Saturday: Hili dialogue

39 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

1. Prime Rib day? Not my favorite but now living in a mostly grass feed area, I can’t say much for any meat. Those of you who find it otherwise – go for it.

   Marching to impeach – it’s sounding better everyday.

   Get well…

2. Get well soon, Jerry.

3. Get well soon Jerry.

4. I don’t know why the penguins are so fussy about eating fresh snow. Rabbits and hares have a special kind of digestion called hindgut fermentation. In short, they eat their own poop and digest it a second time. Bunnies actually make two different kinds of droppings: little black round ones and softer black ones known as cecotropes that are eaten.

   1. Rabbits and hares have a special kind of digestion called hindgut fermentation.

      They also have a considerably modified gut – super-big caecum, which compares in mass to the whole colon. And a gut microflora to go with it, passed on from doe to kits.
      Maybe some of the flightless plant-eating birds can do something like that, but penguins are fish and krill eaters, not vegetarians, so don’t need the mound of specialisations for eking out the nutrition in cellulose.

      1. It is interesting, too, to think of the historic record of penguins preserved under layers of annual snowfall. Since the poo would be too cold to support much decomposition, there should remain a record (not unlike tree rings) dating back to the beginning of penguins or the beginning of snowfall.

         1. That would be true if the penguins nested/ brooded on an area of accumulating ice. If the ice breaks away during some seasons – e.g. in an abnormally warm summer with a high tide – then your record goes away at intervals. Thick accumulations of ice means relatively high edges to the ice sheets. Some penguin species can leap several metres out of the water to get back onto the ice surface, but you see enough failures that it has got to be a constraint on nesting locations and their connection to fishing haul-outs.
            I think there’s more potential where you’re accumulating shingle beaches … but again that is a process that is suppressed by the sea ice. Volcanic sub-Antarctic islands with less fast ice would be my target for that sort of investigation. But those locations would be temperature-buffered to 0degC by the nearby seawater.
            Hmmm, I’m going to have to think about this. I’ve a gut feeling that there are going to be problems about long-term accumulation like that, but I’m not really putting a finger on why my gut doesn’t like that idea. Part of the problem is that “penguin” covers a number of lifestyles, from egg-on-foot-nesters to those that build rudimentary nests of pebbles with the pebbles becoming a “fetish” of sexual selection.

            1. “pebbles with the pebbles becoming a “fetish” of sexual selection”
               I never knew!

            2. The phenomenon of penguin prostitution is fairly well documented – wasn’t there a Simon + Garfunkle song about a “handful of these pebbles such are promises”?
               I *think* that an object which becomes a proxy for a sexual selection response is called a “fetish”, but I might be getting confused over some other field. Another example would be the contents of the bowers of “Bower Birds”. Or, a non-dinosaurian example … Hmmm, I’m not coming up with one. Any ideas?

            3. I’ve been told that loud, red, convertibles are a big turn-on.

            4. For a certain mindset, yes. (The mindset certainly including the designers and sales-wombats of loud red convertibles, but it’s not clear if anyone else maps into that mindset.)

5. That Japanese multiplication – a very neat technique. Effectively the black lines drawn are ‘contour lines’ delineating the 1’s, 10’s, 100’s etc in the product.

   cr

   1. It’s actually exactly the same technique as standard long multiplication except done in a sort of graphical way.

      1. Yes, true. Though the graphical layout does, I think, make it easier to ensure you haven’t missed a digit.

         Quite a good teaching tool, I think.

         cr

         1. I’m not convinced. It still has the same magic as the standard technique and it looks like there are at least two or three opportunities to screw it up e.g. miscounting the dots or putting the lines in the wrong place.

            Also, the need to handle carries spoils it a little bit.

6. Get well soon, Jerry!

   I think I am becoming a bit of a hypochondriac, working at a university wherein there are always students with the plague. Measures are taken, including the steady use of anti-microbial ointments.

   1. Try working in primary and secondary schools, as I have for the last twelve years, and you’ll have no need for hypochondria. I no longer believe that our offspring are our biological descendants carrying forth the future good of the species. Children are merely vehicles for the convenient conveyance of viruses.

7. They’ve remade ‘Hellboy’? Already???

   Sheesh, the original was only made 15 years ago. What’s with that? Can’t they come up with an original script? Have they no imagination?

