Isegoria

Wow. Baby put into X-ray machine at Los Angeles airport:

A woman sent her one-month-old grandson through an X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport, security officials said on Wednesday.

The woman, who spoke little English and was traveling to Mexico, put the infant in a plastic bin used to hold loose carry-on items for security scanning at the busy airport on Saturday morning.

Security screeners saw the baby as it started to pass through, pulled the bin out, and immediately sought medical assistance for the child, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Nico Melendez said.

The baby was examined at a local hospital and judged not to have received a dangerous dose of radiation.

The media-savvy folks at the Chester Zoo in England have said that they expect a virgin birth:

Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.

Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.

“Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way,” Kevin Buley of Chester Zoo in England said in an interview.

He said the incubating eggs could hatch around Christmas.

If you enjoy animation, I recommend watching “animation anorak” Mark Kermode interview Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett on the Culture Show.

Johnny on Drawn! remarks that Hewlett’s influences include zombies, Daffy Duck, and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine — but he neglects to mention Tony Hart.

The Yellow Kid is — arguably — the first modern comic strip:

Comics in America started with The Yellow Kid. At least, that’s how the oft-told story goes. But like most oft-told stories, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, that feature didn’t start out as comics, at least not in the modern sense of the word, a sequence of panels carrying a narrative — at first, it consisted of a single large illustration. For another, it wasn’t actually the first — newspaper and magazine cartoons had been growing in prominence ever since the ability to print them existed, and are known to have existed in America as early as the middle of the 18th century. In fact, an entire comic book, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, appeared in an American paper as early as 1842. For a third, the name of the feature wasn’t The Yellow Kid.

Cartoonist Richard Felton Outcault started drawing funny pictures about New York tenements in 1894, for Truth magazine. The first appeared in that year’s June 2 edition. On Feb. 17, 1895, one of them was reprinted in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World, inaugurating the series from which The Yellow Kid would eventually emerge. By the end of that year, Outcault was doing full-page ones, in color, on a weekly basis, under the title Hogan’s Alley (which appeared on a street sign as early as the very first of the Truth magazine cartoons). Gradually, there emerged a distinctive young character, identifiable by a bald head, huge ears, and a bright yellow nightshirt, which later had his dialog written on it. He wasn’t usually addressed by any particular name (although when that did happen, the name was was Mickey Dugan), but readers came to know him as The Yellow Kid.

I bring this up because, after I linked to that US presidents timeline game, someone I know — Hi, Cate! — put up a newspaper comic strip timeline game, and I was certain that The Katzenjammer Kids was the first comic strip.

In fact, I’m pretty sure The Katzenjammer Kids was the “correct” answer to the Trivial Pursuit question on the subject, and I got it “right” a few years back while playing with a group of unsuspecting non-geeks (or marginal geeks).

At any rate, the popularity of The Yellow Kid led Hearst to hire Outcault away, and George Luks continued using the character in Pulitzer’s World. Both papers became known for The Yellow Kid:

The papers that ran it were often referred to by New Yorkers as the “Yellow Kid” papers or, simply, “the yellow papers”. During the Spanish American War (1898), when their sensational and unreliable reportage reached a fever pitch, that style came to be known as “yellow journalism”.

It was only years later that comics evolved into their more stylized form — with big-headed kids who didn’t look quite so deformed, and who spoke via word balloons, rather than text on their nightshirts.

Jacob Sullum asks, Would Legal Marijuana Mean an Excise Tax Bonanza? No, not really:

Gieringer suggests a tax of 50 cents to $1 per joint, which is extremely heavy even compared to the cigarette taxes that prevail in New York City ($3 a pack, or 15 cents a cigarette, on top of the federal excise tax of 39 cents a pack). Even a levy as big as Gieringer proposes would bring in revenues that “might range from $2.2 to $6.4 billion per year,” according to his estimate.

Here’s where the bonanza would come from:

Drug law enforcement costs something like $40 billion a year, and marijuana accounted for 43 percent of drug arrests in 2005.

