Sunday: Hili dialogue

December 13, 2020 • 6:30 am

Here we are again, at the formal beginning of the week but the titular end of the week: Sunday, December 13, 2020. It’s National Popcorn String Day, which is not a foodstuff  but a Hanukkah-bush decoration. And once again it’s National Cocoa Day, as well as Ice Cream Day and National Day of the Horse.

News of the Day:

Charley Pride, the first hugely popular African-American country singer, died yesterday of Covid-19 at age 86. He was the first black musician inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and had more than 50 #1 hits on the country charts. Here’s his final performance—just a month before last Friday—at the 2020 Country Music Awards:

The NYT reprints an old interview with John Lennon after he’d gone into a 4½-year self-imposed period of isolation (1976-1980) to deal with the tumult of the breakup of the Beatles. The interviewer, in her intro, ties it to the coronavirus lockdown, but it’s not at all comparable. Still, it’s got some good bits. An example:

Did you enjoy the aloneness?

[Lennon]: I loved it. There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. That’s what I learned in the last five years. I rediscovered [in Hong Kong], the feeling I used to have as a youngster, walking in the mountains of Scotland with an auntie. You know, you’re walking [gestures fast] and the ground starts going beneath you, and the heather, and the clouds moving above you, and you think, Ah, this is the feeling they’re always talking about, the one that makes you paint or put it into poetry because you can’t describe it any other way. I recognized that that feeling had been with me all my life. The feeling was with me before the Beatles.

So this period was to re-establish me, as me, for myself. That’s why I’m free of the Beatles. Because I took time to free myself, mentally, from it, and look at what it is. And now I know. So here I am, right? It’s beautiful, you know. It’s just like walking those hills.

As his days in the White House wane, our old SOB of a President continues kvetching about this election, this time taking on the Supreme Court—his Supreme Court (Twitter adds a caveat):

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 297,971, an increase of about 2,200 from yesterday’s figure. America’s death toll now exceeds the total number of our countrymen killed in battle in World War II (291,557.) The world death toll is 1,613,266, an increase of about 10,000 over yesterday’s report—about 7 people dying per minute.

Stuff that happened on December 13 includes:

  • 1294 – Saint Celestine V resigns the papacy after only five months to return to his previous life as an ascetic hermit.
  • 1545 – The Council of Trent begins.
  • 1577 – Sir Francis Drake sets sail from Plymouth, England, on his round-the-world voyage.
  • 1636 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony organizes three militia regiments to defend the colony against the Pequot Indians. This organization is recognized today as the founding of the National Guard of the United States.
  • 1642 – Abel Tasman is the first recorded European to sight New Zealand.
  • 1972 – Apollo program: Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin the third and final extra-vehicular activity (EVA) or “Moonwalk” of Apollo 17. To date they are the last humans to set foot on the Moon.

Cernan’s wrist “cuff checklist”—a guide to using the EVA as well as some parting words for those on Earth—was on auction this fall. One estimate waas $800,000. I’m not sure how much it went for, but wouldn’t have it been better in a museum than in the hands of a private collector?

  • 2001 – Sansad Bhavan, the building housing the Indian Parliament, is attacked by terrorists. Twelve people are killed, including the terrorists.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1797 – Heinrich Heine, German journalist, poet, and critic (d. 1856)
  • 1887 – Alvin C. York, American colonel, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1964)

Here’s a photo of the courageous York after he returned to the U.S. The Wikipedia caption: “U.S. Army Sergeant Alvin C. York after his return to his Tennessee home. His mother is pouring water into the basin and his younger sister is standing on the cabin’s back porch. York turned down many lucrative offers, including one worth $30,000 ($442,400 in 2020) to appear in vaudeville, to return to the life he had known before the war.”

