Filet of bitch
I don’t know why the Daily Mail floated this story to the top yesterday — it’s a couple of years old — but I hadn’t heard it and we were talking murderers. This is one of the most famous.
Hawley Crippen was a henpecked American doctor living in London with his horrible wife. She disappeared in 1910. When questioned, he told the police she had run off with a man and he was too embarrassed to admit it to their friends.
Then he vanished with his mistress.
So Scotland Yard dug up his cellar and found…a big, amorphous mass of rotting belly skin and a hair curler wrapped in his pajama top.
At trial, the pathologist swore the skin belonged to his wife because it had a recognizable scar. He was hanged.
The case is famous for two things: it was Bernard Spilsbury‘s first major court appearance (if forensic pathologists had rock stars, he’d be the first and biggest). And it was the first case to involve the telegraph wireless, as Crippen was breathlessly followed across the Atlantic by the paper-reading public rather like an Edwardian white Bronco.
Welp, somebody recently dug out the microscope slide of the supposed scar and had some DNA testing done. Not only is the skin not that of Mrs Crippen, it’s not even a woman (the things they can tell from DNA these days).
If you’re interested, you can watch an hour-long PBS program about it online.
I’m not persuaded by the toxicologist’s explanation, but I truly don’t know what to think about the new evidence. One thing we certainly agree on, though — I’ve always thought it exceedingly strange that a man would successfully dispose of all the bones, organs and limbs of his victim and then give up and bury a big, nasty slab of belly skin wrapped in his own PJ’s under the floor next to the kitchen.
January 18, 2011 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 28
Words, meet numbers
Have you seen this thing? So cool.
Google has now digitized 15 million books and this dingus allows you to graph word and phrase frequency over time. Up to five comparisons at once.
So, for example, you can see the handover point when “World War I” replaced “Great War” in literature. Or the exact point “Tiananmen Square” drops out of Chinese books.
It isn’t by a pure word count. It couldn’t be. There were only half a million books published in English before 1900 and a squintillion since then, so any pure word count would make a screaming spike roar up the Twentieth Century. They explain a bit more about how they normalize the data here.
This would have been a great tool to have during the Michael Bellesiles controversy. (Though I still think the simplest way to debunk him would’ve been counting how many cookbooks had recipes for game. Game means guns).
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Y’all are going to go look up wirty dords, aren’t you?
Yeah, I know you people like the back of my hand.
December 16, 2010 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 26
The amoeba was always my favorite
I haven’t had my scopes out since I moved, but I was once a keen amateur microscopist. A pond dipper, mostly. Microscopy and astronomy are two areas of scientific study where a non-professional can make important discoveries (that’s the motto of Microscopy UK, which publishes the excellent free online mag Micscape).
I didn’t make any discoveries, important or otherwise. I made bowls of stinky hay infusions. And microphotography rigs that relied on duct tape, balance and the power of prayer.
I didn’t even really learn anything about protozoa. I spent hours and hours staring down the tube going, “ZOMG! That hairy thing just ate that blobby thing!”
I loved every minute of it.
If you want to see some spectacularly good pictures of hairy things and blobby things, check out the Flickr page of Proyecto Agua — the Water Project. It’s a pond-dipping and photography project of the Laboratory of Natural Sciences of the Institute of La Rioja in Spain.
I particularly recommend the videos (why, yes, there’s an amoeba proteus).
It took me an improbable number of years to find an amoeba, by the way. My dad was all, “amoeba? Pff! That’s the easiest one!”
We have really dumb arguments in my family.
September 8, 2010 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 30
21st Century rag pickers
Huh. I should’ve known. You can go onto eBay and buy a flipping IBM AT if you have a mind to, so I can surely find a motherboard and CPU to match the six-year-old machine that died on me. Or match as near as dammit.
Yeah. I decided now is probably not the time to splash out on a specialist Photoshop rig.
It’s amazing how much old tech is out there for sale — some of it new in the original boxes! Mostly scavenged, though.
It’s a market that eBay has made huge, but there was always a grubby dumpster-diving ethos to personal computing. At least down at my end of the market.
When we were in London, there was a regular computer fair at Crystal Palace, with some very dodgy characters selling very dodgy gear. I loved that.
But I’ll never forget my very first computer fair. Must have been 1985 or so. The smell of several hundreds of geeks in a conference room was indescribable.
And there was a cluster of nuns waiting in line to go in.
I thought, “Nuns! Computing! That is so awesome!”
Anyhow. Excuse me. Somewhere out there, there’s an MSI MS-6788 with my name on it.
September 7, 2010 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 8
Join us, won’t you?
Here you go — courtesy of Uncle B — six minutes of our adventure on the Kent and East Sussex. All the good video editing software was on the desktop machine, so he had to cobble this together using free crap. There was much growlings and swearings.
The videos in the YouTube sidebar aren’t ours, but there’s lots of good locomotive porn in there if you’ve a mind to see more of the K&ESR.
