The “Bubble Tree” costs about $12K and is designed by Pierre-Stéphane Dumas. (Thanks ShelterPop.)
Tags: Pierre-Stéphane Dumas
This classic photograph of Mulberry Street from 1900 (photographer unknown) provides a glimpse of life among the neighborhood’s pushcart peddlers. A few brief stories from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Mulberry Street from that era further explain lives of the area’s residents.
••••••••••
“Monkeys in Court” (June 25, 1889): “Francis Samboni and Angelo Antonio, of 150 Mulberry street, New York, and their respective monkeys, Jacko and Jackino, were arrested this morning and taken before Justice Goetting on a charge of not being licensed. The monkeys, imitating their masters, deferentially doffed their plumed caps in the presence of the justice and chattered something which they only understood themselves. The justice fined the men $1 each.”
••••••••••
“Poured Hot Syrup on Him” (August 2, 1890): “Two Italians–John Loui of 940 Mulberry street, New York, and Rocco Passo, of 55 Baxter street, New York, had a fight at 10:30 o’clock this morning in front of 971 Mulberry street, when Loui seized a large dipper full of hot syrup and struck Passo on the head with it. Passo was badly burned and was attended to by Dr. Shea of St. Vincent’s hospital. Loui was locked up in the Prince street police station.”
••••••••••
“The Fruit Vendor Murder” (July 24, 1894): “Francesco Antonio Colluchio, 25, years old, of 116 Mulberry street, the murderer of Giuseppe Tamasco, a fruit vendor of 114 Mulberry street, New York, was taken before Justice Ryan in the Tombs police court this morning and held without bail. Colluchio quarreled with Tamasco in front of 114 Mulberry street at 6 o’clock last night over two bananas which Colluchio had bought from a vendor for 1 cent.
There was a difference in the quality of the fruit and Tamasco refused to exchange it or refund the money. The two men began to struggle on the walk. In the fight Colluchio drew a stiletto and stabbed the vendor in the heart killing him instantly.”
••••••••••
“The Music Knocked Him Out” (March 23, 1888): “Michaelo Petrie, an Italian organ grinder of 115 Mulberry street, New York, was overcome by emotion while reeling off ‘Stick to Your Mother, Tom,’ in front of H.C. Atwood’s dry goods store at 1,197 Broadway, this city, last night, and fell through a plate glass window. He was cut in several places but was able to go home.”
••••••••••
“Suspicious Character” (February 7, 1885): “Michael McNulty, of Mulberry street, New York, was before Justice Massey this morning, charged with being a suspicious character.”
"That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, 'chair'?"
From “Mind vs. Machine,” an article in the Atlantic by Brian Christian.
“As for the prospects of AI, some people imagine the future of computing as a kind of heaven. Rallying behind an idea called ‘The Singularity,’ people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make smarter- than-us machines, which make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. Such a time will become, in their view, a kind of a techno-Rapture, in which humans can upload their consciousness onto the Internet and get assumed—if not bodily, than at least mentally—into an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity.
Others imagine the future of computing as a kind of hell. Machines black out the sun, level our cities, seal us in hyperbaric chambers, and siphon our body heat forever.
I’m no futurist, but I suppose if anything, I prefer to think of the long-term future of AI as a kind of purgatory: a place where the flawed but good-hearted go to be purified—and tested—and come out better on the other side.
Who would have imagined that the computer’s earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity once held to be what made us most different from everything else on the planet? That it could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could create plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, ‘chair’?
As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience—spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting—and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are.
We forget how impressive we are. Computers are reminding us.”
Tags: Brian Christian
Big enough to break your ass but good. (Thanks Crunchy.TV.)
Even on a plate, bologna is horrifying.
From the Science section of the New York Times:
“Q. You know the five-second rule for dropped food? Is it really safe if you pick it up in time?
A. “The five-second rule probably should become the zero-second rule,” said Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Eating dropped food poses a risk for ingestion of bacteria and subsequent gastrointestinal disease, and the time the food sits on the floor does not change the risk.”
