Thursday: Hili dialogue

December 10, 2020 • 6:30 am

Normally, people would think of Thursdays as “Only one more day till Friday, and then the weekend!” But now that everyone’s work has been disrupted, I’m not sure the days of the week are invested with their former meaning. At any rate, good morning on Thursday, December 10, 2020: National Lager Day. (I’m so glad it’s not National IPA Day!) It’s also Nobel Prize Day, when at least one prize will be given, Human Rights Day, and Festival for the Souls of Dead Whales.

Today’s Google Doodle honors the economist W. Arthur Lewis (1915-1991; click on screenshot), who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975. Born in St. Lucia, died in Barbados, and living in England and the Caribbean, Lewis served as an economic advisor to many African and Caribbean nations, and helped produce the five-year economic plan for Ghana when that country became independent. He was also an author and theorist; as Wikipedia notes, “Lewis published in 1954 what was to be his most influential development economics article, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (Manchester School). In this publication, he introduced what came to be called the dual sector model, or the “Lewis model”. He was knighted in 1963.

Wine of the Day: This was quaffed along with Chinese food, which demands either champagne, beer, or an off-dry Riesling or Gewurztraminer. Being out of beer, I opted for the bubbly, an inexpensive bottle that was excellent:

News of the Day:

Sadly, the SpaceX Starship, designed to be the transporter of humans long distances through space—even to Mars—had a fairly successful flight yesterday but then exploded upon landing. A video:

But Elon Musk was still happy:

Is it “Goodbye, Facebook”? The article below details how 48 states and the federal government are suing Zuk’s company for being an illegal monopoly—buying up its competitors (Instagram and WhatsApp) to eliminate the competition. (Click on screenshot for details.) I don’t care about the other two companies, but they’d better leave Facebook. Where else am I going to get kitten and animal pictures?

If you’re exercising only a few hours of week in an attempt to lose weight, don’t bother: it won’t work. You need, well, let the NYT tell you:

Can exercise help us shed pounds? An interesting new study involving overweight men and women found that working out can help us lose weight, in part by remodeling appetite hormones. But to benefit, the study suggests, we most likely have to exercise a lot — burning at least 3,000 calories a week. In the study, that meant working out six days a week for up to an hour, or around 300 minutes a week.

Oy!

For some reason I can’t fathom, the Washington Post suggested this article for me from last July for me (click on screenshot). I always wondered if they’d rename the university. (They’ve already renamed my high school in Virginia: Washington-Lee. It’s now Washington-Liberty High School, but it’s only a matter of time before the “Washington” is ditched. (Others who went there include Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty [her brother], Sandra Bullock, Gena Rowlands, and Forrest Tucker.)

But George Washington? Well, the article says this:

Some are shocked by the suggestion that Washington’s name is offensive. Yes, Washington was the country’s first president after leading the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. But Washington enslaved more than 300 black people. He ordered one whipped for walking on his lawn. As president, Washington engaged in elaborate travel to and from Philadelphia to avoid triggering a Pennsylvania law that provided enslaved blacks a pathway to freedom after a certain period in the state. His dentures may have included teeth pulled from his slaves. These are not actions of a man who should be celebrated.

That of course means that Washington, D.C. must also be renamed. As should Johns Hopkins University.

Canada approved the Pfizer vaccine yesterday, so it’s likely that our northern neighbors will start getting vaccinated next week. The NYT says, “The approval could mean that Canadians receive injections of the vaccine from the U.S.-based company before Americans do.” But who the hell cares. This isn’t a race between countries, but a race between death and medical logistics. If Canadians get protected earlier than we, that’s great!

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 289,529, 286,443, a big increase of about 3,100 from yesterday’s figure—about 2.1 deaths per minute. The world death toll is 1,577,902, another big increase of about 12,700 over yesterday’s report—about 9 people dying per minute.. 

Stuff that happened on December 10 includes:

  • 1520 – Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outside Wittenberg’s Elster Gate.
  • 1684 – Isaac Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley.

The original manuscript is lost, and its contents have been reconstructed from fragments.

  • 1768 – The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.
  • 1884 – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published.

A first edition of this puppy, inscribed by Mark Twain to the recipient, will set you back a cool $206,494! Here’s a photo:

The inscription: “To Major J. B. Pond With the affections of Mark Twain Feb. 21/85”
  • 1896 – Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi premieres in Paris. A riot breaks out at the end of the performance.
  • 1901 – The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
  • 1906 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize.
  • 1907 – The worst night of the Brown Dog riots in London, when 1,000 medical students clash with 400 police officers over the existence of a memorial for animals that have been vivisected.
  • 1909 – Selma Lagerlöf becomes the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here’s Lagerlöf as a child. Am I deceived, or does she look like Greta Thunberg?

