Oxford University researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years.

It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.

— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) April 21, 2021

Killed in combat 21 April 1918.

King Harv steps on Mars.

King Harv’s offers “coffee from absolutely everywhere,” including one surprising venue.

There are many things mankind is not meant to know about. One of these is the fact that Mars has been settled since 2002, specifically for the purposes of coffee cultivation. King Harv’s Imperial Coffees Mars to be precise.

It started long, long ago. I am the son of King Harv, well known coffee tycoon and millionaire philanthropist. I was just a recent Chemistry graduate and Software engineer who had been tinkering for years on the topic of space travel. Specifically with the use of the metal wires steaming out of the Army’s Hellfire missiles being used not for destruction, but as a dynamic bridge to the planets. Now each missile has a wire capacity of about 2.5 miles. The closest Mars would appear would be 34.8 million miles. Hence with only 13.92 million Hellfire missiles, with the wires spliced together, they could make it to Mars. Now, removing the explosive shaped charge of each missile, and extending the wire length accordingly, I figured we could get by with only 9 million Hellfire’s. The next step was where to acquire or manufacture them. Or something similar to them.

This turned out to be much easier than expected. By substituting strong fishing line for the wires, and utilizing solar wind for additional acceleration, we were able to construct a single shot fire and forget missile for under $87.00. (We utilized used fishing line). The budget did not allow for any testing, but we were confident. We just aimed that sucker at Mars one night and “boom”, you could see the giant spool of line flying out faster than you can eat a bag of habanero Doritos. Yeah, that fast. So anyway, it turned out we “forgot” that little bit about celestial mechanics and planetary movement, so we were bound to miss mars by a by millions of miles… had we not fortunately got tagged by one of them there pieces of space junk from the top secret Mercury Blue missions of the 1960s. Anyway, it hit us just right and targeted our little rocket straight to Mars, where it landed with a dignified womf and implanted its space anchor. And the American flag.

So there we were, with a strong fishing line connecting Mars to Earth, and just King Harv’s Imperial Coffees knowing about it. (it was a transparent fishing line.) Well, our plan was for us to get some decent Harbor Freight line grippers and foot by foot pull up the used Russian submarine we had purchased and converted to a space habitat. Seemed like a straight forward idea at first, but you always know something’ll come up, and it did. Our Russian friends were all for us using their old submarine, and at a killer price, but at the last minute demanded a “nuclear royalty” due to us using one of their famously reliable nuclear power plants in the sub/ ship. Now by this time I was about broke, but realized that Russians like a few things in the world besides Rubles and Vodka. A dang good cup of coffee. So we settled on giving them a perpetual 5% of our Martian coffee harvest. Fair enough. It is the red planet after all.

RTWT

HT: Sarah Hoyt (and William Jacobson) via Karen L. Myers.

This is my idea of a great photo.

British Museum photo.

Atlas Obscura:

If cookies go a few weeks without getting eaten, they turn weirdly soft or dissolve into fine dust. If cookies go 1,300 years without getting eaten, they get carefully preserved in a case at the British Museum.

In the winter of 1915, the British-Hungarian archeologist Marc Aurel Stein opened a tomb in Xinjiang. Known as the Astana cemetery, these gravesites were where residents of the nearby oasis city of Gaochang buried their dead, roughly between the 3rd and 9th centuries. As the membrane between Central Asia and China, and the path to the Middle East, Xinjiang has been fought over for centuries (a fight that continues today, as China uses an iron fist to control it as an autonomous province). Gaochang, meanwhile, lies in ruins. But the Astana cemetery, with more than a thousand tombs preserved in the dry heat of the Turpan Basin, tells the story of the once-prosperous ancient city.

The Astana cemetery shows how Gaochang was once a prominent stop on the Silk Road, especially for Sogdians, a people from Eastern Iran who often traveled across Eurasia as merchants. Opening the tombs, Stein found heaps of evidence pointing to Gaochang’s role as a place of “trade exchange between West Asia and China.” Though the vast majority of the dead at Astana were Han Chinese, Stein saw corpses with Byzantine coins in their mouths and Persian textiles included as grave goods.

But inside one tomb, Stein found neither of these things. Grave robbers had emptied it of everything, “except [for] a large number of remarkably preserved fancy pastry scattered over the platform meant to accommodate the coffin with the dead,” he recalled later. Stein was taken aback by the beauty of the cookies and their wide variety of shapes—flat wafers with elaborate designs, delicate, lace-like cookies, and “flower-shaped tartlets … with neatly made petal borders, some retaining traces of jam or some similar substance placed in the [center].” In the arid earth of the cemetery, the sweets managed to survive to modern day.

