On a cold New Year's Eve in 1967 in Ashley, North Dakota, newlyweds Donna and Delbert Eszlinger sliced excitedly into a large, round yellow onion. First, they split it lengthwise down the middle. Then, carefully, the couple peeled back the onion’s layers, laying 12 fresh, eye-watering sections side-by-side, and topping each with a teaspoon of salt.

The onion wasn’t the makings of a celebratory dish for the new year, but a window into the future. While the ground outside was still frozen, the couple looked to the onion layers to predict the coming year’s weather for their farm.

Early the next morning on New Year's Day, the couple rose to check their results. How each onion slice reacted to the salt overnight foretold how wet or dry each month would be. They examined each piece in order—the first representing January’s precipitation, the second predicting February, and so on. Some pieces were left with dry salt, indicating a dry month, while the next might have a pool of briny liquid in its center, indicating heavy rains or snow. Caked or crusty salt crystals meant frost, and bubbles hinted at humidity.

The onion calendar, or onion oracle, dates back to the Middle Ages, when onions and other root vegetables were used by farmers to predict precipitation for the year ahead. Some of the oldest records of using onions as an oracle are from the small town of Urbania, Italy, where the tradition is still practiced today.

In Urbania, they do the ritual on the night of January 24, the eve of what’s known in the Catholic calendar as the Conversion of St. Paul, when the man named Saul was struck to the ground by a divine light and decided to become a Christian. Paul had received a sign of things to come on that night, so practitioners believed that the onion could best be read on the magical date. “He received a sign from God, he should be willing to give signs back,” says Elisa Luzi, an anthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Luzi is from a town near Urbania, and has studied onion oracles, earning her the local nickname “the onion girl.”

Consulting a vegetable about the long-term weather outlook seems quaint today, in an age of instant weather forecasts at our fingertips, but the tradition served its purpose in the past. “As humans, we sometimes fear the future,” says Luzi. “As a farmer, the weather can destroy an entire year of work. Having no control over rain or sun, you need to at least try and see what is coming.”

Luzi grew up with her grandparents who were farmers, and she remembers her grandmother saying casually, "What did the onion say for this month?” or “But the onion said that…” You can still hear the same questions around Urbania today, Luzi says.

“Some people believe it. Some do not,” she says. “It is kind of like a horoscope. Even if you don't believe it, you still check it every now and then, just for fun.” The palm-sized weather predictors, which are cheap and readily available year-round, don’t enjoy any special status. “The next day, right after the reading, they become soup,” Luzi says.

While the tradition today is best known around Urbania, it can be found elsewhere as well. Australian farmer Halwyn 'Hally' Herrmann, for example, used the method for 65 years.

The practice can also be traced back to German folklore. In North Dakota, Delbert Eszlinger learned the ritual in childhood from neighbors who also farmed. The year the Eszlingers married, they decided to give the tradition a try—having continued it ever since. Donna Eszlinger says it usually works, with the exception of one reading several years ago. “It was such an odd year where the weather changed so often,” she says. “The whole onion was way off.”

The onion can be surprisingly specific, she adds. Three years ago, two pieces cut from the exact same outermost layer of the onion predicted opposite results for the months of January and July. “When we checked it the following morning, January had moisture and July had absolutely nothing,” says Eszlinger. “So what determines that there's moisture in one and not at all in the other?” The contrasting results turned out to be right, she says. “We had a lot of snow that January, and then that July was very dry.”

In Ashley, even the local news has started following onion predictions—but not everyone is on board. “One time a weatherman on our local station caught wind of this and said, ‘Nobody knows the weather better than the weatherman,’” says Eszlinger with a laugh. “It was like he was a little put out that we were predicting the weather, like we're taking away his job.”

“I think folklore forecasts will continue to reside in our social communities and circles. They’re tradition,” says Steve Ackerman, retired professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He adds tactfully: “While old sayings of the coming weather still enter our social lives, I do think we rely more now on forecasts that better reflect our understanding of atmosphere circulations.”

