Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 10, 2016 • 6:00 am

Good morning everyone, happy Hump Day! May the blessings of strong coffee or fragrant tea be upon you. It’s Grania here again, Jerry will join us later on in the day; at the moment he has Important Stuff keeping him occupied.

A: What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m promoting your book.
A: With such a gloomy face?
Hili: Not gloomy but wondering whether my friends have already ordered it.

P1030872
In Polish:

Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Promuję twoją książkę.
Ja: Z taką ponurą miną?
Hili: Nie ponurą, tylko pytającą, czy moi przyjaciele już zamówili.

 

If you are wondering about what Hili is talking about, as Malgorzata explains below, Andrzej has written a new book.

Andrzej thought for a long time about writing about the problem why Israel, the country not bigger than one of Poland’s voivodships, gives rise to such interest, passion, obsession, hatred, lies etc. Then about a year ago, he was recommended a blog by a known Polish female journalist who was writing about the Middle East. This very one sided writing became a trigger and  Andrzej decided to write his book in the form of letters to this journalist. Now, many years ago, still under Communism, a very well known Polish writer, Kazimierz Brandys, wrote a book under the title: “Letters to Mrs. Z.”. Playing on the fact that the surname of this journalist starts with “Z” Andrzej gave his book a working title “Different letters to a different Mrs. Z.”. This is now a subtitle, while the title of Andrzej’s book means “Israel’s all faults”.

If you are interested (and can read Polish), you can read more about it here. Our best wishes to Andrzej for the success of his book!

 

And as a lagniappe, long-time regular Taskin sent Jerry a photo of Gus who is as concerned as I am about the cold.

 

IMG_4199

See that bright sunshine and beautiful blue sky? That means it’s FREEZING here!

 

9 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. I hope there might be an English translation of Andrzej’s book someday. Google just can’t handle this job.

    Also, Andrzej and Malgorzata, wrt your re-publication of Dr. Cobb’s article on Neanderthals of Oct. 2015 (http://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/geny-neandertalskie-sa-wszedzie ),
    please note that there’s been a recent correction by Dr. Cobb on WEIT:
    https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/we-are-not-all-neanderthal-this-is-how-science-proceeds/
    Excerpt: “Now it turns out not to be true.

    The authors have published an erratum notice to explain the error, along with updated versions of the figures and tables. If you want the technical explanation, here it is:

    A script necessary to convert the input produced by samtools v0.1.19 to be compatible with PLINK was not run when merging the ancient genome, Mota, with the contemporary populations SNP panel, leading to homozygote positions to the human reference genome being dropped as ‘missing data’

    What this means is that they forgot to run a particular computer programme (‘script’) that would harmonise the outputs of two different programmes used to do the analyses of Mota and of modern sub-Saharan populations. When they did so, much of their effect disappeared. “

  4. “the blessings of strong coffee or fragrant tea be upon you”.

    Or both, I am making ablutions with espresso. (Well, internal ablutions.)

    Reflecting on Andrzej’s book, I remember reading about “criminal/offender profiling” when I discovered that it is considered pseudoscience.

    [Papers in 2008-ish time frame came to that conclusion, lack of statistics and reading the conclusion into that lack of data, and since at least 2010 it is so deemed by psychologists and skeptic organizations alike as far as I can see.]

    There was this latest clean sheet attempt to make profiling something more, which book started out with a supposedly fair description of its infamous history. As I remember it the book claimed that profiling started out as a systematical means in the Roman empire to “investigate” (harass and prosecute) christians and jews alike, and was later adopted by the Inquisition and so on.

  5. I don’t think my book will ever be translated into English, it has too many refereces to Polish literature and Polish history. For those who like to know why do I care about this particular problem and how I write, I can recomend a short autobiografical story from my early childhood: http://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/o-nas/fodderland

  6. The cat in the box made me think about Shroedinger. I have to say, I’m happy the probility wave function collapsed in favor of life for the cat. Wouldn’t if be wonderful if it were forever thus?

Comments are closed.