Schmidt Meister's Grab Bag

[Schmidt Meister]

Pythons are enough of a problem in Florida there is an annual python challenge, because of course they are. Brought to Florida as pets, enough Burmese pythons were irresponsibly released into the wild when they became inconveniently too large to keep as personal pets 35-45 years ago that the state now has an overabundance of this invasive apex predator.
Starting later this summer, hundreds of hunters will disperse across Florida's Everglades.
Their target? An apex predator known to grow up to 18 feet that hunts animals as large as an alligator and sometimes as small as a woodrat.
These hunters are going after the Burmese python, one of the largest species of snakes and a major nuisance to Florida's wildlife.
Native to Southeast Asia, these snakes were first introduced to the Florida wild in the late 1970s, and they have reproduced at an astronomical level since.
Starting Aug. 5 and continuing for 10 days, those hunters (both professional and novice) will fan out in South Florida to humanely capture and kill these snakes for the state's annual Python Challenge.
Registration for the 2022 challenge opened last week. Anyone interested in competing must first register and take a required online training that covers humane killing methods and ways to identify these snakes.
It's an important program that will help restore Florida's ecosystem, according to Donna Kalil, a Florida-based python hunting professional. Last year's competitors removed 223 invasive Burmese pythons from the Everglades.
"To try to keep the Everglades healthy, you have to have the animals that belong in it. And in order to do that, you have to remove the invasive predator that is the Burmese python," said Kalil.
This competition is no easy feat, nor is it for the faint of heart.
Aside from actually having to catch a Burmese python, participants have to contend with the harsh environment of the Florida wilderness in the middle of summer.
Take it from Kalil, a lifelong snake lover and python hunter. She works as a contractor for the South Florida Water Management District and her job is to catch and eliminate these invasive Burmese pythons.
Last year, Kalil competed in the 10-day competition and came out on top in the professional category after catching 19 pythons. Last year's grand prize winner, Charles Dachton, successfully removed 41 pythons.
Kalil plans on competing later this summer, but for her it's just business as usual. For newbies considering a go at the $10,000 grand prize, Kalil has some tips and tricks.
Tips for wannabe python hunters
These nocturnal snakes can be found in vegetation, grass and by the road. For the competition, the snakes have to be presented dead (the state requires certain methods of humane extermination) and within 24 hours of their capture and kill.
Since the competition is happening in August, most of the pythons will be freshly hatched and not as large as a fully grown adult, she said.
Though these snakes are not venomous, they are "massive constrictors and they can kill a person," Kalil is quick to note. She suggests hunting and competing with a partner due to the risks posed by the harsh environment.
There are several native snakes that call the Everglades home, some of which are venomous (like the cottonmouth). Those are not on the kill list during the competition.
Kalil suggests before heading out: "Really, really brush up on your native snakes. Because we're out there trying to save the environment. We don't want any native snakes killed, including the venomous ones. They belong out there."
That transgression will also get you eliminated from the competition and fined.
"It's not a walk in the park," she said. "You have to be very aware and understand the environment that you're heading into."

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/22/1105639143/florida-python-hunting-challenge

[Schmidt Meister]

[DAKA]

1 hour ago, Schmidt Meister said:

DON'T BUY   ........   RENT

[Schmidt Meister]

18 minutes ago, DAKA said:

DON'T BUY   ........   RENT

Buy ... Rent ... I'm still accepting donations, LOL.

[Schmidt Meister]

Alligators kill another victim in South Florida.
An elderly woman was killed by two alligators after falling into a pond near her Florida home, with her panicked splashes attracting the predators who attacked her before she could swim out. 
The woman, whose identity has not yet been released, was seen falling into an alligator-infested pond near her home at the Boca Royale Golf and Country Club in Englewood (just south of Sarasota) Friday night at around 7.47pm, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office.
Investigators say that as the woman was struggling to stay afloat, two alligators were seen swimming toward her. They then grabbed her before she could escape.
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and an investigation is now ongoing.
In the meantime, trappers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have removed the alligators from the pond. Her death is just the latest in a recent string of alligator attacks in the southern United States.

[DAKA]

Too many people want to get out of the Northeast, so developers keep acquiring more land that used to be habitat for the alligators. 

