toucana

The invention of cheese is believed to predate recorded human history. Some early artefacts that resemble sieves have been found in eastern Europe which are thought to be cheese strainers at least 7000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cheese The general assumption is that the craft of cheesemaking developed with the growth of dairy-herding which became widely established some 4000 years ago. One suggestion is that humans discovered cheese by accident when using the stomachs of ruminants to store and transport milk - and found that rennet in the stomachs curdled the milk. The use of salt in early cheesemaking varied according to climate. Hard salted cheeses developed in hotter areas, because it was the only viable method of storing milk products there for any length of time. Cooler European climates encouraged the use of less salt which in turn encouraged the presence of useful microbes and moulds that led to the development of blue cheeses. Cheesemaking is described in Sumerian cuneiform texts from the second millenium BC. Linear B tablets of the Minoan civilization in Crete in the late bronze age refer to it as well - the Minoan word for cheese Turo was borrowed into ancient Greek as τυρός . Thereafter cheesemaking is widely described in the Roman empire and in Homer’s Odyssey, and later on in the Arab world as well. One of the few major civilizations that doesn’t have a dairy-centric tradition of cheesemaking is central China. To this day, Han Chinese people are distinctly averse to cheese products - especially blue cheeses like Gorgonzola.

A new YT video published only yesterday offers a concise (8m) account of recent research into the origins of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death which killed between 50-60% of the entire population of western Europe between 1346 and 1353. A joint study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany has traced the genome of Yersinia pestis to a ‘ground-zero’ grave site near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan which was on the northern route of the Silk Road. https://www.mpg.de/18778852/0607-evan-origins-of-the-black-death-identified-150495-x The ancient grave site was part of a Nestorian Christian trading settlement first discovered by a Russian archaeological expedition in 1886 which excavated the site and brought skeletal remains back to St Petersburg. Grave-stone inscriptions indicated that 118 of the the graves dated 1338-9 were marked as victims of pestilence - almost 10 years before the first appearance of the plague in Europe. DNA analysis has confirmed that Yersinia pestis found in skeletal remains from the Lake Issyk Kul site is the ancestral mother strain of the four known mutations of the bacterium, one of which devastated Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLNxIf2lXk

I tend to stress-test Google Translate quite a lot when doing lessons in Duolingo. One problem which often arises in the non-European language courses, is that the word bank in Duolingo simply doesn’t offer the word or script form you expected or needed. The only remedy is to fire-up Google Translate, and copy-paste the glyphs you need from there back into Duolingo, which often leads to variant translation issues and warnings. The example below is from a Duolingo Chinese lesson this morning - (quite why anyone would move a dishwasher into a bathroom, or need to discuss the matter in Chinese I have no idea !) The problem was that the Duolingo word bank did not wish to give me the characters 洗碗机 xi wan ji for ‘dishwasher', and Google Translate wanted to use a different word 浴室 yùshi for a bathroom, rather than the one Duolingo expected —> 洗手间 xishǒujian - ‘washroom’ You simply copy and paste out of Google Translate and hope for the best, and most of the time it does seem to work - and does so in Japanese and Arabic as well.

My wife who is a proof-reader picked up on many amusing typos over the years. One was in an advertisement for a legal firm of solicitors due to be inserted into the copy for a theatre programme which read - “If you haven’t tried suing us before, why not start now !”

