You Need to Know about the Hundredth Meridian

The Hundredth Meridian was identified by John Wesley Powell (a fascinating character in his own right) as a geographic tipping point separating the wet Eastern US from the dry West.  This has all sorts of implications for ecology and social structure.  Here is a fascinating YouTube video on the subject.

Basically, the dry West is due to the rain shadow from the Rocky Mountains (very broadly defined).  East of the 100th meridian, the land was wet and dominated by forests that were not dissimilar to those with which most European immigrants were familiar.  To the west of this line the land was dominated by grasslands and desert, to which the settlement patterns adopted in the East were not well suited.

"At the Hundredth Meridian" is also a great song by The Tragically Hip.

Domesticated Foxes

Apparently foxes were domesticated thousands of years ago. I guess it never stuck like it did with cats and dogs. Gizmodo has an article that a site in Spain had foxes buried with humans.

"Researchers from several institutes and universities analyzed bones collected at the burial site. They studied the isotopes found in the collagen preserved in the bones, which can provide insights into the diets of individuals. In human bones, we can learn about the diet of an adult in the last five to 10 years of life. In young adult dogs, the diet data spans from six months to three years."

During the 1950s in the USSR, there was a successful systematic attempt to domesticate the silver fox.  The researchers also successfully bred silver foxes for "violence"; a sort of anti-domestication.

The 점심 - Dim Sum Connection

The Korean word for lunch (점심) comes from the same Chinese characters as Dim Sum (點心 or 点心). In Cantonese it is pronounced dim sam, and in Mandarin it is pronounced dian xin. In Japanese they pronounce it as tenshin and it means "snack" . In Vietnamese it is diem tam and means "breakfast". Apparently the lunch meaning came through Eastern Chinese dialects, as in the Shanghai dialect ti xin, is often used for "lunch". In most dialects of Chinese it means "snack", "light refreshment" or "pastry". The word dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618 - 906 A.D.).

Artistic Styles in Craiyon / DALL-E mini

An old man holding a dachshund

George Washington

Gandalf

Big Bird

All of the images above were created by an AI known as Craiyon or DALL-E mini.  This is a simplified version of DALL-E, a neural net that converts text into images.

I am impressed with how the program manages to imitate various art styles, so I am going to show a series of generated images that use the same prompts as above, but also add an artist or artistic style.  Some of the images are quite impressive, while others are odd or silly.  Click on any of the images below to view a larger version.

I picked the subjects because "An old man holding a dachshund" is fairly specific, but open to a lot of artistic interpretation.  "George Washington" is a historical figure with a well-known image, so much less open to interpretation.  "Gandalf" is a fictional character, but the image from the movies played by Ian McKellen is, by far, the most widely known.  Finally, "Big Bird" just looked really awesome when painted by Caravaggio.

You Think You Have Translation Problems?

In his book, Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose notes the following translation sequence occurred when Lewis and Clark met the Wallawalla Indians in April 1806. Lewis speaks in English George Drouillard or Francis Labiche, French Canadian soldiers in the expedition, translate this into French. Toussaint Charbonneau, a 45-year-old French Canadian trapper who speaks no English, translates this into Hidatsa, a language he has picked up in the course of trading with the Indians. Sacagawea, Charbonneau’s fifteen-year-old Shoshone wife who had been captured by the Hidatsa four years earlier, translates this into Shoshone. A Shoshone woman held captive by the Wallawallas translates this into Wallawalla, a language related to Nez Perce. This was considered an improvement over the sign-language they had been using with the Indians further west.

Computer Case Mod for "Gondor"

 

I assembled my first custom-made desktop computer several years ago when I was still living in Utah. My youngest son, Alan, had actually put it together a year or two before that, but he was upgrading and I wanted something better than the MacBook BYU had issued me as a work computer.

A DALL-E Short Story

 

This story starts with the simple inquiry to DALL-E mini, shown above.

Imagining Feelings with DALL-E Mini

 

DALL-E mini is a app that converts text into images.  It's based on a larger neural net called (not surprisingly) DALL-E.  The main public usage of DALL-E mini seems to be the generating of silly memes like those linked in this article.

One really interesting use, however, is to see the kind of images it generates when you type in feelings and emotions that are rarely associated with a specific image.  The images above are from "existential angst."

Building Westmarch, my Home NAS

 

A couple of months ago my main desk top computer, which I built two years ago at the begining of the COVID pandemic quit working.  Diagnosing the problem took me down a real rabbit-hole of possible parts problems and I ended up with some extra working parts at the end of that journey.  (The problem turned out to be a bad HDD.)  As a result I decided to see if I could cobble together a working home NAS.

There's something about ...rungus!

 

Not long ago a comedian named Guy Kelly typed in the nonsense name, Crungus, into DALL-E mini and got the horrifying result above.  DALL-E mini is a app that converts text into images.  It's based on a larger neural net called (not surprisingly) DALL-E.

What is a Mergopus?

 

Is this a mergopus?

What exactly is a mergopus?  Try searching on your favorite internet search engine and you will find no information on the word.  This is because it is a nonsense word I made up a few days ago.