Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 19, 2020 • 6:30 am

We’re already closing in on the weekend, it being Thursday, November 19 (2020) and all. It’s National Macchiato Day, celebrating an espresso diluted with just a tad of milk and some foam on the top. It’s also Nouveau Beaujolais Day (fuggedabout this glorified grape juice: wait until the Morgons and Moulin-a-Vents are released later), National Carbonated Beverage with Caffeine Day, World Toilet Day (be sure to use one), World Philosophy Day, International Men’s Day, and Women’s Entrepreneurship Day.

News of the Day:

A tiny but adult male saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus) has been rescued from the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree after a three-day, 170-mile trip to New York City. He was in the tree, discovered by a worker, and rescued. Although he was hungry and dehydrated, he is being rehabbed, is doing very well, and will be taken back upstate for release. He’s been named, of course, “Rockefeller.”

Some photos:

Reader Jez, via the BBC, reports that Alexa is now able to decipher your cat’s meows—sort of. Click on the screenshot below for more fascinating information.

An app that aims to translate your cat’s miaow has been developed by a former Amazon Alexa engineer.

MeowTalk records the sound and then attempts to identify the meaning.

The cat’s owner also helps to label the translation, creating a database for the AI software to learn from.

Currently, there are only 13 phrases in the app’s vocabulary including: “Feed me!”, “I’m angry!” and “Leave me alone!”

Research suggests that, unlike their human servants, cats do not share a language.

Two federal prisoners are set for execution by lethal injection: one today and another for December 8. I’ve suggested that Trump should give the condemned a stay so that Biden can review the cases. Curiously, though, the courts have allowed litigation to continue about whether lethal injection involving only pentobabrital without other pain-relieving drugs is cruel and unusual punishment. Apparently, this latter litigation won’t affect whether the executions go forward, though I don’t understand why.

The death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. exceeded 250,000 people yesterday. I remember when estimates of 200,000 for the entire year were consider ridiculously high and impossible.

After New York City hit a 3% Covid-19 positivity rate, the Mayor decided to close its public schools as of today to in-person learning. All education will be remote.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 250,409, a big increase of about 2,000 from yesterday’s figure. The world death toll is 1,356,7051, a huge increase of about 10,600 over yesterday’s report.

Stuff that happened on November 19 includes:

Here’s a rare picture of Lincoln at that address. Remember, there were no microphones then, and speakers had to talk very loudly to be heard by a big crowd. Lincoln is circled:

  • 1942 – World War II: Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR’s favor.
  • 1943 – Holocaust: Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lemberg (Lviv), western Ukraine, murdering at least 6,000 Jews after a failed uprising and mass escape attempt.
  • 1955 – National Review publishes its first issue.
  • 1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the “Ocean of Storms”) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
  • 1969 – Association football player Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.

Fittingly, he scored it at Maracanã Stadium in Rio, though it was a penalty kick. (He went on to score 1281 goals in his career.) Here is #1000 and the goals leading up to it:

  • 1985 – Cold War: In Geneva, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time.
  • 1985 – Pennzoil wins a US$10.53 billion judgment against Texaco, in the largest civil verdict in the history of the United States, stemming from Texaco executing a contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil had entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty.
  • 1994 – In the United Kingdom, the first National Lottery draw is held. A £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of correctly guessing the winning six out of 49 numbers.
  • 1998 – Clinton–Lewinsky scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Notables born on this day include:

Sunday was the most popular preacher in America in his day. Here he is preaching in 1926 (hear another sermon about drinking booze here).

Actress birthdays!

Glover has a claim to be the best tap dancer who ever lived. Here’s a demonstration of his skills:

Those who conked on November 19 include:

  • 1703 – Man in the Iron Mask, French prisoner
  • 1828 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (b. 1797)
  • 1887 – Emma Lazarus, American poet (b. 1849)
  • 1915 – Joe Hill, Swedish-born American labor activist (b. 1879)
  • 1975 – Francisco Franco, Spanish general and dictator, Prime Minister of Spain (b. 1892)
  • 1988 – Christina Onassis, American-Greek businesswoman (b. 1950)
  • 2004 – John Vane, English pharmacologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1927)
  • 2013 – Frederick Sanger, English biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1918)
  • 2017 – Della Reese, American singer and actress (b. 1931)
  • 2017 – Mel Tillis, American singer and songwriter (b. 1932)

Here’s Tillis singing “Take me back to Tulsa”. He had a terrible stutter, but it mysteriously disappeared completely when he sang:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is annoyed that Kulka is starting to look like her (they may be distantly related!):

Hili: She is aping me.
A: How?
Hili: She is mocking me with her appearance.
Kulka is on the left
In Polish:
Hili: Ona mnie papuguje.
Ja: W jaki sposób?
Hili: Przedrzeźnia mnie swoim wyglądem.

Kulka has climbed to the second floor and is meowing to be let in. Hili will no longer go upstairs because she hates Kulka so much!

From Merilee:

From Nicole:

From reader Laurie, an Off the Mark cartoon by Mark Parisi:

Titania points out another instance of book censorship in schools, this time in Burbank, California. Besides Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the other banned books are Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The links to each book go to Wikipedia articles that talk about “incidents of banning and censorship.”