What is the answer 

[Schmidt Meister]

Today is National Ice Cream Day as established in 1984 by President Ronaldus Maximus Reagan. I'm in line for a banana split soon.

[Schmidt Meister]

1 hour ago, DAKA said:

Too many people want to get out of the Northeast, so developers keep acquiring more land that used to be habitat for the alligators. 

What is the answer 

Not sure I know. We've set aside as much land in Florida as we can for alligators I guess. But one of the contributing problems is that alligators have been a protected species for long enough that their numbers have increased to the point where human/gator interactions are just gonna happen. I'm thinking that a big part of the answer is humans need to be more aware of where they are and who/what they may encounter there.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

Brandon displays his ... you know, the thing ... Jack.

 

[janice6]

On 7/12/2022 at 2:27 PM, Schmidt Meister said:

She lies constantly.

[Batesmotel]

4 hours ago, Schmidt Meister said:

Brandon displays his ... you know, the thing ... Jack.

 

The lights are on but nobody is home. 

[Schmidt Meister]

Rosetta Stone

In July 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s military invasion of Egypt, a group of French soldiers accidentally made a groundbreaking archaeological discovery. While working to strengthen the defenses of a sunbaked fort near the Nile Delta town of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid), they knocked down a wall and unearthed a 44-inch-long, 30-inch-wide chunk of black granodiorite.
It wasn’t unusual for the French troops to stumble upon Egyptian relics, but this particular slab caught the attention of Pierre-Francois Bouchard, the engineer in charge. When, upon closer inspection, he noticed that it was covered in ancient text, he halted demolition and sent word to his superior officer. Experts would soon confirm that the stone contained writing in three different scripts: Greek, demotic, or everyday, Egyptian and hieroglyphics.

Almost immediately, Bonaparte remarked on the stone’s potential. “There appears no doubt that the column which bears the hieroglyphs contains the same inscription as the other two,” he said before the National Institute in Paris that autumn. “Thus, here is a means of acquiring certain information of this, until now, unintelligible language.”
While the French soldiers couldn’t have known it at the time, the “Rosetta Stone” they pulled from the rubble would trigger one of history’s great intellectual odysseys. The meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics had been lost since the dying days of the Roman Empire, but with its triple inscription, the stone offered scholars a chance to decipher the ancient symbols once and for all, making the find the key to this remarkable period in history. Yet it would take decades, and the work of two brilliant scholars, to unlock the stone’s secrets.
Soon after its discovery, the Rosetta Stone was already the subject on international intrigue when British forces seized it in 1801 after defeating the French in Egypt. By then, several casts and copies of its text had been made, allowing researchers across the globe to begin experimenting with potential translations. The first and easiest step, deciphering the Greek text, revealed that the Rosetta Stone contained a relatively mundane Egyptian decree praising the 2nd–century B.C. boy-king Ptolemy V Epiphanes. A rudimentary translation of the demotic text (a script rendering of the everyday Egyptian language) followed shortly thereafter. But when linguists tried to tackle the portions written in hieroglyphics, most were left scratching their heads.

A clear understanding of how the ancient script functioned would ultimately take 20 years and involve two of the early 19th century’s greatest minds. The first major discoveries came courtesy of Thomas Young, a British polymath who had previously made contributions to physics, optics, medicine and mathematics. In 1814, the 41-year-old began tinkering with a copy of the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions during what he described as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Piggybacking off previous research by Swedish scholar Johann Akerblad and Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, Young eventually focused on the text’s “cartouches”, ovals that enclosed certain groupings of hieroglyphic script. After concluding that the cartouches were used to denote royal names, he matched one of them to the name “Ptolemy” in the Greek text and identified the phonetic properties of several hieroglyphic signs.
Young’s other inroads concerned the demotic Egyptian script. According to author Andrew Robinson’s book Cracking the Egyptian Code, Young proved that demotic script derived from hieroglyphics and contained individual phonetic letters as well as ideographic symbols. Demotic “was neither a purely conceptual or symbolic script, nor an alphabet, but a mixture of the two,” Robinson wrote. Crucially, however, Young did not apply these same revelations to hieroglyphics. Like most scholars at the time, he subscribed to the belief that hieroglyphics were almost entirely symbolic, and he theorized that the script only had phonetic properties when spelling out foreign names.
Young eventually set his aside his Rosetta Stone research in 1819 and took up other intellectual pursuits. Around that same time, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion began to give the ancient slab his full focus. Brilliant, eccentric and prone to occasional fainting fits, Champollion was a former child prodigy who had mastered half a dozen languages by his teens. He also harbored a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of Egypt. “I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation,” he vowed in an 1806 letter.

