The American Origins Of The Not-So-Traditional Celtic Knot Tattoo

What is the most cliched tattoo you can think of? Chinese characters? A tribal armband?

How about a Celtic knot? Those interlocking lines that look like ropes or basket weaving.

Last week I was in Ireland and decided to investigate the roots of this trend.

I spoke with Kevin McNamara at the Dublin Ink tattoo parlor.

"It would be a weird week in the shop if I didn't do at least, like 40," he told me. "That's not a literal number, but yeah, it's nuts."

Without Celtic knots and shamrocks, McNamara said, he would never have learned how to tattoo.

"The first couple months, or first couple years, that was how I made my money," he said.

Now, the Celtic knot is his retirement fund.

He said he can spot Celtic knot customers the minute they walk in the door: young, earnest and almost always American. Other telltale signs: the style of jeans they wear, fanny packs, baseball caps.

"And also they let you know that they're American, you know?" he said. "You don't have to worry about that."

The image of the Celtic knot is thousands of years old. It's carved into ancient stones all over Ireland. But it turns out the Celtic knot tattoo is a bit like the Chinese fortune cookie: American born and bred.

There's actually no evidence of Celtic tattooing, according to Anna Felicity Friedman, a tattoo historian who runs a blog called TattooHistorian. In fact, while people in other parts of the world have been tattooing themselves for thousands of years, the practice only came to Ireland in the last century.

The Celtic knot tattoo seems to have started on the American West Coast in the 1970s and '80s, part of a trend in tattooing called blackwork: big, black geometric designs — much bolder than the old-school mermaid or cobra.

"Blackwork is sort of the more PC term for what used to be called tribal tattoos," Friedman says.

Some of the early designs came from Native American or Aboriginal patterns. The style took off.

Tattoos that mark heritage have always been popular, says Friedman. Combine the trend in blackwork with a desire to mark European heritage, and you have the Celtic knot, which spread across the U.S. and over the ocean to Europe.

It was sort of the "lite rock" radio station of tattoos: pretty, bland and inoffensive. It could work for women or men. It didn't have biker or sailor connotations. And it implied heritage and history.

At Dublin Ink, Irishman Greg Donne is getting a geometric pattern on his right shoulder. On his left shoulder, an intricate Celtic knot has begun to fade.

"Ah, it was the very first one I got. You know, when you're just getting a tattoo and you don't know what to think," he said.

He was 19, he explained with a shrug.

Tattoo artist McNamara has a lot of ink on his body.

So does tattoo historian Friedman.

But their personal tattoo collections do not include a Celtic knot. npr

Hookah smokers are inhaling benzene

High levels of benzene, a chemical in crude oil and gasoline, are present in hookah smokers and nonsmokers after they attend social events where the water pipes are used, a new report says.

Benzene exposure is a known risk factor for leukemia. Since there are no safe levels of benzene exposure, interventions to prevent or reduce hookah smoking or regulate the tobacco products are needed, say the authors.

“Hookah smoking involves tobacco which is simply hazardous to the health of those who smoke it, and those who socialize or live with them,” Nada Kassem, who led the study, told Reuters Health in an email.

Burning charcoal is needed to heat the hookah tobacco to generate the smoke, said Kassem, who is the associate director at the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health at San Diego State University.

“In addition to inhaling toxicants and carcinogens found in the hookah tobacco smoke, hookah smokers, and non-smokers who socialize with them, also inhale large quantities of charcoal combustion-generated toxic and carcinogenic emissions,” she said, adding that benzene is present in both tobacco smoke and the burnt charcoal emissions. msn

atlantic bay scallops

dodo bird

Plate V in: Hugh Edwin Strickland, The Dodo And Its Kindred, Or The History, Affinities, And Osteology Of The Dodo, Solitaire, And Other Extinct Birds Of The Islands Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon. London: Reeve, 1848.

astronaut and lunar lander 1966

Astronaut and lunar lander, 1966, illustrated by John Polgreen.

comet of 1882

The comet of 1882, as seen from Streatham, Endgland on November 4, illustrated by T.E. Key.

