Re-collecting Jim. Discovering a name and a slave narrative's continuing truth

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as "Major Ross" had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in "a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country towards the market." The right-hand side? Was that level of precision necessary? Because people challenged the veracity of slave narratives at the time they were published, details mattered very much. But the level of specificity in this instance caught my eye. The facts were borne out: property records in the Charleston County Register Mesne Conveyance Deeds office show that in 1831, a James L. Ross, known also as "Major Ross," purchased a house situated on the west side of King Street, just a few blocks north of the market. If you were entering the city of Charleston from the country, Ross' house would indeed have been on the right-hand side (fig 1). And so it comes down to that. In order to prove his own humanity, the truth about the human capacity for cruelty, and the very reputation of abolitionist crusaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, this survivor made his story unassailable by giving the correct location for the speculator's house on King Street in Charleston

Fake Tales of San Francisco

Prose by Michelé Strachota

Generalized linear mixing model accounting for endmember variability

Endmember variability is an important factor for accurately unveiling vital information relating the pure materials and their distribution in hyperspectral images. Recently, the extended linear mixing model (ELMM) has been proposed as a modification of the linear mixing model (LMM) to consider endmember variability effects resulting mainly from illumination changes. In this paper, we further generalize the ELMM leading to a new model (GLMM) to account for more complex spectral distortions where different wavelength intervals can be affected unevenly. We also extend the existing methodology to jointly estimate the variability and the abundances for the GLMM. Simulations with real and synthetic data show that the unmixing process can benefit from the extra flexibility introduced by the GLMM

CactusTalk: More dragon tree tales

Dragon trees (Dracaena species) are updated since the last synopsis (Walker, 2001) with three new subspecies being newly described. Dracaena draco subsp. caboverdeana is endemic to the Cape Verde Islands, leaving subsp. draco restricted to the Canary Islands and Madeira. Dracaena serrulata subsp. dhofarica is endemic to the Dhofar Province of Oman. Dracaena serrulata subsp. mccoyorum is endemic to Saudi Arabia, where it occurs near the summit of a single mountain and hence is assessed as being on the brink of extinction

Tales of tails in cosmology

Late time mild inflation (LTMI) proposes to solve the age of the universe problem and the discrepancy between locally and globally measured values of the Hubble parameter. However, the mechanism proposed to achieve LTMI is found to be physically pathological by applying the theory of tails for the solutions of wave equations in curved spaces. Alternative mechanisms for LTMI are discussed, and the relevance of scalar wave tails for cosmology is emphasized.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, no figures, to apper in Int. J. Mod. Phys.