In 1821, Champollion settled in Paris and began a personal quest to decipher the Rosetta Stone. The 30-year-old benefited from Young’s earlier research, in particular his work on the cartouches, but he also had the advantage of being fluent in Coptic, a language that was descended from ancient Egyptian. Following months of painstaking labor, Champollion succeeded in identifying some of the phonetic hieroglyphic signs used in foreign royal names such as “Cleopatra” and “Ptolemy.” He then applied the signs to the names in the cartouches found on the Rosetta Stone and elsewhere, using the discoveries from each new translation to fill in the gaps on the others.
Champollion’s cross-referencing technique allowed him to develop a working hieroglyphic alphabet, but his true eureka moment came in September 1822, when he realized that the hieroglyphic spelling of “Ramses”, a traditional Egyptian name, was made up of symbols that all corresponded to spoken sounds. By applying these same phonetic symbols to other words on the Rosetta Stone that weren’t enclosed in cartouches, he made a discovery that had eluded all previous scholars: Rather than being a purely symbolic script, hieroglyphics included both conceptual symbols and phonetic signs.
Depending on their context, the symbols in the script could represent entire words and phrases or individual components corresponding to the sounds of spoken language. According to legend, Champollion was so floored by his revelation that he raced to his brother’s office and screamed, “I’ve done it!” before immediately fainting.

Once he hit on its phonetic properties, Champollion was able to begin unraveling the mysteries of hieroglyphics. Following several years of additional study, he published research that outlined the underlying principles of the Egyptian writing system. Armed with his new knowledge, he made a pilgrimage to Egypt, where he became the first known person in more than 1,400 years to read the inscriptions on ancient Egyptian tombs and monuments. “Before Champollion, the ancient voices from the ancient world that could be heard were from the Greece, Rome and the Bible,” historian John Ray wrote in his book The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. “Now the Egyptians were beginning to speak with their own voice.”

Champollion died in 1832 at the age of just 41. Today, he’s credited with creating the field of modern Egyptology by giving scholars access to ancient Egyptian literature and culture.
Just how much of a debt Champollion owed to Thomas Young’s earlier scholarship has long been a matter of debate. French researchers have traditionally tended to trumpet Champollion’s work, while British scholars highlight Young’s earlier discoveries. Still, most modern historians give the Frenchman the lion’s share of the credit. “Any decipherment stands or falls as a whole,” the Egyptologist Richard Parkinson wrote, “and while Young discovered parts of an alphabet, a key, Champollion unlocked an entire written language.”
Equally important was the Rosetta Stone itself. By allowing scholars to compare hieroglyphics to known languages, it helped them decode a lost language. For more than 200 years, the original stone has been housed in London’s British Museum, where it receives millions of visitors annually. As the artifact responsible for rescuing ancient Egypt from the mists of time, the 2,200-year-old slab is often listed among history’s most important archaeological discoveries, the key that unlocked the secrets of a civilization.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[railfancwb]

17 hours ago, Schmidt Meister said:

Rosetta Stone

In July 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s military invasion of Egypt, a group of French soldiers accidentally made a groundbreaking archaeological discovery. While working to strengthen the defenses of a sunbaked fort near the Nile Delta town of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid), they knocked down a wall and unearthed a 44-inch-long, 30-inch-wide chunk of black granodiorite.
It wasn’t unusual for the French troops to stumble upon Egyptian relics, but this particular slab caught the attention of Pierre-Francois Bouchard, the engineer in charge. When, upon closer inspection, he noticed that it was covered in ancient text, he halted demolition and sent word to his superior officer. Experts would soon confirm that the stone contained writing in three different scripts: Greek, demotic, or everyday, Egyptian and hieroglyphics.

