Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 6, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Sunday, October 6, 2019. It’s National Noodle Day,  Garlic Lovers’ Day, National German American Day (see below), and National Plus Size Appreciation Day. It’s also the third day of World Space Week, and National Badger Day (yes, there are badgers in the U.S.; one is below):

An American badger

The sad news today is that the great drummer Ginger Baker has died at age 80. The BBC obituary is here, and here’s a tweet from his website.(h/t: Matthew).

Stuff that happened on October 6 includes:

  • 1600 – Euridice, the earliest surviving opera, receives its première performance, beginning the Baroque period.
  • 1683 – Immigrant families found Germantown, Pennsylvania in the first major immigration of German people to America. [This is the origin of German American Day, though Wikipedia says that 13 German families landed in Philadelphia on this day and only later founded Germantown.]
  • 1910 – Eleftherios Venizelos is elected prime minister of Greece for the first of seven times.
  • 1927 – Opening of The Jazz Singer, the first prominent “talkie” movie.

Here’s Al Jolson singing in that iconic first full-length “talkie”. Jolson played Jakie Rabinowitz, a Jewish boy destined to be a cantor (a singer in the synagogue), but who abandons that fate to become a popular singer, to his parents’ great dismay.

  • 1943 – World War II: Thirteen civilians are burnt alive by a paramilitary group in Crete.
  • 1981 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is murdered by Islamic extremists.
  • 2007 – Jason Lewis completes the first human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth.

In 2010 a really bad thing happened:

  • 2010 – Instagram, a mainstream photo-sharing application, is founded.

And so we have “influencers”, a word and a position I despise.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1820 – Jenny Lind, Swedish soprano and actress (d. 1887)
  • 1846 – George Westinghouse, American engineer and businessman, founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company (d. 1914)
  • 1900 – Willy Merkl, German mountaineer (d. 1934)

Merkl died trying to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas. Forced to take refuge during a nine-day blizzard, he and his colleagues perished of starvation and cold. The mountain, shown below, wasn’t climbed until 1953, when Hermann Buhl made a dangerous solo ascent and had to spend the night out on the mountain because he summited too late. By the time of Buhl’s success, 31 people, including Merkl, had died trying to climb the peak.

This view, which resembles that you can see in Nepal (Nanga Parbat is in Pakistan), shows you why I love the Himalayas. The incongruous sight of these stupendous peaks rising up to the sky from a verdant pasture fills me with awe. To me, there is no more beautiful sight on the planet.

More people born on this day:

  • 1914 – Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian ethnographer and explorer (d. 2002)
  • 1939 – Melvyn Bragg, English journalist, author, and academic

Those who “fell asleep” on October 6 include:

  • 1536 – William Tyndale, English Protestant Bible translator (b. c. 1494)
  • 1892 – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English poet (b. 1809)
  • 1989 – Bette Davis, American actress (b. 1908)
  • 2012 – J. J. C. Smart, English-Australian philosopher and academic (b. 1920)
  • 2018 – Montserrat Caballé, Spanish soprano (b. 1933)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pretends to listen to Sarah:

Sarah: Did you hear what I said?
Hili: Yes, I’m listening all the time.
Photo: Sarah Lawson
In Polish:
Sarah: Słyszałaś co mówiłam?
Hili: Tak, słucham cały czas.

From Saving West Virginia Wildlife Farm:

A sweet picture from Tail Love:

From Sad and Useless Humor via reader William:

From reader gravelinspector. The translation of the Japanese is (via the Google translator is “This is a superb pendulum display! It is difficult to adjust this. It was a very craftsmanship. Nagoya City Science Museum Science Festival for Youth, NGK Science Site”

Gravelinspector’s explanation, which of course is above my pay grade, is this:

Before the step-change (stick moved) a couple of the balls have several cm at several Hz noise. After the step change, the dominant frequency of the system slowly increases, and the energy of the step change is re-partitioned into the spectrum of noise frequencies. I don’t know the maths of Fourier’s theorem well enough (that you can describe any waveform as a sum of sine wave components), but I see that happening here. (The different balls are also communicating with each other, interacting, by vibrating the frame, which has its own resonances. That’s part of what is going on here.)

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. The first shows the flehmen response of a cat sniffing feet:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1177567264142450695

Cat butler!

Tweets from Matthew. First, a spider evolving to mimic a warningly colored ladybird beetle: a case of Batesian mimicry:

Matthew says, “Yes this is a joke,” and of course it has to be, but you can fool some of the people on the internet all of the time.

A bird with a never-changing and lovely greeting ritual (read the link; they spend hours a day maintaining their pile of dirt that is their nest and egg incubator):

Shark Bay, a highly saline environment in west Australia, is famous for being one of the few places on Earth where stromatolites (one of the earliest known forms of life, made by cyanobacteria) are still living. It’s also a World Heritage Site with tons of great animals, including dolphins who protect their noses with sponges while foraging on the bottom.

Here’s a video of the sponge-using dolphins, passed on from generation to generation via cultural inheritance:

 

22 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “Euridice” by Iacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini should not be confused with the much later and better known (and truly baroque) “Orfeo ed Euridice” by Christof Willibald Gluck.
    A dramatic sad story, btw.

  3. “The incongruous sight of these stupendous peaks rising up to the sky from a verdant pasture fills me with awe. To me, there is no more beautiful sight on the planet.”

    And no more remarkable illustration of the power of plate tectonics to build mountains. The Himalayas exist because India is ploughing into Asia.

