Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 21, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, March 21, 2019,  and the first official day of Spring!

Two ducks arrived at the pond yesterday, though they don’t include Honey. It’s National French Bread Day, though you are guilty of cultural appropriation if you eat it, and all of the days below:

I guess people like to put these things on the first day of Spring.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) is interactive, and a first. As Pitchfork notes:

In honor of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Google is launching its first ever AI-powered Google Doodle. Users will be able to input their own melody, which the Doodle’s machine learning model will craft a harmony to in the Baroque style of Bach. The interactive Doodle was made in partnership with Google Magenta and Google PAIR and will offer facts aimed to help users learn the basic fundamentals of how machine learning works. It’ll be available from March 21 (Bach’s birthday) to 22.

Try it!

In the Old Style calendar, Bach was born on March 21, but in the Gregorian calendar it was March 31.  To get started, click on the screenshot below, which takes you to the Doodle:

On this day in 1556, according to Wikipedia, “On the day of his execution in Oxford, former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer deviates from the scripted sermon by renouncing the recantations he has made and adds, “And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.” This is the day that the Bahá’í calendar began in 1844, and is celebrated as the New Year by members of that faith. On this day in 1871, journalist Henry Stanley began his long search to find the explorer David Livingstone. He did—on November 10 of that year, though Stanley’s words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” may have been an invention.

On this day in 1925, Tennessee’s Butler Act went into force, prohibiting the teaching of human evolution (note: not evolution, but human evolution). It was this act that Scopes violated when convicted in the 1925 “Monkey Trial.” On March 21, 1935, Reza Shah Pahlvavi, the Shah of Iran, requested that the international community start calling Persia by its native name of “Iran.”

On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco bay closed for good. You can still visit it, though, on tours by the National Park Service. I highly recommend a visit.  On this day in 1965, Martin Luther King led 3200 people on the third (and successful) civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  Here’s a short video history of the three marches:

Here’s another one I just learned of: on this day in 1983, according to Wikipedia, “The first cases of the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic begin; Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of poison gas, but the cause is later determined mostly to be psychosomatic. That is a weird one!  Finally, it was on this day 13 years ago that Twitter was founded. Many are addicted to it or swear by it; I use it but am appalled at the hatred and rancor it engenders.

Notables born on this day include Joseph Fourier (1768), Modest Mussorgsky (1839), Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1867), Julio Gallo (1910), Éric Rohmer (1920), Walter Gilbert (1932, Nobel Laureate), Rosie O’Donnell (1962), and Cenk Uygur (1970).

Notables who croaked on this day were few, and include Pocahontas (1617, the real one), and Bobby Short (2005).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cadging for noms in the guise of social justice:

Hili: We have to repair the world.
A: OK, where do we start?
Hili: With my bowls.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy naprawić świat.
Ja: O.K., od czego zaczniemy?
Hili: Od moich miseczek.

A cartoon from my undergrad adviser Bruce Grant:

A meme from reader Keira:

From reader Barry. This is either a brave woman, a stupid woman, or the gator is tame, but one thing is for sure—she’s an animal lover.

https://twitter.com/AwardsDarwin/status/1108163353044811777

From reader Nilou. I think the sparrowhawk won this round, but she’d better get out of the road pronto.

From reader Jiten. This looks deeply suspicious: the groping and thigh-rubbing by the TSA agent is far more extensive than seems warranted. Perhaps he likes to grope; even in my gropiest experiences I haven’t gone through what this kid did.

Tweets from Matthew. I can’t believe that a). a bird can make a noise like that and b). the cat doesn’t seem to care!

Look at that mess of puffins! (Does anybody know what a group of puffins is called?)

Remember the strutting woodcock from yesterday? Look how cryptic they are:

The tweet below exemplifies Pinker’s thesis that morality has gotten better:

Tweets from Grania, including this romantic dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Lumpy:

A gruesome but unique relic:

I love this. Yes, ducklings can’t fly like that, but who cares: I’m a sucker for ducks. The thread’s comments are nice, too:

30 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. There is a twit in the white house that apparently uses twitter a great deal. However, I am told the damage done by Facebook and Google is worse.

    1. If I believed in metempsychosis, I’d swear that this young woman had once been a crocodile whispering priest at Crocodilopolis in ancient Egypt. They were mentioned by Herodotous, Strabo, and other writers in antiquity.

        1. There’s a welter of fascinating information in classical sources about crocodile worship, a lot derivative of earlier writers, a lot of it mythical, but some quite true, I am sure, such as the crocodile priests, if only because we see videos like the one in question.

          A couple of interesting sources: Aelian “On the Nature of Animals” 8:4 “‘(ii). I have heard that the Egyptians assert that the sacred crocodiles are tame, and if their keepers at any rate touch and handle them they submit and do not object; and they keep their jaws open when the keepers insert their hands and cleanse their teeth and pick out bits of flesh that have got between them. Further, the Egyptians assert that the aforesaid crocodiles are endowed with prophecy, and adduce the following evidence. Ptolemy (which of the line it was, you must ask them) was calling to the tamest of the crocodiles, but it paid no attention and would not accept the food he offered. And the priests realised that the crocodile knew that Ptolemy’s end was approaching and consequently declined to take food from him.”

          And this:
          https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/06/12/the-ancient-crocodile-hunters-that-helped-to-supply-the-roman-games/#574f086547d3, which reproduces a scene from the Palestrina Mosaic depicting people hand-feeding crocodiles.