  • 1918 – Bill Vukovich, Serbian-American race car driver (d. 1955)
  • 1925 – Dick Van Dyke, American actor, singer, and dancer
  • 1957 – Steve Buscemi, American actor and director
  • 1989 – Taylor Swift, American singer-songwriter, record producer and actress

Those whose existence was snuffed out on December 13 include:

Here’s Donatello’s great bronze sculpture of David, estimated to have been done in the 1440s:

  • 1930 – Fritz Pregl, Slovenian-Austrian chemist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1869)
  • 1944 – Wassily Kandinsky, Russian-French painter and theorist (b. 1866)

I always forget Kandinsky in my list of my favorite painters, but he’s on it. He was also, arguably, the first painter in history to create non-representational “abstract” art. Here’s one of his first in that genre: “Composition V” (1911):

Sometimes called “The Beast of Belsen” because of her unrelenting cruelty, Grese was hanged for war crimes in 1945. She was 22. A photo from her trial for war crime (she’s #9):

 

I was surprised that I couldn’t find a Grandma Moses painting with a cat in it, but here she is holding a cat:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being cynical again:

Hili: I’m not an optimist.
A: Why?
Hili: Murphy’s Law comes true every day
In Polish:
Hili: Nie jestem optymistką.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Prawo Murphy’ego sprawdza się każdego dnia.

Little Kulka is playing on the roof. Apparently she is always running about and climbing, and is rarely still. There’s still a lot of kitten in her! (Photo by Paulina):

From Diana:

A true cartoon from Susan:

From Merilee:

I’ve posted several tweets showing the remarkable stabilization of bird heads; here’s a fabulous one with a kestrel:

Titania continues her list:

Matthew and I have been arguing about this one, though we both think Richard is right:

Molecular data suggests that the above is true, but Matthew noted that some people think that the ancestor of sharks and bony fish had bones, and that cartilage, which makes up the skeleton of sharks and dogfish (the class Chondrichthyes), evolved later. That could put us no more closely related to catfish (bony fish in the supraclass Osteichthyes) than to dogfish. So, Matthew wrote this.

Molecular data could settle it, and seems to, as I pointed out:

But the debate continued, as Matthew is stubborn:

In the end, Matthew declared that even if cartilage skeletons did evolve after bony ones, Richard is still right.

Another tweet. I hope Trump doesn’t leave this way, but it’s funny to imagine.

We’re in for some cool astronomical phenomena in the next few weeks. I’ve even heard that we might see the Northern Lights in Chicago!

24 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “You are a closer cousin to a catfish than a catfish is to a dogfish.

    [ and ensuing discussion ]”

    This is great! So much to learn from lively discussion!

    Reply

  2. The most beautiful example of Murphy’s Law I saw was on a BBC programme, 40 Minutes I think it was called. They explained Murphy’s Law and gave some examples and then started an experiment with buttered slices of bread. 20 Students each buttered a number of slices of bread and let them drop to the floor. 19 of them had more than average slices falling on the floor with the buttered side down. One student though had a fifty-fifty result. Very annoying… When asked for her name she said “Jane Murphy”.
    I don’t know if one of the more famous examples (The Russian lense cap on the planet Venus) is actually true.

    Reply

    1. I did not remember the lens cap situation:

      The Venera 9 lander operated for at least 53 minutes and took pictures with one of two cameras; the other lens cap did not release.

      The Venera 10 lander operated for at least 65 minutes and took pictures with one of two cameras; the other lens cap did not release.

      The Venera 11 lander operated for at least 95 minutes but neither cameras’ lens caps released.

      The Venera 12 lander operated for at least 110 minutes but neither cameras’ lens caps released.

      Live and learn.

      Reply

      1. The story goes that one of the Venera landers had an arm that could deposit some Venus soil into a small laboratory to be investigated. It could do this only once. Unfortunately it picked up a lens cap…

        Reply

  3. Cernan’s cuff notes….agree that it should be in a museum as an important artifact of the u.s. moon program. In general i object to individual scientists and engineers who achieved their fame supported by the largesse of the u.s. taxpayers, then personaly profiting in this way. If not in a museum, at least donate dosh to a charity. This is much along the lines that research results supported by taxpayer (nsf, nih, dod, nasa…) should be freely available without requiring subscriptions to expensive journals. I do not object to astronauts or famous pilots taking home certain memorabilia from their careers in general, but these objects should be confined to their personal use, maybe passing to their heirs, or eventually benefitting either a charity or a museum. I write this as a retired nasa engineer who was supported in a very personally rewarding career, both good years and bad, by the u.s. taxpayer.