Here’s Edward’s document renouncing the throne:

  • 1953 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill receives the Nobel Prize in literature.
  • 1978 – Arab–Israeli conflict: Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and President of Egypt Anwar Sadat are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
  • 1996 – The new Constitution of South Africa is promulgated by Nelson Mandela.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1815 – Ada Lovelace, English mathematician and computer scientist (d. 1852)

This appears to be the only photo of Lovelace, a daguerrotype taken around 1843:

Here’s the only authenticated photo of Dickinson after childhood; Wikipedia says it was taken at Mount Holyoke in late 1846 or early 1847, when she would have been 16 or 17.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to chat with her? As I reported at the time, though, in 2012 another photo of what appears to be Dickinson surfaced in Amherst.  Experts say the second photo below is also likely to be real.

This may be Dickinson (left) with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner, taken in 1859 when Dickinson would have been 29.

 

  • 1891 – Nelly Sachs, German-Swedish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1970)
  • 1909 – Hermes Pan, American dancer and choreographer (d. 1990)
  • 1960 – Kenneth Branagh, Northern Ireland-born English actor director, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1975 – Emmanuelle Chriqui, Canadian actress

Those who ceased respiring on December 10 include:

  • 1896 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, invented Dynamite and founded the Nobel Prize (b. 1833)
  • 1928 – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish architect and painter (b. 1868)
  • 1946 – Walter Johnson, American baseball player, manager, and sportscaster (b. 1887)
  • 1967 – Otis Redding, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1941)
  • 1968 – Karl Barth, Swiss theologian and author (b. 1886)
  • 1987 – Jascha Heifetz, Lithuanian-American violinist and educator (b. 1901)
  • 1999 – Rick Danko, Canadian singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (b. 1943)
  • 2005 – Richard Pryor, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1940)
  • 2017 – Angry Grandpa, American Internet personality (b. 1950)

I didn’t know about the Angry Grandpa show, which was apparently quite popular. Here’s the old guy destroying a drone. He sure is angry!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili escaped the other cats by going into the guest room (MY room in Dobrzyn):

I feel excluded.
A: You went into hiding yourself.
Hili: Out of lack of a safe place in the public space.
In Polish:
Hili: Czuję się wykluczona.
Ja: Sama się tu schowałaś.
Hili: Z braku bezpiecznego miejsca w publicznej przestrzeni.

Here’s a formal portrait of little Kulka by Paulina. Look at her golden eyes! She’s not yet fully grown, but she’s very rambunctious.

And let’s not forget Kulka’s BFF, Szaron:

From Stash Krod:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Luana. This is pretty funny but they mean VICE writers, not VICE bloggers:

From reader Barry. Is that really catnip, or is it just a clowder of cats?

Tweets from Matthew. Here’s a thread of amusing cartoons and memes. There are several more.

There are a lot more salacious but cringeworthy entries on this bad sex writing thread.

That squirrel will sleep with the fishes:

A tweet from my law/philosophy colleague Brian Leiter. I don’t know any of them!

Indeed, all those Gothic buildings are still here save one:

30 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The states going after Facebook is only a last ditch effort because as usual, the congress does not do their job. Social media will likely be the death of this country.

  2. 1999 – Rick Danko, Canadian singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (b. 1943)

    I’ve always loved Danko’s voice. For my money, he gave one of the great all-time rock’n’roll vocal performances on The Band’s “It Makes No Difference.” This one’s from The Last Waltz:

  3. Wouldn’t it have been nice to chat with her? [Dickinson]

    I think intellectually I’d rather have chatted with Lovelace. However given her brainpower, I suspect Lovelace would not have gotten much out of a chat with me.

    1. That’s young Monsieur Des Cartes all right. I’m reading a biography of Descartes by Adrien Balliet, “The Life of Monsieur Des Cartes: Containing the History of his Philosophy and Works: As Also, The Most Remarkable Things that Befell him During the Whole Course of his Life.” English translation, R. Simpson, 1693. It was negatively recommended by Isaac Disraeli in his essay “Literary Anecdotes.”

      Disraeli writes “Baillet loads his life of Descartes with a thousand minutiæ, which less disgrace the philosopher than the biographer. Was it worth informing the public, that Descartes was very particular about his wigs; that he had them manufactured at Paris; and that he always kept four? That he wore green taffety in France: but that in Holland he quitted taffety for cloth; and that he was fond of omelets of eggs?” It’s precisely this kind of detail that made me search for the book, and I found it on the Internet so downloaded it. What’ll Baillet have to say about Francine? Also interesting are the syntax and vocabulary employed by the translator.

    3. Kant and Descartes (the first two) are easy, as is Schopenhauer, who was already old when young (I suspect some joke there). The other 3 are less obvious.
      Bottom left must be Wittgenstein, the bottom right possibly Hegel, and the top right I really don’t know, Nietzsche without his famous moustache?
      For honesty’s sake, i have to admit I looked a bit around on Google images for the last three.

