It's like looking down at your watch. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The word for an ancient water clock sounds like a name of a Greek goddess: Clepsydra.

These age-old time-keeping devices are handsome and intriguing, using the gradual flow of water to measure time. Water clocks date back as far as 500 BC and served as a practical daily tool all over the world for well over a millennium.

In ancient Persia, the water clock was a bowl placed in a large pot filled with water. A small hole would be made in the bottom of the bowl so that water from the pot would slowly flow in; when the bowl became full, it would sink down into the pot, and a trusty time keeper would dump it out and place it back on top of the water inside the pot.

Time was thus measured by how many times the bowl sank—a bit like an hourglass with the sand swapped out for water.

This would have been the job description of a timekeeper in ancient Persia. (Photo: Maahmaah/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

This bowl-pot tag team is one of the oldest time-measuring technologies, with evidence of use by Babylonians, Egyptians, and Native Americans, among others. 

The water clock, or fenjaan, was employed in Persia to ensure fair irrigation practices. Due to the arid environment, farmers there built underground irrigation channels that carried water from aquifers to separate properties. In Persia, this system was called qanat, but it also existed elsewhere, including China’s modern-day Xinjiang Province, where you can still visit the qanat (in Uighur, karez) in the city of Turpan.

Two trusted older men from the village were chosen as full-time clock managers. They were known as khaneh fenjaan and tasked with monitoring water flow day and night. Their role was critical in ensuring that water in the qanats was diverted equally to different farms.

An outflow clepsydra. (Photo: Maahmaah/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

There also existed an even simpler form of outflow clepsydra, known for its use in timing speeches in ancient Rome. This water clock was basically a graduated cylinder with a hole, the passage of time measured by keeping track of the level of remaining water. It could be filled halfway for short speeches and topped off for longer ones, and if a speech or hearing required suspension, the hole could be temporarily plugged with wax. 

Later and more complicated forms of clepsydra incorporated mechanisms involving gears and wheels, and clepsydras remained in wide use until pendulum clocks made their debut in the 17th century.

But, should you ever find yourself stranded in the woods sans modern technology and trying to hold an election, you can fashion a fenjaan to keep candidates’ speeches in check.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

The 15th of 20 seed bottles that make up the world's longest-running experiment "Some people say it looks like a whiskey flask," says curator Dr. Frank Telewski. (Photo: Kurt Stepnitz/Michigan State University)

In the fall of 1879, Dr. William James Beal walked to a secret spot on Michigan State University’s campus and planted a strange crop: 20 narrow-necked glass bottles, each filled with a mixture of moist sand and seeds. Each vessel was “left uncorked and placed with the mouth slanting downward so that water could not accumulate about the seeds,” Beal wrote. “These bottles were buried on a sandy knoll in a row running east and west.”

In the spring of 2000, under cover of night, current WJ Beal Botanical Garden curator Dr. Frank Telewski and his colleague Dr. Jan Zeevaart crept out to the same secret knoll and dug up the sixth-to-last seed bottle—completing the latest act in what has become the world’s longest continually monitored scientific study.

When he buried those bottles 137 years ago, Dr. Beal didn’t aim to start the As the World Turns of garden experiments. As a botanist at an agricultural school, he was just trying to find a rigorous answer to a question that has dogged farmers for millennia: how many times do you have to pull up weeds before they stop growing back? “Back then, [farmers] didn’t have herbicides,” and weeding was the most tedious part of the job, explains Telewski. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘that’s a long row to hoe?’ That’s where that came from.”

Dr. William James Beal, father of the longest-running experiment in history. (Image: Internet Archive/Flickr)

They may be tiny, but seeds are notoriously tough. Without water or sunlight to spur them into action, they can lie dormant for a very long time—in 2005, Israeli researchers grew a healthy date palm out of a 2,000-year-old seed (that tree, nicknamed Methuselah, recently became a dad). Hoping to figure out exactly how many years local species could hang on in neutral conditions, Beal filled 20 bottles with 50 seeds each of 23 different plant types. The bottles are unearthed one at a time, and the seeds are sifted out and planted.

Fifteen bottles in, the clear winner is Verbascum blattaria, or moth mullein, a splay-flowered weed common throughout the United States. Verbascum has popped up consistently in every bottle, and “of the 50 seeds of that particular plant, 23 of them germinated” in 2000, says Telewski, a “phenomenal” result. Distant second place goes to Malva rotundifolia, a round-leafed mallow nicknamed “cheeses” after its wedgelike seeds. Only one of those seeds sprouted in 2000.

Dr. Telewski in 2001, among some thriving century-old moth mullein. (Photo: Frank Telewski)

As for the other 21 species, none showed even a tendril. While this might have pleased the farmers who inspired the study, it’s a little sadder for those who are now watching it most closely. These days, farmers have a whole arsenal of anti-weed tools, and Beal’s biggest devotees are conservationists—those who hope the study’s results will help them better understand the bottled seeds’ wilder counterparts. “Many species of plants that are locally extinct may actually still be viable in the soils of those particular environments that have been disturbed,” Telewski explains. Stir them from their slumber, and these Lazarus plants could restart a whole population.

Geneticists also hope to compare the next bottle's cargo to its contemporary brethren. But for these seeds of ideas to bear fruit, Telewski must first preserve the bottled ones under his charge. He always goes digging under cover of night, both to avoid exposure to sunlight and to dissuade copycats from coming back later: “We don’t advertise where they’re buried because we don’t want anybody poking around and digging up souvenirs,” Telewski says. Plus, he adds, “I’m always a little nervous when there’s construction on campus. You know: ‘Don’t put a building there!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I can’t tell you, just don’t!’”

The last bottle is set to be unearthed in the year 2100—but if the project’s past curators are any indication, it might stay buried even longer than that. According to Beal’s original vision, the bottles were supposed to be dug up every five years, the last excavation marking a neat century. But in 1920, a decade after Beal retired, his replacement noticed that “the experiment seemed to be stabilizing,” with the same seeds sprouting each time, Telewski explains. “And so, he thought, well gee, why not extend it?” Seven bottles later, the new powers-that-were extended it again. Now there are 20 years between excavations.

