Ambigrams

River

Tiffany Harvey makes these. This one is reversible, it reads the same both ways. Some combine two words, you see one word when it is viewed one way, another when it is turned upside down.

Tannerie Chouara

Tannerie Chouara, Fes El Bali, Fes, Morocco

Fes is equidistant from Tangier and Casablanca. It is about 100 miles from the Atlantic coast and 100 miles from the Mediterranean coast.

The Magazine Rack

The Magazine Rack is a collection of digitized magazines and monthly publications. It seems to be an eclectic collection, some mainstream, some odd-ball, some lunatic fringe. Just glancing at their web page this one caught my eye. Cute girl. I'm always amazed at what comic book artists could get away with in their pictures of women. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

Via Elsa the librarian.

Green is Good

Infrared image of Ethylene Cracker #7, Dow Chemical Plant, Freeport, Texas, from Genscape.
Genscape now monitors 41.95 billion lbs/yr, or 69 percent, of U.S. Gulf Coast ethylene cracking capacity via infrared camera technology.

Just finished reading Green is Good by D. T. Max in a May, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. It's about how Mark Tercek, an investment banker from Goldman-Sachs (!?!), has taken over The Nature Conservancy and is leading it in a new direction. Naturally enough, controversy ensues.

There were a few lines in the article that stood out. This one confused me, as it didn't seem to follow.

Chemical plants are volatile places, and individual components are separated from one another and buffered from residential areas, allowing nature to thrive in the gaps. 

Now that I think about it, I realize that they leave large-ish areas around chemical plants vacant because these places can be explosively dangerous, so you don't really want them around anything valuable, like people. These buffer areas make great hiding places for tweety birds and bunny rabbits, as long as the chemical plant doesn't blow up.

This line points up the big problem with conventional environmentalism.

If you saw nature as having unlimited and unquantifiable rights and humans as having none, you turned environmentalism into a form of class warfare. 

War is not bad for everything:

The war [in Columbia, South America] had been good news for the region’s many frog and butterfly species.

This line is an example of a form of statistics that I detest.

According to the most recent E.P.A. data, Dow’s Freeport plant remains the ninth-highest emitter of bromine, the eighth-highest emitter of chlorine, the fifth-highest of cumene, and the sixth-highest of hexachloroethane, which causes cancer in mice.

That sounds just awful, but wait a minute, just how much bromine are they emitting, and how does that compare to the other guys? Are we talking molecules per year, or railroad tank cars? If the #1 emiitter is dumping a supertanker load a day into the atmosphere, and our plant is dumped a cupful, do we really care about this plant? If the guys who are using bromine are dumping more into the environment than the guys who are making it, do we care about the manufacturers losses? Without some kind scale to compare these things these positional rankings are meaningless.

     And everything causes cancer in mice.

A New Crop Formation with an Ominous Warning

A magnificent crop formation that appeared on June 28 in a field near Torino, Italy.
Image copyright 2015 Valeria Margherita Zanola

Stephen Hawking is supposedly warning us about alien invaders, at least that's what his handlers are telling us he's saying. I'm not convinced he's even saying anything anymore. His handlers might just be using him as a prop to lend credence to their own hair-brained schemes.
    Some people claim this elaborate design (picture above) contains a secret message encoded in binary. Sure it does. If aliens created it, why would they bother with the binary version of ASCII codes for letters? If they can make this elaborate figure, they can certainly write letters. All this supposes that they understand Roman letters and words and modern pop-culture references, and if they can do all that, why wouldn't they also understand ASCII codes?
    Anyway, I thought I would try decoding this message. Surprisingly enough, I came up with the same translation as the people at Unknown Country did, to wit:

timeo ET ferentes

I also got a 1/2 symbol to start with, but that's just me, I obviously don't know the secret handshake. This 'message' echos the line from the Trojan priest Laocoön during the Trojan war:

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

which roughly means beware of Greeks bearing gifts, so our alien message could mean 'beware of extraterrestrials bearing gifts'.

     I translated this message by interpreting the rows of dots between each point around the outside of the design as binary codes. Dark circles (trampled grain) got a value of 1 and light circles (not trampled) got a value of zero. I started at the top of the picture and worked my way around clockwise. There are obviously a lot of problems with this interpretation. What if I got the sense for 1's and 0's backwards? What if I put the high order bit at the wrong end of the string? What if I started in the wrong place on the circle? What if I went the wrong way? Why do I feel like I've been set up?

    I used a spreadsheet to decode the message, and just for grins I tried reversing the order of the bits, but all I got was gibberish. But then I didn't try using EBCDIC instead of ASCII either.

    I think the real message here is that some people are very creative, but we already know that. Why are they doing their designs in fields? Perhaps because they can't afford paper and paint.

Via Detroit Steve and Indiana Tom.

P.S. I originally interpreted the low order bit of the first character as a 1 instead of a 0, which would have made the first letter of the message a 'u', but that wouldn't give us our nice quote from the Trojan War.

Previous Crop Circle post.

Democracy

Ace Of Spades is, I think, disgusted:

Democracy is not being practiced here; it is merely being stage-managed. [The GOP] have worked their level best to insulate themselves from the rebuking power of popular opinion, and, with their corporate-media allies to protect them, they have managed to do so almost completely.

So this is why I have become a radical: I agree with a left-wing socialist/communist about the fundamental rotten lie at the heart of the American democracy.

I will not trouble myself to follow a farce.

Mirrors my feelings on the matter almost exactly.

Via Dustbury and Rotten Chestnuts.

P.S. Looking for a picture to accompany this post, I Googled "Democracy farce". I was surprised to see how many results came up on exactly that subject.

Space Rock

Вращение астероида 2011 UW158 (Аресибо)
(The rotation of asteroid 2011 UW158 (Arecibo))
Radar image from Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico.

The Near-Earth Object (436724) 2011 UW158 on 2015-07-09
Optical observation from from Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia.
While we are sending probes to reconnoiter rocks in the far reaches of the solar system, whatever gods there be are sending rocks to probe our local space neighborhood. Asteroid 2011 UW158 passed a little more than 1.5 million miles of earth last Tuesday and thanks to our astronomers, we got some pictures, or so the news reports would have you believe. I had to dig a bit to come up with these, and while they are not Hollywood Awesome, they are pretty impressive considering how far away (4.3 million miles when the pictures were taken) and how small this thing is (1,000 by 2,0000 feet), and I certainly didn't expect to get images from a radio telescope!
    The news reports are all blathering about how this rock in made of platinum and is worth a fortune. On one hand I want to say 'I told you there was gold in them that hills'. On the other hand I can just see this prompting someone to embark on a half baked scheme to bring it into a low earth orbit so we can mine it, and then the funding runs out and as a desperate last gasp, the miners deorbit this rock and bring it crashing down to earth which brings our civilization to an end. At least we'd die rich.

Via Detroit Steve.