    Reply

    3. Not sure that I would hold this up as such a valuable item or why such money would be offered but who knows. It is my understanding that check lists surround everything in the business of flight. For nearly every piece of an airplane or rocket there are checklists and manuals created for operations and for maintaining them. This may have been this guy’s personal copy of the checklist and he scratched his little speech on it. But the check list itself was created by someone else and there are probably many copies. So what makes this one valuable to some is who’s it was. It is like baseball gloves or shirts worn by specific individuals. I’m just not all that concerned about it’s value or to who that value should belong.

      Reply

      1. My fairly educated guess is that every piece of material on any manned(then, human inhabited now) spacecraft must be human rated as far as failure modes, fire susceptibility, breakage characteristics, etc) and accounted for as part of the system mass budget. so an astronaut really has no personal checklist. He will modify checkists by additiin of some notes or highlights, but they are atthe end of the day, nasa checklists. The only reason an astronaut or anything associated with him or her has any extraordinary value is because of the billions of public dollars invested in the associated space missions. At least thats how i feel abou it.

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  5. Charley Pride, the first hugely popular African-American country singer, died yesterday of Covid-19 at age 86. He was the first black musician inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame …

    Willie Nelson was a buddy of Charley Pride’s. One night In 1971, at a time Charley was struggling to get live bookings, Willie kissed him square on the mouth on stage at the Big D club in Dallas, as a show of solidarity and to demonstrate to the crowd how ridiculous racial prejudice is. Willie’s also the first musician to have an LGBT-themed tune on the country charts with his 2006 cover of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other”. And it was Ol’ Willie, of course, who personally broke down the previously unbroachable divide between hippie culture and redneck culture in Texas.

    Willie’s all right in my book. Maybe them Norwegian Nobel fellas in Oslo oughta get around to givin’ him one o’ their Peace Prizes. They could do worse.

    Reply

    1. It would be particularly sad if Charley got COVID at/in connection with the CMA. I just heard that he was wildly popular in N Ireland because he went there during the Troubles when nobodyelse would. One of his songs became an anthem of sorts there, but I didn’t catch which one.

      Reply

  7. For the last 45 years or so I have been fighting a Canute-esque skirmish wanting to see Si units used correctly. OK “y” for years … I have some sympathy for this, as I do break my own rules for this, but the correct abbreviation is “a”. my??? milli years really? My! My!

    Reply

    1. “The year is not an SI unit and it is not approved for use with the SI.”

      “There is no official symbol for the year, but y, yr, and a are probably the most common; note that “a” conflicts with the symbol for the are.”

      [ https://usma.org/si-unit-definitions# ]

      Personally I use “yrs” for “years passed” since it is in widespread use, and “a” for “years ago” since that is is in widespread use in areas I’m interested in [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale ].

      I would for example write that the solar system originated at “4.5 Ga”, but it is “4.5 Gyrs” old.

      The m for “mega” must be a mutation 👹. It seems locally viable in US, but it is rare elsewhere. You know the drill: “US goes metric, inch by inch.” There is a lively discussion among rocketry within and out to the enthusiasts, where NASA should use metric but almost always report to the public in Imperial units. So we see Rankine instead of kelvin et cetera.

      Reply

  8. There was a photo exhibit in SanFrancisco with huge blowups of moonscapes and Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and the EVA vehicle. Sometime in the early ’90’s I think. I walked into an empty room of photos and there was Gene Cernan, alone, looking at the photos and I had a chance to chat with him. Very engaging guy and receptive to questions he had probably answered hundreds of times. Thanks Gene.

    Reply

    1. Gene comes across as a very nice and funny guy. My space-mad daughter was delighted to stand on the same spot as him (not on the Moon!) in London’s Science Museum, where Gene posed in front of the Apollo 10 Command Module “Charlie Brown” when it was unveiled there years before.

      Reply

  10. Another cool astronomical event is tomorrows (Dec. 14th) total eclipse of the sun, visible in central Chile and Argentina, weather permitting.

    Reply

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