Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 5, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning on another chilly day (at present it’s 10° F or -12° C): Tuesday, March 5, 2019. But in three weeks I’ll be in balmy Amsterdam, eating rijstafel and visiting the once-in-a-lifetime Rembrandt retrospective, “All the Rembrandts” at the Rijksmuseum. I suppose it’ll be too early for the tulips to bloom.

It’s also Shrove Tuesday, which, says Matthew Cobb, ” is the only day we ate/eat pancakes in the UK. Very odd!” He also adds this, “a Here’s a Heath Robinson contraption for flipping them.”

And the wags at St. Pancras station have gotten into the act (also via Matthew):

https://twitter.com/alexanderedge_/status/1102848650827481093

It’s also National Cheez Doodle Day, celebrating the popular snack made from of orange-colored styrofoam. Fuggedaboutit.  It’s St. Piran’s Day in Cornwall, celebrating the patron saint of tin miners. Many pasties will be eaten, which are far better than Cheez Doodles and nearly as good as pancakes:

You can find the story of the Cheez Doodle here.

News of the day:  a patient in England seems to have been completely cured of AIDS, only the second one known. Perhaps a permanent cure is in the offing; the disease is already regarded as mostly chronic rather than fatal.

On this day in 1496, Henry VII of England began that nation’s age of exploration by issuing letters to John Cabot and his sons, authorizing them to explore unknown lands. On March 4, 1616, Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, proposing a Hili-centric solar system, was added to the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books—73 years after it was first published. (Being Polish, his universe was naturally Hili-centric.)

On March 4, 1770, the Boston Massacre took place, with five Americans, including the black/Native American man Crispus Attucks, were killed by British troops. Attucks is counted as the first death in the American Revolution,  though the war war didn’t formally begin for five more years.  On this day in 1836, Samuel Colt patented his first mass-produced revolver, the .34 caliber.

Two events happened on this day in 1933. In the U.S., President Franklin Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, closing all banks and freezing all financial assets in a vain attempt to stave off a financial collapse. Across the pond on the same day, Hitler’s Nazi Party got 43.9% of the vote at the Reichstag election, allowing him the tools to establish a dictatorship.  On this day in 1940, six members of the Soviet Politburo, among them Joseph Stalin, ordered that Polish intellectuals and POWs should be executed; 27,500 of them were killed in the Katyn Massacre in April and May.

On this day in 1946, Winston Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College Missouri, coined the phrase “Iron Curtain.” Here’s a short video on the speech and its Cold War consequences:

On this day in 1953, Joseph Stalin died in Moscow after a cerebral hemorrhage.

Finally, exactly a decade later, three country music stars, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas, died (along with pilot Randy Hughes) in a plane crash in Tennessee.

Notables born on March 5 include Gerardus Mercator (1512),  Rosa Luxemburg (1871), Zhou Enlai (1898), Rex Harrison (1908), Daniel Kahneman (1934), Lynn Margulis (1938), Penn Jillette (1955), Joel Osteen (1963), and Joshua Coyne (1993).

Those who expired on March 5 include Crispus Attucks (1770, see above), Allesandro Volta (1827), Edgar Lee Masters (1950), Sergei Prokofiev and Joseph Stalin (both 1953), Patsy Cline (1963; see above), John Belushi (1982), and Hugo Chavéz and Duane Gish (both 2013).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili is inspecting Andrzej’s notebooks:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m trying to read what you’ve written here.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Próbuję przeczytać co tu napisałeś.

A picture from Facebook:

Reader Barry sent a photo of a lovely Eastern lubber grasshopper (not sure if I posted this before):

From Heather Hastie, a video of a lovely cryptic leaf mantid. Enlarged, this would make a good alien in a horror movie.

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1099532107737649153

Tweets from Grania. This is something you don’t want to see in your snowcone:

Intercat affection:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1102263139700219905

Wasps blowing water bubbles because housekeeping:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1101666610773819393

And a fantastic sky photo:

Tweets from Matthew. The first paper shows an intriguing explanation for variation in egg color: thermoregulation. I have the paper and may summarize it on this website.