Not into trains? No problem! How about this adorable orphaned baby stoat raised in captivity and then released in the wild?
Yes, putting in all these text links was a huge pain in the ass, but WordPress auto-embeds the video if you don’t.
August 26, 2010 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 23
Awesome train set is *awesome*
What, geeks like trains? Huh. Who knew?
It rained like a bastard all day today and we did exactly Jack and Shit, so have some more trains, Poindexters.
This here is from the Romney Marsh Model Engineering Society, which we visited last year and I somehow never got around to writing about. It is huge. They have six permanent tracks in three gauges.
On the day we visited, they were running about five of these little steam engines and one electric. Plus a bunch of tiny models on the track in the center.
The tracks are huge. Did I mention huge? Here’s a screencap from Google maps. I’m pretty sure those houses at the bottom are semi-detached (what we would call duplexes).
I was going to call it the awesomest train set ever, but this being England, undoubtedly…no.
August 25, 2010 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 20
WOOoooooWOOOO!
We went and rode the puffer-trains today!
There are “heritage railways” all over Britain. This one is the Kent and East Sussex, which runs ten whole miles, from the lovely old town of Tenterden to the lovely old castle of Bodiam.
A long drive to a short train ride — which somehow abuses the very notion of transportation — but this one is a lovely run across open fields. And we had sammiches and tea and sunnenshine and…it was very nice.
Most of the things we do for fun here are almost entirely run by volunteers. From the steam lines to the old country houses, most of the work — including the really back-breaking work — is done by armies of unpaid staff.
I wonder if that’s taken into account when they tally up which countries give most to charity.
August 24, 2010 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 29
Forgiving.
Yeah, that bent pin? Apparently, it’s been that way for eighteen months. Yes, it’s been taking a few tries to boot all the way, but once it got up and running it was perfectly stable. (When I unpacked my desktop machine after the big move, the CPU was just rattling around in the case, so I popped it into the socket. I must have bent the pin then).
Computers are more forgiving than we have any right to expect. I bought myself a new motherboard and CPU for Christmas one year — I believe the chip was a 486-SX and the motherboard would also take a full 486. At any rate, there were more holes in the m’board than pins on the chip and — but of course — I plugged the chip into the wrong holes.
Christmas morning, watched in horror as I flipped the switch and solder hissed and bubbled out of the smoking socket. But I killed it, let it cool and got it plugged in the right way around and it lived a long and happy life. For a 486SX.
This one is finally kaput, though. I got the pin straightened and re-reseated, but I broke the thingie that holds the heat sink in place, so it overheats before it even finishes booting.
Eh. Six years. Time it crossed the rainbow bridge to live with Grandma.
Now comes the tedious business of looking at barebones systems and Googling all the components to figure out what the hell I’m looking at.
Do all motherboards come with on-board graphics now? Is the AGP graphics card socket a dead standard? Are there wifi cards for desktops, or do they assume wired LAN? And this dual/quad core thing — does software need to be written specially to take advantage of that? I mean, is any of my funky old software (particularly Photoshop) going to benefit from it?
God, I hate learning new stuff.
August 18, 2010 — 11:13 pm
Comments: 48
Not my week, really
Eh. Now I’ve picked up a virus on my principal laptop. One of those cutesy deals that drops itself into the system tray and pretends to be a virus checker. I think I’ve managed to scrape it out of my system without too much fuss, but now I’m having to run all the inevitable scans and checks.
If I didn’t have this trusty old Linux box, I’d be gefukt.
Especially on account of my increasingly erratic desktop computer has now ceased booting at all. For months, I could wobble the heat sink and get it going after a few resets — so, building on that logically, I took it apart this morning, cleaned all the bits and put it back together again. Now it’s a paperweight.
What gripes me about that is the money I don’t have, of course, and the fact that I’m going to have to learn stuff. It’s been a long, long time since I spec’ed a machine — godnose what the current state of play is with motherboards and processors and RAM and sech. It’s been a much, much longer time since I actually found hardware interesting.
Oh, well. I checked my records and I built this machine in March of 2004, so it sure as hell doesn’t owe me anything.
August 11, 2010 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 30
Because there’s so gosh darned much demand for the Segway
Michael at IB posted this gem. It’s a more portable take on the Segway idea — and if you think these trim young ladies look ridiculous on it, imagine how your scraggy ass would look.
The doohickey is clever: it’s a wheel made of cylinders. The wheel takes you forward and back, the cylinders side to side, and combinations of the two move you diagonally. “Clever” being an engineering term for “unreliable pain in the ass.”
Incidentally, mobility scooters are street legal here. And man are there a lot of them about. The scooter vendors turn up at local fairs and markets and have shiny showrooms on the high street. I get the impression the NHS gives them out like candy.
And why not? Stop moving around on your own, and there goes your life expectancy. When you pass your contributing to the system years and reach your consuming resources at an alarming clip years, a socialist healthcare system can’t get you off the planet fast enough.
June 18, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 40