It’s Saturday, my Day of Rest: June 16, 2018, and National Fudge Day. And in Sussex it’s Sussex Day. And of course it’s Bloomsday; see below. The weather will be HOT for the next three days in Chicago, with high temperatures exceeding 94°F (34°C) each day.
But I’m totally bummed that I’m missing the World Cup. I don’t have cable, and the only way to see it is to go downtown early in the morning and watch it at a bar. Who wants a beer at 6 a.m.? Here are yesterday’s (and today’s) results, with France vs. Australia having 21 minutes to go as I write.
Ronaldo scored a hat trick for Portugal, denying Spain a win, and you can see the highlights here. (With 84 international goals, Ronaldo just tied that record for a European player.) I don’t want any damn highlights; I want to watch the games. Readers who can help are welcome. Sigh. Over in Manchester, Matthew is happily watching all the games.
Watch these Spain/Portugal highlights soon, as FIFA will force the video to be taken down:
On this day in 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois. Although it didn’t gain him the Senate seat for which he was running, he was prescient about the coming conflict:
A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated. And of course, on June 16, 1904, James Joyce began his relationship with Nora Barnacle, who became his wife, and he commemorated that day by setting the entire novel of Ulysses in Dublin on that very day. On this day in 1944, George Junius Stinney, Jr. became the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. He was black, of course, the trial was in South Carolina, and it was basically over in a day: guilty of murder. Stinney was executed at age 14. Read the horrible details at the link. On June 16, 1961, Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union during a gig in Paris. Exactly two years later, during the Vostok 6 mission, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. Finally, on this day in 2010, Bhutan became the first country in the world to totally ban tobacco.
Notables born on Bloomsday include Adam Smith (1723), Geronimo (1829), Stan Laurel (1890), Barbara McClintock and George Gaylord Simpson (both 1902; McClintock was a Nobel Laureate in Biology and Simpson one of the greatest paleobiologists of the last century), ecologist Archie Carr (1909), Katherine Graham and Irving Penn (both 1917), Joyce Carol Oates (1938; she’s 80 today), and Tupac Shakur (1971).
Not many notables died on this day; those who expired include Wernher von Braun (1977) and Helmut Kohl (last year).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing a cold reading:
A: What are you doing?Hili: I’m reading a mind.A: Whose mind?The one of that mouse sitting in the burrow.
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Czytam umysł.
Ja: Czyj?
Hili: Tej myszy, która siedzi w norce.
From reader Paul, we have a kitten who wants to be a bridesmaid:
https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1007372147591958529
From reader Gethyn, a bad pun but still funny:
CLEAPSS discovers water on Mars #otherchocolatebrandsareavailable #FridayAfternoon pic.twitter.com/mDk4rFrg6p
— CLEAPSS (@CLEAPSS) June 15, 2018
From Grania: Princess Anne describes a failed attempt to kidnap her in 1974.
Princess Anne talking about her 1974 kidnap attempt is peak 💅
Full interview: https://t.co/pF5TDjAYm2 pic.twitter.com/6CH5dv3zlI
— Daniel Rosney (@DanielRosney) June 14, 2018
Matthew’s tweets. This first one is a doozy! (What species is that woodpecker?)
this tree sucks pic.twitter.com/kozbAB1CBI
— CAWWW (@pissed_eagle) June 15, 2018
Two kids awed by Ronaldo before his game against Spain:
https://twitter.com/karenfelizlive/status/1007699407117185025
A striking visualization of the amount of water on the planet, though I don’t know the dimensions of those drops (the “all water” one looks pretty small):
#Map visualizes amounts of water.
From big to small:
1. All water (1384km in diameter)
2. Fresh liquid water in the ground, lakes, swamps & rivers (273km)
3. Fresh-water lakes & rivers (57km)Water really is a rare commodity…
Source: https://t.co/kIq2dKCfTL pic.twitter.com/aDq151F7aS
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) June 15, 2018
Hamster on the loose!
My sister’s hamster escaped from it’s cage 3 nights in a row so I decided to finally make use of my Xmas-present camera trap and I’ve got to say the results make the whole thing worth while 🐹 #hamster #cameratrap pic.twitter.com/XVjZjKdrdt
— Mel Reid (@MelReid93) June 14, 2018
Matthew tweeted part of an unhinged letter he got from a flat-Earther:
I get mail (it continues like this for several pages)… pic.twitter.com/TBif0yxyLS
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 15, 2018
Some lovely video from the BBC Springwatch:
This is the most relaxing thing we've seen all week! 💙 🐬#Springwatch pic.twitter.com/WlEUgE3iMs
— BBC Springwatch (@BBCSpringwatch) June 14, 2018
Are those capybaras or buses? The caption is clever.
