Screaming into the void

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Do yourself a favor and check out Swanson's Fabrics! The physical location is in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, USA, but the online shop will ship to you!

I can't remember who first told me about Swanson's, but they're a textile thrift shop that collects and repurposes donations of unused sewing supplies. Their physical location, The Stash House, offers community sewing resources and a studio. For non-locals (such as myself), their online shop offers fabrics, patterns, and notions. The shop restocks on Thursdays, and they have a constantly-rotating collection of items. If you like thrifting secondhand craft materials, Swanson's is for you!

Via their official "about" page:

Swanson’s Fabrics and notions are gifts from retired sewing stashes. They are the fabrics and supplies that sewers and fiber-artists naturally accumulate. I had a suspicion that the reason we all collect so much is that we didn’t have a place “good enough” to take it. So I made the place. Turns out I was right, and thanks to my community (and yours) of makers and crafters, I can resell these fine materials at a low, approachable cost. ALL FABRICS ARE $5.00/yd, NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE MADE OF. REALLY. I MEAN IT. I KNOW. UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE! As we come to grips with the climate crisis, interrupted supply lines, and our dependency on slave-labor in far away countries to produce our cotton and fiber goods, we need another way to approach the fabrics in our lives. We have a massive resource of textile goods in our country and it is time to tap into it. Our attics, basements, thrift-store donation bins, and dumpsters are brimming with discarded fabrics. It is time to start making and trading for the things we need, and stop buying so much new stuff we don’t. We need to see ourselves as trash-rich. Customers at Swanson’s can pay for goods and services with goods and services. I accept trade of sewing and fiber supplies/materials, and trade for help in the shop. I hope to inspire you to make your own clothes, to mend the ones you have, to shop second-hand and alter things to your taste. There is a lot of power in dressing yourself. Custom is king, and you can’t have a revolution in your master’s clothes…. ❤️💪🏻 -Kathryn

The CovidSafeCosplay blog and its admin are unaffiliated with Swanson's Fabrics, and are simply sharing the resource.

“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:

It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.

You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.

Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.

Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%

During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.

When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.

You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.

You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.

If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.

Please feel free to share this.

And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.

Text from link:

TLDR .... an update on my exploding diarrhea....

I spent the last four days on Bactrim. To be clear, we caught this very early. For me, this started with heavy fatigue, then a fever. I knew I was sick when I heard my stomach rumbling. What followed was Dreamcatcher Diarrhea. Watch the movie if you don't get the picture. My dog has been literally standing next to me, fearfully growling.

For the past four days, I've had this pattern of trying to sleep, waking up starving, forcing myself to eat something, going to the bathroom immediately, feeling immense thirst, drinking as much as I could, and then knocking out from exhaustion. I'm writing this at 4 am and at the point where I'm starving and will have to muster the will to eat here shortly.

For three days, I could only eat a Hawaiian Roll, every 12 hours or so. The pattern is slowing down - I was been able to sit up in bed, then watch Big Boy drive by my house. But, that's really the only sign of progress.

I'm realizing my post got pretty widespread as I'm coming out of this. That is sheer accident. I shared it with friends, then thought I should change my page into a content creator account, hoping locals would see it. I didn't boost it or aim for this audience. It's absolutely insane to me that my random post about diarrhea was spread as if I'm authoritative. This speaks to the sheer inadequacy of the federal government.

Last year, changes were made to the federal government's pathogen surveillance mechanism. The way cyclospora is traced changed. The CDC said that the active monitoring of the pathogen would instead be passively collected by the federal government based on health department reporting in, instead of active monitoring by FoodNet.

Just as there have been cuts to the federal agencies, federal funding to county health departments has been slashed. So now, we are experiencing what experts warned about: 1) inadequate comparison of state-by-state trends creating a rise in illnesses; and 2) slowed identification of illness slowing the response to an outbreak. That's where we are folks.

Ding, ding, ding! The experts were right.

Now, I am no expert on any of this. I see people sharing my post, I guess because the information tracks. The only expertise I have is how to research unknown topics. My career depends on my ability to do this. I'm an expert in no particular field, but I am especially qualified to pull information from different sources and communicate that in simple terms.

People have reached out to me to challenge parts of my first post. Honestly, most had really weird ideas. So, I asked them about the process by which they've drawn their conclusions, because arguments should be based on premise and reasoning. When you start to argue against conclusions, you're arguing against a logical fallacy called "bare assertion," where conclusions exist on their own with no real premise.

