Have Batmobile, Will Travel 24 Hours Straight

The purpose of the car might be to promote fuel efficiency, but you can be forgiven for having other thoughts, such as, "Does Christopher Nolan know about this?"

We're talking about the DeltaWing, an experimental car from Nissan that looks suspiciously like something about a Batman picture. The word from Nissan was that they were just improving efficiencies, etc., but we all know the truth, don't we? Why would you model your car so much on the Caped Crusader's favorite vehicle ("Chicks dig the car" if you weren't affiliated with a vaguely legalistic crime-fighting syndicate? 

Nissan says that the 4-cylinder, 1.6-liter engine-powered car will take part in the Le Mans 24 Hour event and use half the gasoline of the other cars doing the event. Sure. We know that the real purpose of the DeltaWing in that scenario is to unmask the Joker, who is rumored to be driving a car from Italy.

Nissan says that behind the DeltaWing wheel will be Marino Franchitti from Britain and Michael Krumm from Germany. Right. We know who will really be behind the wheel cranking out the 300 bhp for more than 3,000 miles. 

Say It in Style: Haikus Accompany Street Safety Signs

In a true melding of words and images, the New York City Department of Transportation has posted traffic signs that feature safety warnings in graphic and haiku form.

Two of the 12 signs are in Spanish; the other 10 are in English. All are designed to get noticed and get their warnings heeded. The images are large and startling, engaging your concentration enough to look in more detail, to the words below the images. And it is there that you find the haikus.

They are evocative yet simple, some with a touch of humor. For example, this one shows a woman obscured by darkness. She is clearly both in and out of the vision of anyone looking her direction. The text is thus:

She walks in beauty
Like the night. Maybe that's why
Drivers can't see her.

The words begin like a noble poem and end like a gentle barb.

A bicycle safety sign illustrates the common occurrence when a cyclist has to confront a suddenly opened car door. The image is descriptive enough without words, but the words give it even more poignancy (with a wry sense of humor and wordplay).

Car stops near bike lane
Cyclist entering raffle
Unwanted door prize

The signs are the product of the imagination of John Morse, who has done a similar thing in Atlanta. 

Morse is a collage artist known for his work The Color Spectrum in Fruits and Vegetables. 

He is sure to be more well-known now.

Tiny Tim Gets Modern Diagnosis

In one version of A Christmas Carol, the published one, Tiny Tim Cratchit doesn't die of his afflictions; rather, he lives on, thanks to the generosity of a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge.

If Tiny Tim, however, hadn't been able to live on, what would he have died of, specifically? After all, in the version of the story that is developed before Scrooge's near-miraculous conversion, Tiny Tim is on a slippery slope to an early demise. 

In the latest of real-world speculation on the causes of fictional maladies, an American doctor has a new theory for what afflicted poor little Cratchit. The doctor, from Tennessee, asserts that Tiny Tim suffered simultaneously from rickets and tuberculosis.

Rickets, a bone disorder caused mainly by vitamin D deficiency, was a common enough affliction in the 19th Century, especially in poor populations like the one obviously inhabited by the Cratchit family, which lived in a London that was full of sunlight-hampering pollution and was also close-knit but in an awful way. The disorder, which can also be caused by lack of calcium or phosphate, makes the bones soft and weak and prone to breaking. Such bones need support, and the notable means of that kind of support in 19th Century England was the kind of leg braces that Tiny Tim wore, according to Dickens. An astonishing 60 percent of children in working-class families had rickets, and boys who looked just like Tiny Tim was described would have been all too painfully common.

Tuberculosis, often called the "white plague," was deadly in the 19th Century. A young boy suffering from rickets would naturally have had an immune system that could more easily be ravaged by something like TB. (Dickens would have known firsthand how deadly TB could be: his nephew died of it.)

The modern doctor also asserts that Dickens' statement that Scrooge's money helped save Tiny Tim's life is further proof of the rickets-TB theory. The idea is that the Cratchit family's having more money would have enabled them to not only move out of the cramped, clouded conditions of working-class London that denied Tiny Tim of vital things like sunlight (a natural source of Vitamin D), but also would have afforded the family the ability to buy something like cod liver oil, a Vitamin D-rich product, and also buy more nutritious food. (Scrooge's Christmas-day turkey was just the start.)

Our latest modern doctor is not the first to suggest a diagnosis for poor old Tiny Tim, nor will he be the last. He did disagree with earlier doctors who diagnosed Tiny Tim with polio or cerebral palsy, though.

So, where does that leave us? Did Tiny Tim suffer from rickets and/or tuberculosis? Who knows? He was a fictional character, after all, no matter how many people can quote "God bless us, every one." Dickens, although he had many real-world examples to draw from, didn't leave behind any written notes stating categorically what made Tiny Tim the way he was. 

We are left to our conjecture.