Today, the pastries are owned by the British Museum, as part of what Stein described as his “haul” of artifacts sent back to the United Kingdom. During his expeditions, Stein also helped himself to priceless cultural objects, such as the first-known printed book. Stein’s plundering of the Diamond Sutra caused vociferous protests in China. In 1961, the National Library of China released a statement saying that Stein’s book theft was enough to cause “people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred.” The cookies, in comparison, are regarded more as curiosities. A 1925 article in The Times of Mumbai, describing an exhibition of Aurel Stein’s finds in New Delhi, noted how “the most remarkable of all the objects are the actual pastries deposited with the dead as food objects,” with the author writing that they closely resembled “the ‘fancies’ of a modern confectioner’s shop window.”

RTWT

A Yale classmate recently sent me a link to this book coming up for auction at Swann: Lot 0021: Richard Brathwait (1588?-1673) The English Gentleman.

We both thought the frontispiece, showing the English Gentleman in Youth, during his Education, his Recreations, Vocation, Disposition, &c., His “Hope in Heaven, but His Feet on the Ground” attired in Carolingian fashion delightful.

I would certainly have purchased this curiosity if it were not horribly expensive. Alas! it went for $1700, with Buyer Premium: $2210. The book is quarto sized, and I fear a lot of people like framing and hanging that amusing and evocative frontispiece.

I looked for a free ebook, but was disappointed. There isn’t one.

HT: Tom Weil.

Outside reports that the COVID epidemic had terrible consequences for the Lake Tahoe resort community:

They just kept coming. The day-trippers, Airbnbers, second-home owners, and unmasked revelers. Unleashed after California’s first statewide COVID-19 lockdown ended in late June of last year, they swarmed Lake Tahoe in numbers never before seen, even for a tourist region accustomed to the masses. “It was a full-blown takeover,” says Josh Lease, a tree specialist and longtime Tahoe local.

July Fourth fireworks were canceled, but that stopped no one. August was a continuation of what Lease called a “shit show.”

The standstill traffic was one thing; the locals were used to that. But the trash—strewn across the sand, floating along the shore, piled around dumpsters—was too much. Capri Sun straws, plastic water-bottle caps, busted flip-flops, empty beer cans. One day in early August, Lease picked up a dirty diaper on a south shore beach and dangled it before a crowd. “This anyone’s?” he asked.

Lease was pissed. He couldn’t believe the lack of respect people had for this beautiful area, his home for two decades. Plus, they’d invaded during a pandemic, bringing their COVID with them.

That day, after the diaper incident, Lease went back to his long-term rental in Meyers, California, a few miles south of the lake at the juncture of Highways 89 and 50, where he could see the endless stream of cars. An otherwise even-keeled guy, he logged on to Facebook and vented. “Let’s rally,” he posted on his page, adding that he wanted to put together a “non welcoming committee.” He was joking—sort of. But word spread like the wildfires that would soon rage uncontrollably around the state. Before long someone had designed a flyer of a kid wearing a gas mask, with a speech bubble that read “Stay Out of Tahoe.” It went viral.

On Friday, August 14, at four o’clock, over 100 locals from around the lake began to gather. They commandeered the roundabouts leading into the Tahoe Basin’s major towns—Truckee, Tahoe City, Kings Beach, and Meyers in California, and Incline Village in Nevada—to greet the weekend hordes. Young women in bikini tops, elderly couples in floppy hats, and bearded dads bouncing babies in Björns held up hand-painted signs: “Respect Tahoe Life,” “Your Entitlement Sucks!,” and “Go Back to the Bay.” One old-timer plastered his truck with a banner that read “Go Away” and drove around and around a traffic circle.

But summer turned to fall, which turned to winter, which became spring, and the newcomers are still here. It’s not just the tourists anymore, whose numbers have ebbed and flowed with lockdown restrictions and the weather and whose trash has gone from wet towels twisted in the sand to plastic sleds split in the snow. There’s another population of people who came and never left: those freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: “Zoom-towns.”

In Lake Tahoe, the unwelcoming party was hardly a deterrence. The outsiders have settled in.

RTWT

This was a wild 46 seconds pic.twitter.com/jIHQg0G4qU

— Sada (@Evi3Zamora) April 15, 2021

From Jalopnik:

A North Carolina man and woman were attacked by a bobcat in their driveway earlier this week, and things got real crazy, real fast. What starts off as a sleepy suburban morning becomes a chaotic scene, culminating in the man throwing the bobcat and yelling “I’LL SHOOT THE FUCKER!”

The day seems to start off innocuously enough, as the man and woman begin their morning by loading things into a Ford Explorer. To the side is a fabulous Ford Freestyle, a vehicle that never got its proper due despite being a wagon.

The man bids good morning to a runner and turns to the Explorer. He carries a tray of food and what looks like coffee, which he then sets down on the hood right after reminding himself that he needs to wash his car. I mean, coffee on the hood is a risky move already, but it pales in comparison to what’s next.

HT: Vanderleun.