 

Tweets from Matthew. Below this one, I’ve enlarged what I think is Earth:

This cat is annoying but it’s still very cute and I’d take it in a second (sound up!):

Matthew says, “I show this to my students every year, normally projected on a huge screen with the lights off. This year, not so much…
Very impressive way of presenting things, undermining the idea of any tendency towards anything much in the big picture of evolution.

This tweet goes to a useful paper about how we shouldn’t get too hung up on “charismatic animals”, and, especially, why evolution shouldn’t be seen as “progressive”:

A behavioral exaptation. Sound up.

I guess this makes the guy salivate because the beetle looks like a piece of candy (a licorice allsort?):

 

21 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  3. Rare photo of lincoln at gettysburg address: my late cousin, milton kaplan, was curator for prints and photographs at the library of congress in the 1950’s and 60’s. I recall that when i was a kid in the 60’s he told a story of the serendipitous discovery of such a picture during a class being taught at library in the 1950’s on how to identify time, place, and subject for undocumented historical prints and photographs. I recall that they would dump out a number of such objects on a table and class members and instructors would cold read them in real time. During one of these classes either this picture or a similar one caught the teachers (who may have been my cousin, but memory details fade) attention … something about the crowd’s configuration, their attention to the speaker, and the speaker’s appearance…and he worked with the class eventually identifying it as the first known photographic record of lincolns gettysburg address. This photo looks like what he described.

  4. When I was a kid in school, can’t remember the grade, we had to memorize the Gettysburg Address. I don’t think we even comprehended the meaning but that didn’t matter, just memorize it.

    1. Yes. We did too…probably fifth grade (1958ish) in virginia. As with your class, i do not recall any emphasis on understanding..just memorizing. That said, i still recall most of it to this day, and over the years have grown to understand and deeply respect the thoughts expressed.

    2. They had the mayor of New York City on TV this morning attempting to justify closing the schools. It seems the guy is an idiot. No wonder the governor is going nuts – he is getting it from both ends.

    3. It is all together fitting and proper they should do this. It is one way to help to ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.

      School kids should also be required at least to familiarize themselves (though to memorize would be a bit much) with the Second Inaugural and Cooper Union speeches, too.

  5. Savion Glover did some great hoofin’ in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Still, for my money, the best there ever was came in a pair, the Nicholas Brothers:

  6. Re: Uranus. I’ve always thought it a bit weird we used the Roman mythological names for all the planets…except Uranus. That’s from the Greek – Wikipedia tells me the Roman form is Caelus. So we could change it to Caelus if we wanted to be pantheon-ically consistent.

    But if that’s too much of a change, we could instead use the spelling ‘Ouranos.’

    The third fix I thought of is possibly the most socially difficult. Which is to grow up.
    🙂

  8. As some people here know, prison reform is one of the issues I’m most passionate about (and, unfortunately, one that neither party seems to give a hoot about). The death penalty is included in this.

    Even if we don’t manage to completely abolish the death penalty soon, I still can’t figure out why the hell we can’t just use a fatal dose of something like pnetobarbital or secobarbital for all executions. Barbiturates have a low LD 50 threshold, are some of the cheapest drugs available, have no patents still active, cause no pain with or without a fatal overdose, and a fatal dose is easy to procure. In fact, an those barbiturates are usually used in many legal assisted suicide cases. So, in the cases currently being litigated, I don’t see how death by pentobarbital alone could be considered cruel and unusual punishment (assuming, as the Courts do, that execution itself is not cruel and unusual punishment), nor how a proper lethal dose could cause something like flash pulmonary edema. I at least agree with the Circuit Court on this. Death by barbiturate is probably the most “humane” form of execution.

    Like our prisons, few people or politicians care about how humanely we treat prisoners. I think our horrid treatment of prisoners is a reflection of a warped moral sensibility on the part of our society, though I reckon most people simply don’t even bother thinking about the issue and, when they do, think that they’ve wasted their time bothering.

    1. Not sure if this applies to any or all barbituates, but IIRC European drug makers won’t sell their product to any U.S. organization for purposes of execution. My understanding is that this has resulted in several more humane options being unavailable.

      The second “why not” I can think of is that the folks who support the death penalty are going to reject any execution method that is similar to dying peacefully in ones’ sleep, because they don’t see that as a fitting punishment. IOW – some cruelty is their goal.

  9. I can’t believe they are censoring books in Burbank, CA! I went to grade school there and always thought it was pretty much an average middle-class LA suburb. As far as I’m concerned, this officially signals that this craziness has spread everywhere.

  13. Joe Hill was born a century but only 50 km distant from where I was born!

    Notice how long it takes for anything much to happen

    The video is a bit dated though, and the timeline of early events are potentially much compressed.

    The planetary system is now believed to have formed within 200 kyrs (from isotope data), which is consistent with the 500 kyrs timescales of simultaneous star and planet formation that can be seen elsewhere. The Earth-Moon formation is dated to 60 Myrs (from isotope data), the early bombardment is believed to have tailed off at 100 Myrs (from dating Mars meteorite zircons recording impact ages), the earliest subduction zircons showing water (from isotope data) are from 300 Myrs and the earliest safely dated Earth rocks have been found on Earth and Moon and are from 600 Myrs [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks ].

    And the biological evidence from fossil dates and trees agree on an early start [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6152910/pdf/emss-78644.pdf ].

Comments are closed.