An undisputed masterpiece of this type is O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez or ““The New Guide of The Conversation in Portugese and English”, first printed in 1855, and later republished under the title “English as She Is Spoke” in 1883. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke It is attributed to a pair of Portugese authors called Pedro Carolino and Jose Da Fonseca, neither of whom were overburdened with any great knowledge of English. Pedro Carolino in particular who did much of the translation was said to have possessed no grasp of English whatsoever, and dragged his idiomatic phrases through a pair of Portugese-French, and French-English dictionaries, with entertaining results: The English idiom “A rolling stone gathers no moss” was mangled into “The stones as roll not heap up foam” The Portugese idiom “Chover a canataro" was rendered as “Raining in jars” - as opposed to “Raining in buckets”. Items of proverbial advice included: - Dress your hairs. - This hat go well. - Undress you to. - Exculpate me by your brother’s. - She make the prude. - Do you out the hairs? - He has tost his all good. Mark Twain who wrote the introduction to the 1883 edition said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

That is what it says in the BBC press release: Although buried away in the text, it also says that: The Met Office website has a blog page about its newest supercomputing service that came online in May, and which is said to be a Microsoft Azure cloud based system. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who-we-are/innovation/supercomputer

The BBC has announced that it will revert to using the UK government Met Office as the data source of all its weather forecasting and climate update services. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm4z8mple3o The BBC had previously terminated a near century old relationship with the Met Office eight years ago in 2017 in favour of a Dutch provider called the MeteoGroup citing a need to obtain “best value for license payers money”. The MeteoGroup was subsequently taken over by a private American firm called DTN based in Minnesota. In October 2024 a technical fault affecting the supplying of data to the United Kingdom's BBC Weather service caused the latter's website and app to incorrectly forecast wind speeds of over 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h) and air temperatures exceeding 400 °C (750 °F). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTN_(company)

Suffice to say, it's not a compliment. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/international/trump-go-home-scotland-erupts-in-rage-u-s-consulate-stormed-over-support-to-israel-on-gaza/videoshow/122932742.cms

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in UK have determined that a medieval scribal error triggered centuries of confusion and misunderstanding over a long-lost saga. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/18/science/medieval-saga-chaucer-mystery-error The saga in question is a little-known text in Middle-English called The Song of Wade, twice mentioned by Chaucer, but largely forgotten nowadays. Researchers now believe that a transcription error changed a ‘W’ to a ‘Y’, transforming ‘Wolves’ into ‘Elves’. Another word in the excerpt, translated as “sprites,” should instead be “sea snakes,” moving the story even farther away from the realm of the supernatural, the researchers reported July 15 in The Review of English Studies. https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res/hgaf038/8198901?login=false Magic:The Gathering will never be the same ! ;-)

New reporting in the WSJ suggests that investigators now believe it was the Captain who turned the fuel switches off, while the junior First Officer was flying the plane in the RH seat on takeoff. https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/air-india-crash-senior-pilot-eab72db5?mod=hp_lista_pos4 The report is apparently based on sources within the US federal NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) agency.

The Chinese subsequently took this type of social projection very much further. By the the time of the medieval Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Chinese imagination had populated their model of heaven with a vast celestial bureaucracy of local magistrates, prefects, provincial governors, and imperial censors, which exactly mirrored the intricate and labyrinthine civil service system found on earth in China at that time - complete with literary examinations which had to be passed to obtain promotions. This motif can be found in several major Chinese collections of ghost stories dating from 1378 in the early Ming dynasty, and most especially in another large collection of supernatural ghost stories called the Liaozhai ( 聊齋 ) written by Pu Songling during the following Qing dynasty, over a 40 year period from around 1670 onwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Tales_from_a_Chinese_Studio The Liaozhai was first translated into English by Herbert Giles in 1880 under the title ‘Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio’.