   (FWIW, I enjoyed the original Hellboy, it was camp but kinda fun.)

   cr

   1. I think they’re both fun films. And the sequel has some of the most striking imagery in any superhero movie. There’s a bit where the heroes take down a lumbering, hundred foot tall plant-monster thing and as it dies it slowly splurge-carpets the neighbourhood in psychedelic flora and strange, glowing chlorophyll lamps and doodads. It’s visually rapturous.

      1. Okay, maybe I’ll watch it some time.

         I’m still suspicious of remakes in general, though. To say it ‘breaks continuity’ is a massive understatement.

         cr

   2. Yes, I enjoyed Hellboy also even though I am not a fan of that genre. I’m a big fan of Ron Perlman. Although his role was not particularly prominent, “City of Lost Children” is on my Top 10 list. His Twitter feed is pretty outrageous also:

      https://twitter.com/perlmutations

      1. I like him even more now…

   3. I haven’t seen it, but the review on Wittertainment was not not encouraging.

      It’s also described as a prequel, not a remake.

   4. I think this one is hellboy III, really.

8. Look and learn:

   DNA differences between …

   Link is missing.
   The datum is an obvious consequence of the bottlenecks of population at the Red Sea (whether they went north or south) and later at the Bering Straits and Timor Sea. One would assume, fairly safely, that the diversity in “First Nations”+South American “Indians” or the Australian Aborigines is even lower than the Asian/ European branch.

9. That headline about the Easter Bunny violating parole seems worthy of The New York Post, rather than some provincial Traverse City newspaper — you know, like “Headless Body in Topless Bar”.

10. The munching rodents are goony pigs, not hamsters!

    1. Indeed, as with all things on the internet, Cavy-at emptor!

       1. lol!

11. Best wishes Jerry. I hope that dog gets hit by traffic.

12. Re: Prime Rib Day
    A couple of years ago, I decided I would congratulate my baby-having friends by including which ‘day’ it was.
    Example:
    Congratulations on your National Cheese Cake Day Baby!
    I find this too amusing, but it does help me remember which kid is which, and I plan to include it on all birthday salutations in the future. Would recommend.

13. I didn’t know worker bees could lay eggs. I wonder what percentage of them get away with it.

    Get well soon, PCC.

    1. If I were that bee, I’d fly away and try to found my own colony.

    2. Bees are fascists.

       Evidently.

       cr

14. Actually the umbrella crab is not a horseshoe crab. It is, in fact, a crustacean and true crab. Horseshoe crabs are chelicerates.

    1. Never mind, I reread the comment which indicates it has a horseshoe crab morphology.

15. Get well Jerry!

    DNA differences between people from East Asia and Europe are smaller than the diversity of the two parental chromosomes of an African person

    One reason why I was late reading this Hili dialogue was that a new paper use a nice new method of Approximate Bayesian Computation analysis with Deep Learning network to model the demography of humans. They agree with earlier work that find, despite having no reference fossil genome, an archaic ghost line within Africa! It looks like a sister to us, but split between when the archaics migrated to Eurasia and later split into Neanderthals and Denisovans [ https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1684-5 ].

    Moreover they find that [while the DL may be biased /TL] there is effectively zero likelihood for a model without an archaic introgression in Africa, and it comfortably beats the models where instead Neanderthals would migrate back. They also put in the Eurasian ghost lineage that introgressed into Denisovans, so that too is shored up.

    Some numbers:

    The ghost archaic in Africa split at 528 ka, with the Neanderthal/Denisovan ancestor at 603 ka and the latter N/D split at 426 ka. The ghost that introgressed into the Denisovans split from us at 1.4 Ma (in the supplement) and is labeled Erectus – for comparison the Dmanisi Eurasian Erectus is 1.8 Ma – and crossed in crazy late: within the last 100 ka. That is while humans were in Asia, and almost concurrent with the other two late Erectus suspects of Florensis and Luzon humans.

    The ghost populations were sizable, their Ne’s were 20-30+ k as the other humans at the time. Especially the “Erectus” ghost fared well before it vanished.

    The introgressions into N/D are ~ 1 % while the introgressions into A are ~ 5 % (earlier underestimated). Perhaps the difference reflect rates of successful couplings (we do procreate faster than other humans did)? It will be interesting to see future analyses!

    1. All very interesting. Genomics of archaic humans is just about the most fascinating new branch of science. Discoveries are bound to come rather fast and paint a great tapestry of human evolution and migration.

16. Hope you’ll feel better soon, PCC(E).

    -Ryan

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