          Also, another book I just came across that you and others might be interested in, “A Sourcebook on Medieval Science” by Edward Grant, 1974. The Google Book URL is too long to reproduce.

      2. Hail Sobek! Several centuries and a millenium later, the 17th century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi claimed the Egyptians were also skilled at having sex with crocodiles. He wrote down several tips on how to safely engage in such activities.

  3. Meteorological spring starts on the 1st of March & I am sticking with that. It means summer starts on 1st of June. It makes no sense to start summer in midsummer! nuts!

    🙂 … xxx

    1. I celebrate Spring with the arrival of the first flowers. When crocus blooms start poking their little purple heads out of the soil, which was on the 13th, then it’s Spring. Maybe not something that can be pinpointed with mathematical accuracy but I celebrate the seasons as localized events based on latitude and climate rather than what a calendar says.

      1. Now I want to sing –
        “When it’s spring again, I’ll bring again, tulips from Amsterdam…”

        I’d like to hear PCC[E] sing that in Holland!

  4. The TSA PAT DOWN Occurred March 26, 2017
    DFW International Airport, Dallas, Texas.
    Recorded by Jennifer Williamson the mother of 13 yr old Aaron

    FULL VIDEO WITH AUDIO

    Video description:

    Aaron cleared traditional x-ray without incident. He placed his backpack on the x-ray scanner, his laptop had not been removed from his backpack, it was removed, returned to the scanner and cleared x-ray without any alarm.

    He was standing with me while other passenger bags were checked, then an an agent who claimed to be the supervisor said he would require a pat down. I indicated that he was a child and also had Sensory Processing Disorder and I would prefer they find an alternate way to scan him and did not understand what the problem was, since he had already passed x-ray screening without incident. I was very rudely told that we could do that or we could be escorted out by DFW police and would not be flying and also sarcastically told that I was “setting a great example for my children”.

    This same apparent supervisor gave us multiple rude comments and made all of us feel targeted because I spoke up in concern for the procedures. The pat down of Aaron was extremely excessive and seems to me very unfounded after he passed screening without any alarm

    NBC video: The Williamsons talk about the incident

  5. To quote Caitlin R. Kiernan, an author who happens to be transsexual…

    “Nothing but good would come from pulling the plug and silencing Twitter forever. It is a chaos engine and needs to be dismantled.”

    Date: 28th of April, 2018

  6. It’s highly unusual to find Skeletal remains on the site of a Battlefield, still in their Chain/Mail and or Armour, as this equipment was very expensive, a suit of Armour for a knight could cost £20,000 + in today’s money, it could set a poor Archer up for life.

  8. Wow, that TSA agent could be Father (“Full”) Nelson, the defrocked parish priest.

  9. The Bach doodle is useless. I tried to plug in a fugue theme to see what the computer would do with it, but it wouldn’t let me change eighth notes to quarter notes. The designers don’t seem to know much about music notation. I want my money back!

    1. I really like improbability. It seems to reflect the birds appearance and flight characteristics.

  12. I love the badgers, and the baby badger yesterday.

    The fused skull is gruesome but kinda captivating.

    I was once acquainted with one Sally [Walter] Thomas, an intersexed person, who identified as a woman but was enough of a male to be incarcerated in Alcatraz (several other prisons for men as well). She was full of amazing and crazy stories about her criminal escapades, which at first seemed so kooky that I was sure she was lying; but when I researched them, the ones I could find were true.. She was incarcerated along with Morton Sobell and Mickey Cohen said that Mickey Cohen named her “The Queen of Alcatraz.”

    The barking cockatoo atop the cat is hilarious, also hilarious is the cat, which snoozes serenrly throughout the entire display, except for one rather tired cock of its head. It’s obviously used to this indignity.

  13. This day in Superstition Kingdom they lost their morality platform again – well, most of what remained – since “the moralizing high gods” came *after* complex, large, multi-ethnic societies:

    “Humans Built Complex Societies Before They Invented Moral Gods”

    The appearance of moralizing gods in religion occurred after—and not before—the emergence of large, complex societies, according to new research. This finding upturns conventional thinking on the matter, in which moralizing gods are typically cited as a prerequisite for social complexity.”

    “For the new study, Turchin and his colleagues analyzed nearly 50,000 records spanning the last 10,000 years of world history—from the Neolithic to the beginning of industrial/colonial periods. Over 400 different societies were included from 30 regions around the globe. In all, 51 different measures of social complexity and four measures of moral divinity were used to assess any potential connection between the two. Measures of social complexity included population, size of the military, and the presence of roads, judicial system, and scientific texts. Moralizing gods were identified by beliefs such as a high god who created the Universe and actively enforces human morality.”

    “So without the presence of vengeful moralizing gods to keep citizens of complex societies in check, it’s reasonable to wonder how these societies managed to stay intact. One possibility detected by the researchers is that daily or weekly collective rituals—the equivalent of Sunday mass or Friday prayers—appeared early in the rise of social complexity. Such rituals, they said, “may have allowed new beliefs and practices to spread to, and become stabilized within, much larger populations than had previously been possible.””

    [ https://gizmodo.com/humans-built-complex-societies-before-they-invented-mor-1833436320 , https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 ]

    https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-019-1043-4/MediaObjects/41586_2019_1043_Fig4_ESM.jpg

    https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-019-1043-4/MediaObjects/41586_2019_1043_Fig5_ESM.jpg

  15. The TSA agent checked the bot’s armpits four times. Must have s thing about armpits, and boys.
    One of the most creepy things I have ever seen.

    Tip for the day:

    Don’t kick no sleeping alligators.

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