Almost immediately, Bonaparte remarked on the stone’s potential. “There appears no doubt that the column which bears the hieroglyphs contains the same inscription as the other two,” he said before the National Institute in Paris that autumn. “Thus, here is a means of acquiring certain information of this, until now, unintelligible language.”
While the French soldiers couldn’t have known it at the time, the “Rosetta Stone” they pulled from the rubble would trigger one of history’s great intellectual odysseys. The meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics had been lost since the dying days of the Roman Empire, but with its triple inscription, the stone offered scholars a chance to decipher the ancient symbols once and for all, making the find the key to this remarkable period in history. Yet it would take decades, and the work of two brilliant scholars, to unlock the stone’s secrets.
Soon after its discovery, the Rosetta Stone was already the subject on international intrigue when British forces seized it in 1801 after defeating the French in Egypt. By then, several casts and copies of its text had been made, allowing researchers across the globe to begin experimenting with potential translations. The first and easiest step, deciphering the Greek text, revealed that the Rosetta Stone contained a relatively mundane Egyptian decree praising the 2nd–century B.C. boy-king Ptolemy V Epiphanes. A rudimentary translation of the demotic text (a script rendering of the everyday Egyptian language) followed shortly thereafter. But when linguists tried to tackle the portions written in hieroglyphics, most were left scratching their heads.

A clear understanding of how the ancient script functioned would ultimately take 20 years and involve two of the early 19th century’s greatest minds. The first major discoveries came courtesy of Thomas Young, a British polymath who had previously made contributions to physics, optics, medicine and mathematics. In 1814, the 41-year-old began tinkering with a copy of the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions during what he described as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Piggybacking off previous research by Swedish scholar Johann Akerblad and Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, Young eventually focused on the text’s “cartouches”, ovals that enclosed certain groupings of hieroglyphic script. After concluding that the cartouches were used to denote royal names, he matched one of them to the name “Ptolemy” in the Greek text and identified the phonetic properties of several hieroglyphic signs.
Young’s other inroads concerned the demotic Egyptian script. According to author Andrew Robinson’s book Cracking the Egyptian Code, Young proved that demotic script derived from hieroglyphics and contained individual phonetic letters as well as ideographic symbols. Demotic “was neither a purely conceptual or symbolic script, nor an alphabet, but a mixture of the two,” Robinson wrote. Crucially, however, Young did not apply these same revelations to hieroglyphics. Like most scholars at the time, he subscribed to the belief that hieroglyphics were almost entirely symbolic, and he theorized that the script only had phonetic properties when spelling out foreign names.
Young eventually set his aside his Rosetta Stone research in 1819 and took up other intellectual pursuits. Around that same time, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion began to give the ancient slab his full focus. Brilliant, eccentric and prone to occasional fainting fits, Champollion was a former child prodigy who had mastered half a dozen languages by his teens. He also harbored a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of Egypt. “I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation,” he vowed in an 1806 letter.

In 1821, Champollion settled in Paris and began a personal quest to decipher the Rosetta Stone. The 30-year-old benefited from Young’s earlier research, in particular his work on the cartouches, but he also had the advantage of being fluent in Coptic, a language that was descended from ancient Egyptian. Following months of painstaking labor, Champollion succeeded in identifying some of the phonetic hieroglyphic signs used in foreign royal names such as “Cleopatra” and “Ptolemy.” He then applied the signs to the names in the cartouches found on the Rosetta Stone and elsewhere, using the discoveries from each new translation to fill in the gaps on the others.
Champollion’s cross-referencing technique allowed him to develop a working hieroglyphic alphabet, but his true eureka moment came in September 1822, when he realized that the hieroglyphic spelling of “Ramses”, a traditional Egyptian name, was made up of symbols that all corresponded to spoken sounds. By applying these same phonetic symbols to other words on the Rosetta Stone that weren’t enclosed in cartouches, he made a discovery that had eluded all previous scholars: Rather than being a purely symbolic script, hieroglyphics included both conceptual symbols and phonetic signs.
Depending on their context, the symbols in the script could represent entire words and phrases or individual components corresponding to the sounds of spoken language. According to legend, Champollion was so floored by his revelation that he raced to his brother’s office and screamed, “I’ve done it!” before immediately fainting.