Almost five years ago in October 2020, Mother Jones published a lengthy article by writer and film maker Leland Nally which makes fascinating re-reading in the light of the most recent political arguments within MAGA over the ‘Epstein Files’. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyone-in-jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book/ In the article the author tells the story of how he obtained a copy of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘little black book’, parts of which first surfaced on the now defunct Gawker website in 2015. It’s a 97 page contact book containing some 1571 names in all, with roughly 5,000 phone numbers, and several thousands of email addresses and home addresses. Having obtained an unredacted PDF copy via 8chan, Leland Nally then sat down and systematically began dialling phone numbers, one after another, and documented the results Many of the numbers were dead, others had changed hands, and some answered but hung up the moment they realised the caller was a journalist. A good few of the people who answered were astonished to discover that their contact details were in Epstein’s black book - they claimed that they either barely knew the man, or had only ever interacted with his close friend and confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein and his confidante Maxwell apparently ‘collected‘ people in the same way that a lepidopterist collects butterflies. By far the most sinister and revealing aspect of this tale however, is what one of Epstein’s previously unknown sexual assault victims (referred to only as ‘Julie’) disclosed about his taste in literature: The book in question was in fact just the first of an entire series of over a dozen similar books, and a film spin-off a.k.a ‘The Real Gone Girls’ released in 1970. https://www.goodreads.com/series/211187-the-man-from-o-r-g-y Jeffrey Epstein it seems had the box-set, and used it as a life guide.

There is a useful YT video by blancolirio (Juan Browne) which includes a sequence from another video by ‘Just Planes’ showing a normal Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner take-off as seen by a cockpit camera mounted directly behind the pilots. The clip shows the First Officer co-pilot flying the plane in the RH seat, with the Chief Officer monitoring the take-off from the the LH seat - which matches the scenario of the AI-171 incident. The clip begins at 6:50 elapsed in the YT video, and you can see the PIC (pilot in charge) reaching for the switch to retract the landing gear at 9:04 once a positive climb rate has been confirmed by the FO. That switch is nowhere near the fuel cut-off switches below the throttle levers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA_UZeHZwSw

One interesting detail mentioned in the report is that the investigation team had to rely on a ‘Golden Chassis’ device to read out the data stored on a heavily damaged ‘black box’. https://www.ndtvprofit.com/nation/ai-plane-crash-us-golden-chassis-helped-aaib-download-raw-data-from-black-box The Boeing 787-8 carries two Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorders (EAFR) each of which records both the flight data inputs, and the audio from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) system. One unit is mounted in an equipment bay at the front of the plane, and the other is in the aft section. Both EAFR units were recovered, but both were found to be seriously damaged. The aft unit in particular was completely unreadable owing to severe impact and fire damage. The AAIB team managed to download the data from the forward unit by breaking open the crash protection module (CPM) and transplanting the memory card into an identical ‘Golden Chassis’ unit i.e. a write-protected data-recovery jig.

The 15 page AAIB preliminary report is now available and confirms that the data and CVR systems show that the fuel cutoff switches for both engines were toggled to the CUT position barely 4 seconds after take-off: https://aaib.gov.in/What's%20New%20Assets/Preliminary%20Report%20VT-ANB.pdf The data then indicates that both switches were toggled back on, which relit both engines, but the engines were unable to develop enough thrust in time to prevent the crash.

The Air India flight 171 crash on 12 June which killed 241 passengers and crew 32 seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad airport in India was related to the fuel cut-off switches according to the Air Current website. https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/ai171-investigation-fuel-control-switches/ The WSJ and Reuters are reporting the same sources and findings from a preliminary report as well. According to these reports, both fuel cut-off switches were found in the CUT position, which should be an impossible scenario if the crew had been following SOP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD64uYK926o Even if one engine had failed on rotation as the plane took off, SOP dictates that the crew would continue to fly the plane up to a pre-determined safe ‘one engine out' altitude before attempting to run any check-lists, switching fuel feeds on and off, or attempting any engine restart procedures. The switches themselves have physical guards, and spring-loaded detentes to prevent accidental mis-operation.