In general, if there are bacteria on the floor, they will cling to the food nearly immediately on contact, Dr. Gulick said. Factors that influence the risk and the rate of bacterial transfer include the type of floor; the type of food; the type of bacteria; and how long the bacteria have been on the floor.”
Tags: Dr. Roy M. Gulick
"Guy with 3-foot dick."
sexual oddities – $25 (philadelphia, pa)
SEXUAL FREAKS OF NATURE
Did I get your attention? Long ago a wise man once said, “Seeing is believing.” I am now going to put that to the proof. I am offering a series of video tapes for any standard VHS. In the early 1970’s, some genius rounded up a series of sex freaks and taped them doing their thing. These tapes can’t be had for love or money, after all, we are now living in a DVD world. A lot of things recorded long ago on a vanished medium are going the way of the saber-toothed tiger. BUT, some of us far-sighted individuals kept their precious recordings, and now I am in a position to hand down my hoarded collection.
What am I offering. Simply, video tapes of extremely gifted individuals.
1) Freaks of Nature No. 4 a) The Blob. A middle aged guy, slightly overweight, with a penis approx. 1 foot long and as thick around the base as a grapefruit, being worked on by a buxom female.
b) Ron Jeremy with a big-breasted babe, who then milks herself.
c) Hard core hermaphrodite scene
d) Double-dicked gent who eventually cums from both members.
e) Two very lucky guys, one with a dick head the size of a mushroom, and the other with a 3 foot long penis.
f) An oriental guy with a 3 foot dick gets oral sex, then balls himself
g) Another scene with The Blob
h) A babe with enormous breasts services two herms, one with a dick 2 feet long.
i)Another scene with a guy with two dicks
j) Rom Jeremy and a chick with wonderful vaginal muscle control
k) Another scene with mushroom head and a 3 foot long dicked guy
2) Best of Dixie Dynamite and Long Dan Silver. WOW, talk about a combo! Dixie Dynamite is some chick with breasts like water melons, damned if I can figure out how she sleeps. She had a brief appearance on the Howard Stern Show once upon a time. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. Long Dan Silver has to be one of the luckiest guys born (other than Bill Gates). Honestly, I don’t know why he doesn’t faint when he gets a hard-on. It’s so big he can’t fit it into a very willing chick’s pussy. CHECK THIS OUT!
3) Freaks of Nature No. 6 a) A 102 y/o man has sex with a young blond.
b) Girl with 3 inch nipples having fun with another girl’s pussy
c) Guy with two dicks
d) Sex with chubby chicks
e) Guy with super long tongue – at least a foot long – having fun with chick’s pussy
f) Nice lactating tits
g) Guy with 3 foot dick takes it up his butt
h) Return of The Blob
i) Two hermaphrodites, one with a 2 foot long dick
k) Double penetration he – shes
l) Double dicked gent, again
4) King Kong Dongs – Series of scenes of eye-poppingly giant cocks being serviced by a bevy of slurp-tongued beauties.
5) Six Girls and Long Dan Silver – A lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky guy with a cock half again as big as a Louisville Slugger.
6) Robo Cock – Our friend again: Long Dan Silver
7) King Kong Dongs No. 2 – More scenes of disgustingly endowed men and their vixens.
8) Double Penetration He Shes – Two scenes of hermaphrodites having fun with each other and a third person. The blond’s dick is easily 2 feet long, and she flexes it to prove it’s real.
9) Freaks of Nature No. 5 – more scenes featuring John Holmes, super long tongue, a girl born with two dicks, Wendy Whoppers, The Blob, and more guys with three foot dicks.
10) Extreme Sex – no sex freaks, just a porn flick I,ve enjoyed more than most.
“Lift” is an excellent 24-minute documentary from 2001 by director Mark Isaacs, in which he camps out in the lift of a residential tower in the East End of London and films the tenants as they travel vertically. Wary at first, the residents soon relax and human nature (in all its forms) emerges.
Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, gave Russia the early lead in the space race.
From Stewart Brand’s “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” published in Rolling Stone in 1972:
“After Russia’s Sputnik humiliated the US in the middle of the Fifties, America came back hard with the Mercury Program, John Glenn and all that, crash-funded through a new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense – ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).
When the US space program was moved out of the military to become NASA, ARPA was left with a lot of funding momentum and not much program. Into this vacuum stepped J.C.R. Licklider among others, with the suggestion that since the Defense Department was the world’s largest user of computers, it would do well to support information-medium like computers.
So in 1963 a fraction of ARPA’s budget, some $5-8 million, went into a program called IPT, Information Processing Techniques, under the initial direction of Licklider and then of a 26-year-old named Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland, the developer of ‘Sketchpad’ at MIT, gave the agency its bias toward interactive graphics and its commitment to ‘blue sky mode’ re- search. The next director, Bob Taylor, then 32, doubled I PT’s . budget (while ARPA’s overall budget was shrinking) and administered a five-year golden age in computer research.
The beauty was, that being at the very top of the Defense Establishment, the agency had little Congressional scrutiny had little bureaucratic responsibility, able to take creative chances and protect long-term deep-goal projects. Alan Kay: ’90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low. The basic ARPA idea is that you find good people and you give them a lot of money and then you step back. If they don’t do good things in three years they get dropped – where ‘good’ is very much related to new or interesting.’
One of the accomplishments of ARPA-funded research during this time was time-sharing, Time-sharing is a routing technique that allows a large number of users to sit down ‘on-line’ with a. computer as if each were all alone with it. Naturally, timesharing was of no interest to computer manufacturers like IBM since it meant drastically morc efficient use of their hardware.”
••••••••••
Spotnik’s launch, October 4, 1957:
Still no explanation for the mutton chops.
From Goodreads.com: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’“
Tags: Isaac Asimov
Sword wins.
"We’re having an information explosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available."
From “The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History” on Maximum PC:
“Although Barbara Liskov is often named as the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, that honor actually goes to Sister Keller who beat Liskov to the punch by three years. After earning her Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, Sister Keller went on to assist in the development of BASIC computer language at Dartmouth – which had previously held a ‘men only’ rule. Sister Keller, who also held a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Mathematics and Physics from DePaul University, felt that women should be involved in computer science (especially in the field of information specialist) and has been quoted as saying ‘We’re having an information explosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available.’ Also interested in advancements toward AI, Sister Keller founded – and directed – the computer science department at Clarke College for twenty years.”
Tags: Barbara Liskov, Sister Keller
"When you first take up this sport, after two laps, say, you are blowing like porpoises."
Running didn’t take hold as a popular exercise in America until the 1960s, but it had its moments in earlier decades, as evidenced by a brave group of New York women who took the then-rare activity out of doors in 1902. An execerpt from a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from June 29th of that year:
“Arabella Knickerbocker has a new fad for improving her complexion. It is running, or ‘sprinting,’ as she calls it. ‘Nothing gives me a better color or makes better lungs than running, some one tells me,’ explains Arabella to a group of lovely maidens, ‘so I am training, and determined to learn to run, if not like an antelope, at least some way, somehow.’
‘How perfectly lovely,’ exclaims one who was valedictorian at her class in college, and knows a thing or two. ‘We used to sprint now and then, too. Some one who lectured at the college on ‘Girls,’ and what he didn’t know about them, remarked incidentally, with more point than gallantry. ‘There are no girls today who can run.’ We didn’t exactly run that man off the college grounds, but we then and there formed a club, with a president and rules and bylaws and a prize at the end of a mile.’
‘Well, there are eight of us at the gym,’ continued Arabella, ‘and after practising running in all its branches within doors, we finally boldy ventured forth into the street.’