The Eszlingers appreciate science-based weather predictions and the convenience of the Weather Channel, but they still carry on the onion tradition—and Donna Eszingler hopes others will continue it after her. “The ones that are doing it, they're the same age I am. I'm 75,” she says. “It’s a German thing and a heritage that we like to carry on.”

There are already signs that her two daughters are interested in continuing the many-layered tradition, she says. “They’ll call and say, ‘Okay, Mom, what are we going to have this year?’”

How to Make Your Own Calendar

The practice of making an onion calendar can vary slightly depending on what area you’re in, but the tradition goes something like this:

Step 1: Select a nice round onion. While the color and where it’s grown don’t matter, everyone has their preferences. The Eszlingers prefer yellow. “The yellow one seems to be a sturdier onion,” she says. “So you probably get a better reading that way.”

Step 2: Cut the onion in half lengthwise and carefully separate the six outermost layers so that you have 12 sections total. Lay the sections out in two rows: The first half should be January through June, with January being the outermost layer and June the innermost. The second half represents July (the outermost layer) through December (the innermost).

Step 3: Add a teaspoon of salt in the center of each onion cup.

Step 4: Let sit overnight. Some people keep it inside, but many agree it should be outside to get the most accurate reading.

Step 5: In the early morning—ideally around 5 a.m.—bring the onion inside and quickly jot down your readings before the inside temperatures change the results.

Step 6: Enjoy consulting your onion calendar throughout the year!

In a comment on yesterday's "Software testing day" post, ernie in berkeley offered a nice "QA Engineer walks into a bar" joke, and pointed us to its origin in an old xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom":

…which in turn reminded me of an old problem, discussed in "Excel invents genes", 8/26/2016:

Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-Osta, "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature", Genome Biology 2016:

The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions.

This was a problem a dozen years ago when I worked on information extraction from biomedical literature — it's amazing to me that it still goes on. The authors note that

Automatic conversion of gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers is a problematic feature of Excel software. The description of this problem and workarounds were first highlighted over a decade ago [1]—nevertheless, we find that these errors continue to pervade supplementary files in the scientific literature. To date, there is no way to permanently deactivate automatic conversion to dates in MS Excel and other spreadsheet software such as LibreOffice Calc or Apache OpenOffice Calc. We note, however, that the spreadsheet program Google Sheets did not convert any gene names to dates or numbers when typed or pasted; notably, when these sheets were later reopened with Excel, LibreOffice Calc or OpenOffice Calc, gene symbols such as SEPT1 and MARCH1 were protected from date conversion.

It's shocking that biologists ever relied on Excel as a database system, and even more shocking that they're still doing it.

And of course this is adjacent to the problem of wrong row or column numbers in data analysis, and the wider problem of Cupertinos and other autocorrect effects, and so on.

I don't have time this morning to check whether MS has finally fixed the issue of Excel inventing new gene names (and similar things in other research areas) — or at least provided and documented a setting to allow researchers to turn off such "helpful" re-interpretations.

But it occurs to me that the rise of LLM "AI" means that there will soon be (the opportunity for) many new types of dataset corruption, as legions of clueless (or at least context-agnostic) developers enlist the intervention of helpful AIs everywhere…

prismatic-bell:

naamahdarling:

atreefullofstars:

theunnamedstranger:

jumpingjacktrash:

xenoqueer:

nettlepatchwork:

pervocracy:

Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home.  The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”

If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese.  Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.

Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)

Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.

From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.

the portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.

volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.

so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.

of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.

it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.

Reblogging because I honestly never thought about it but yeah, this lines up.

This is also why the idea of “pay a lot for fancy food on tiny plates” pisses so many Americans off. Unless you are rich enough not to care about throwing your money away, it’s not just a ridiculous ripoff in terms of not filling you up, it’s stingy. Restaurants are places of hospitality. If I pay that much for a plate it had better be damn good and it had better be generous. Otherwise they are just trying to fleece me out of my money AND saying they don’t value me as a customer.