Labeled plants at the WJ Beal Botanical Garden. Somewhere nearby, the bottled seeds slumber underground. (Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Although it’s possible for Telewski to imagine stretching it even further—after all, the moth mullein shows little sign of slowing down—“we don’t want to lose continuity where people might forget about the study,” he says. “There’s that living memory thing that’s really important.” Telewski thinks often about Beal, and about the other experimenters who inspired him in turn—Charles Darwin; Asa Gray; Native American corn hybridizers. “All of us basically stand on the shoulders of giants,” he says. “It is kind of neat to be a part of that history.”

In the meantime, he is biding his time until 2020. “In 1980, I was a graduate student in plant physiology, and we learned about the experiment ... I had absolutely no idea that I would ever be the person to dig up the next bottle,” Telewski says. “And lo and behold, 20 years later, there I was … I have this wonderful opportunity to continue this historically important and significant experiment.” It’s a long row to hoe—and getting longer—but for now, he’s the lucky guy that gets to do it.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history.See more Time Week stories here.

Every minute at the bus stop feels longer than it actually is (Photo: Public Domain Pictures/Pixabay)

Waiting at a bus stop or a subway station, it can feel like the minutes stretch on forever, forever, forever, foooooooorever, for-ev-er before the train or bus finally (finally!) arrives. This isn’t because your local transit agency is conspiring to make your life miserable. Your brain perceives the minutes spent waiting as longer than they actually are.

Studies of transit riders’ perception of time have found that people unconsciously multiple their wait times by a factor of 1.2 to 2.5. In this time warp, a five-minute wait can feel like it takes anywhere from six minutes to 12.5 minutes.

The vibe at the stop can make time feel even longer, too. Say a woman’s waiting for a bus at a stop where she feels unsafe. In this situation, time can feel three times as long. That woman might tell you she’d been there for about 30 interminable minutes, when only 10 minutes had passed.

Even under normal circumstances, though, transit riders hate waiting. “People actually consider waiting at the bus stop for buses as among the most unhappy moments of their life,” says Yingling Fan, an University of Minnesota associate professor who specializes in planning and policy.

Pure misery (Photo: Frank Hank/Wikimedia)

Transit agencies do already have one proven strategy for mollifying the masses. Tell us exactly how long we have to wait, and we will quietly accept it, which is why transit agencies across the country have started installing wait-time clocks. If you know the train will come–in just four minutes!–those four minutes pass more peacefully, with the knowledge that the train will come forestalling at least a portion of those neck-craning glances down the track. But these clocks are not a cure-all, in part because they can be expensive to install. 

Market researchers have also spent years developing tricks to make waiting less terrible. Waiting in a rigidly straight line, for instance, makes people crazy, but put us in one of those meandering, switchback-style situations, and we’re much happier.

Fan and her colleagues are searching for the analogous secrets to making transit stops tolerable–station designs that can mitigate the exasperation of waiting and make people perceive the passage of time at a more-or-less normal rate. What they’re finding promises a better world for transit riders, because, according to their research, making wait times more bearable is quite simple. They’ve already identified one secret weapon in the fight against tedium–trees.

The minutes seemed like hours, and they passed so slowly (Photo: Skitterphoto/pixabay)

They began by choosing 36 rail and bus stations in the Twin Cities, in residential and commercial areas, in both urban and suburban neighborhoods. At each station, they documented the waiting area and the surrounding environment. Was there seating? Water foundations? Restrooms? How clean was the station? Was route info clearly posted? How wide was the street? How heavy was the traffic? Was it noisy? Were there landmarks around? Trees? Trash and graffiti?

They also observed the people waiting at the stop. A research assistant would find a discreet place to set up a camera and film riders while they waited. This video could be used to document all sorts of variables about the study subjects–if they were male or female, if they were alone or in a group, if they were carrying bags, whether they sat, stood or played with their phones while waiting. Most importantly, though, it allowed the researchers to measure the actual time people spent waiting at the station.

When the bus or train arrived, another team of research assistants would board along with the riders and ask them to fill out research surveys. The first and key question: How long did you spend waiting for the bus or train?

Across the more than 800 people who were included in study, the average wait was 5.57 minutes. But the riders believed they had waited significantly longer. When the team analyzed riders’ reported wait times, they found their research subjects’ perceived wait times averaged out at 6.78 minutes.

Trees help a surprising amount (Photo: Andrew Longton/geograph)

What the researchers were really interested in, though, were possible connections between reported wait time and characteristics of the station or stop. And they did find some factors that were associated with more accurate perceptions of wait times.

The first was very simple. Basic amenities–a bench and a shelter–meant “significant reductions in reported wait time.” In other words, if people had a place to sit and a shelter, their wait didn’t feel quite so long.

This might seem intuitive, but it goes against the strategy that many cities have adopted in sprucing up transit system. “A lot of the time, when policymakers invest at a bus stop or station, they’re trying to create a high amenities environment,” says Fan. “It’s expensive, and you can only improve so many stations. But our finding suggests that just having basic amenities could mitigate people’s waiting time experience.” Instead of having a few relatively luxe stations, maybe cities should be adding benches and shelters to stops that are, right now, just a metal pole and a sign.

Trees, bench, shelter–actually a pretty good bus stop (Photo: självskapat/Wikimedia)

In a second study, Fan and her colleagues looked at environment around the stop. There, they found that if people were waiting for more than five minutes, high air pollution or traffic tended to push people to overestimate, even more dramatically, how long they were waiting.

On the flip side, though, people waiting at stops in tree-heavy areas didn’t feel like they were waiting all that long. Sometimes they even underestimated how long they had been waiting. The longer they were waiting, too, the more difference the trees made.

As simple as this finding is, it creates a bit of a conundrum for transit agencies. Usually, the duties of getting people places and planting trees are divided, and a transit agency wouldn’t have much to do with the tree cover around its stations.

But the Minnesota’s team research suggests that perhaps they should get into this business, or at least start inter-agency partnerships to get more trees near bus stops. If trees can actually make people underestimate their wait times, that is a powerful kind of time-warping magic.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here.

Inside the Wendelstein 7-X reactor (Photo: Gwurden/Wikimedia)

Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, is about to switch on a giant fusion reactor, to create hydrogen plasma.