If girls would turn their athletic attention to running they would find the novel pastime the most exhilarating in the world, as well as one of the most healthful. Excessive running is as injurious as any other excess, but frequent and easy running is one of the best exercises, and both men and women should run. Of course when you first take up this sport, after two laps, say, you are blowing like porpoises; you haven’t any wind. For one reason, you probably come down with a thud on your heels; you should know that you cannot run unless you get the spring from your toes.
After learning the rudiments of running in a gymnasium, practice should be continued out of doors, for fresh air is one of the factors in the sport. It is the fresh air that is going to give Diana that bewitching color in her cheeks and purify every drop of blood in her body.”
‘
Tags: Arabella Knickerbocker
Server problem. Seems to be remedied.
Eyebrow gets arched, Brando gets impersonated.
Tags: John Belushi, Marlon Brando
"The decommissioned McNair US army barracks in Berlin is soon to be posh apartments.
Marginal Revolution pointed me toward this Financial Times piece about the (perhaps) coming trend of disused public buildings being repurposed as upscale abodes. An excerpt:
“In a suburb of Berlin, a German-American investment consortium is converting the disused McNair US army barracks into upmarket apartments. In the US, the original New Jersey Medical Center – a publicly funded hospital in the 1880s extended with art deco blocks in the 1930s – has now become apartments and a retirement community.
Such transformations are still relatively rare. Yet in the next few years they may become commonplace as western governments tackle budget deficits – and in doing so, free up a glut of public-sector buildings.
In some ways, the UK is ahead of the trend, thanks to two complementary tranches of legislation. First, planning policies have discouraged building on unspoilt ‘greenfield’ land, with the result that house builders have targeted old offices and warehouses for new developments. Secondly, health and safety laws have rendered many landmark public buildings effectively obsolete for their original purpose – making them so expensive to modernise that only residential conversion makes financial sense.”
An odd protest by the outlandish anarchist troupe Voina, a favorite of Banksy.
Voina member Alex Plutser-Sarno to Don’t Panic magazine: “Anarch-art-activism is the only lively activity in Russia. Nowadays, when even hope for democracy in Russia is ruined, painting flowers and pussy cats or making any other ‘pure’ art, lacking a socio-political content, is to support the right-wing authorities. The symbol of anarchy – a skull-and-bones – has to be painted right at the Russia’s parliament building.”
"From the tenth to the nineteenth-born the mortality was markedly greater."
“Vitality of Last Children: The old belief, still common among the laity, that first-born children are endowed by nature with greater vitality and logevity than last-born, has induced Doctor Alfred Ploetz of Munich, Germany, to make an exhaustive study to ascertain if this were true. He compiled the returns from a very large number of families of the nobility, and his figures show, generally speaking, that the vitality of the first to ninth-born children varied little, but that from the tenth to the nineteenth-born the mortality was markedly greater.”
•Taken from the 1915 World Almanac and Book of Facts.
Tags: Doctor Alfred Ploetz
Released in 1987 in anticipation of an expected urban crime wave that never arrived in America, Paul Verhoeven’s near-future social satire nonetheless remains a sharp indictment of the practice of outsourcing justice and a reminder that weapons are made to be used.
“Old Detroit,” as it is called, is a necropolis only inhabited by predators and prey. But it is about to be bulldozed and replaced by the corporate urban center known as Delta City, courtesy of the greedy overlords at Omni Consumer Products. In order to clear the area of criminals so that they can start reaping profits, the fine folks at OCP have built a robotic crime fighter that they are about to unleash. But the bot badly malfunctions, gunning down an OCP exec. “I’m very disappointed,” says one of the corporate honchos in a hilariously deadpan line, as the employee lies dead on a conference table. But an ambitious, immoral fellow exec (Miguel Ferrer) has an answer. Create a cyborg that incorporates the best of technology with the human brain. He gets the opportunity to hatch his plot when a young cop named Murphy (Peter Weller) is shot to pieces by brutal thugs. Wires and microchips soon transform him into RoboCop. Of course, there are complications when the Singularity arrives, and the erstwhile Murphy soon becomes difficult to control.