If I go to IHOP or Olive Garden or whatnot, I absolutely don’t need to eat again until evening if I had leftovers, and until the next day if I did eat everything (you can’t really take pancakes home as leftovers).

But EVEN IF I DID EAT EVERYTHING and then ate a full meal on top of that, later, it’s really not anyone’s place to criticize what other people eat. It just isn’t. Let it go. It’s old.

Making fun of American food culture and food habits isn’t original or surprising or witty or funny or getting one over on us or crafting a clever retort or whatever. It’s lazy and petty and childish.

Yeah, we eat a lot of hamburgers. They’re fucking delicious. Cope.

Also re: Nobody Goes Away Hungry, here is AN INCOMPLETE LIST of things my family was gifted by neighbors when I was a child:

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have a cake

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have some cookies

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have a box of licorice (as you can tell this was Very Big News in my neighborhood)

—it’s Christmas, have cookies

—my garden did really well this year, have zucchini and tomatoes and corn also do you like rhubarb

—we saw an ambulance at your house this morning, have a lasagna

—we heard your mother died, have some soup and a bag of groceries

—Nina looked hungry and nobody is mentioning you’re on food stamps because we’re polite, also we just so happened to cook way too much for dinner, have some chicken

—it’s a block party, everyone take home whatever you want…no, more than that….MORE than that! You think we want to eat all this potato salad by ourselves?!

—we heard your husband had heart surgery, here’s a prepped meal so you can eat properly when you get home from the hospital

—it’s Halloween in a small town, have some apples/popcorn balls/pumpkin bread

—I’m a coupon queen and at the end of this shopping trip the store owed me $10 PLEASE tell me you want groceries I have 42 cans of baked beans

—because why not

I am genuinely bothered by how much this tradition seems to be going by the wayside. This was a whole thing when I was a kid, and there’s literally etiquette for how you handle it:

1) hot meals for tragedy and postpartum assistance, sweets for celebration and introduction.

2) presentation is important—don’t present a burnt or dirty dish. Dishes should have a lid or foil on top. Cling wrap isn’t rude, but it should be avoided because it’s easier to accidentally tear and if it’s not wrapped just right it’ll come undone, which is particularly problematic if you’re leaving food at a doorstep where ants may be present. (1990s addendum: when I was a kid you could buy colored or printed cling wrap around Christmas, and it was considered classy to use this on sweets you were gifting your neighbors as long as it was done in person and wasn’t a doorstep dropoff. This, sadly, seems to have gone away, and I miss it a lot.)

3) when receiving food, always say thank you. Never reject a dish; if it’s food you don’t like, someone in your extended family will take it. If four other people in the neighborhood have already gifted you food and you have no idea what to do with it all, freeze some or gift it to people in your out-of-the-neighborhood circle. The only polite rejections are dietary restrictions, and “three other people have already given me zucchini I’m so sorry.” If all else fails, take it to the break room at work. Someone who forgot their lunch will thank you.

4) Never return a dirty dish.

5) Never return an EMPTY dish. It’s always good to have two or three quick, low-effort recipes in your back pocket for refilling a dish. There is no rule for what you should use as a thank-you recipe, but most people use sweets because there are a lot of quick and simple options and you can refill the dish without cooking in it. (My go-tos are fudge no-bake cookies and honey milk balls. A lot of people in my neighborhood did cookie bars.)

5a) …unless you’re a new parent or the dish was presented to you as a consolation for a funeral. In these cases, a thank-you card will suffice.

6) a dish should always be returned within seven days.

7) using disposable dishes is acceptable, but consider the occasion. A new parent will be grateful for one less dish to wash. Someone who just lost a parent should not be presented with a paper plate.