  5. Thanks for the heads up the other day on the spacex flight. Before i retired from nasa, such upcoming events were always water cooler talk so were hard to miss. But now i am less in touch so it is great when weit wakes me up. I tuned in yesterday just five minutes before lift off and got to see the whole event live. I was a flight controls engineer so found all of the vehicle maneuvering to be of particular interest. It seemed pretty clear that the settling speed at the end was a bit high and just as i said out loud, “that does’t seem right”…kablooey! (a semi technical term). Also enjoyed pics of maneuring fins and rocket motor nozzles. The rapid gimbel on ascent may have been in response to a wind shear encounter (like space shuttle challenger had just before it came apart). Will look forward to data analysis. A lot of stuff appeared to work right including the successful last second abort on tuesday(?).

    1. Possibly you can explain what we were seeing as the rocket went up. The video stayed on the three engines burning and they seemed locked together. Then they moved around and seemed to become disconnected and maybe only two burning. Then more moving around and finally only one burning. Later the one went out.

        1. I have not followed any of the development of this vehicle so i would not want to speculate. Regardless of musk’s comments, i suggest we wait for the team’s full data analysis. Given the explosion on landing, nasa would likely convene an independent incident or accident investigation team, but i have no idea how spacex will treat this or what nasa involvement in this development program is. Sorry.

          1. SpaceX was not expecting this test to not end in destruction. This is part of their iterative process.

      2. I’m no expert, but to me it looked like a planned shut down. It looked like just before the first engine shutdown that the engines gimballed to realign their thrust, and that since it happened just before the engine shutdown that it must have been planned. Whether planned or not, when an engine goes out the others must be realigned to keep the combined thrust vector where it needs to be.

        Musk has since said that all of the engine shutdowns and gimballing on the ascent were planned. However, the shutdowns during the landing were not. Those were caused by low fuel (methane) pressure causing a loss of power and oxygen rich combustion, which cause the engines to burn themselves up.

      3. There was clearly a small fire under the “skirt” as there has been during several past launches with this new Raptor engine. Starting and stopping engines like this is still hard.

        It should also be pointed out that the landing legs on this rocket were simple and not the legs that will be required going forward. Even though there was a fuel delivery problem during the landing, I suspect the legs are marginal at best. Even though the earlier, shorter hops didn’t result in an explosion, one of the legs partially collapsed. Musk says they are doing major work on the legs.

    2. Watching it live I too thought that the landing flip simply happened to late / low. However, from information available so far I haven’t seen anything that suggests that was the case.

      The little bit of information so far is that low methane header tank pressure caused a loss of power and “engine-rich” (LOL) combustion, leading to 1 or 2 engine shutdowns (not clear) and general loss of thrust.

      From what I understand the intent was to use all 3 engines to land, that in the event of failure(s) landing was possible with 2, but that landing was not possible with 1.

  6. “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with too blunt a pin, he screwed himself into her.”

    “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

    “The sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless cyclops whose eye never blinks.”

    Fuhgeddabout bad sex writing; these three could compete for worst similes ever. Full stop.

    1. Those are bad fersure but I read somewhere that Amanda McKittrick Ros, considered one of the worst novelists of all time, wrote so many howlers that JRR Tolkien used to have competitions to see how long someone could read a passage of hers without laughing.

    2. I went over and read the whole Literary Review thread. It contained this gem:

      “Sebastian’s erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it.”

      Now, that one at least made me laugh out loud.

  7. Look at the stately neoclassical London Guarantee Building among all those gothic sequoias. . .

  8. Thank you for not referring to Ada Lovelace as “the world’s first computer programmer,” erasing Carl Babbage.

  9. The medium in which exercise is done is significant — thermal loading of water is proposed to account for discrepancies in outcomes for swimming exercise vs. exercise in air. See Ray Cronise, and the example of Michael Phelps.

    Also see that Harvard Medical School professor promoting lifespan – David something … cold showers and brown fat.

  10. Otis Redding was only 26 when he died on this day, 53 long years ago. His death is one of the greatest tragedies in soul music, comparable to the premature death of Sam Cooke (one of Redding’s idols).

    Shortly before his death Otis had recorded “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” which posthumously became his only number one hit. He was on the verge of breaking through to the mass (white) audience before he died; chance robbed him of superstardom. “Dock of the Bay,” which Redding called “soul folk,” was a significant change of style as well. We will never know how he might have followed up on this genre-shift, or responded to the rise of funk.

    But the sweet soul music he left is incredible enough: “These Arms of Mine,” “Respect,” “FA-FA-FA-FA-FA (Sad Song),” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” and his definitive versions of “Satisfaction” and “Try a Little Tenderness.”

    If you want a visual memento of how powerful Redding was as a live performer, try the DVDs “Dreams To Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding” and “Stax/Volt Revue, Live In Norway 1967.” The latter also includes a sizzling performance by Sam & Dave. Forced to follow their dynamic double-act, Otis practically burns down the theater with his passion.

  11. Another significant event on 10 December: in 1965, the Grateful Dead played their first public gig.

  12. If you’re exercising only a few hours of week in an attempt to lose weight, don’t bother: it won’t work. You need, well, […]

    Every so often my favoured computerised timewaste pops up a comment (in the voice of an AI-bot passenger) that “I tried the ‘Happy Dayz’ diet and lost 15 kilos. But I lost a limb at the same time, so I’m not sure if that counts?”

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