Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 4, 2019 • 6:30 am

We’re arrived at another Caturday: May 4, 2019. It’s National Hoagie Day, and if you’re not familiar with hoagies, it’s the eastern U.S. term for a “submarine sandwich.” If you don’t know what that is, it’s sad. In my view, Britain needs shops that sell good “subs” rather than 2-mm thin “chicken and sweetcorn butties.” (No, Subway “subs” aren’t good ones.)

It’s Star Wars Day (I haven’t seen the movie), and the date is said to derive from this:

Apocryphally, the reference was first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. An online news article from the Danish public broadcaster says her political party, the Conservatives, placed a congratulatory advertisement in The London Evening News, saying “May the Fourth Be with Yu, Maggie. Congratulations.”

It’s also World Naked Gardening Day; if you send me a picture of you celebrating that day without naughty bits showing, I’ll put it up tomorrow.

Puttering around in my empty lab yesterday, I found some old papers I’d saved from college and, among them, coincidentally, was the first research paper in genetics, the identification of an unknown white-eye mutant (actually a combination of cn and bw, which I called “tangerine” and “chocolate” respectively) in Drosophila melanogaster. This was a project for my genetics class in my second year in college. And it was dated exactly fifty years ago!

50/50: a perfect score! It was actually this paper, and my amazement at being able to map the mutations cleanly, and identify how they acted, that made me want to go into genetics. Many thanks to my professor, Bruce Grant at the College of William and Mary.

News from this day in history is a bit thin. On May 4, 1626, the Walloon explorer Peter Minuit arrived at Manhattan island aboard his ship the See Meeuw. He latter became governor and then reportedly bought Manhattan from the native Americans for about $1000.  Exactly 160 years later, the Haymarket affair took place in Chicago, when a bomb was thrown at police trying to disperse a peaceful labor rally for an eight-hour day.  In the explosion and ensuing police gunfire, 8 were killed and 60 wounded. Eight civilians were convicted; four were hanged.  It was a landmark event in the history of the American labor movement.

On May 4, 1904, the U.S. began constructing the Panama Canal.  And on this day in 1932, Al Capone began serving 11 years in prison for tax evasion, first in Atlanta and then at Alcatraz, Diagnosed with syphillis and gonorrhea, he died in 1947.  On May 4, 1953, Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Old Man and the Sea. To my mind, it is not the best of his novels: I think The Sun Also Rises is on top.

On this day in 1970, four unarmed students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia were killed at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. You all know the iconic picture of the event, and here’s Neil Young’s song about it, performed at Farm Aid 25 in 2010:

On this day in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And on May 4, 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Yasser Arafat signed a peace accord giving self-rule to the Gaza Strip and Jericho. Sadly, things are still violent there: there were riots at the border yesterday, leading to one Palestinian killed, Hamas firing 100 rockets into Israel, injuring a 15-year-old boy, and two Israeli soldiers wounded the previous day by snipers.

Notables born on this day include Horace Mann (1796), Alice Liddell (1852), Eugenie Clark (1922), Audrey Hepburn (1929), and George Will (1941).

Alice Liddell (1852-1934) was of course the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which originated when Alice asked Carroll to tell her and her sisters a story during a boating trip. Here she is at seven, 20, and 80:

7:

20:

80:

Those who bought the farm on this day include Moe Howard (1975), Paul Butterfield (1987), and Christian de Duve (2013, Nobel Laureate).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is exploring leisurely:

Cyrus: Come on, we have to see the other part of the orchard.
Hili: There is no hurry.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Chodź, trzeba obejrzeć drugą część sadu.
Hili: Nie spieszy się.

A cat chart from reader David:

I found this on the Twitter feed of reader/athropologist Dorsa Amir. It looks to me like a duck!

And two collated tweets from Stephanie Lahey. Cats get grants for the win! Be sure to click on the original pair of tweets:

https://twitter.com/StephanieLahey/status/1124113192605618176

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. The first might convey too much information, though:

Kittens learn to lick:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1123968438735646723

Tweets from Grania. Ebony and Ivory—live together in perfect harmony:

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1108822684186693632

A cat tests its bath water:

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/1124240206159339520

Once again Nick Cohen proves himself the Orwell of the post-Hitchens era. Do read the piece:

Tweets from Matthew. The first is a lovely snow leopard photo:

DO NOT TOUCH THIS CAT!

And the origin of the penguin Feynman diagram in quantum physics. Ellis’s account (Trigger warning: weed is involved!)

Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos] and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976… The penguin name came in 1977, as follows.

In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K and I wrote a paper on GUTs predicting the b quark mass before it was found. When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K, Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology. That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.