Doctors Larry and Jonathan Zaroff recount an unusual medical emergency in Is There a Barber in the House?:

A 50-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital with complaints of severe weakness and difficulty breathing. She had been quite healthy until the afternoon of the admission, with no history of serious illnesses.

The doctors at the university hospital where she became a patient are known for using their brains. They also use their stethoscopes wisely, and observe closely how a patient looks.

On examination this one was sweaty and had pinpoint pupils, and her lungs were wheezy. But unlike physicians of centuries ago, doctors today do not regularly use their noses. (In the 18th century, doctors could make diagnoses of kidney failure, diabetes and liver disease by smelling a patient.) For this woman, the diagnosis remained obscure for the next hour as her breathing got more labored and she became comatose.

A tube was placed in her windpipe and she was attached to a breathing machine. Then an experienced nurse, with good sense and a good sense of smell, came to the rescue. The nurse noted that the patient had a peculiar odor, resembling garlic, most prominently from her hair. The unusual odor raised the suspicion of insecticide poisoning with organophosphates.

The patient was immediately treated with atropine and 2-PAM to reverse the effects of the poison, while blood was sent to the lab to verify the diagnosis. Each time she received the medications she woke and improved, but then lapsed back into a coma with increasing lung problems. Her skin was washed and her hair was shampooed several times with no lasting improvement.

Since the primary contamination seemed to be in her hair, her head was shaved. After that she improved rapidly, her medicines were tapered and she regained consciousness. Soon she was able to breathe on her own.

The lab reports verified that the nurse had been correct. The patient had been poisoned with an organophosphate insecticide. Now her doctors wondered, How did her hair become impregnated with insecticide in quantities to bring her to the brink of death? This was no casual exposure. She denied a suicide attempt — swallowing would have been more direct. Nor could it have been attempted murder — there are easier ways to administer poisons more covertly.

The answer came from the patient when she fully awakened. She remembered exactly what she had done before becoming ill: her usual activities, except that she had gotten her hair shampooed by a neighbor.

The neighbor, when contacted, was willing to bring in the shampoo. Chagrined, she showed up shortly, bringing two containers. One held shampoo. The other, a similar jug, contained an organophosphate insecticide. Both receptacles were the same size, the labels old and blurred.

Inventor takes airport design to new heights — of egotism:

Starry’s design calls for new airports — he calls them Starrports — to be built on relatively small parcels of land close to major cities. He envisions parallel runways — on an incline for landing and a decline for takeoff — leading jets directly onto, or off, the roof of a circular passenger terminal and parking garage. The distance from garage to gate would be short. The heat of the terminal would help de-ice the runways, and lights on the terminal could illuminate runways.

Starry says his design would cut air pollution at a single airport 56% and save 1,000 gallons of jet fuel per flight. Inclined runways would allow jets to burn less fuel, he says, because the planes would reach takeoff speed sooner and land without thrust-reversers. The short distance from terminal to runway would allow jets to wait at the gate instead of idling their engines on taxiways. And proximity to downtown would mean fewer miles by autos to and from the airport, also reducing air pollution.

“A Starrport can be built on one-third the land at one-half the cost,” Starry says. “It’s based on simple, understandable concepts.”

Retailers profit from unused gift cards:

Last winter, Best Buy Co. reported a $43 million gain in fiscal 2006 from cards that hadn’t been used in two or more years. Limited Brands Inc. recorded $30 million in 2005 revenue because of unredeemed cards.

Even so, this holiday season is likely to see record sales of gift cards. The National Retail Federation, a trade group, estimates that shoppers will buy $24.8 billion worth of cards, up 34 percent from last year.
[...]
About 6 percent, or $4.8 billion, of this year’s gift cards will go unused, estimated Laura Lane, vice president of unclaimed property services for Keane Co., a compliance and risk management consulting firm.

Consumer Reports put the figure even higher, estimating that 19 percent of those who received cards last year had not used them because the cards were lost or expired.
[...]
Some gift cards get spent faster than others. Supermarkets and gas stations have close to 100 percent redemption rates, said Bob Skiba, who runs the gift card division of Ceridian Corp.’s Comdata gift card division, based in Louisville, Ky.

Even cards that get used are effectively a free loan to the retailer.