As mentioned, RoboCop was made at a moment when crime was rising in the country and every last expert was predicting a continued spike. That never happened (and some of the theories for the decline are controversial). But the film isn’t just concerned with momentary social problems. It also deftly sends up America’s lingering Cold War mentality, which demands that we police the entire world, even when we have to outsource much of the nasty business, as we’ve done recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Greek chorus of the film is a series of parodies of TV news and commercials that comment on the action; in one of the latter, a game called “Nukem” is advertised as the kind of good family fun in which “you get them before they get you.” That’s the mentality RoboCop employs when he initially goes rogue, rationalizing that “somewhere there is a crime happening.” There always is.•
Tags: Miguel Ferrer, Paul Werhoeven, Peter Weller
Has a flashlight, too.
Amy Bishop's Harvard Ph.D. thesis was entitled, "The Role of Methoxatin (PQQ) in the Respiratory Burst of Phagocytes."
Being denied tenure was the motive bandied about in the wake of Professor Amy Bishop’s shooting spree in Huntsville, Alabama, last February, in which she murdered three fellow academics and wounded several others. The general feeling that higher education is somehow broken seemed to contribute to the acceptance of the refelxive explanation. Amy Wallace of Wired takes a deeper look at the tragic events in “What Made This University Professor Snap?” An excerpt:
“What makes a smart, well-educated mother of four go on a killing spree? In the more than 12 months since Bishop became the first academic in US history to be accused of gunning down fellow professors, many theories have been offered up. One is that she’s a lunatic. That suggestion came from her attorney.
Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, Roy Miller, called her simply ‘wacko.’ Later he apologized for his word choice, but he has continued to press the point. ‘They’re going to try to show she’s sane, that she was just mean as hell,’ he tells me, referring to the prosecution, which is seeking capital murder charges against Bishop in the killings of department chair Gopi Podila and professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. ‘If they seek the death penalty, which we have to assume they will, our only defense is mental.’
The Wacko theory is often accompanied by the Tenure Made Her Do It hypothesis, which posits that the grueling, years-long process of trying to win a permanent professorship—and the despair that accompanied being denied tenure by her peers—made Bishop snap. This explanation got a lot of traction right after the vicious slayings, in part because it seemed to open the door to a more general indictment of academia. Is the tenure process itself vicious? Some, like Katherine van Wormer, a blogger for Psychology Today who has herself been denied tenure, says it is. ‘I would describe the denial of tenure as an end to one’s career, to one’s livelihood,’ van Wormer wrote after the killings. ‘Being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers, is the ultimate rejection.’
But the Tenure Made Her Do It assertion is undermined by the calendar. Bishop learned she would not get tenure in March 2009, 11 full months before she transformed a routine faculty meeting into an execution chamber. She appealed the faculty’s decision, thus extending the process. But that appeal was denied for good in November 2009—still three months before her alleged crimes. What’s more, although tenure decisions are not public, university officials say Bishop had indicated she’d found out which colleagues had voted for and against her. Yet she shot some of the very people who had supported her. If this was tenure-related payback, it was carried out with less than surgical precision.” (Thanks Longreads.)
Tags: Amy Bishop, Amy Wallace
??????????
Lets Switch (Brooklyn)
Well! Here you are! Now that you have clicked on the link to this ad, and are slowly reading each word, one at a time, you are getting closer and closer to your new life. Exciting isn’t it? Tantalizing even. Perhaps you are wondering, “but what will happen to my life when I leave it?” No worries, mate! Your life will be in good hands; polished every so slightly for the whole world to silently envy. I will make the most of your life, and you will make the most of mine.
