Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 17, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Sunday, February 17, 2019, and we have 1-3 inches of snow predicted for Chicago today. It’s National Café au Lait Day, another blatant instance of cultural appropriation. It’s also the Catholic Feast Day of Saint Fintan of Clonenagh.

On this day in 1600, philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome for denying Catholic doctrines, including the virginity of Mary. It’s a good thing the Church no longer has such power.  Exactly 201 years later, there was a tie in the U.S. Electoral College between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr for President of the U.S. A vote in the House of Representatives resolved it, and you know how.  On February 17, 1863, the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, later known as the International Committee of the Red Cross, was founded in Geneva.

On this day in 1867, the first ship passed through the Suez Canal. In 1904, Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly” was premiered at La Scala in Milan.  On February 17, 1949, Chaim Weizmann took up his job as Israel’s first President.  In 1980, two Polish climbers, Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy, made the first winter ascent of Mount Everest.  Since then Polish climbers have specialized in winter climbs of “eight thousanders.”  Finally, on this day in 1996, world chess champion Garry Kasparov beat the Deep Blue supercomputer, and went on to win the match. The next year, however, the computer defeated Kasparov in a match.

Here’s a video of Kasparov’s defeat in 1997, showing how the computer did the playing:

Notables born on this day include Banjo Paterson (1864), geneticist Ronald Fisher (1890), Duane Gish (1921), Chaim Potok (1929), Alan Bates and Barry Humphries (both 1934), Christina Pickles (1935), Gene Pitney (1940), Huey P. Newton (1942), Larry the Cable Guy and Michael Jordan (both 1963), and Paris Hilton (1981).

Those who packed it in on February 17 include Giordano Bruno (1600, see above), Molière (1673), Jan Swammerdam (1680), Heinrich Heine (1856), Geronimo (1909), Thelonious Monk and Lee Strasberg (both 1982),  Randy Shilts (1994), and Billy Cowsill (2006, note that Wikipedia gives his date of death as February 18!).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sees the demise of paper:

Hili: Paper clips do not have any future.
A: But they have a rich past
In Polish:
Hili: Spinacze nie mają przyszłości.
Ja: Ale mają bogatą przeszłość.

Here’s a biologically informed and hilarious “meme” sent by reader Tom:

A tweet from reader Gethyn, who, with his partner Laurie, will become parents of two black kittens today. He asked me if this is real and all I could say is, “Well, it might be; we don’t know what the dolphins are experiencing.” Read the linked article:

Reader Nilou sent another tweet from the Tower of London’s Raven Master. I didn’t know that ravens had moustaches and beards.

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. Kakapos, New Zealand’s flightless parrots, are famous for “booming”, with males making loud noises to attract distant females. Sinbad was booming but didn’t want to be disturbed:

But then he got a treat: an almond. Oy, do I love these birds!

Tweets from Matthew. This finding is amazing, even more so than the recent discovery that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks and eagles. Horseshoe crabs ARE arachnids: a sister group to one specific clade of spiders. As the paper below says:

In spite of uncertainty in the placement of some arachnid clades, all analyses show Xiphosura consistently nested within Arachnida as the sister group to Ricinulei (hooded tick spiders).

Is this normal in Ireland???

Another novel finding: sea snakes have light-sensing ability in their tails. Apparently this helps them hide their tails to avoid predators when lurking among the reefs. Read the linked blurb from Phys.org.

Tweets from Grania. This white cat can’t catch a break.

Is it any surprise that this cat lies atop a warm espresso machine?

I had no idea that rays did this. There are other hypotheses, of course, including parasite removal and communication.

 

55 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Jeez, those acrobatic rays are incredible. Specially those at the end of the clip doing somersaults.

    cr

      2. I was wondering, perhaps it’s the size of the splash from the belly-flop that is attractive?

        1. It could well be. Some of them look as if they’re deliberately landing as flat as they can.

          cr

  5. The problem of the tie for president in 1800 was fixed a few years later with the 12th amendment, which is useless today. The contest for most despicable vice president would be between Aaron Burr and Spiro Agnew.

      1. Yes, he could certainly be entered but should probably wait until out of office. He may still become president for a short time which would put him in the contest for most despicable president.

        1. Ol Dick “shoot ya in the face” Cheney deserves at least an honorable mention, and Dan “ Mr. Potatoe Head” Quayle still gets the golden dunce cap.

          1. I know, there are many runner’s up. But Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton and while Burr was VP. Agnew carried on his corrupt New Jersey ways even in the White house with bag men bringing the money into his office. He gave up the job just in time before he would have been president, thanks to federal investigators.

          2. Agnew may have had corrupt NJ ways, but he performed them in Maryland. IIRC, his 1967? election to MD governorship was somewhat lucky in that he ran against two Democrats who split what was usually a heavy Democrat majority. Despite all I’ve forgotten since then, I can still hear his election jingle that seemed to run incessantly on DC area TV news.

          3. Thanks for correcting that for me…Maryland, not New Jersey. I believe it was Feds in Baltimore that uncovered his doings under the attorney general.

          5. There was a typical Bob Hope joke around that time, typical in that it had more than one punch line. Quoting from memory: “A terrible thing has happened. There’s been a fire in Spiro Agnew’s library–and both of his books were destroyed! And he hadn’t even finished coloring in one of them!”