In 2014, a team at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, in Greifswald, Germany, finished building the Wendelstein 7-X, a fusion device that could create energy from fusing atomic nuclei together, the same process that makes the sun so powerful. It had taken almost 10 years. But in the history of fusion research, that's a relatively short time. For decades, scientists have been chasing the possibility of fusion power, which theoretically could provide people with enormous amounts of sustainable energy. 

The challenge, though, is getting more power from the fusion reaction than it takes to create it. The temperatures needed to create plasmas that can reach 100 to 200 million degrees Celsius. To manage that extreme, fusion reactors use magnetic energy to contain the plasma.

This reactor won't actually produce energy, but it's supposed to demonstrate that this type of fusion device, a stellarator, could be used in power plants. There's a rival device, called a tokamak. (France is building one.) But the Max Planck Institute likes their device. "The stellarator is much calmer," the head of the project told the AP. "It's far harder to build, but easier to operate."

In December, the team used the reactor to create helium plasma, which is easier to create; today, at 3:35 p.m. CET—that's 9:35 a.m. on America's East Coast—Merkel, trained as a physicist, will start the new process, to create hydrogen plasma. You can watch here.

Bonus finds: Fossilized spider penis

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Is the rabbit high? Probably not. (Photo: Roland zh/Wikimedia Commons)

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

What’s the difference between a stoned rabbit and a not-stoned rabbit? The layhuman may not be keen to the symptoms, subtle as they are, exhibited by indoor varieties, but an expert in the wild—he can tell.

More bunnies. (Photo: Tiia Monto/Wikimedia Commons)

These are bunnies. But are they high bunnies?

Such was the effect in the Utah State Senate last March, when Drug Enforcement Administration agent and canna-buzzed rabbit connoisseur Matt Fairbanks offered his testimony to Senate Bill 259, a medical cannabis bill.

"The deforestation has left marijuana grows with even rabbits that had cultivated a taste for the marijuana," Fairbanks warned, "where one of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone."

It’s easy to sympathize with the disbelief the rabbit must have experienced in that situation. Ganja aficionados easily latched on to the bit as yet another federal fear-mongering tactic against growing widespread acceptance. For one, the bill originated with Republican Utah State Senator Mark Madsen, who introduced the bill after his own experience using cannabis instead of prescription opioids for ongoing back problems.

In this clash between state and federal views of marijuana legalization, the DEA often serves as the mouthpiece of the government’s interests. Or, as Agent Fairbanks put it, "I come to represent the actual science."

Inspired by his insistence on facts and science, MuckRock filed a FOIA shortly after the hearing. Were there any of these facts and science to support concerns that Utah’s new post-legalization weedscape would be overrun by high rabbits?

A couple of months later, the DEA responded: no.

No. Of course.

It’s important to note that Fairbanks is part of the Cannabis Eradication Task Force, which receives funds for cannabis removal efforts in states across the country. Each new legalization and more thoughtful and appropriate removals makes the need to finance drug prevention-by-elimination just that much less pressing.

For example, in Utah, where Agent Fairbanks had been an agent for ten years, they reported no eradicated grow sites for 2014, the last year reported before Agent Fairbanks’s testimony.

In 2013, they list 4,424 outdoor plants from 2 sites removed, down from 2010 when they removed over 100,000.

New requests have been sent to the Environmental Protection Agency and the DEA to follow up on concerns that marijuana-inspired deforestation and pesticides have had a detrimental environmental effect.

There are certainly legitimate considerations for integrating formal weed into society. They’re just a little hard to hear when the DEA’s arguments sound as half-baked as the bunnies they’ve met.

Read DEA's letter on the request page.

Zhang living the dream. (Photo: Miffyscat/Weibo)

Ill-timed snowstorms in eastern and central China have wreaked havoc on Chinese New Year plans, stranding tens of thousands of travelers in train stations and airports. A couple of days ago, though, one lucky woman waited out the crush and had the opposite experience—an airplane all to herself.

Over 100k passengers trapped in Guangzhou Railway Station on Mon, due to train delays in #SpringFestival travel rush pic.twitter.com/DcajMP3oAq

— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) February 2, 2016

After surviving a 10-hour delay at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport, the woman, whose last name is Zhang, got some good news: everyone else had switched to earlier flights, and her patience had been rewarded with an essentially private journey. As People's Daily reports, Zhang took to the social network Weibo to share the journey: "I am the ONLY passenger on board with the whole crew! Just like a Lombardi!"

Zhang with her new friends. (Photo: Miffyscat/Weibo)

Zhang spent the flight as any of us would: taking Vanna White selfies with the empty seats, switching from row to row, and sharing a bag of oranges with the pilot. When she landed in Ghangzhou after two hours of pure bliss and freedom, she was also the only passenger on the shuttle bus—less glamorous, but we'd take that, too.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A different type of 19th century mousetrap (Photo: The Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science/Wikimedia)

When Colin Pullinger & Sons advertised an innovative, humane mousetrap in the 1860s, the company promised it would "last a lifetime." One of their traps, in the collection of the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England, more than lived up to that promise. 

Recently, when an assistant curator was searching through the museum's collection for objects connected to animals, the University of Reading reports on its Tumblr, she came across a dead mouse of comparatively recent provenance in the trap. She sent out an email:

"There appears to be a dead mouse in this mousetrap…Can you perhaps check whether it should be there and/or decide if having a dead mouse in the trap is the best way forward from a conservation perspective?"

Ok so a mouse got into the @MERLReading store & then got itself killed in 155-yr. old trap https://t.co/2Fqvt4TMEspic.twitter.com/L2mdmQQB7A

— Adam Koszary (@AdamKoszary) February 3, 2016

The 155-year-old mousetrap was not baited, but it was still enticing enough to this ill-fated mouse that the creature crept inside. Once it was there, the trap's see-saw mechanism kept it from going anywhere. 

The museum is still deciding what the mouse's ultimate destiny will be. They write:

"For the moment, the mouse remains in the trap while we decide what to do with it. One option is a dignified burial, another is to desiccate it or have it prepared to remain as a permanent feature of the mouse trap for our new displays."

Either way, this mouse has now been part of history in a way that few others will ever be.

Museum w/ 150yo mousetrap finds out it still works (note: contains pictures of late mouse) https://t.co/eKFLnqYXa8pic.twitter.com/dXBrWSUNts

— John Overholt (@john_overholt) February 3, 2016

How long is a second? How do we know what time it is? And how can we be sure that two clocks are running at the same pace?