Happy donkeys (Equus africanus asinus) gamboling and braying in a pasture.

A bad biology pun:

This is scary, but I’d totally go on the ride:

https://twitter.com/AwardsDarwin/status/1101782958128746496

 

 

40 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “All the Rembrandts” got an excellent review on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. Although it isn’t ALL the Rembrandts, of which there are apparently hundreds, but all of the Rijksmuseum’s own works by him.

      1. I’ve always wondered why Rembrandt signed his paintings with his first name instead of his last. He’s the only famous painter I can think of who did this.

        1. Good question. Maybe he was the Baroque art world’s equivalent of Prince or Madonna – or perhaps he was looking to the future, and sparing American art collectors from mispronouncing his name like they do Vincent van Gogh’s?

        2. First name only? How about Vincent the approx 1.5 eared?

          His name at birth in his language is Rembrant Harmenszoon van Rijn [Rembrant, son of Harmen, from the Rhine]

          He studies Latin as a young lad & then when he moved to Amsterdam he called himself by the posher Latin Rembrandus Hermanni Leydensis [Rembrant, son of Harmen, of Leiden]

          HOW HIS SIGNATURE EVOLVED:

          1625-29: R, RI, RH, RL
          1630-31: RHL
          1632: RHL – van Rijn
          1632: <b>Rembrant
          1633-1669: Rembrandt

          Another source gives this:
          https://flic.kr/p/2eYuWqA

          Also the dates are different for his engravings & sometimes he ran out of space when signing

          NOTES:

          ** Raphael, Leonardo & Michelangelo were known commonly by their first names & he was probably putting himself up there with the superstars.

          ** he added the silent “d” to his signature in 1633. Nobody knows why, but I am guessing it looks more Latin with a “d” thrown in. I think [my opinion] he was a snob & he cared about status. Like buying a house that almost ruined him later.

          ** my opinions are worthless on this matter.

  4. The story of Copernicus is quite fascinating. He was a monk and a local administrator and did his astronomy on the side over many years. He traveled to Italy where he picked up a lot of astronomical info, including some Iranian attempts at devising a non-Ptolemaic system. As a monk he was not allowed to marry and he was hounded for decades by his monastic superiors for keeping a live-in maid. I wonder if she should be given a bit of credit for inspiring his accomplishments.

    1. Oh … that was … amusing

      a href

      that’s the thing I’m not learning.

      1. Now that is interesting.

        The rule I follow is, copy & paste the URL but remove the ‘https://’ from the start of it. WP then restores the ‘https://’ but doesn’t imbed.

        cr

          1. RESULTS:
            A space only doesn’t stop embedding
            Character plus a space stops embedding.

  6. In Warsaw yesterday I saw a crew planting pots of tulips on the street…

  7. Just a minor correction: It is rijsttafel, double t, rice-table.
    Anyway, enjoy.

    1. Correct rice=rijst table=tafel.
      It is a collection of a dozen or so accompaniments (most of them delicious in their own right) to some cooked rice. I’m not even sure it is a traditional Indonesian dish, and not concocted by the Dutch Colonialists. Anyway, it is a great dinner.

  8. I’m a fan of cheesies, as I call them, but I find it hard to find good ones where I live in British Columbia. My favourite from when I lived in Ontario, are Humpty Dumpty Cheese Sticks, so I always buy a few bags whenever I visit. For years I was annoyed that they weren’t available in Western Canada, but the company was bought by Old Dutch, and suddenly they appeared in some stores. Unfortunately there are two manufacturing plants, one in Quebec that supplies Ontario, and another one that supplies B.C. Unfortunately the B.C. supplier makes a different version than the Ontario one, and to be blunt, it sucks.

    It also seems that whenever I find an acceptable alternative, the company stops producing them:
    – Angies (Boom Chicka Pop) used to sell cheesies through Costco, but has stop making them
    – London Drugs was selling a brand that had two unusual flavours, but that company has again stopped making them
    – Walmart used to carry a good brand, but…

    The best ones that I can still get are Herr’s. Unfortunately they don’t seem to distribute to Vancouver stores anymore, but I have found them on road trips close to the Alberta border. Fortunately you can order them through Amazon or directly from the company. They are a little expensive though.

