Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 14, 2016 • 6:30 am

This afternoon I fly back to Chicago, leaving about 5 p.m. from Heathrow Hell and arriving in Chicago at about 8 pm. February 14 is, of course, the Christian feast day of St. Valentine, the patron of courtly (not lascivious!) love. It’s a day of historical events, too, for on Feb. 14 Henry IV was excommunicated (1076) and Richard II died (1400). In 1556 Thomas Cranmer was declared a heretic, and later burned in Oxford. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent on the telephone, and, in 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in Chicago. The horrible fire-bombing of Dresden began on this day in 1945 (see Slaughterhouse-5), and in 2005, YouTube was launched, inundated the world with a flood of kitten videos. Births on this day included Jack Benny (1894), Jimmy Hoffa (1913; his body was never found, proving, according to Denis Alexander, that he was bodily resurrected), Teller (1948), Renee Fleming (1959). Deaths on this day included Captain Cook, slaughtered in Hawaii on February 14, 1779, P. G. Wodehouse in 1975, James Bond (ornithologist, name model for the spy) in 1989, and John Ehrlichman in 1999. Wikipedia also lists Antonin Scalia as having died on this day, but that’s an error; he died either yesterday or before midnight on February 12. 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissing Cyrus again. Malgorzata comments on the photo: “Hili was watching Cyrus eagerly fetching the ball, and commenting.”

Hili: I have a feeling that dogs like to carry out orders.
A: And cats?
Hili: We prefer to issue them.

P1030880

In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażeniem, że psy lubią wykonywać polecenia.
Ja: A koty?
Hili: Wolimy je wydawać.
As lagniappe, we have Theo, staffed by Laurie and Gethyn in London, who couldn’t make it to my talk as Theo was ill (he was badly constipated but “cured himself” on the way to the vet!). Now he’s back in shape, demonstrating that by licking the remains of a cup of espresso (I’ve posted before on his penchant for coffee.) Theo loves java and even tries to eat the coffee out of the grinder:

And, for extra lagniappe, here’s a photo sent by reader John Williamson, who interprets it as a lightning bolt striking a plane at one end, exiting the other end, and “with a halo or rainbow colors, possibly due to camera effects.” Do readers concur?

https://twitter.com/Fascinatingpics/status/698764119483277312

30 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

        1. OMG my wife is in Chch! Staying with our daughter & family.

          Apparently they had a small quake yesterday, then a big one last night. Didn’t damage their new house though.

          I simultaneously (near enough) had a kidney stone, though there doesn’t seem to be any connection between the two events.

          cr

        2. In one of the videos of the event from a home security camera, I did see a cat streaking off, poor thing. There have been a lot of aftershocks since as well, so the poor animals will be needing lots of reassurance.

      3. Reports are that the quake was pretty mild. The cliffs on the beach caved in throwing up a dust cloud, but no serious damage in town, and nobody hurt.

      4. There were no major injuries or deaths, and infrastructure held up well. Apparently a lot of people in Christchurch are a bit distressed because of the memories it brought back. Physically though, everyone’s fine.

        Thanks for asking. 🙂

          1. Well, the worst the TV news could come up with was a homeowner whose backyard pool (plastic sheeting on a metal frame) burst and sent several thousand gallons of water through his lounge.

            And one newly-sealed road that had fountained mud again.

            So, not a lot of damage. Almost everything that could fail has failed by now.

            cr

          3. I know that photo well.

            Incidentally, those flats look to have been very well-built. The ground accelerations on them may not have been very strong (hard to know), but the gravitational forces on the leaning ones are acting at a very large angle to those that they were designed for.

            cr

          4. Oh yes, that comment has been made many times. Even if liquifaction and overturning wasn’t anticipated, I suspect that only the unluckiest of inhabitants didn’t walk out of there. Cuts and bruises, maybe an occasional borked leg. Serious need for clean underwear. But just in terms of fewer bodies needing hospital after the quake, the over-engineering probably more than paid for itself.
            I wonder if any of the blocks were pulled upright and marketed as “earthquake-tested”?

          5. Incidentally, I was in Christchurch a few weeks ago.

            Two years ago, much of the ‘red zone’ (area unsuitable for rebuilding) was like a midwestern ghost town – all the houses still standing, not visibly damaged, but deserted and weeds growing in the gardens, and the roads full of humps and big potholes.

            Well, now those areas have been cleared, and it’s like a huge park. The roads (with potholes) are still there, but around them is grassland with frequent trees and shrubs – when they cleared the area they left all the ornamental garden vegetation, which I think was remarkably sensible and sensitive. Obviously not done by an Auckland housing contractor.

  2. photo sent by reader John Williamson, who interprets it as a lightning bolt striking a plane at one end, exiting the other end, and “with a halo or rainbow colors, possibly due to camera effects.” Do readers concur?