The intangibility of time makes it tricky to standardize. We can, for example, confirm the exact weight of a kilogram by consulting the International Prototype Kilogram. The mass of this piece of iron, rarely handled so as not to rub off any precious atoms, sets the standard. But for time, there can be no object to refer to—so what determines the exact length of a second?

In 1967, the International Committee of Weights and Measures defined a second as the "duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."

It is this principle that guides the operation of the NIST-F2, a caesium fountain atomic clock that rules all other U.S. timepieces. The NIST-F2 is the clock that defines a second. The process it uses is, needless to say, extremely complex, but, basically, it measures the frequency of microwaves needed to produce maximum fluorescence in a ball of cesium atoms. The "fountain" in its title refers to the rising and falling of the ball of cesium atoms, which is produced by a group of lasers.

The NIST-F2 is the creation of NIST, or the National Institute for Standards and Technology. NIST’s job is to measure, calibrate, and standardize things. Besides straightforward stuff like working to come up with standards for voting technology, standardized government ID cards, and standards for MRI machines, the organization works on standards for cutting-edge tech like nanotechnology and quantum computing.

Precisely accurate time—measured not down to the second, but down to the nine-billionth of a second—can aid advances in telecommunications, satellites and medical technology. It also allows for the utmost accuracy in scientific experiments where the tiniest measurements can make a huge difference—for example, determining the presence of fluctuations in what we perceive as constants of the universe.

For all its high-tech impressiveness, even the NIST-F2 will soon be obsolete. The newest NIST clocks use lasers instead of microwaves to measure the frequency of light on atoms near absolute zero. While the NIST-F2 is said to be so accurate that two clocks would not drift by a second over the course of a million years, the newest optical clocks are so accurate they will drift less than a second over the age of the universe.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here.

An artist's impression of a Kalligrammatid lacewing (Image: Vichai Malikul/Smithsonian)

120 million years ago, in the Mesozoic era, there were little creatures called Kalligrammatid lacewings fluttering around. Scientists knew they existed, but until unusually well preserved fossils of the lacewings were found in northeastern China, no one realized how close they were to today's butterflies.

Like butterflies, these lacewings were likely pollinators. Like butterflies, they had long, tubular proboscises to suck up their food from flowers. Like some butterflies, their wings had large eyespot patterns, likely to deter predators.

On the right: butterfly. On the left: an insect that lived 40,000,000 yrs before butterflies https://t.co/O1JvNBrkHJpic.twitter.com/qk3VtCexWd

— Ed Yong (@edyong209) February 4, 2016

Butterflies didn't appear on earth for another 50 million years, in a separate evolution, and they didn't get features like spots until about 110 million years after the lacewings disappeared.

This is a particularly striking example of how advantageous traits can evolve more than once. Flowering plants hadn't even begun their takeover when the lacewings were around: they likely ate pollen from a type of ancient plant that's also since gone extinct.

Bonus finds: Hieronymous Bosch painting, Soviet-era camera in the Oregon woods

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

El Jefe, America's last known jaguar, investigates the weird new gadget in his mountain home. (Screenshot: Center for Biological Diversity/Facebook)

It took years of planning, but the conservationist paparazzi finally nabbed footage of one of America's most reticent celebrities: El Jefe, the country's only known wild jaguar.

In a compilation video released yesterday by Conservation CATalyst and the Center for Biological Diversity, El Jefe prowls through a moonlit forest, expertly clambers over river rocks, and shows off his coat in the dappled afternoon sunlight. Experts finally captured this video after three years of camera site refining and the help of a jaguar scat-detection dog. All film was taken in Arizona's Santa Rita mountains, where the cat spends much of his time.

As The Atlantic reports, El Jefe (Spanish for "the boss") is "the only verified jaguar living in the U.S." since the controversial death of his peer Macho B seven years ago. Long before that, jaguars roamed from California to Louisiana.

El Jefe, the last of the bunch, had been showing up on camera traps since 2013, but experts hope this new footage will help them learn more about their new neighbor. As the Center for Biological Diversity's Randy Serraglio said, “Just knowing that this amazing cat is right out there, just 25 miles from downtown Tucson, is a big thrill.”

Till next time, El Jefe. (Screenshot: Center for Biological Diversity/Facebook)

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Our creation of the Seven Second Delay may be making TV even less live than we intended. (Photo: SashaW/Flickr)

Later this month, the Oscars will be airing "live" all across America. But not really, because there are delays—both intended and not—that stop us from really "being there."

From Periscope to Twitch, live video is just something we expect in this day and age. When it comes to live television, however, not only is there often an intentional broadcast delay between when an event is taped and when it hits screens, the unintentional lag may be getting worse.

The history of intentional broadcast delay, or what is more commonly known today as the “seven-second delay,” actually has its roots in the days of radio. A primitive method of broadcast delay was first implemented by radio stations that would send out their signals down a telephone wire to a receiver in a different city hundreds of miles away, that would then return the signal, providing only milliseconds of delay thanks to the journey. Given the tiny amounts of time such a trick created, this method was not used for censorship or control so much as to increase sound clarity and depth when it was layered over itself.

It was not until the introduction of magnetic tape that live delay as we know it came about, although it was still all about physical distance. The earliest invention of intentional delay as we understand it seems to date back to Pennsylvania radio station WKAP in 1952. The system was initially developed to allow “live” on-air broadcasts of listener phone calls. Up until that point, only one side of a phone conversation could be aired due to FCC privacy regulations. In order to create what we now know as the common radio call-in format, the engineers at the station set up a system in which the broadcast would be recorded to one reel and broadcast off another, just seconds later—skirting the regulations but making it so that the calls weren’t truly “live.” Once again, the delay time between when the show was recorded and broadcast was determined by how long it took for the recording to get from one reel to the next—in other words, the physical length of the path between.

Once this system of physical delay of live recordings was invented, it became the standard both in radio and on live television. Joe Snelson, former president of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, who has been working in the industry since 1970, breaks down the process for us: “[When I started,] stations would place two video tape recorders side by side,” he says. “The machine on the left would record the program on tape. The tape would exit the machine, go over a series of rollers and then go into the second machine on the right for playback. Since the tape ran at 15 inches per second you would need a distance of about about nine feet between the machine tape paths for a seven-second delay.” This allowed a crucial few seconds for editors, directors, or engineers to catch anything they deemed indecent before it hit the airwaves.