So, now I suppose it is time to tell you what treats lay ahead: 1. The body of a 20 year old, red-haired, slightly curvaceous, out of shape, woman. Too much cheese and broccoli makes her gassy, but don’t worry, every morning you will be surprised with a timely B.M. It’s like clockwork 2. Occasionally enjoys the carcass of dead, most likely breaded and fried chicken, but usually consumes veggies in all of their forms. Be warned, dairy can cause an over production of phlegm, and fried foods make her bloated. Keep an eye on the thighs. 3. You will be living in a two bedroom apartment in South Slope. Your bedroom will have a large closet, some plastic drawers, two shelves that have yet to be put up, and a twin bed. Sometimes the kitchen sink gurgles through the night. Sometimes mice will make friends with your hair in the morning. But hey! You still got the bathtub that doesn’t unclog! 4. Which brings us to our next chapter of your new life: friends. Well, they are few and far between. When deciding between old high school friends that smoke too much weed, or ones who spell things like, “D33z NuTz” you have readily chosen: your sister, your neighbor, Barefoot’s 7 dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, and Netflix. Don’t get too down: your an honors student who goes to school for free! 5. But hush, new soul mate, I know how enraptured you are to get started in your other-worldly experiences once you take over my life. But before we begin this transformation there are a few formalities. Please, have 800 dollars in cash upfront as to pay your months rent. Memorize the info on your fake I.D (I don’t want to come back with my body in jail, thank you very much) and expect to pay interest on the few hundred dollars I have on the few credit cards I own. Another helpful detail you will thank me for: don’t let my leg hair get too long, my legs start to get dry and itch like crazy. FInally the most important pointer, when a family member calls practice: agree, sigh, rhetorical “no way!”, repeat.
I think you are ready for the thrills that await you. Live in the now! Not the past or future. Be all you can be! Only, *you* will be me. And I will be *you*! Oh, I should have mentioned earlier, if you are balding, over 35, broke, have children, overweight, have no cable, live outside of the new york city area, own more than two cats, not rich, not famous, have an STD, have crazy roomates/ ex boyfriends, live in a walk-up, have a tail/webbed feet/other physical deformities, have less friends than I do, or finally, cannot control your bowels in public, I do not think this is relationship you should consider getting into.
Happy trading!:
Masdar City’s proposed podcars have been scrapped, a casualty of the economic slowdown. From David Hill on IEEE Singularity Hub:
Sounding like something out of a Robert Heinlein novel, Masdar City’s integrated transportation plan involves four initiatives, but it was the podcar system, designed by the Italian company Zagato and developed by Dutch firm 2getthere, that held the most promise. The plan proposed a driverless fleet of 3,000 free-moving, electric vehicles that could transport 2 to 6 passengers between 85 to 100 stations, tallying up to 135,000 trips a day along preprogrammed routes. This system of podcars was basically a replacement for taxis, providing privacy to passengers without the congestion common in other urban centers. A wi-fi network would maneuver the podcars through obstacles in real time as magnets along the path continuously pull the vehicle into alignment with little variance: if one is missed, the podcar continues but if two are missed, it comes to a stop. Ultimately, the podcars were to be powered by solar panel arrays on top of buildings (which was also axed from the budget) and thermal energy-storing molten salt technology allowing the vehicles to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.•
Tags: David Hill
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: Just smart enough to be dangerous.
Great Britain sent more unique visitors to Afflictor during February than any other foreign nation. Here are the Top 5 finishers:
- Great Britain
- Canada
- Germany
- Australia
- India
Tags: Tony Blair
From Philadelphia inventor Jack Zylkin’s site: “The USBTypewriter is a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad! The modification is easy to install, it involves no messy wiring, and does not change the outward appearance of the typewriter (except for the usb adapter itself, which is mounted in the rear of the machine). So the end result is a retro-style USB keyboard that not only looks great, but feels great to use.” (Thanks IEEE Spectrum.)
Tags: Jack Zylkin
“Tests of Death: Hold mirror to mouth. If living, moisture will gather. Push pin into flesh. If dead the hole will remain. If alive it will close up. Place fingers in front of a strong light. If alive, they will appear red; if dead, black or dark. If a person is dead decomposition is almost sure to set in after 72 hours have elapsed. If it does not, then there is room for investigation by the physician. Do not permit burial of the dead until some certain indication of death is apparent.”
•From the 1902 World Almanac and Encyclopedia.