    Look at the kink in the bolt path just below the plane ; the bolt veers towards the right, from the oranges into the reds.
    If the rainbow was due to dispersion effects from the light emitted by the bolt, then the colour fringes would retain symmetry about the light source. There’s another similar effect at the top of the photograph.
    I’m not going to rule out Photoshoppery, but the obvious slip up of allowing the colour of the rainbow to bleed into the lightning bolt has been avoided. It would be a considerable coincidence to line up the 4 events (plane, bolt, rainbow and finger on shutter) at the same time, but not impossible.

    1. I’m not able to detect an airplane in the photos either. Moisture/precipitation would likely cause the rainbow along the lightening?
      If he at least had a detailed report that a plane was hit in that area, it would be easier to believe. If you are in a plane hit by lightening, you usually know it.

      1. Moisture/precipitation would likely cause the rainbow along the lightening?

        No. If the light from the bolt were being refracted to form a rainbow it would be at 57deg to the line of sight to the bolt.
        If you had something like a direct-vision diffraction grating over the lens … no, you’d still have the emission spectrum at [whatever] angle is appropriate to the grating spacing.

      2. “Moisture/precipitation would likely cause the rainbow along the lightening?”

        And no. Since a rainbow is purely a visual illusion, caused by reflection/refraction of the sun’s rays from raindrops. It has a fixed direction but no real ‘distance’ – in particular, it does not denote the edge of the rainshower. It has no physical existence.

        Whereas lightning is definitely a physical phenomenon.

        I’d guess maybe the photographer was lining up to catch the plane crossing the rainbow and the lightning strike happened at that moment by chance.

        cr

    2. Two more indications it’s a real rainbow and not a camera effect – the sky is brighter inside the rainbow (camera effects would be localized to the lightning), and the bolt doesn’t line up at all with the rainbow at the top of the photo.

      As for it being a plane, it even looks like arcing from a wingtip.

      As far as the odds, I’m with you. Unlikely still happens. And when practically everyone in the developed world has a camera on them all the time, and the Internet lets everyone share all those photos, it makes those unlikely events more likely to be seen.

      1. Jeff Lewis wrote: “And when practically everyone in the developed world has a camera on them all the time, and the Internet lets everyone share all those photos, it makes those unlikely events more likely to be seen.”

        Indeed. One would expect by now at least one miracle would have been photographed.
        If they actually happened.

      2. Two more indications it’s a real rainbow and not a camera effect – the sky is brighter inside the rainbow (camera effects would be localized to the lightning),

        I noticed that, but that feature of rainbows is relatively well known. Again, not taking a position on Photoshoppery, but just because many faked images are done crudely doesn’t mean that all photo-fakers are ignorant of optics.

  4. I concur on the amazing plane image!

    I can see the return stroke entering and leaving the plane at different positions.

    And I can see a downward streamer (or possibly the ghost of a previous return stroke) leaving the plane, as well as upward streamers from – I guess – a temporary ground the plane provides when the leader approaches the plane from above.

    If I am interpreting the system behavior correctly, the lightning would be the most common negative cloud-to-ground one. So I feel fairly confident of seeing a plane.

    Jimmy Hoffa (1913; his body was never found, proving, according to Denis Alexander, that he was bodily resurrected),

    He.

    But the supplicant to Sophisticated Theology™ is even more ridiculous. There is after all no historical evidence of his jeebus character before or after the character’s mythical death.

    This particular jeebus of the Sophistry Trade™ is like the Wicked Witch of The Wizard Of Oz. When she gets hit by a bucket of water she melts and her body is never found again. Obviously then she was resurrected! (Is there a sequel to TWOO where it could happen!? Maybe ST™ is a Hollywood manuscript factory.)

  5. I was able to locate a copy of the lightning/rainbow image with the metadata intact. You can locate it easily by searching for the photographers name and downloading the 6000 x 4000 pixel image. It certainly isn’t the original image – there is a magnified crop inset in the upper right, but the original Raw Data and GPS information is intact and unedited. Here is what I can find:

    Camera Data
    Make: Sony
    Model: SLT-A77V

    Shot Information
    Focal Length: 50.00 mm
    Exposure: 1/80 sec; f/20; ISO 800
    Image Size: 6000 x 4000

    Date Created: 2014-08-24
    Credit Line: Birk M bius
    Headline: Amazing photo shows lightning striking an airliner flying in a rainbow – Boeing777-D-AALB
    transmission Reference: AD*144264163

    GPS Data
    Position: 51° 23′ 56.21″ N, 12° 31′ 47.45″ E
    Time Stamp (GMT): Aug 24 2014, 12:40:10 PM
    Receiver Movement: 2.55 km/hr at 228.59°
    Map Datum: WGS-8

    1. That GPS location is just outside “aero-club-leipzig.de”, which is certainly consistent with the claimed origin. The sight lines to the airport are consistent too.

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