You wait ages for one and then three come along at once… pic.twitter.com/MMx95K5CVo
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) June 15, 2018
Finally, a reconstructed flyby showing the surface of Mars. The YouTube link is in the tweet.
Mars – Gorgonum Chaos flyby, made with @HiRISE data
4k60: https://t.co/aJCOk0m9pg pic.twitter.com/thec49Pu2t— Seán Doran (@_TheSeaning) June 14, 2018
I don’t get the lack of cable being a problem. I just watched the France/Australia match on the local Telemundo affiliate. They have three more games today. Fox is also showing a bunch. One match this morning but US Open Golf this afternoon.
Check your local OTA stations and I am sure you will find something.
In Chicago it is WSNS, channel 44.1. Second half of Argentina-Iceland just kicked off. Score was 1-1 at the half.
PCC(e) should be able to get good reception with an indoor antenna. Just put it by a window facing north.
Just noticed that the ARG-ISL match is on Fox OTA – channel 32.1 in Chicago. The announcers are terrible. I switched back to the Spanish broadcast.
Is PCC(e) going to do a World Cup pool like he did back in 2014? I still have the spreadsheets I made to keep track of the entries. Aaron H. won – correctly predicted the final – Germany 1-0 over Argentina.
It’s done–at your suggestion!
From that visualisation of the water on the planet – obviously the threat of rising sea water levels is a myth.
(Well, actually, no. It’s a sort of optical illusion. Due to the huge volume-to-surface-area ratio of a sphere, and the fact that we occupy a thin film of habitable surface about as thick as the skin on an apple, it doesn’t take much water to cover the whole thing).
cr
The water-on-earth visualization reminds me of another amazing analogy. The surface of the earth is smoother than the skin of an orange if it was the same size. And, of course, the atmosphere is a very thin shell too.
The way things are going we will be forced to live on an orange earth!
Yes. Perhaps Trump’s ultimate goal is King of the World. Of course, we know how that ends on the Titanic.
Smoother than a billiard ball is the analogy I’ve seem. About one part in 400 in radius.
You could subscribe to YouTube TV (or one of the other streaming services) for 1 month, then cancel. There are no contracts.
– Install VLC
– Get a VPN, spoof your location as Germany.
All games are on one of these URLs, open them in VLC:
http://daserste_live-lh.akamaihd.net/i/daserste_de@91204/master.m3u8
or
http://zdf1314-lh.akamaihd.net/i/de14_v1@392878/master.m3u8
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.”
Here are a couple of thoughts about this speech. Lincoln did not expect that war would be required to end slavery. In fact, he did not think southern secession would take place. He was surprised when it actually took place because he severely misjudged the South. Although he was quite aware that the southern slave states wanted to legalize slavery in the territories through federally mandated slave codes, he did not think this would happen. Nor did he think that the risk of slavery being legalized in all states would come to pass. He felt that the anti-slave North would prevent this. He did believe that slavery was “in the course of ultimate extinction.” But, the term “ultimate extinction” was exceedingly vague. It could mean almost anything. Lincoln believed that slavery might continue to exist to at least the beginning of the twentieth century. In other words, Lincoln’s views were Republican orthodoxy. Lincoln considered himself far from a radical on the slavery issue. Of course, the southern slaveholders had a different view. Even the thought of slavery being done away with in some distant, hazy future was anathema to them. They considered the Republican position to be substantively the same as the true radicals of the time, the abolitionists (which Lincoln was not one), who called for the immediate end of slavery. Abolitionists had as much disdain for Republicans as they did for the southern slaveholders. By the end of the war, their view of Lincoln changed from condemnation to adoration.
But whether or not Lincoln could predict what the south would do he knew what course he would take when they did secede and that is what separated him from everyone. Not knowing and not predicting is very much secondary to knowing what actions you will take. And anyway, his prediction in the speech was correct – a house divided cannot stand.
It is far more important that the south could not predict Lincoln.
Does the house divided reality of 1860 have any clues for us in our current situation. I think it does, however not down to ending in civil war it may be just as destructive. Already we see destruction of the republican party and maybe our form of government as we see it. Two general ways to go with governing only work with lots of compromise and this is no longer alive. The founders did not predict this two party system and were alarmed when it appeared. George Washington said it was destructive and he turned out to be correct.
Jerry could potentially get really good OTA HD TV with the lake nearby (depending where he faces). My parents only watch HD TV OTA and they get a lot of broadcasts across Lake Ontario.