8) if using disposable dishes, make sure you indicate you don’t expect them back. Some people (I am one of them) will absolutely look at disposable-but-reusable dishes, wash them out, and return them if you do not do this. Never give a disposable dish with the expectation it will return home.

9) if giving a pass-me-on plate/Amish friendship plate, be sure the recipient knows the rules of a pass-me-on plate. You can purchase plates with the rules printed directly on them, but if you’re using a regular plate, gift it with a card that explains the game.

THIS WAS A WHOLE THING. You’ll notice #9 up there—pass-me-on plates are usually somewhere in size between a dinner plate and a serving plate, often very pretty, and the way they work is you fill them up with something good to eat and give them to a friend. The friend will then wash the plate, fill it with something good, and pass it on to someone else—hence the name pass-me-on plate. (The phrase “Amish friendship plate” is….older. With all the slightly wincey connotations of “older” when discussing out-groups.)

This was a way families bonded with other families and cared for our communities, and I really want to see it come back.

The new universally-hated new MLB uniforms, which look like incredibly cheap knock-offs of an actual uniform, introduced by Nike and Fanatics are will be one and done. And while there’s a natural tendency to finger Fanatics — a maker of notoriously shoddy merchandise that has a near-monopoly on league-branded apparel because professional sports owners both like to get paid and hate their fans — this was apparently Nike’s doing:

Major League Baseball plans to address its uniform fiasco after changes this spring to the standard jerseys and pants led to widespread complaints from players and fans, according to a memo obtained Sunday night by ESPN.

The prominent modifications include a return to larger lettering on the back of jerseys, remedying mismatched gray tops and bottoms and addressing the new Nike jerseys’ propensity to collect sweat, according to the memo distributed to players by the MLB Players Association on Sunday.

The changes, which will happen at the latest by the beginning of the 2025 season, will also include fixes to the pants, widely panned this spring for being see-through.

The union informed players of the coming changes in a letter that placed the blame on Nike and the debut of its Vapor Premier uniform, which was advertised for its superior performance but remains disliked by players.

“This has been entirely a Nike issue,” the memo to players read. “At its core, what has happened here is that Nike was innovating something that didn’t need to be innovated.”

I’ve never been much of a Nike guy — I give my Official Endorsement to Brooks for gym and Hoka for long periods on your feet — but according to Drew Magary the decline at Nike is more widespread:

I think you see the pattern here. Nike, not unlike a host of other once-vaunted companies, is making cheaper, worse products and selling them as the future made real. They’re also cutting workers by the thousands. This is right out of Silicon Valley playbook, which a company like Nike isn’t supposed to be reading from.

This is because, for my entire lifetime, Nike has been cool. They had the coolest shoes. They repped the coolest athletes and had the bright idea to give those athletes their own signature product lines (watch Ben Affleck’s Air, perhaps the least essential film I’ve ever seen, if you’d like to find out more). And they had the best ads. Bo knows. Chicks dig the long ball. I am not a role model. When I was a kid, I wanted Nike shoes. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an NFL player and have a Nike contract. When I was working in the ad business as an adult, I wanted to work on the Nike account, because they, along with their longtime ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, represented the apex of the profession.

I am now 47 and I wear Skechers, because no Nike sneaker has felt comfortable on my feet since 1993. If I own any Nike apparel, it’s likely because I got it off the rack at TJ Maxx. The Nike brand that exists in the mind has nothing to do with the Nike that’s currently squeezing their athletes into near-thongs and misappropriated ballet tights. That they’re willing to get into bed with Fanatics, and give them control over products as genuinely consequential as Caitlin Clark’s first pro uniform, says even more the current state of Nike than it does about their bumbling manufacturer. What kind of shitass company lets Michael Rubin take command of their most important products?

Making quality products is becoming increasingly inconsistent with the dominant ethos of corporate America.