For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrinwhere I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

25 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. You got to see “Star Wars”, Jerry. The original film is a classic, just about two hours long, expertly paced, and tells a neat fairytale adventure story. It’s perfect for a lazy Sunday — if you ever have one of those. You can cure that peculiar cinematic Philistinism. 🙂

    1. It should be seen solely for its cultural significance but when I saw a bit of it recently it seemed extremely dated and the dialogue is quite wooden. The special effects are not nearly as good as in “2001: A Space Odyssey” which is 9 years older.

      1. I heard an interview in which Mark Hamill asked George Lucas what this movie was about after his screen test, and he said it’s like Buck Rogers but with good effects like 2001, and faster and louder.

        I add that idea of having C-3PO and R2-D2 largely guide the audience through the story was not a subtle borrowing from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.

        I think I make this comment every May 4th.

        1. Seen it. It’s only too obviously a movie directed at 10-year-olds. R2D2 is just tolerable but C3PO is so ‘quaint’ or ‘quirky’ it makes me want to barf. Yoda insufferably annoying is, luckily for my sanity I’ve never watched the one with Jar Jar Binks.

          Some (okay, many) of the FX are quite good though, most particularly the opening shot where that space cruiser comes past and keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

          But on the whole I’ll stick with Red Dwarf, thanks.

          cr

          1. The creative element in the mix that makes Star Wars stand apart is brilliant use of the classic technique of leitmotif, not to mention John Williams’ score. It’s no secret that the sound of many of the themes were clearly drawn from Tchaikovsky (Swan Lake), Dvorak (New World Theme), and others but so what. Star Wars would have failed if it was mostly about impressive effects or sophisticated story writing.

  2. I wish I could have understood the value of writing like that earlier – I don’t know the technical consequences of the details but it is clear, interesting, and meets Eric S. Raymond’s criteria “volume is not precision” – writing less and saying less can do more.

  3. I thought Naked Gardening Day was yesterday! No wonder I got so many funny looks!

    1. Celebrating Naked Gardening Day without showing any naughty bits kind of defeats the point, doesn’t it? 😉

      cr

  4. Re the cat language chart ,the only time my cat Misha does the excited one is when i let him out in the morning ,ungrateful sod .

  5. Sorry to be that guy, but Haymarket would have been 260 years after Peter Minuit arrived in Manhattan.

  6. What a wonderful object that 33,000 year old duck is. It is amazing to think of the person carving that – so far away in time yet brought right up to us through the object she/he created.

  7. During your study of the Drosophila double mutant, you got the two mutations separated by crossing over. What were their individual phenotypes?

    1. Tangerine was bright reddish-orange, and chocolate was brown. It turned out that the mutants were really cinnabar (removes brown pigment, making eye bright red) and brown (removing red pigment, making eye brown). When both mutations are homozygous (they’re recessives), the eye is white. Thus I was stunned to cross our white-eyed sample to normal flies and get four colors in the F2! I identified the locations of the mutations but of course when I wrote the paper I didn’t know what their “classical” names were.

  8. “ANALYSIS OF UNKNOWN MUTANT”

    Does it have super powers? Because that’s the title you expect on a document describing super powers.

  9. I love the “home schooling” clip. The kittens are clearly looking at Mom to see if they did it right. The one in the back has to pop its head up a bit as Mom is obscured by its sibling.

    1. Yes, I noticed that. It’s clear they are mimicking. They must have some inheritance for the trait though. Otherwise, it would be much harder to master.

  10. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Star Wars when I first saw it. Which of course, since I’m always wrong, means that everyone would be impressed by it. My assessment at the time was that it was a cheap rip-off of Star Trek. To be fair, in my youth nothing else was as good as Star Trek either. The Outer Limits and Columbo were a close second and third though. I hated it when McCloud or McMillan & Wife were on. Where the hell was Columbo?

  11. In Massachusetts, which of course is in the Northeastern part of the US, we do not call these items”hoagies”, but “submarines” or “subs. Many would not comprehend the former designation.

    1. In California, we see all the names for such a sandwich: torpedo, hoagie, submarine, grinder, etc. depending on which region of the country they are trying to channel. There is also the Vietnamese bahn mi which are wonderful. I consume more of them than all the others put together.

    2. I suppose the UK equivalent of the sub is the baguette, culturally appropriated from the French, of course (as is the banh mi). I know Jerry believes (erroneously) that we can’t make sandwiches; but even he might be grudgingly impressed by some of the stuff that our sandwich bars and pubs get into their baguettes. I had a bacon, brie and cranberry one in a local pub the other day that I could barely get into my mouth.

  12. My friend has a strain of Muscovy ducks which are mute. The pics here of Alice Liddell make me wonder if she is from a strain of people who cannot smile.

  13. PCC is, of course, right that Sun Also is Hem’s best, even though it was his first. Everyone needs to get to know Brett & Jake. The Old Man, while a taut and engrossing read, is weighted down with its Christian symbolism–which of course Hem, in true Hem fashion, denied.

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