(Gutenberg)

cuzco and pisac, peru

machu picchu, peru

the town below machu picchu

benchmark!

inca bridge

classic.

alpaca

alpaca party

Solar Bike Path Opens This Week In The Netherlands

A Dutch project that integrates solar panels into a bike commuter path will officially open this week, on a special roadway outside Amsterdam. Power generated by the SolaRoad's panels will be funneled into the national energy grid.

The project in the town of Krommenie is being called the world's first public road that includes embedded solar cells. The crystalline silicon solar cells are encased in two layers of tempered safety glass, mounted in a concrete housing.

The equipment is part of pre-built concrete slabs that SolaRoad says have been refined in years of testing. The company says it's been a challenge to produce energy-producing slabs that are both durable and rideable by thousands of cyclists a day.

"It has to be translucent for sunlight and repel dirt as much as possible," the company says. "At the same time, the top layer must be skid resistant and strong enough in order to realize a safe road surface."

The section of the path that's opening this week is some 230 feet long. Its creators call it a test of an idea that could someday lead to roads that generate the same power that electric cars use to travel on them. npr

Sex 'emerged in ancient Scottish lake'

Scientists believe they have discovered the origin of copulation.

An international team of researchers says a fish called Microbrachius dicki is the first-known animal to stop reproducing by spawning and instead mate by having sex.

The primitive bony fish, which was about 8cm long, lived in ancient lakes about 385 million years ago in what is now Scotland.

The research is published in the journal Nature.

...Prof Long added that the discovery was made as he was looking through a box of ancient fish fossils.

He noticed that one of the M. dicki specimens had an odd L-shaped appendage. Further investigation revealed that this was the male fish's genitals.

"The male has large bony claspers. These are the grooves that they use to transfer sperm into the female," explained Prof Long. bbc

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coastal flooding by tropical cyclones and sea-level rise

Jonathan Woodruff, Jennifer Irish, and Suzana Camargo

Nature; Vol 504; December 5, 2013

…the Western North Pacific has been the most prolific tropical cyclone basin over the instrumental record, both in terms of the overall number of tropical cyclones (30% of global activity) and peak tropical cyclone wind intensities (Fig. 1). However, in recent decades this basin accounted for neither the majority of economic nor human losses from tropical cyclones. These records have been held by two of the least active tropical cyclone basins, the North Atlantic (10% of global tropical cyclone activity) and North Indian Ocean (5% of global tropical cyclone activity), respectively. Since 1970, around 65% of all lives lost as a result of tropical cyclones occurred within the North Indian Ocean — equivalent to more than half a million deaths³. Over this same period, more than 60% of all economic losses from tropical cyclones took place in the North Atlantic — amounting to around US$400 billion³.

first paper published!

my first paper (based on my thesis work) was just published in the journal of foraminiferal research!

assateague island

nor'easter heading in.

i win. you lose. 

sunset.

fox burrow.

sunset over tom's cove.

butterfly.

NASA's Wallop's Island rocket explosion

Ancient Viruses Lurk In Frozen Caribou Poo

A careful examination of frozen caribou poop has turned up two never-before-seen viruses.

The viruses are hundreds of years old: One of them probably infected plants the caribous ate. The other may have infected insects that buzzed around the animals.

The findings prove viruses can survive for surprisingly long periods of time in a cold environment, according to Eric Delwart, a researcher at Blood Systems Research Institute in San Francisco.

"The DNA of viruses is preserved extremely well under cold conditions," he says.

Delwart's day job at Blood Systems is to find new viruses that could contaminate the blood supply. But he enjoys looking in odd places too. He got interested in ice cores from high mountain regions, after reading about all the interesting old things the ice contained.

"Things like old shoes and arrowheads," he says, "and then I realized this is nature's freezer, which should also contain organic remains."

Delwart had one particular type of organic remains in mind: caribou poop. Just about everything an animal eats can be infected with a virus. And that makes animals, including humans, virus vacuums that suck up every virus in their path.

"I mean we're constantly shoving viruses down our throat and if you look at poo samples from humans and from animals you will find a lot of viruses," he says.

Caribous hang out on ice, so these pristine ice cores are actually full of poo. And as scientists go through layer after layer of ice, the poo gets older and older.

Delwart examined poop from northern Canada that was 700 years old. The result, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the discovery of these two viruses. npr

old world language families