Nullary Sources

BBC News:

Dr [Howard] Falcon-Lang, who is based in the department of earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, spotted some drawers in a cabinet marked “unregistered fossil plants”.

“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained.

“This process allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled ‘C. Darwin Esq’.”

The item turned out to be a piece of fossil wood collected by Darwin during his famous Voyage of the Beagle in 1834. This was the expedition on which he first started to develop his theory of evolution.

Totally crazy, but at the same time, not really that crazy at all. Universities and museums have huge collections of stuff that are often poorly sorted and catalogued, if at all.

Alli Knothe for The Boston Globe’s Metro Desk:

A former Fall River dentist has pleaded guilty to charges that involved substituting paper clips for stainless steel posts while performing root canals, the attorney general’s office said.

Michael Clair, 53, of Maryland, allegedly billed Medicaid for the cost of the stainless steel posts he didn’t use and is facing Medicaid fraud charges. He also pleaded guilty Monday to charges of assault and battery, larceny over $250, tampering with evidence, intimidation of a witness, and illegally prescribing hydrocodone, Combunox, and Percocet.

homina homina homina

Eric Pfeiffer, writing on Yahoo! News’s The Sideshow blog:

John Tyler was born in 1790. He became the 10th president of the United States in 1841 after William Henry Harrison died in office. Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler in 1853, at age 63. Then, at the age of 71, Lyon Gardiner Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924 and four years later at age 75, Harrison Ruffin Tyler. Both men are still alive today.

Nuts. Click through for a bunch more facts about Tyler — most of which I’m sure the well-read (and well-groomed) Nullary Sources already know.

Today was a good day.

Michael Warren for the Associated Press:

British adventurer Felicity Aston became the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica on Monday, hauling two sledges around crevasses and over mountains into nearly constant headwinds, past the South Pole and onward to the coastal ice shelf, persevering for 59 days in near-total solitude.

She made it to her destination ahead of schedule, using nothing but her own strength to cover 1,084 miles from her starting point on the Leverett Glacier on Nov. 25 to Hercules Inlet.

TWO MONTHS

A THOUSAND MILES

COMPLETELY ALONE IN ANTARCTICA

WHAT THE FUCK

Michael Powell reporting for The New York Times:

Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”

This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.

Fucking.

You guys.

God damn it.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds for Popular Mechanics on a recent excellent Supreme Court decision:

Can police attach a GPS tracker to your car, or is that an invasion of your privacy? On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Jones, ruled unanimously that doing so is a search, meaning that it must pass muster under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ruling may put a crimp in the use of this popular law-enforcement technique, but what’s really interesting is that it also may signal the court’s willingness to overhaul how it thinks about what constitutes a trespass on your privacy.

…

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority opinion, also wrote a separate opinion saying that future cases involving GPS data obtained, for example, from car manufacturers’ location services might raise Fourth Amendment issues. Fourth Amendment law bars unreasonable searches, and Sotomayor wrote that the notion of what constitutes an unreasonable search may change with technology. People may disclose a list of search terms to a search engine, but that doesn’t mean that tracking years of a person’s Web history can’t be construed as a search on the part of the government.

In a separate concurring opinion, four justices—Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan—criticized the majority’s approach as unnecessarily limited by “18th century” views of property. Noting that there are many services such as cellphone tracking, toll-road records, and modern cars’ onboard data recorders that allow cars to be tracked without trespassing, these justices suggested the need for a broader focus on privacy issues. In this they, like Justice Sotomayor, seem sympathetic to the D.C. Circuit’s suggestion that when the government collects a lot of bits of data about you, it’s the aggregate of the data—the mosaic that it represents about you—that determines whether there is a search, regardless of the status of any particular bit.

Adrian Higgins, Washington Post:

For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t.

What exactly is being eliminated here? Apparently botanists had to publish a prose description of the species in Latin. And since most botanists don’t know Latin, they have to get help from scientist-translators to write these descriptions. Whole thing seems kinda nuts.

D. Aileen Dodd, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A Gwinnett schools investigation found former Beaver Ridge Elementary School teacher Luis Rivera was the author of a third-grade homework assignment that used slave beatings to teach math concepts.

In a statement to school officials obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, Rivera, a teacher at the school since August 2008, apologized and said some of the questions he wrote were in “poor taste.”

Rivera’s 20-question homework assignment used slave beatings and picking cotton to link lessons about ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to math computation. One of the problems read: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

What the fuck.

Brandon Keim, Wired:

In the new study, researchers led by [Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota] and William Ratcliff grew brewer’s yeast, a common single-celled organism, in flasks of nutrient-rich broth.

Once per day they shook the flasks, removed yeast that most rapidly settled to the bottom, and used it to start new cultures. Free-floating yeast were left behind, while yeast that gathered in heavy, fast-falling clumps survived to reproduce.

Within just a few weeks, individual yeast cells still retained their singular identities, but clumped together easily. At the end of two months, the clumps were a permanent arrangement. Each strain had evolved to be truly multicellular, displaying all the tendencies associated with “higher” forms of life: a division of labor between specialized cells, juvenile and adult life stages, and multicellular offspring.

Really cool result. I hope the findings are replicated soon.

Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the Costa Concordia, a luxury cruise ship that ran aground off the Italian coast. If not, Wikipedia has a decent roundup.

The captain, Francesco Schettino, has come under fire for allegedly taking the ship off course to get closer to the coast, causing the wreck, as well as abandoning the ship before the passengers were evacuated. His excuse for the latter, as reported by Phoebe Natanson and Lee Ferran for ABC News, must have come from The Onion:

“I had no intention of escaping,” Francesco Schettino, 52, said during his first court hearing Tuesday, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“I was helping some passengers put the life boat to sea. At a certain point the mechanism for lowering it, blocked. We had to force it. Suddenly the system unblocked itself and I tripped and I found myself inside the life boat with a number of passengers.”

Once in the lifeboat that was lowered into the sea, Schettino insisted to the court that it was “impossible to go back onboard.”

Freedom from Religion Foundation:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation discovered the shocking extent of petty and vindictive community reactions against 16 year old litigant Jessica Ahlquist when it attempted earlier this week to order a dozen roses to be delivered to the victorious state/church plaintiff in Cranson, R.I. FFRF is in the process of filing a complaint about one of the floral shops with Rhode Island’s human rights division over the civil rights violation.

They tried a bunch of different shops too and were rebuffed each time. Bonkers.