Around 62% of China’s electricity still comes from coal fired power stations - and they are the world’s largest electricity producer too, producing around 8.534 TWh of electricity, or roughly 30% of the world’s entire output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China The Chinese were using steam-engines for mainline passenger train services and freight haulage all the way up until 2005, and they still possess the fourth largest coal reserves in the world. So they have no shortage of fossil fuels. As of 2023 China’s total installed generating capacity was 2.92 TW, of which 1.26 TW was renewable (376 GW wind power and 425GW from solar power). They also possess very large hydroelectric resources as well. One of the larger geographical problems facing China however is a mismatch between the location of these energy resources, and the locations of their fast growing industrial centres where the power is most needed - which is in the east (Shanghai-Zhejiang) and the deep south (Guangdong, Fujian). Many of China’s coal-fields are located in the north-eastern provinces up near the borders with North Korea and Russia, in what used to be known as Manchuria - nowadays the provinces Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning. Much of China’s hydroelectric power resources by contrast are buried in the remote mountains of far south-western provinces like Sichuan, Yunnan and in Tibet. The famous Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is located near Yi Chang in the central province of Hubei - still a very long way from Shanghai, Shenzen and Fuzhou. China has previously made pledges to achieve peak coal consumption by 2030, and carbon neutrality by 2060 in accordance with the Paris climate accord of 2020. Whether that is achievable or not remains to be seen. In 2023, The Economist wrote:

Meanwhile, in the wake of the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County Texas on 4th July that has claimed the lives of 80 people, including 21 children, with another 11 still missing from Camp Mystic - a Christian summer camp for girls - there have been recriminations from local Texas officials over the quality of the weather forecasting supplied by the NWS (National Weather Service) in advance of the intense rain storms https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/doge-nws-cuts-texas-flood-b2783357.html Mother Jones and other sources however report: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/tragedy-strikes-texas-and-some-experts-blame-trump-cuts-for-devastation/

Out of curiosity I looked up the text of Genesis 1:26 in the Septuagint version which is a very early translation of the Hebrew Tanakh into Koine Greek. According to tradition this translation was done at Alexandria Egypt c.250 BC by a panel of 70 scholars - (hence the name Septuagint) - at the behest of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. At a time when few Jewish people could actually read classical Hebrew scriptures, this was an important and highly influential rendering of the Tanakh in the pre-Christian era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint Here is what the Koine Greek rendering of Genesis 1:26 in the Septuagint says: which translates as: The interesting detail here is the use of the Greek word εἰκόνα which I think comes from a verb εικονίξω meaning “to mould into the form of”: i.e. it invokes the idea of a three-dimensional sculpture, like a bronze statue, and not a two dimensional image. The Greek word ὁμοίωσιν translated as ‘likeness’ usually equates to the Latin word similis - as in the derived word simulacrum which means an imperfect imitation, notably in the case of ancient Greek statues which were often made with subtly distorted dimensions to correct for the perspectival effect induced by viewing statues mounted on a plinth from below.

Nope - not quite. The problem the OP is alluding to is known as the ‘Cumulative Audience Paradox’ in speculative philosophical writing about time travel. In this case the presumption is that if a time machine were to be invented at a particular time and place - e.g. London in July 2025, then many curious time tourists from the future - in say 2075, or from any other era beyond that, might want to travel back in time to witness that historic moment of invention, which implies that all those myriads of people would somehow be present in the laboratory or test hangar at the exact moment when the time machine was fired up for the first time in July 2025. The issue that you refer to is different one that was neatly described in chapter 9 of the novel ‘Up The Line’ by Robert Silverberg : Your suggestion offers one possible solution to this potential paradox of cloning entities, by saying that the time travellers could only return to their original temporal point of departure

America has an excellent record of rehabilitating criminals. Only last year they elected a guy with 34 felony convictions for fraud as their new president - same guy also happens to be an adjudicated rapist and insurrectionist.