The closest places with Canadian broadcasts would be Sault Ste. Marie – about 350 miles straight up Lake Michigan or straight across Michigan in Windsor – about 300 miles. Both too far for OTA. We have Spanish language OTA of the World Cup in Chicago.
Who needs Canadian broadcasts? My parents watch a lot of US channels over the air. They can’t get any baseball though.
Lincoln (who by most accounts had less than a year of formal education) was known for his allusive speeches, especially for their abundant nods to Shakespeare and the bible (as in the “House Divided” allusion to Matthew 12:25).
There’s a fella with a diploma from Penn (from its Wharton School, as he is wont to boast), who seems never to have heard another man speak; who seems never to have read another man’s book; who, judging from the content of his speeches, seems never to have studied any history or any literature or any culture at all.
I think it might be some proof of reverse evolution. Just a joke. But I am pretty sure that fella from Wharton is a really good example of the term Pathological Liar. Read about it in Wikipedia and pseudologia fantastic. The liar decorates their own person.
And he thinks everyone else is as stupid as he is. One of the (not so recent) examples as described by Gail Collins,NYT, 5/23/18:
It may easily be too large. Earth is a bone dry inner planet.
As baseline, the typical asteroid, which lies close to the system”snowline” – where water in the protoplanetary disk could freeze out – contains 10 % free water by mass. Earth has 0.02 % free ocean water by mass [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Physical_properties ], and perhaps as much in the mantle: “one volume water below for one above”. Lkely source is mostly the initial accretion – fits the D/H ratios – but also some contributed by impactors.
The assumed water content is 0.05 % by mass, but it may be less (or more).
As a surface coating by late impactors. A surface coating of sludgy clay minerals, from which the water was later baked in subduction events.
There is evidence of appreciable heterogeneity in the composition of the mantle – inconsistent Hf-W extinct clocks, slightly discordant Sm-Nd dates in diamond inclusions – suggesting there was still accretion going on significantly after the probably Moon-forming event.
People get the relative sizes of spheres wrong all the time. They look, for example, at the Moon and Earth in view together, and think “the moon is about a quarter of the size of the Earth”. Which is not untrue in radius (or diameter). In volume, the ratio is more like 1^3 : 4^3 or 1:64. In mass the ratio is closer to 1:90 (I checked – 1:81.8), because there is less pressure compression in th inner parts of the Moon. Those relative sizes look in the right ball park to me. Noting that there are three “balls of water” there, one of which looks like a single-pixel error.
Watch the 2018 FIFA World Cup™
As Jon Mummaw @ #3 says you can try YouTubeTV & watch the World Cup on the hosted Fox & FS1 channels. “$40/month. Cancel anytime. Available in select U.S. cities. Terms apply.”
Or perhaps this is cheaper? I can’t see pricing from the UK. Tune in on FOX and FS1 with fuboTV
Both options allow you to stream on your TV, phone, computer & other devices
Poor Matthew, that fragment is quite a read. I notice the main technique is to assert something, provide little or no evidence for that assertion, then move on to another assertion. There is also a complete failure to consider other explanations for an observation.
Weirdly enough, Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” defends a spherical, although they repeat the old canard (occasionally found among atheists) that before Columbus everyone thought the Earth was flat.
(The well-educated classes throughout most of the latter Middle Ages understood it to be a sphere with gravity towards the center, although they falsely believed Ptolomaic astronomy with the sun going around the earth. The earth is a sphere in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”.)
Mr. Cobb’s nemesis has the curvature wrong. The earth curves 80 inches in 10 miles, not 66, and his figures are mutually contradictory. If, as he said, the earth curved 66 feet over 10 miles, it would curve 350 feet over 50, not 1666. (The fellow has 6’s on his mind.)
Here’s Ken Ham’s outfit explaining why the earth is round.
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/earth/is-the-earth-flat/
My mistake. The mention the canard of the medieval flat earth only to rebut it.
I like to drink beer at six am.
But then I keep strange hours
I believe the woodpecker to be a white backed woodpecker; a european three toed species.
Funny kitten!
Water total doesn’t include water in mantle.
Hope you figured out how to get the soccer, Jerry. If still no luck, maybe you could see if a fitness centre near you opens early and has a lounge or the latest technology in recumbent bikes, elliptical trainer, etc that come with TV! That’s what I used to do when certain tennis tournaments were being shown on just one TSn channel (which we didn’t have). I’d plan my workout during the matches I wanted to see,
What about the student or staff lounges on campus, or some kind colleague’s home near you, or push come to shove a waiting room at the local clinic or TV showroom, bus terminal etc.? Worst case, maybe go to the bar and get coffee and pie for brekkie.