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It's a strange fall so far. Many trees have leaves that are turning brown and falling rather than the usual brilliant colors.

It looks like leaf scorch but it has been plenty wet up here.

How about you all? Are you getting the pretty colors?

Quote:

Originally Posted by flatbutt (Post 12102369)

How about you all? Are you getting the pretty colors?

I'm in So Cal. We've had more rain than usual, so the only color we have is green. To see fall colors, we have to go somewhere there are trees with leaves turning color.

You can stop clutching your pearls and do your happy dance...

the McRib is coming back!

Quote:

Originally Posted by flatbutt (Post 12102369)

We sometimes get a little bit of color here. Most of our color comes from Chinese Tallow trees which are invasive. We have some maples, and depending upon how our weather turns, we may get a little color out of them. But most often what I've seen in maples here is - We'll have nice warm weather in the 80s and 90s, and then a cold front will come in that will drop the weather into the 40s, and that cold front and going from "hot" to "cold" essentially over night will cause the maples to drop their leaves almost completely within 24 hours. We had a maple, and I remember one time in particular, it got cold over night. When I woke up the leaves were green and a little yellow, and by that evening, almost every leaf was brown and 75% of them had dropped. I think one year that we had it, did we get a bit more color over a little more time.

"We" (archeologists) do a lot of guessing about what ancients did and why. I think that sometimes they are WAY off. I'm sure that a lot of time they are pretty close. I wish we had a better idea.

Sometimes when you read about stuff that they've found, you're left wondering "WTF?"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/remains-infants-found-wearing-helmets-made-skulls-other-children-180973608/

Quote:

Archaeologists excavating a site in Salango, Ecuador, have discovered evidence of a burial ritual that might even make Indiana Jones shiver. As the researchers report in the journal Latin American Antiquity, excavations at a pair of 2,100-year-old funerary mounds revealed several unusual sets of remains: namely, the skeletons of two infants wearing what appear to be bone “helmets” made from the skulls of older children.

Members of the Guangala culture interred the infants at Salango, an ancient ritual complex on the country’s central coast, around 100 B.C. Archaeologists unearthed the remains—as well as those of nine other individuals, many of whom were buried with small objects including figurines and shells—while conducting excavations between 2014 and 2016. Per the study, the discovery represents the only known evidence of “using juvenile crania as mortuary headgear” found to date.

One of the babies was around 18 months old at time of death, while the second was between 6 and 9 months old.

As the study’s authors write, “The modified cranium of a second juvenile was placed in a helmet-like fashion around the head of the first, such that the primary individual’s face looked through and out of the cranial vault of the second.”

The older infant’s helmet originally belonged to a child aged 4 to 12 years old; interestingly, the researchers found a small shell and a finger bone sandwiched between the two layered skulls. The second baby’s helmet was fashioned from the cranium of a child between 2 and 12 years old.

Perhaps most eerily, the older children’s skulls likely still had flesh when they were outfitted over the infants’ heads. Juvenile skulls “often do not hold together” if they are simply bare bone, the archaeologists note.

“We’re still pretty shocked by the find,” lead author Sara Juengst of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte tells Forbes’ Kristina Killgrove. “Not only is it unprecedented, there are still so many questions.”

Potential explanations for the unexpected burials abound: DNA and isotope analysis currently underway may clarify whether the infants and children were related, but even if these tests fail to provide a definitive answer, Juengst says the researchers “definitely have a lot of ideas to work with.”

Speaking with New Atlas’ Michael Irving, Jeungst explains that “heads were commonly depicted in iconography, pottery, stone, and with literal heads in pre-Columbian South America.”

She adds, “They are generally representative of power, ancestors, and may demonstrate dominance over other groups—such as through the creation of trophy heads from conquered enemies.”

According to the paper, the helmets could have been intended to protect the deceased’s “presocial and wild” souls as they navigated the afterlife. Other infants found in the funerary platform were buried with figurines placed near their heads, perhaps for a similar purpose. An alternative theory posits the skull helmets belonged to the infants’ ancestors and were actually worn in both life and death.

Jeungst and her colleagues also outline a “tantalizing hypothesis” centered on a volcano located near the burial site. Ash found at Salango suggests the volcano was active and likely interfering with agriculture in the area, potentially subjecting the children to malnourishment and even starvation. Sîan Halcrow, an archaeologist at New Zealand’s University of Otago whose research focuses on juvenile health and disease, tells Killgrove that all four sets of bones showed signs of anemia.

Another less likely explanation identifies the children as victims of a ritual designed to quiet the volcano. The remains show no signs of trauma, however, and as Juengst says to Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou, the evidence suggests the four juveniles “probably were quite ill anyway.”

The most plausible explanation, according to Jeungst, is that the Guangala outfitted the infants with skulls “in reaction to some sort of natural or social disaster and [to ensure] that these infants had extra protection or extra links to ancestors through their burials.”

While the unusual burial may seem macabre to modern readers, Juengst tells Killgrove she found the helmets “strangely comforting.”

“Dealing with the death of young infants is always emotional,” she explains, “but in this case, it was strangely comforting that those who buried them took extra time and care to do it in a special place, perhaps accompanied by special people, in order to honor them.”