  6. It’s funny, I just watched Cosmos that had Bruno in it. They glossed over the specifics of what Bruno rejected, while still saying he objected to something about the faith.

    Also playing chess today and wondered who went first in the game of the century, now I wonder “who” went first – Deep Blue or Kasparov? I’ll look for it…

    1. Wikipedia has GotC :

      “1. Nf3

      A noncommittal move by Byrne. From here, the game can develop into a number of different openings.
      “
      Source : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_the_Century_(chess)

      Kasparov v Deep Blue

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov
      1996 game:

      1. e4 c5 2. c3

      It is more common to play 2.Nf3, but Kasparov has deep experience with that line, so White’s opening book goes in a different direction. The IBM team determined the opening moves played by Deep Blue.

      1997 game :
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov

      Looks like Kasparov, Nf3

      There’s more, of course. Interesting articles there…

    2. I notice occasionally that my comment is awaiting moderation- does that mean my comments are getting me in trouble?

      1. > 2 links in one post: automatically goes to moderation – an anti-spam measure.

        1 or 2 links & it’ll post immediately.

  7. Is this normal in Ireland???

    If so, “clean-up needed on Isle 5” must be a dread announcement for Irish department-store clerks to hear.

  9. Weizmann was also a real scientist – a biochemist who developed a bacterial route to acetone that was of significance to the war effort.

  12. “video of Kasparov’s defeat”
    The voice-over ends saying “…but the computer can’t think like humans do.” I wonder what he means by that. What IS thinking, anyway? Why aren’t computers capable of thinking? I suppose he’s just trying to be reassuring.

    1. Having built the self-taught AlphaGo – the Go players nightmare – we are none the wiser re “thinking” & it can’t tell us why it plays a particular crazy, but brilliant [it turns out] move. We will be the thicko cousin ‘left behind’ monkey mechanics to such machines one day soon, but probably not for long after that unless they’re fond of pets.

    2. One of the McGill professors I knew about as an undergraduate was involved in the Deep Blue project. It works by a very psychologically implausible process (effectively deep searches with pruning rather than the whatever it is humans do). Is this a necessary approach? For the moment it seems to be. Will it be so forever? I would think not; in fact Alpha seems to show not.

      1. We know from Go & poker AI programs that exploring all possible branches in the decision tree is slow & gets slower into the middle of a game, very inefficient & decision space is vast. Too vast. Quantum computing will not solve this because they are useful only in very constrained problems.

        Machine learning neural network [with a bit of tree search thrown in] is the only way we know of to advance beyond brute force tree searching. I don’t think anybody has a clue where to go with AI h/ware s/ware beyond that. Perhaps an AI will bootstrap past that. 🙂

        1. I’m holding out for a simulated brain with simulated neurons. Maybe even largely meat grown in a bell jar. As soon as we find out how our brains work, we can provide them with the same algorithms – no extensive tree searches required. An android of some kind. They will be smarter than humans, of course, since that would be their purpose – to help solve the BIG problems. Would they have souls? Good question. Should they be allowed to vote and run for public office? Would you let your child marry one?

          1. I’m thinking brains might need to grow & develop rather than being built in one lump & programmed. Maybe there’s a problem with connecting billions of neurones all in one go & growing is the only way.

          3. Thank you Keith & I hope it’s some sort of universal fact of thermodynamics or information theory or whatevs. A universe where one brain could manufacture limitless ‘like minded’ functional copies is not where I’d want to be! Same goes for Star Trek style transporter technology which is a potential route to ‘beaming’ many copies from one original [though I gather the enormous energies needed to build one copy would generate enough heat to destroy the copy & then some by orders of magnitude so no worries]

  13. And very cool about horseshoe crabs falling in with Arachnids! The power of sequence comparisons / molecular-based phylogenetic analysis!

  14. Thanks:

    Horseshoe crabs ARE arachnids: a sister group to one specific clade of spiders.

    I can’t vouch for errors. But the work is a real tour de force – especially liked the quartet methods to resolve (putative incomplete lineage sorting caused) networks into branching – and they crossed most of the t’s I would like to see looked at.

    So my world shrunk. But also widened, because some of the close lineages likes water mites have also returned to the sea. And the sister clade of hooded tickspiders (Ricinulei) was new for me, apparently they are thick shelled too.

    1. If you have access to the paper (I don’t) was there any mention of whether they have genes for spider silk?

  15. The kid with the horse reminded me of a scene from the movie, The Commitments.
    Jimmy Rabbitte, the group’s manager, is in a lift (elevator) on the ground floor of a high-rise in Dublin. Before the doors can close a boy starts to get in with his horse.
    Jimmy: You’re not bringing that thing in here, are you?
    Boy: I’ve got to, mister, the feckin’ stairs’ll kill him.

    1. I can’t remember if my dad was perpetrator or victim in this story, but in college some guys led a horse up a flight or two of stairs and left it in some poor sucker’s dorm room. Apparently it’s much harder to get a horse down stairs than up stairs.

      Btw, loved everything about The Commitments!

      1. One of my favourite films. There are very few white singers able to sing soul authentically, but Andrew Strong’s vocals are so good he makes Michael Bolton sound even worse than he already is, and I’ve always thought that Bolton sounds like he’s suffering a strangulated hernia!
        My daughter once asked me why Bolton hated soul music so much. When I asked what she meant, she said that she’d been listening to the radio and heard him murder When A Man Loves A Woman.

Comments are closed.