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

Reinforcing elite authority during times of turmoil makes sense, Dr. Manning said. “Bad flooding is interpreted as having a bad king in office.”

Volcanic eruptions have left fingerprints on other societies, too. They’ve been tied to economic decline in sixth-century pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and famine-induced migration in eastern China in the 10th century. Eruptions have potentially helped trigger widespread outbreaks of disease, such as the Justinian plague around 540 A.D. Just over a decade ago, an eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull led to the costly closure of a wide swath of European air space.

Questions persist, however, for geoscientists, historians and archaeologists alike. Having more ice core records might reveal the identities of orphan eruptions, their sulfur signatures in ice cores still unpinned to a parent volcano, said Robert Dull, a paleoecologist at California Lutheran University who studies volcanic eruptions.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

A better understanding of how societies were structured is also important. Increased knowledge of trade patterns, for instance, would shed light on how a crop failure in one geographic area would have trickle-down effects throughout a wider region, Dr. Dull said. “You need to understand how human beings were connected.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

“Okmok volcano is not exactly a commonly known threat,” Dr. Holmberg said. “But then neither was Eyjafjallajökull.”

Of course, as the article says, Rome's institutions were already teetering and what remained of the successors to Alexander the Great, but this kind of thing does help push the situation over the edge.

 

[Kaitzilla]

TIL in some parts of the United States it is against the law to cause a catastrophe.
https://features.weather.com/causing-a-catastrophe/

Scott was charged with knowingly causing a catastrophe in November 1994. It’s an obscure law on the books in Missouri, and no one in the United States had ever been convicted of the crime.
...
After a 4-week trial, which included Flach’s testimony, the jury found James Scott guilty of causing a catastrophe. He was sentenced to life in prison.

 

[The_J]

TIL that in the 60s-70s there were several attempts to form a pan-arab state. None of them were successful at the end, but at least one of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic (Egypt+Syria) existed for 3 years and was in a federation with Yemen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_States .
A bigger proposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Arab_Republics_(1972)

I find that very interesting, given that I can't think of any other voluntary merger of independent nations in modern times (except formation of Germany maybe).

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learne that a flashing GIF can **** as a deadly weapon if you send it to someone with epilepsy.

 

[Samson]

Today I learne that a flashing GIF can **** as a deadly weapon if you send it to someone with epilepsy.

Doing it on purpose is obviously evil, but I do not know why someone who is susceptible would not take preventative action, with something like a plugin that blocks such images.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Argh I misspelled "count"...

Doing it on purpose is obviously evil, but I do not know why someone who is susceptible would not take preventative action, with something like a plugin that blocks such images.

That extension was only made last year, article I linked is from 2017.

Firefox used to have ESC key stop animation, but that got taken out for some reason.

 

[Zkribbler]

The actor who played Qwint in Jaws received no money for his performance. He turned his salary over to the IRS to settle a claim for unpaid taxes.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned that those with Parkinson's Disease often have difficulties with the rapid (saccadic) eye movements needed for reading. There's a study on it here although I don't entirely understand it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Today I learned that those with Parkinson's Disease often have difficulties with the rapid (saccadic) eye movements needed for reading. There's a study on it here although I don't entirely understand it.

I got through the abstract and knew nothing more than when I started.

Abstract: Despite extensive research, the functions of the basal ganglia (BG) in movement control have not been fully understood. Eye movements, particularly saccades, are convenient indicators of BG function. Here, we review the main oculomotor findings reported in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and genetic parkinsonian syndromes. PD is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder caused by dopaminergic cell loss within the substantia nigra pars compacta, resulting in depletion of striatal dopamine and subsequent increased inhibitory BG output from the internal globus pallidus and the substantia nigra pars reticulata. Eye movement abnormalities are common in PD: anomalies are more evident in voluntary than reflexive saccades in the initial stages, but visually guided saccades may also be involved at later stages. Saccadic hypometria (including abnormally fragmented saccades), reduced accuracy, and increased latency are among the most prominent deficits. PD patients show also unusually frequent and large square wave jerks and impaired inhibition of reflexive saccades when voluntary mirror saccades are required. Poor convergence ability and altered pursuit are common. Inherited parkinsonisms are a heterogeneous group of rare syndromes due to gene mutations causing symptoms resembling those of PD. Eye movement characteristics of some parkinsonisms have been studied. While sharing some PD features, each syndrome has a distinctive profile that could contribute to better define the clinical phenotype of parkinsonian disorders. Moreover, because the pathogenesis and the underlying neural circuit failure of inherited parkinsonisms are often well defined, they might offer a better prospect than idiopathic PD to understand the BG function.