Even though we are getting past the days of relying on magnetic tape in television broadcasting, the method of creating delays in live TV is essentially the same. Today, there are two primary methods for intentional delays: "a file server that uses spinning disks or a box with large memory capacity,” says Snelson. “In either case, cutting out indecent material would occur by somebody hitting a button on the ‘dump box.’”

This is an actual dump box. (Photo: Wikipedia) 

Dump boxes, as they are affectionately known, were first introduced in the 1970s. In the beginning, they were just custom-built hard drives that would take in live recordings and hold them in memory for a short time before releasing them to broadcast, achieving what once took nine feet or more of tape to achieve. With the push of a button—the "dump" button—these boxes could instantaneously edit out questionable content, and even splice the footage somewhat seamlessly by automatically matching moments of silence between dialogue or sound.

Dump boxes have become much more advanced over the years. As Snelson notes, some broadcasters don’t even use the purpose-built hardware boxes, opting to run footage through their own servers, and process it using content-editing software. But no matter how advanced the tech gets, live broadcasts still need someone at the helm to look out for those morally questionable moments. “This might be a production person that is knowledgeable of station broadcast policies and is ‘quick on the switch,’” Snelson says.    

Though intentional delay has come to be known as the “seven-second delay,” the amount of time that the footage is held back is really up to the people at the controls. It "would most likely be based on the reaction time of the person in control over the edit,” says Snelson. However, even with all of these protections, many things still make it to air that many wish hadn't, from the devastating on-air suicide of Christine Chubbock in 1974 to Janet Jackson's heavily publicized wardrobe malfunction in 2005.

Maybe the most famous live television debacle in recent memory. (Video: Youtube)

As for unintentional delays, you might expect that advances in technology are making them shorter and more rare. But the opposite is true. “When I began in this industry a live telecast was displayed virtually instantaneously on a viewer’s home television from when it occurred,” Snelson says. “Nowadays, due to the digital processing required to provide the viewer with digital television, there is a delay of several seconds before the viewer sees what occurred live.”

The radio and “over-the-air” broadcasts of decades ago were, in a way, more live than current live television. Seconds are often lost as broadcast signals are transferred and processed between stations, satellites, and other relays, creating unintentional lost time between the material and live viewing of it. These various transactions can each add seconds of delay, cumulatively creating unintentional delays that are longer than the intentional ones.

While these lags are still only seconds in length, when you consider that it is similar slivers of time that broadcasters rely on (often unsuccessfully) to keep the viewing public safe from indecent exposure, the lost time doesn’t seem so insignificant.

When the Oscars air live later this month, spare a thought for the men and women with their fingers waiting on the dump buttons, protecting the country from Hollywood’s foul mouths and wild outbursts. And know that, no matter what happens, you're not truly seeing it live.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here.

Another radiated tortoise (Photo: Kyle Bedell/flickr)

Yellow lines streak in stars across the dark shell of a radiated tortoise. It's beautiful, and highly prized in the illegal wildlife market. 

The Perth Zoo is freaking out, because they had a 10-year-old radiated tortoise that's now gone missing. Its cage wasn't obviously broken into, although the zoo is reviewing security footage. It's just gone.

The presumption is, though, that someone stole it, with the thought of selling it. The zoo is very worried about the tortoise's welfare, because radiated tortoises are pretty picky. They have a special diet and need to stay at just the right temperature to eat.

There are very few radiated tortoises left in the world. They're native to the southern parts of Madagascar and to the island of Reunion, and because their habitat is being destroyed, they're critically endangered.

Bonus finds: Glaciers on Pluto

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Like all tech-savvy escaped animals, the escaped @uiowa goat joined Twitter: @UofIGoathttps://t.co/gg32gtV8y6pic.twitter.com/S6t3INwApB

— KCRG (@KCRG) February 3, 2016

Just a few days after the Iowa caucuses forced citizens to get out the vote, state residents are being tasked with another tough job: bring in the goat.

After escaping from a portable carrier, a 125-pound research goat named William has been running rampant all over the University of Iowa's campus and the surrounding areas for a straight week, reports the Iowa City Press-Citizen

William bolted last Friday, January 30th, during "a transfer operation at the UI Research Park in northwest Coralville," the Press-Citizen says. (The University of Iowa owns 14 lab goats, and uses them for orthopedic research). Since then, he has been spotted near the area—perhaps taunting his former captors, perhaps recruiting more escapees.

Home sweet bush for the evening. Hoping tomorrow is warmer and offers more snacks. pic.twitter.com/paWoCkSI2P

— UofI Goat (@UofIGoat) February 4, 2016

On Monday, some "university people" managed to trap him under a deck, but then he "took off running," Coralville Police Chief Barry Bedford told the Press-Citizen. "Another time, the goat was seen in an area and they thought they had him penned in, but he got away from them."

Experts wranged by the Press-Citizen said that goats can easily survive in the wild for years, living off of shrubs and melted snow. Meanwhile, the Coralville Police Department has tweeted out a humorous "WANTED" sign, and Chief Bedford promises to "put whatever resources... as possible" into the retrieval. An equal match? Only time will tell.

He enjoys playing hide-and-seek pic.twitter.com/OOI223Rt8P

— CoralvillePD (@CoralvillePD) February 3, 2016

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

But how much money will you give me? (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr)

Every job negotiation, no matter how big or small, comes down to one thing: Is it worth my time? But how much, exactly, is our time worth—and how much could someone’s time be worth? And what could possibly make a person’s time worth more than $20 per minute, not to mention $208 per second?

And whose time is worth the most?

Measurement, of course, is tricky. One of the most efficient ways for someone to maximize the time/money delta is through quick tasks like autographs. Time-wise, we’re looking at, what—two seconds, maybe three? With his autograph worth up to£3,950 ($5,762), you could argue that one second of former Cuban president Fidel Castro’s time is worth $2,881, or 12 times the average annual salary in Cuba. Musician Paul McCartney is second on the Autograph Index; his scribble can go for £2,500 ($3,647), or $1,823 per second of scribbling. 