The post The Boeing of sports apparel appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In 1885, seeking a way to depict vocal sounds visually, Welsh singer Megan Watts Hughes invented the eidophone, a chamber capped with an elastic membrane that would resonate when the singer sang into a tube. When she spread the disk with a thin layer of sand or glycerine, standing waves would register as visible patterns resembling forget-me-nots, daisies, marigolds, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers.

“Stepping out of doors,” she wrote, “[I] have seen their parallels living in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and … the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to nature’s production of her own beautiful forms.”

The field of study she helped to pioneer is now known as cymatics — see Chladni Figures.

Once again, the exact thing we said was going to happen, vis-à-vis the horrific Texas legislation allowing people to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion, is happening.

At some point this year, a Texas woman made the decision to run off to Colorado to seek an abortion in order to avoid giving birth to the purported child of one Collin Davis. Given what we know about this Collin Davis character, this is the smartest possible decision she could have made, as having his child would have meant being chained to him for life in some capacity — and he sure seems like a goddamned nightmare.

In February, when Davis found out that she was considering this, he immediately retained Jonathan Mitchell, who is the architect of the Texas law and also the absolute spitting image of Robert, the haunted Edwardian-era doll who destroys the lives of Florida tourists who disrespect him.

Mitchell then sent her a “legal threat” meant to keep her from having the abortion. It did not work (thank goodness).

Now that his ex has had the abortion, Collin and Mitchell are still hoping to ruin her life by filing a petition to investigate her and anyone he believes aided and abetted her in getting the abortion.

Via Washington Post:

In the Davis case, Mitchell is attempting to depose the woman who had the abortion, along with several other people he writes may be “complicit” in the abortion. If deposed, they would be asked about others involved in the abortion, including any abortion funds or any other entities that provided financial support, according to court records. They would also have to provide all documentation relevant to the abortion.

“Mr. Davis expects to be able to better evaluate the prospects for legal success after deposing [the people listed], and discovering the identity of their co-conspirators and accomplices,” Mitchell wrote in the complaint, which he filed on March 22.

He is able to do this because of Texas’s Rule 202, which allows for an investigation prior to filing a lawsuit.

Davis, who we don’t know isn’t related somehow to Texas oil tycoon Cullen Davis who allegedly killed his stepdaughter and attempted to have his soon-to-be-ex-wife and the judge in their divorce proceedings killed, is clearly just trying to continue to exercise control over his ex and everyone she knows — because that is what men like him do. That is, in fact, exactly why it was a good idea for her to have an abortion.

He’s not the first man to try and pull this either. In March of last year, a man named Marcus Silva was also represented by Jonathan Mitchell. Silva was very open — at least to his ex — about the fact that he was using the threat of the lawsuit to force her to continue having sex with him and cleaning his house.

MARCUS SILVA: You’re not considering what can happen to you if I continue to do this sh*t for the next 40 years.

BRITTNI SILVA: Marcus, I’m not gonna be f*cking blackmailed into having sex with you.

MARCUS SILVA: Then you’re just gonna have your f*cking life destroyed in every f*cking way that you can imagine to where you want to blow your f*cking brains out.

What a peach!

So far, we haven’t heard from Collin Davis’s ex, but I think we can all be pretty sure that when we do, she’ll likely have a very similar story to tell. Any man who would sue his ex’s friends and family over helping her get an abortion is at least psychologically abusive.

Donate Just Once!

I’ve always found the “Let’s do Lysistrata!” thing extremely cringe, as we no longer really live in a society in which women are regularly sexually involved with men who hold diametrically opposite views to them and also have any particular power to change anything. Like, it is unclear what a woman going on a sex strike from their equally antiwar or pro-abortion rights partner, who has no more political power than she does, would actually accomplish. It also presumes that all women share the same opinions on things and that sex is a favor they do for men. I could go on about this for a bit, but I will spare you.

What I will say, however, is that if I lived in Texas (I would not live in Texas), I would be getting me to a convent, because there is no way in hell that I would trust any man in that state to not try to ruin my life if we broke up and I needed to get an abortion. Absolutely not, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else either.

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