This Silverberg novel explores two other amusing temporal paradoxes that are of some interest, starting in chapter 11, where trainee Time Couriers are being given a lecture on the complexities of time tourism: The lecturer explains that an illegal time-traveller had poisoned Jesus at the age of 11, which meant Christianity had never come into being. The Roman empire had converted to another sect of Judaism and then been destroyed by the rise of a totalitarian Turkish regime that subsequently controlled the whole world. To rectify the problem, the Time Patrol had to monitor the time-line of Jesus, obtain proof of the crime, obtain a conviction, then travel back in time to intercept the poisoner just before he set off to poison Jesus and execute him thereby editing his crime out of the timeline. One of the trainees however is unhappy with this explanation: The lecturer explains that this would constitute the ‘Ultimate Paradox” in which time travel becomes its own negation. To counter this problem, philosophically speaking you then have to invoke a subsidiary paradox called the “Paradox of Transit Displacement’ whereby time travellers who are already ‘up the line’ and encapsulated in a detached bubble of their own ‘now time’ are immune to the transformations of paradox in the main continuum.

This paradox was foreseen in some detail in a Sci-Fi novel called ‘Up The Line’ by American author Robert Silverberg which was first published in 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Line In another example, a time-travel tour guide called Jud Elliot II takes a party back to Baton Rouge Louisiana in September 1935 to witness the assassination of a local demagogue called Huey Long, but has to negotiate the complexities of placing his tourists in a vantage point that doesn’t interact with four other parties of visitors from the future, each accompanied by instances of himself during previous tour visits.

The murder of two firefighters in Coeur d’Alene Idaho on Sunday 29 June appears to be linked to a significant anniversary of an incident that occurred exactly 24 years earlier involving property that once belonged to a violent neo-Nazi white supremacist hate group called Aryan Nations. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/aryan-nations-behind-coeur-d-alene-idaho-shooting-theories-emerge-amid-ongoing-manhunt-101751250931648.html The back-story here is that Aryan Nations was formerly based in a 20 acre security compound of buildings near Hayden Lake Idaho which is just a few miles from Canfield Mountain in Coeur d’Alene where the most recent shootings took place. Aryan Nations lost control of their HQ at Hayden Lake following a court case in 2000 which was brought with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Centre after an incident in 1998 when Aryan Nations security staff shot at, beat up, and threatened to murder a local American Indian woman Victoria Keenan and her son Jason. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/victoria-keenan-discusses-run-aryan-nations/ Control of the land passed to the families of the victims as part of $6.3 million court-ordered restitution and damages settlement after Aryan Nations went bankrupt. The land subsequently became part of a Peace Park, and the Coeur d’Alene fire-department were allowed to to use the area for training purposes. On 29 June 2001 the abandoned Aryan Nations properties at Hayden Lake were burned down by local firefighters in the course of a training exercise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Nations The deceased suspect subsequently identified on Monday as 20 y/o Wess Roley was a local resident who once hoped to become a firemen himself. According to US social media his family strongly supported the Trump/Maga agenda. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/01/idaho-firefighter-attack-gunman On Sunday 29 June 2025 Wess Roley deliberately set a brush fire on Canfield Mountain to lure firefighters to the area, then opened fire on them, killing two battalion chiefs and wounding nine others before being found dead himself after a prolonged firefight with SWAT team responders.

As of Monday 30 June The US Department of Defense will no longer provide satellite weather data leaving hurricane forecasters without crucial information about storms as peak hurricane season looms in the Atlantic. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5446120/defense-department-cuts-hurricane-ice-weather-satellite The message said: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/noaa-cuts-hurricane-forecasting-climate Due to their unique characteristics and ability to map the entire world twice a day with extremely high resolution, the three DMSP satellites are a primary source of information for scientists to monitor Arctic sea ice and hurricane development. The DMSP partners with NOAA to make weather data collected from the satellites publicly available. The loss of DMSP comes as NOAA’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs. Some sources suggest that cybersecurity concerns over sharing high-resolution data derived from military satellite systems with civilian researchers may also be in play as well. A current NOAA scientist who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said that the action to halt the DMSP, when taken in context with other recent moves by the Trump administration, amounted to “a systematic destruction of science”. Scientists said the decision to halt the DMSP will result in immediately degraded hurricane forecasts during what is expected to be an above-average season as well as a gap in monitoring sea ice – just as Arctic sea ice is hitting new record lows.