Mmm, my signature? Might cost you a few bucks. (Photo: Max.dai.yang/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Art is also not a bad racket, if you're Picasso. One of his paintings, "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust", was auctioned for $106.5 million. According to Time, it took him a day to complete, putting that at $73,958 per minute (of a 24-hour day) or $1,232 per second.

But that’s just one way—and a slightly far-fetched one—to measure how much someone’s time might be worth. More often, time is charged by the hour or appearance rather than by the signature or the second. Sometimes, an hour of someone’s time comes with a speech or performance; sometimes, the person just needs to show up.

Paris Hilton wondering if we're worth her time. Probably not. (Photo: Philip Nelson/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

If you’re looking at time, pure time, time that doesn’t come with anything else—no practice or preparation, no expectations except that you come hang out—then welcome to the world of media moguls and club appearances. Reality star Kim Kardashian has been paid $600,000 to simply sit at a club’s VIP booth and throw a few smiles at party goers, while Paris Hilton, an heiress and socialite, was once paid $2.7 million to hang out and deejay a for few nights in Ibiza for the equivalent of $347,000 an hour, or, since you’re wondering, $5,783.33 a minute—an expensive minute. Other luminaries like Lil Wayne, Britney Spears, and Pamela Anderson have raked in between $250,000 and $350,000 to basically show up at night clubs; if they stick around for four hours, that boils down to about $1,250 a minute. 

Hey, I'm Snooki, and yes I get paid more to speak to students than Toni Morrison. (Photo: Aaron/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

In other less lucrative news, Rutgers University once shelled out $32,000 for Jersey Shore reality star Snooki to show up for a one-hour campus Q&A session. That happens to be $2,000 more than the university paid Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison to give the commencement address that same year. 

But generally, a person’s time is tied to more than their mere physical presence. Usually, someone is expected to deliver something—for example, a private rendition of the happy birthday song. Singer Jennifer Lopez was once paid $1 million to sing "Happy Birthday" and three other songs for the president of Turkmenistan, $2 million for the birthday of Russian bureaucrat Alexander Yelkin, and booked for $2.5 million by the dictatorship of Azerbaijan. (She got some heat for accepting money from some of the world’s most corrupt tycoons, as did singers Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey, Beyonce, and Usher when they performed for Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi). Regardless of wherever that oil money came from though, (in the case of Turkmenistan’s Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the China National Petroleum Corp picked up the tab), an hour of Jennifer Lopez was valued at one or two million USD, or $250,000 a minute, though that number should be lowered when one considers she had to schlep all the way to Turkmenistan.

Smiling because you are paying me thousands per minute. (Photo: Ana Carolina Kley Vita/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

That’s not such a big surprise, especially when we’re talking Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, though the numbers might still raise eyebrows when calculated down to the minute. Other performers, such as The Eagles, Rolling Stones, Kanye West, Christina Aguilera, and Taylor Swift can expect $1 million, up to even $6 million for a show. And let’s not forget athletes, whose presence (and product promotion) are pretty pricey. Former NFL running back Tiki Barber’s company at a sports game will cost you $2,000 or $1,000 for a lunch date. If you only have $500 to spare, you could get Rob Gronkowski, New England Patriots tight end, to tweet out your message—and that’s probably one of the cheaper tweets out there.

One hour, you say? That'll be $1,250—a lot cheaper than Snooki, you know. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Entertainers and athletes aside, lawyers and politicians can also charge a lot for a bit of their time. The Wall Street Journal published a handy list of the hourly rates of the highest charging lawyers, mostly dealing in corporate, tax, and finance, with fees ranging between $1,000 and $1,250 an hour, or $20.83 a minute—or less than $0.35 a second! A steal, really, especially if you think about it as paying not just for that one hour but for all of the time they’ve spent becoming qualified to advise you. It’s also very cheap when you compare it to hiring the Donald (who to clarify, is not a credentialed lawyer).

In 2006 and 2007 one company hired Donald Trump to come give 17 seminars for $1.5 million each. Even if the seminar was a long-winded two hours, that’s still $12,500 per minute, or $208.33 per second. Turns out financial folk like Trump are in high demand, often booked by businesses hoping to boost their bucks and morale. Economist Ben Bernanke, for example, gets up to $400,000 for a speaking engagement. 

Everyone in this family is a prized public speaker. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But former politicians perhaps hold the most public speaking cache. In 2006, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair took in nearly $616,000 for two half-hour speeches ($10,266.66 a minute), and Bill Clinton can get up to $450,000 for gracing an audience—more than twice the presidential salary ($200,000). In January, Bernie Sanders accused Hillary Clinton of receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year, but compared to Trump, that's nickels and dimes. (Although she did try to charge $275,000 for a lunchtime engagement last February at the University of Missouri at Kansas City; they ended up booking her daughter for $65,000 instead.) Folks like Rudy Giuliani, Alan Greenspan, even Sarah Palin and former first daughter Chelsea Clinton can command more than $75,000 or $100,000 for a speech. A little lower down the ladder, best-selling authors are able to get around $40,000 for a speech (as high as $666 per minute). Not sure how much it costs to book the poet laureate, but probably a lot less.

Of course, oratory requires preparation, and speeches require writing. But, with junior staff to cover those bases, most of those dollars are really going to getting that person in that room. Bragging rights (and selfie opportunities) are also a major boon. “The underlying principle,” Harvey Miller, a New York-based bankruptcy lawyer told the Wall Street Journal, “is if you can get it, get it.”

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

If the fact that earlier this week the World Health Organization declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus a global emergency didn't catch your eye, perhaps this close-up video of a feeding skeeter will. And if you find yourself repulsed, let's be honest, you're probably going to watch it anyway—for the sake of science, if not for the rad soundtrack.

Observe as the mosquito first begins to bury its proboscis deep into the skin. The video then cuts to a shot of aforementioned proboscis seeking out a vein, successfully inserting itself, and then beginning to suck, the blood pulsing up into its spindly body.

Initially, when the camera cuts back out, you might wonder: hey, this got boring, why is nothing happening? But watch closely, and you'll see that the mosquito's abdomen is slowly and steadily swelling with blood. Check out the difference one minute can make:

(Photos: Screen shots)

Anyway, wear bug spray and use bed nets, everybody.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

What is the nationality of a baby born on a plane? (Photo: mliu92/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Imagine that you are a pregnant lady. (Perhaps you actually are, but if you are not, then do your best to imagine.) You are in your third trimester, and you get on a plane because you weren't paying attention during your last doctor's visit, where she advised you against traveling. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, your water breaks.