    1. IIRC India is ploughing under Asia.
      But it is beautiful indeed.
      A comparable view, but from a more desert like valley can be seen in Afghanistan. At the foot of the Himalayas (or Hindu Kush in A) the mountain is always present, always overthere ….
      Jerry, did I understand correctly (from a previous post) you actually climbed Mount Everest?

      1. I think Jerry has been up the “donkey trail” to Everest Base Camp, which is at about 5350m. That’s pretty near to the base of the “death zone”, where people just don’t improve condition with further acclimatisation.
        If they could get tourists much higher, they probably would, but Everest-wards from there is the Khumbu Ice Fall, which overall is responsible for about half the deaths on the mountain. Ascending Pumori above the Base Camp is a popular climb for mountaineers planning to ascend higher on the mountain, but it’s a grade 3 mixed rock-ice route and you do need to be an experienced climber to move fast enough to climb it reasonably safely.

  4. “We are very sad to say that Ginger has passed away peacefully in hospital this morning.”

    Doesn’t surprise me drummer Ginger Baker “passed away”; it does surprise me he passed away “peacefully.” Dude wasn’t known for doing anything else peacefully. Hell, Jack Bruce damn near brained him with his bass back in the day. Hell of a musician, though.

    He outlived Keith Moon and John Bonham by forty years. That’s saying something, though Charlie Watts is still out there like Old Man River.

    1. ROLLING STONE:

      …but for Cream bandmate Jack Bruce, Baker’s extended solos served a more basic function onstage. He once said he liked them “because I could go off and have a smoke”

      In the Student Unions I inhabited in the early to mid ’70s, extended drum solos were useful for popping out to the bar from the concert hall to get another pint – knowing you were missing nothing.

    2. You and me, we sweat and strain,
      Body all aching and wracked with pain.
      You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
      Another day older but deeper in debt.
      But Old Charlie Watts,
      He keeps on Rolling along.

      I too got hung up on the word “peacefully”.

  5. The dolphins may have learned to use the sponge glove by simply playing with one, checking out the fun effects of pushing the sponge along the bottom. Humans tend to accumulate and pass on discoveries effectively, while other species are locked into small local cultural discoveries that seem never to be developed.

  6. THE WAVE PENDULUM: Invented perhaps by Ernst Mach when he was Professor of Experimental Physics at Charles-Ferdinand University (today known as Charles University) in Prague around the year 1867. The demonstration is used in the Czech Republic under the name Machuv vlnostroj — the “Wavemachine of Mach”

    However there’s bunkum going on in the explanation given here on WEIT!

    “This is a superb pendulum display! It is difficult to adjust this. It was a very craftsmanship. Nagoya City Science Museum Science Festival for Youth, NGK Science Site”

    […]

    Before the step-change (stick moved) a couple of the balls have several cm at several Hz noise. After the step change, the dominant frequency of the system slowly increases, and the energy of the step change is re-partitioned into the spectrum of noise frequencies. I don’t know the maths of Fourier’s theorem well enough (that you can describe any waveform as a sum of sine wave components), but I see that happening here. (The different balls are also communicating with each other, interacting, by vibrating the frame, which has its own resonances. That’s part of what is going on here.)

    The Google translation of the words in the Tweet [bolded] are accurate – the pendulum lengths have to be precise for a neat effect, but the rest of the wordage that I’ve quoted is baloney. In a nutshell, the individual pendulums are UNCOUPLED [they don’t effect the period of swing of each other] & the frame is far too stiff to act as a coupling mechanism.

    ** The “dominant frequency of the system slowly increases” is just not true

    ** Nothing is “re-partitioned”

    ** There is no need to invoke Fourier’s theorem – one can mathematically model the collective motions of the pendula with a continuous function if you’re so inclined, but why would you?

    ** There is no [as in very, very little] exchange of energy between pendula [resonances have to be damped by using a decent frame for this thing to actually work]

    ** Period of swing of each pendulum remains effectively constant & is determined by the pendulum length for each pendulum

    DETAILS:
    HARVARD NATURAL SCIENCES LECTURE DEMONSTRATION

    https://youtu.be/yVkdfJ9PkRQ

    VIDEO DESCRIPTION: “Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual travelling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion. […] The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations”

    1. The same Nagoya Science Show demo from another angle. The wiring setup is a passive sensor system, measuring individual periods I think – there’s 10 red LEDs along the bottom rail & I think these are detected by 10 sensors at the top – one each in the pendulum line/thread/wire hangers. Perhaps that’s why the ‘crystal balls’ are transparent.

      https://twitter.com/nagoya_SciShow/status/1180371677806415872

      1. I clicked through on the tweet. Once I saw the end on view, the second one above, it seemed like perfectly normal pendulums swinging, with the shorter ones going faster.

    3. Agreed. The individual pendulum lengths need to be in a particular ratio to get the periods in a suitable progression, but that’s all. Each pendulum does its own thing and they gradually shift out of phase with each other and back into phase.

      cr

  7. Never saw the Jazz Singer in entirety or knew that it transitioned from silent to talkie in mid-stream. Pretty cool.

  8. And re. the massacre in Crete, I’ve long thought it was remarkable, and now I think it’s all the more remarkable, that in Chania (which isn’t all that far from Rethymnon near where the massacre took place) there is a German war memorial – a monument with a diving eagle perched on a swastika. The swastika was filled in shortly after the end of the war, and now the bird is mostly gone after a storm, but it lasted into the early 2000’s and at one glance when I saw it with no forewarning in 1984 it was obvious that it was a Nazi memorial of some sort.

  9. Correction: “The Jazz Singer” is not all-talkie. It was intended that only the songs would have sound. But Jolson ad libbed a few words around the songs (“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”) and audiences went wild.

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