Reblogged:Friday Hodgepodge

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Four Things

1. Smoked mackerel ice cream may sound gross to you, but I'd definitely try it. That fishy/savory take on ice cream is just one I learned about when I stopped by Strange Maps and saw a tourist map of Lithuania showing where to get any of "the country's 47 weirdest ice cream flavors." Others included bacon, beer, and rhubarb.

I'm not a dessert -- or even a sweets -- person, so I'd probably find many of these less weird than most people.

2. Yeah. I'm not going to Europe any time soon, either.

But I did recently get a peek at what a German city looked like a century ago from the air. Embedded below is some remarkably good footage taken from Wuppertal's suspended railway in 1902.

3. And, while we're looking back in time, here's a story from a few years ago by FiveThirtyEight on why the tenures of the world's oldest living persons have been growing shorter over time:

Weaver's five-day run as the oldest person in the world was short, but it turns out that the oldest person in the world never holds that title for very long. Since records started being kept in the 1950s, the average tenure has been just around a year, according to the Gerontology Research Group; it has dipped to just seven months since the year 2000. Weaver's incumbency isn't the shortest in recent years; North Carolina's Emma Tillman died four days after becoming the world's oldest person in 2007.

No spoilers here. You'll have to go over there to learn what's going on.

4. With recent news of fishiness in the data on Russia's "approved" coronavirus vaccine, one might wonder which circle of scientific hell the folks involved deserve. Wonder no more. (PDF).

The fourth level, for example, is for p-value fishing. Considering how popular that is with nutritionists, the punishment is fitting enough.

-- CAV

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