In some miracle there is a gynecologist on board, a few aisles down from you, and therefore your labor goes as smoothly as it could possibly go in those circumstances. And then, while you are still over the Atlantic Ocean, your baby is born. You arrive at United States customs, clutching your newborn baby, who obviously does not have a passport. Where do you say your baby is from?

The answer is quite complicated, and contested. Countries have different laws governing the citizenship of babies born on their soil–either jus soli or jus sanguinis; Latin for right of the soil versus right of blood, respectively. Most countries follow jus sanguinis, which dictates that the baby can only assume citizenship via one or both parents. However, the U.S. and some of its neighbors observe the more generous jus soli, which grants automatic citizenship to babies born on their soil. 

Babies born in-flight are sometimes considered citizens of the country where the airline is registered, but this is not the case for US aircraft. (Photo: Claude Covo-Farchi/Wikipedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Things get a little shadier on ships and aircraft. Is an airplane considered to be the soil of the country which owns the airline? According to the United Nations, a baby born on a flight is a citizen of the country where the airline is registered. However, this is not always the case. Weirdly enough, despite its general adherence to jus soli, the United States will not recognize a baby birthed on a U.S. vessel unless it is docked at a U.S. port or flying within the country's airspace.

There are plenty of stories about real life "sky babies." There was the woman who boarded a plane in May 2015 not knowing she was pregnant, and left the flight having delivered a surprise child. There was a Taiwanese woman in October 2015 who gave birth on her flight to the United States, and was accused of attempting "birth tourism"—in which pregnant women travel to countries in the hopes of gaining citizenship via jus soli. 

There is at least one perk to being a citizen of the sky, which could make up for any identity crises resulting from being born in the air: airlines have been known to grant free air travel to babies born on their planes. 

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

Details of a late Baroque tower clock made in the second half of the 18th century, from Upper Austria. (All photos: Yvonne Oswald)

The Uhrenstube Aschau, a little-known private clock museum in the sunny hills of Austria’s Burgenland region, is not easy to find. But after extensive phone explanations by its owner Wolfgang Komzak and two wrong turns, the historic farmhouse filled with clocks in the remote, lovely village of Aschau was finally located. Komzak was waiting outside a complex of early 19th century buildings with rye straw roofs. 

Komzak, now retired, is one of the world’s most sought after experts for the renovation of tower clocks. His collection of rare clocks, mostly from the 15th to the 19th centuries, is the largest private collection of its kind in Middle Europe. He has traveled all over Europe in search of outstanding pieces, and currently has about 70 of these majestic clocks, all of which he knows how to assemble.  

Wolfgang Komzak posing in front of the ancient granary storing part of his collection. 

Komzak’s story is fascinating. He and his mother fled the east after World War II and found shelter in a large house in the Austrian countryside. His mother worked as a seamstress to provide for their living, and he was frequently left to himself as a small child. He spent much time in the house's vast attic. One day, he found a tower clock, which he destroyed by accident while playing with it. When he tried to reassemble it, he could not succeed. This caused a lifelong fascination with the machines.

He started to collect tower clocks while working as a civil engineer. By the time Komzak retired, he had become a well-known specialist in repairing the clocks, and had been asked to become a member of the Swiss, French, German, British, and Austrian Chronometric Societies.

Eventually, he decided to set up a private museum in the small village of Aschau. He renovated the historic farmhouse to show his collection in several little houses, and also installed a forge and a precision workshop for restoration of his clocks or others that are brought to him to repair. The museum was opened in 2003.

The painted dial of a small Gothic period house clock from 1573, made in southern Germany. 

While working in his forge on the restoration on a beautiful and delicate baroque tower clock rescued in Southern Germany, he recalls some of his travels. It turns out that he is often called in when churches are renovated or attics are emptied. More than once, he has managed to rescue rare pieces that would have ended up in the trash, and brought them to life again. During the tour, he provides affectionate description of each detail concerning the story of his clocks.

During lunch in Komzak’s cozy parlor, heated by a tiled stove, he tells of a darker era of the museum’s history. In the summer of 2013 part of the house was burned down by a mentally ill boy. Komzak escaped death by sheer luck. The house caught fire quickly, due to its straw roof, but he was trapped in a room with windows too small to escape from. Thanks to the Austrian fire brigades, he made it out at the last moment.

After the fire the main house was re-roofed with rye straw.

Part of his collection was destroyed and he still grieves for a rare Gothic period clock that could not be saved. Insurance was reluctant to pay for his losses. But Komzak fought his way back and the museum reopened in 2014.

Despite many awards Uhrenstube Aschau is hardly known, even in Austria, but it is well worth the journey. Tours are by appointment only, however Komzak is not easy to reach thanks to the bad mobile phone connections in the hills of Burgenland. But the museum sees quite a few members from different Chronometric societies around the world, who recognize what a special place it is. Below, peek inside this intriguing private clock museum. 

This clock was made by Ignaz Berthold in the late 19th century in Styria/Austria.

A baroque clock from the early 18th century, Upper Austria.

Wolfgang in his forge preparing parts of a historic watch for restoration.

The workpiece at the anvil being forged in form.

This tower clock was made by Sándor Ferencz in Hungary in 1912.

Handling a coal forge requires deliberate skills.

A small tower clock from the late 17th century made entirely from wood, probably in Switzerland.

Spare parts of ancient tower clocks are waiting for their restoration.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

A ballot is cast in the second round of the French presidential election of 2007. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Rama)

As the 2016 Presidential Campaign finally enters primary season—and with no clear frontrunner for the nomination from either party—allegations of electoral misconduct and dirty tricks are sure to remain in the headlines for some time.

But there is hope for the election observers who have long sought out a way to guarantee the validity of election results. A test commonly used in forensic accounting called the Second-Digit Benford’s Law (2BL) just might make it possible to spot a numerical irregularity just by looking at it.