Once he hit on its phonetic properties, Champollion was able to begin unraveling the mysteries of hieroglyphics. Following several years of additional study, he published research that outlined the underlying principles of the Egyptian writing system. Armed with his new knowledge, he made a pilgrimage to Egypt, where he became the first known person in more than 1,400 years to read the inscriptions on ancient Egyptian tombs and monuments. “Before Champollion, the ancient voices from the ancient world that could be heard were from the Greece, Rome and the Bible,” historian John Ray wrote in his book The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. “Now the Egyptians were beginning to speak with their own voice.”

Champollion died in 1832 at the age of just 41. Today, he’s credited with creating the field of modern Egyptology by giving scholars access to ancient Egyptian literature and culture.
Just how much of a debt Champollion owed to Thomas Young’s earlier scholarship has long been a matter of debate. French researchers have traditionally tended to trumpet Champollion’s work, while British scholars highlight Young’s earlier discoveries. Still, most modern historians give the Frenchman the lion’s share of the credit. “Any decipherment stands or falls as a whole,” the Egyptologist Richard Parkinson wrote, “and while Young discovered parts of an alphabet, a key, Champollion unlocked an entire written language.”
Equally important was the Rosetta Stone itself. By allowing scholars to compare hieroglyphics to known languages, it helped them decode a lost language. For more than 200 years, the original stone has been housed in London’s British Museum, where it receives millions of visitors annually. As the artifact responsible for rescuing ancient Egypt from the mists of time, the 2,200-year-old slab is often listed among history’s most important archaeological discoveries, the key that unlocked the secrets of a civilization.

I’ve wondered whether damage to the Rosetta Stone as pictured was done when the  French were working on their fortifications or whether it was found in the damaged condition. 

[Schmidt Meister]

7 hours ago, railfancwb said:

I’ve wondered whether damage to the Rosetta Stone as pictured was done when the  French were working on their fortifications or whether it was found in the damaged condition. 

We'll never know. I read quite a few articles about the Rosetta when I first heard about it and I never read anything about any damages incurred during the discovery.

[Schmidt Meister]

A man wakes up in the hospital bandaged from head to foot.
The doctor comes in and says, "Ah, I see you've regained consciousness. Now you probably won't remember, but you were in a huge accident on the Interstate. You're going to be okay, you'll be able to walk again and sustain a reasonably normal life, however your penis was severed in the accident and they couldn't find it."
The man groans, but the doctor goes on, "You have $9000 in insurance compensation coming for the severed member and we now have the technology to build you a new penis. They work great but they don't come cheap. They're roughly $1000 an inch."
The man perks up.
"So," the doctor says, "You must decide how many inches you want. But I understand that you have been married for over thirty years and this is something you should probably discuss with your wife. If you had five inches before and get nine inches now she might be a bit put out. If you had nine inches before and you decide to only invest in five inches now, she might be disappointed. It's important that she plays a role in helping you make a decision."
The man agrees to talk it over with his wife.
The doctor comes back the next day, "So, have you spoken with your wife about the penis?"
"Yes I have," says the man.
"And has she helped you make a decision?" asks the doctor.
“Yes" says the man.
"What is your decision?" asks the doctor.
"We're getting granite countertops and a new dishwasher.”

[Schmidt Meister]

I've had leg 'cramps' for years now. I don't think they're technically 'leg cramps', I've been told that they are the result of having 'restless leg syndrome.' I have a thyroid problem and whenever my medication for hyperthyroidism is off a little bit, the leg cramps get so annoying that I can't sleep. I saw these things (Van Holten's Pickle-Ice) on a website ad and researched them. I've drank pickle juice to help with the cramps and it seems to help but there's only so much pickle juice in a jar of pickles and you have to wait until you eat the pickles or you end up with nasty, dried out pickles.

SO, anyway, I ordered them and the most economical way to but them was in a box of 48 on Amazon. They are 2 oz. apiece. Pickles naturally have certain minerals and other things that help with the cramps and these things have added electrolytes. I can eat half of one every day and I haven't had any 'restless legs' since I started about a month ago.

Just thought I would put this here in case anyone has a similar problem.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]