Mary Lou Retton very ill

A mouth full of crowns. Well not literally but dang I broke another tooth today due to ancient amalgam fillings. Sigh just another sidebar to getting old,

Quote:

Originally Posted by flatbutt (Post 12130333)

A mouth full of crowns. Well not literally but dang I broke another tooth today due to ancient amalgam fillings. Sigh just another sidebar to getting old,

Yes we are the victims of the school dental system. A tiny bit of decay and they would drill the whole tooth out. Crazy bastards.

Just grow in your third set of teeth. What, you didn't know you had a third set?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a44786433/humans-have-third-set-teeth/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=li nk&ICID=ref_fark

I've had a couple teeth crack too far for a root canal / crown, so they end up getting pulled. Haven't looked at implants, I can still chew okay.

My DDS swapped out my amalgam fillings many years ago for composite. I guess gold was okay, but rarely done due to cost. My uncle had gold fillings. He would take a penny on edge between his molars and bend it. Still makes me cringe.

A thread for miscellaneous stuff...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1699990094.jpg

Back in the summer, our Plumeria blooms were these variegated pink and white.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1699990094.jpg

We moved it indoors into our "kitchen dining room - greenhouse, and plant nursery area for the winter. This is the very same Plumeria! Just a three months later.

I have to assume it is a female plant, as it can't decide what color to bloom. Both are pretty, so we don't really care.

The world's largest ice berg is on the move!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-worlds-largest-iceberg-is-drifting-three-miles-into-the-ocean-each-day-180983326/
(partial excerpt)
[IMG]Called A23a, the iceberg measures around 1,500 square miles—more than 20 times the size of Washington, D.C.—and it’s roughly 1,300 feet thick, making it two and one-third times the height of the Washington Monument. It weighs nearly one trillion metric tons. Chad Greene, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells New Scientist’s James Dinneen that large icebergs like A23a break off from Antarctica around once per decade. Sometimes, they get stuck in the Antarctic’s cold waters, which staves off their melting, but only for a while. “Icebergs this big can hang around for decades in one place, then one day decide to go for a jolly,” Greene says to the publication. “That’s when things get interesting.” A23a did just that—it broke off from Antarctica in August 1986, then it became grounded on the floor of the Weddell Sea, which is part of the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and South America. Andrew Fleming, the remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey, first noticed the iceberg was moving again in 2020, he tells BBC News. Satellite imagery from the British Antarctic Survey showed currents and winds pushed the iceberg thousands of kilometers through the Weddell Sea in 2022 and 2023.[/IMG]

https://cubasi.cu/sites/default/file...opa-press.jpeg

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cp...s_2x640-nc.png

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cp...2cbe4ee4aa.jpg

I work with flippin' geniuses. IT related.

We have to temporarily relocate some servers so that we can do some power work in part of one of our data centers.

The open cabinet that I'm going to use doesn't have working patch panel above it, but there's a couple top-of-rack switches a few cabinets away. Rather than mount another pair of switches, we ran some cables from that rack to the one I want to use.

I used ports 13 - 24 on both switches, in fact one of the geniuses helped me run the cables. I should have labeled all the ports, but #1, the label maker I had to use blows, and #2, this is temporary, remember? So I labeled #13, 14, 15, 16, then left a bunch blank, and labeled 22, 23 and 24. On the other switch I messed up some of the labels, so I only labeled 13, and 22, 23, 24. To me, it was obvious I cabled all 12 ports on each switch, but I guess not.

I stopped in tonight as they were finishing up the move, and wouldn't you know it, they only used the ports I labeled. I asked why they didn't just start at 13 and then use 14, 15, etc. they said they didn't realize they were live. The cabinet was open where the switches were, so I know they could see all the cables plugged in.

Retirement can't come soon enough.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rockfan4 (Post 12144775)

I feel ya. A long long time ago when I was in a manufacturing control role I instructed an operator to add a bag of methocel ( a thickener) to a batch. When the line sampler came back, she said that the batch had two big lumps in it. I figured that the operator had added the methocel too fast. Oh no he didn't, he simply slashed the bag and tossed it in then went on break.

After I wrote him up the union rep came back with "YOU told him to add a bag which he did."

That's when I decided that R&D was a better gig.

Flatbutt, when I was managing a dairy distribution center, we had a period when our orders from the main plant were so screwed up I lost it. Attached to the fax for our order one day I attached an image with the following:
" At F******Dairy we hire the mentally handicapped. We didn't mean to, but we did."

It was about an hour before the $h1t trickled down to my level. My boss's exact words were, "Les, you can think that, you might even say it, but for God's sake, don't put it on paper!"

If I had known then what I know now, when my boss told me my position was being eliminated and they had a good package for me, I would have kissed him on the mouth.

Retirement is so much more simple.
Best
Les

^^^
Cool but for some reason I immediately thought of A Clockwork Orange

My grandsons hockey team posts all game pix on Facebook. I figured I'd sign on to see them but FB wants a state issued ID in order to prove my identity.

NO WAY!