The story behind the test itself, favored by statisticians, is fascinating. According to TK, physicist Frank Benford was working at the GE Research Laboratories in the 1920s when he noticed that there seemed to be more numbers with low first digits in the data sets he worked with. After testing numerous geographic, scientific, and demographic distributions, Benford calculated the expected frequencies for particular digits appearing in a particular position.

For example, if we have a set of numbers that includes the number 154, Benford’s Law predicts a 30 percent chance that 1 would be the first digit, and about a 9.6 percent chance that 5 would be the second digit. Therefore, if you look at a distribution and see a lot of numbers with the digit 5 in the second position, it implies something strange is going on.

Plot of Benford's Law vs the first significant digit of a set of physical constants. Data from http://physics.nist.gov/constants. Created by Aaron Webster. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Drnathanfurious)

If it sounds hard to believe that every set of numbers would adhere to this law, well, you’re right! Only certain distributions are known to obey Benford’s Law, including transaction level data like sales and numbers resulting from mathematical combinations. Benford’s Law definitely does not apply to numbers assigned in sequence (like invoices), numbers influenced by human thought (like prices), or distributions with a set minimum or maximum (like IRA contributions). But when it works, it really works: in his description of applying Benford’s Law to account auditing, Dr. Mark Nigrini provides a great do-it-yourself test of the law:

For a hands-on introduction to Benford's law, open the Wall Street Journal and pick a random starting point in the stock tables for the two major exchanges. Tabulate the first digits of the daily volume (in hundreds) for 100 stocks. About 50 of the numbers on the list should start with a 1 or a 2. Only about 5 numbers should start with a 9—just as Benford's law would predict.

But how does Benford’s Law help us detect election fraud? Some mathematicians argue that an application of Benford’s Law called the Second-Digit Benford’s Law (2BL) test can be applied to vote totals to detect irregularities that may indicate fraud. Dr. Walter Mebane, a professor at the University of Michigan, has done substantial work on the application of the 2BL test to vote counts, and argues that 2BL can be used to detect potential voting irregularities. In 2004, he applied 2BL to known fraudulent elections in Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. In three instances, the 2BL test detected the voting irregularities. He applied the test again in 2009 to the highly-contested Iranian presidential election with similar findings. Similarly, The Guardian applied the 2BL test to Vladimir Putin’s 2012 landslide victory in Russia’s presidential elections, and found numerical shenanigans.

So, if we’ve applied the test to elections that we’re pretty sure were less-than-democratic and had our suspicions confirmed, it must be a good test, right? Unfortunately, even proponents of the test like Dr. Mebane are quick to explain things are much more complicated. As he pointed out the US News & World Report in 2009, “[A]nomalous statistics could imaginably have an innocent explanation.” As for Putin’s victory, the Guardian explains that there’s a possibility that Benford’s Law doesn’t apply to the distribution at all:

Each polling station within this set of data has a relatively tight range of votes: between three and around 2,600. This makes it unlike most data in, say, financial accounts, due to lack of variance, and can mean data doesn't comply to the Benford pattern even when totally legitimate.

Furthermore, using the 2BL test to detect voting irregularities is far from accepted within the academic community. Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov, and Peter C. Ordeshook strongly challenged the viability of the 2BL test in 2011, applying the test to a number of simulated fair and fraudulent elections with inconsistent results. In response, Mebane quickly took issue the paper’s methodology. Similarly, Susumu Shikano and Verena Mack applied the 2BL test to the 2009 German Federal Parliamentary Election. They found that although no serious complaints of fraud had been registered, the test indicated fraud in a number of constituencies.

Ultimately, the 2BL test may not be a foolproof way of guaranteeing fair elections. Fortunately for the United States, at least, widespread voter fraud is merely a persistent myth. Elsewhere, UN Peacekeepers sometimes play a role in observing and validating elections, but more steps need to be taken to guarantee free and open elections worldwide. Statistics still may hold the key to quick, reliable analysis of election data.

Thomas Peter Lantos (2011) by Laurel Stern Boeck, detail. (Photo: Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives)

A long-running dispute in Congress has finally reached its conclusion: The sordid practice of using taxpayer funds to pay for painted portraits of members of Congress and other government figures is officially no more, saving the government less than $500,000 annually.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), has been fighting to liberate thousands of dollars in tax revenue from servicing his fellow politicians’ egos since 2013, when he first introduced the Eliminating Government-Funded Oil Painting Act (the “Ego” act for short—and yes, that was intentional). The bill failed to pass in 2013, although its proponents attempted compromise by proposing a spending cap of $20,000. After this setback, the bill’s spendthrift spirit made its way into the 2014 budget as a rider on the annual Congressional spending bill. Now, the prohibition is permanent.

Although the meager savings may make Senator Cassidy’s quest seem a little quixotic, it’s difficult to fault its supporters’ argument that a photograph or selfie could now preserve American history as well as an expensive oil portrait. In fact, the frivolous nature of portraiture in the photographic age was pointed out as early as 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. At the same time, it’d certainly be a shame to miss out on some of the interesting symbolism artists’ occasionally include, such as the now-infamous allusion to Monica Lewinsky in President Clinton’s official portrait.

Fortunately, there is a long-established practices of outside groups funding congressional portraits as well. The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for government transparency and accountability, reported in a 2010 blog post that donors had contributed thousands to various politicians’ portrait funds. Such donations are accepted by the US Capitol Historical Society, which receives any money leftover from the fund after the portrait has been commissioned. Prior to the Society’s establishment in 1962, interest groups would occasionally fund-raise and commission portraits for politicians on their own. For example, former Representative Edith Nourse Rogers’ portrait was donated by veterans in 1950, in recognition of her support of military veterans and her service as the chairwoman of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

So, as long as spending on Congressional portraits is limited to generous donors and the politicians’ private funds, we’ll have to hope there remains a strong interest in portraits of politicians and their dogs. Regardless,  I can assure you that Congressional fighting over paintings will continue for decades to come. As the Washington Post details, politicians have fought over paintings’ subjects and details for decades. Controversies include a 1947 outcry by a Native American group over a painting featuring a scalping (the painting was later removed), the Congressional Black Caucus’ 1995 protest over the decision to display a portrait of a segregationist in the House Rules Committee room, and John Ashcroft’s decision to cover all of the partially nude statues in the Department of Justice. Beauty must truly be in the eye of the beholder.