    1. Quebec seems to supply Ontario with a lot of yummy “junk” food. My favourite are the Viva Puffs cookies even though now they are somewhat artificial in taste.

    2. Most of these cheesy puff worms taste nice, but their resulting mash tends to stick between the teeth. I rarely eat them.

    1. I remember that the previous cured patient was in the same situation.
      To me, the problem is that bone marrow transplantation has quite high risk of its own.

    2. I heard a brief interview with one of the doctors who treated the patient and he said that it would not be advisable to use as a treatment because it comes with a high risk, one of which is death. It does offer something worth pursuing though.

  10. As a Canadian, I’m always surprised when people don’t eat pancakes very often. I remember I gave maple syrup to my auntie in NZ and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it.

    1. We can only pity them in their deprivation. Where are they holed up? I’d like to donate. 😎

    2. I often eat pancakes, I just had them them as recently as 2013! But we eat them with sugar and cinnamon or sugar and lemon juice here.
      In my youth we ate bacon pancakes in winter.

      1. I just discovered ginger syrup to put on pancakes. It’s quite yummy if you like ginger!

    1. Oops…that just goes to his museum’s home page. Clicking on “Gentle Man” at the bottom left reveals him w/ cat. He knew how to draw them.

  12. If you go to Holland, make sure you don’t miss out on the ‘maatjes’, delicious raw herring, generally eaten with onion, and/or some smoked eel.
    I just noted that the “Genuine American chocolate chip cookies” I’m partaking in now (and delicious they are) in South Africa, are actually manufactured in Holland. Go ask…

  14. “Temperature drives the evolution and global distribution of egg color in modern birds.” I doubt it.
    The idea seems to be that sunlight falling directly on heavily pigmented eggs heats them and reduces developmental time. This would be especially important at high temperate and polar latitudes. However, few birds, even ones with cup-shaped nests, lay eggs exposed directly to sunlight. Measurements presented in the paper seem to show modest effects of pigmentation on egg heating, abt 1-3 degrees F., too small to reduce development time by much. In many or most pair-forming birds, females spend from 50%-75% of their time incubating, giving little time for direct heating. She is often fed by the male. In well studied birds (e.g., Great Tit), speed of development does not seem so important as developmental synchronization among nestmates and hatching when caterpillars are at peak abundance on oak trees.
    Perhaps some real ornithologists could chime in?

    1. It does seem simplistic [speaking as a non-birdologist & non-scientist]. Modern birds make up the colours & patterns of their eggs from blue & red pigments & I would have thought that camouflage from parasites/predators would be a bigger driver by far. Thus egg colouration determined by the nest materials, ambient light & perhaps the colouration of the egg sitter seems more likely.

      HERE’S a paper on dino egg colours

  15. Well actually, to split hairs**, that train annunciator isn’t *at* St Pancras, since the train it is announcing is going to St Pancake, it’s somewhere down the line.

    And the train’s a ‘fast’ or ‘semi-fast’ since it has no intermediate stops.

    (**Sorry, the laws of physics made me do it)

    cr

    1. ASSUMING the sign is showing the scheduled time for the train, I’d guess that’s at Farringdon station and the train is the 08.54 from Purley via London Bridge, terminating at St Pancake (hence the ‘only’ on the sign).

      (Any idea how many East Midlands Trains, First Capital Connect, SouthEastern, and Thameslink timetables I had to download to find that? It was NOT the first one I thought of…

      Of course, if the 08.31 is time of day, and the train is just the next train from that platform, that blows it wide open…)

      The background of the picture doesn’t give much away, all I can tell from Googling Farringdon Station images is that it’s not incompatible with being there.

      No I don’t have OCD, why do you ask? 😉
      cr

  16. On March 4, 1616, Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, proposing a Hili-centric solar system,

    That was something like 394 years fore-sighted of him. Has the Vatican been informed of this potential miracle – they alway like to take the blame for the good things, and they’ve got plenty of bad news they’ll be wanting to distract people from.

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