The person who explained their process and premises taught me something. I erred in considering some things, because I was focused on letting my friends know what I understand to be true. That's not the same as being true. I am in no way, shape, or form privy to information that isn't out there and available, and I'm not 100% sure it's coming from Taylor Farms, but if there was a betting line in Vegas, I'd cash out my savings, take mortgages out, and borrow against my 401k to place a bet.

It's also not good for me to encourage people to skirt the step of getting your stool sampled. Doing so could make the government underestimate the severity of the spread. I sure would not want a government that reduced the oversight of cyclospora and defunded our local health departments to be surprised by or underestimate the severity of this because of something I said. It would be awful for our government to underestimate this.

I was thinking about the risk of dehydration to my friends, especially after America just came off of a year long IV bag shortage. There was one major supplier and a factory got hit by a storm. 80% of healthcare providers saw rationing of basic fluid bags. There's going to be a lot of people who think their bodies can fight this, but there's a pretty strong likelihood that dehydration will come quicker than your body will naturally recover. Let's keep our fingers cross that there's no issues with the supply and demand of fluid bags during a diarrhea outbreak!

I collect information because I'm curious. If you're curious, go to local reddit pages: every area where there's an outbreak has a list of commenters naming the same items and restaurant chains. Plus, there's a company called Biofire that collects data from labs about what respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses is tracked with a lot of information posted online. Someone went as far as to make a self-reporting website for the public. Crowdsourcing that amounts to the equivalent of facebook check-ins is yielding more information than you're seeing government agencies put out.

There's also a lot of information readily available about food distribution networks. As best I can tell, with the early outbreaks around New York and the boom around Detroit/Toledo, that points to something upstream going wrong, meaning two different processing plants (ie: one for bagged lettuce for supermarkets, the other for restaurant chains) receiving the lettuce with the parasite on it. If that turns out to be the case, conversations will be warranted about the food chain and how having different regulations state to state is a part of the problem.

Now, like I said, I'm getting DMed with weird ideas, from:

"IVERMECTIN WILL WORK, HAHA YOU MUST BE SLOW."

to

"Patriot Front- psy op paid for by your own tax dollars."

Like... am I really getting veiled threats from white supremacists about my hot take on diarrhea right now? Yes, I am.

We don't give enough credit to how far away left-field is, sometimes. I'm not engaging in that back and forth. If you don't like what I'm saying, ignore me and move on or share my post and tell all your facebook friends about why you disagree. I don't care.

The bottom line is this parasite is hard to catch up to, even with a functioning federal government. Onset of viral food poisoning comes quickly and people know what they ate, while this takes a week or two. Compounding that is the unfortunate state of the federal government.

So, be safe. Washing your lettuce is not enough: cook your produce. If you know your farmer, you know where your food came from. Generational farmers take pride in their produce and aren't using reclaimed water as much, and the government's lackadaisical approach is going to hurt them too, as people just stop buying produce all together because no clear messaging is coming out about this. If your local farmer isn't supplying fast food chains, you might be alright without altering your eating habits at all.

And once again, for the people in the back - Ivermectin is not effective. Ivermectin targets some parasitic worms. Cyclospora isn't a worm. It's a single-celled protozoan, so it doesn't work the same way. This protozoan needs Bactrim. Bactrim interferes with folate metabolism that the cyclospora need to survive.

I am so sorry, folks, that this government has screwed this up so bad that people are looking at me like I know something.

And, thank you for coming to my Fireside Chat. Toiletside Chat.

I'm sorry I couldn't make this shorter, but damn, the soap box got left on my doorstep. I did not wake up on Friday morning, hear "explosive diarrhea" and think "that bell, that's the bell that tolls for me!"

Now, like 2 million people have seen my first post, and the only thing they know about me is that I have explosive diarrhea.

That was quick. 🥴🤢🫩

“@washingtonpost washingtonpost Investigators have identified shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms as a potential source of contamination in the outbreak of a parasitic illness that has sickened thousands in the United States, according to two individuals familiar with the investigation.

This summer's outbreak of cyclosporiasis has been largely concentrated in southeastern Michigan, where more than 4,300 cases have been reported and at least 100 people have been hospitalized as of Thursday.

Taylor Farms describes itself as one of the leading global producers of salads and healthy fresh foods, with production facilities across the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Western Europe.

One of these has the moral standing of a cartoon villain, the other might save the country.

Welcome to British politics.

Well that's not staying in the tags

Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.

This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.

https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html