Tuesday: Hili dialogue

December 18, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: December 18, 2018, and only a scant week until the beginning of Coynezaa. But it’s a banner day, because it’s officially “I Love Honey Day.” They mean bee exudate, of course, but I construe the day another way:

Selfie with Honey, 2017

It’s also International Migrants Day, a timely reminder of refugees throughout the world.

Not much happened in history today; not many notables were born, and not much interesting happened. I do my best: on this day in 1271, Kublai Khan renamed his vast empire “Yuan” (元 yuán), officially marking the start of the Yuan dynasty. He then decreed a stately pleasure dome.  On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William Seward proclaimed that the 13th Amendment was adopted, prohibiting slavery. Here it is:

AMENDMENT XIII

SECTION 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

SECTION 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

On this day in 1892, Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. Finally, in 1932 Da Chicago Bearz beat the Portmouth Spartans in the very first National Football League Championship game. It was an unofficial championship, and the first game played indoors at Chicago Stadium.

Notables born on December 18 include J. J. Thompson (1856; Nobel Laureate), Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1863; assassinated 1914), Paul Klee (1879), Ty Cobb (1886), Betty Grable (1916), Harold Varmus (1939; Nobel Laureate), Steve Biko and Steven Spielberg (both 1946), and Brad Pitt (1963; the handsome lad is 55 today).

Google’s Doodle today celebrates Paul Klee’s 139th birthday, and, if you click on it the drawing (which spells “Google” in a Kleeian way), it takes you to his Wikipedia page.

Like all good artists (see Kandinsky yesterday), Klee painted cats. Here’s his”Cat and Bird” (1928). The bird seems to be a thought. . .

Those who died on December 18 include Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1829), Richard Owen (1892), Bobby Jones (1971), Mark “Deep Throat” Felt (2008), and Zsa Zsa Gabor (2016, died at 99).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a rare self-deprecating moment:

Cyrus: Do you have any ideas?
Hili: I have a few but they are not very interesting.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Masz jakiś pomysł?
Hili: Mam kilka, ale mało ciekawe.

Please enjoy some cat LOLs I gleaned from Facebook:

Tweets from Grania. This first one is a Corker (like Grania herself):

Well, there are no sea otters around the UK, so this one must like brackish water or something. . .

This is mildly NSFW, but truly French:

https://twitter.com/toof2018/status/1071660910157144064

If you don’t know my favorite species of wild felid, here it is (also called the “manul“):

This is incredible footage; it looks as if the dugong is imitating the dolphin. Do you know where dugongs live? FInd out here.

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1070716671487205376

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is a tweet and picture by Matthew himself. Pepper, one of Dr. Cobb’s three cats (the others are Ollie and Harry) doesn’t look like a very happy Christmas ornament!

Circular rainbows do occur, but they’re rare and hard to see. You have to be high up, like this viewer:

Well I’ll be—fish noises!

This was a tweet sent at 3:30 p.m. yesterday  Chicago time) from an awesome site, which takes the history of Earth as one year, and tweets throughout the year what stage we’re up to at that point:

https://twitter.com/YearOnEarth/status/1074786315164475392

As Marine scientist Andrew Thaler pointed out, this is a robotic Anomalocaris. Fantastic!

For comparison, here’s what one species in that extinct family looked like; you may remember Anomalocaris from Steve Gould’s Wonderful Life:

27 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

    1. “Otters are largely solitary, semi-aquatic mammals that get most of their food from lochs, rivers or the sea. The Scottish population has an unusually high proportion (perhaps 50% or more) of coastal-dwelling individuals, which feed almost exclusively in the sea. An otter must eat around 1–1.5kg of prey daily.

      Coastal otters are sometimes called ‘sea otters’, but they are exactly the same species as the animals that live further inland. ”

      https://www.nature.scot/plants-animals-and-fungi/mammals/land-mammals/otter

  3. He then decreed a stately pleasure dome.

    Goin’ all Coleridge on us, huh? Xanadu’s as good a place as any to spend a slow day in history.

    1. In Bartertown did Aunty Entity
      a deadly Thunderdome decree
      Two men enter, one man leaves!

      One of Coleridge’s lesser known later poems.

  4. AMENDMENT XIII
    SECTION 1
    Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

    The law does not always have its desired effect. I have read that in the southern US in the early 20th century, when workmen were needed by a town, business or farm, often local police would round up “loterers” at the bus station, post office, etc. and bring them before a judge to be convicted for a few days of uncompensated labor.

    2. Southern recalcitrance — something to think about when these neo-Confederate types go pining for their “lost heritage” every time a rebel flag or statue comes down.

  5. Migrants Day and don’t we have the migrant president. Tent cities at the boarder in Texas and thousands of refugees on the other side, not allowed to cross. Dead and dying children, what country is this?

  6. The water around the Isle of Bute is probably pretty fresh, since there is a lot of water from the Clyde and the saltier Atlantic water is at a deeper level.

  8. Could be wrong, can’t see much of it but the photo with Hili – looks like a Hawaiian shirt?

  9. I’m reminded how nice ”Cat and Bird” is. Klee’s playful, impish personality is evident. I’m always amused by his work. As you can see, he was into color theory.

  10. Trump is already dismantling and abrogating the 14th Amendment; he’ll soon be working on the 13th, I’m sure. Except who’ll be the slaves once he sends all the Latinos to South and Central America, re-interns the Japanese, and sends all the blacks back to Africa?

  11. The cat surrounded by it’s staff looks a bit like my Misha when he is in a bad mood ,which is always .

    And the bottom right photo of the Pallas cat,is it attempting a Robert Newton impression ?

  13. Dugong and Dolphin sounds the start of a terrific TV show. “Together they fight crime!”

  14. I like the “follow Dolph” play pair.

    this one must like brackish water

    As some earlier comments indicate, they may. I did not know that – being from in land – until I was working at the coast of the (brackish) Baltic Sea, and saw several specimens there.

  15. As Marine scientist Andrew Thaler pointed out, this is a robotic Anomalocaris. Fantastic!

    The mechanics are different. The lateral fins of this vessel are single, continuous, homogeneous sheets of material. I wouldn’t be surprised if convenience and durability hadn’t made them from conveyor-belt fabric. But the lateral lobes of anomaolcariids are discontinupus, separate all the way back to the central (visceral ?) longitudinal division of the body. Each flap may well be coordinated with the next’s movement, but there is (as far as preserved in the fossils) no material linkage from one lobe to the adjacent.

    I think the lateral fin of cuttlefish would be better analogy.

      1. Firstly, since they’re arthropods, the muscles have to fit inside the preserved sections. Which requires some assumptions about the thickness of the sections, but that is constrained by the creasing of the cuticle.
        Inside the cuticle sections, there are muscle attachment scars – just as on hard-bodied skeletons both exo- and endo- where the tendons join the muscle to the skeletal element. The larger the area, the higher the muscle force communicated and so the greater the volume of muscle tissue connecting one scar to it’s opposite scar.
        A corollary : opposite ends of one muscle have similar areas of scar.

        Palaeobiomechanics is a subtle science, but on solid footings.

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