Friday: Hili dialogue

December 18, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning at a frigid butt end of the week: Friday, December 18, 2020: National “I Love Honey” Day. Well, well, well. Are they referring to a quotation I often use when referring to my favorite duck? If not, why the scare quotes? If they’re referring to the product of bees, the quotes can only be ironic, i.e., you only pretend to love honey. It’s also Bake Cookies Day, National Ham Salad Day, National Roast Suckling Pig Day, National Wear a Plunger on Your Head Day, and International Migrants Day.

As for the plunger, several sources say something like this:

December 18th is traditionally Wear a Plunger On Your Head Day, a day that ex-bounty hunter Vern Halsey and his beloved Komodo Dragon, Felix, continue to celebrate almost entirely by themselves.  I’ve looked high and low, and while I’ve found several sources of documentation confirming this holiday’s existence, nowhere have I found any explanation — and I’d settle for an implausible one — for said existence.
The Komodo Dragon participates as well:

News of the Day:

Yesterday an FDA panel recommended approval of the Moderna vaccine. Pending CDC approval today or tomorrow, Moderna shots could be administered as early as next week.  Like the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna shot uses mRNA that makes spike protein, but the Moderna vaccine can be stored at normal freezer temperatures and can even be stored for 30 days at refrigerator temperatures (the Pfizer vaccine lasts 5 days under those temperatures).  Approval of the second vaccine will of course mean that more people can be vaccinated much more quickly.

Joe Biden has named a Native American, Deb Haaland, as his Secretary of the Interior. She’s a Democratic representative from New Mexico, and the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position. He’s also named Michael Regan head of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Regan, only 44, is the first black man to head the EPA.

If you want a hollow feeling in your stomach, read Elizabeth Bruenig’s NYT piece on her trip to Terre Haute, Indiana, to witness the federal execution of prisoner Alfred Bourgeois. The last-minute Hail Marys of the defense lawyers are described in detail, and of course all failed. Bourgeois was executed last Friday. Two down and three to go until Biden becomes President, and would probably have stayed their executions.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 310,935, a big increase of about 3,700 from yesterday’s figure, with deaths occurred at about 2.6 per minute. The world death toll is 1,670,547, a huge increase of about 13,200 over yesterday’s report—about 9.2 people dying per minute.

Stuff that happened on December 18 includes:

  • 1271 – Kublai Khan renames his empire “Yuan” (元 yuán), officially marking the start of the Yuan dynasty of Mongolia and China.

We have no known date for his decree of the Stately Pleasure Dome.

  • 1777 – The United States celebrates its first Thanksgiving, marking the recent victory by the American rebels over British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga in October.
  • 1892 – Premiere performance of The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Note that, over the years, Tchaikovsky has been accused of lacing this ballet with anti-Arab and anti-Asian racism, so one might question whether it should even be performed during the holidays.

  • 1917 – The resolution containing the language of the Eighteenth Amendment to enact Prohibition is passed by the United States Congress.
  • 1932 – The Chicago Bears defeat the Portsmouth Spartans in the first NFL playoff game to win the NFL Championship.
  • 2015 – Kellingley Colliery, the last deep coal mine in Great Britain, closes.

Here’s a 3-minute report on the last shift in Britain’s very last deep coal mine.

  • 2018 – List of bolides: A meteor exploded over the Bering Sea with a force over 10 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
  • 2019 – The United States House of Representatives votes in support of the impeachment of Donald Trump

Notables born on this day include:

It was the Archduke’s assassination that was a main cause of World War I, and it was an accident, as he had survived a bomb throwing earlier in the day and happened to encounter an assassin by accident while going out later to visit the bomb victims. Here’s his bloodstained uniform:

Here’s Klee’s “Cat and Bird” (1938):

  • 1886 – Ty Cobb, American baseball player and manager (d. 1961)
  • 1888 – Robert Moses, American urban planner (d. 1981)

If you want a great book to read for the holidays, you couldn’t do better than Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Moses, one of the best biographies I’ve ever read.  And it will keep you occupied, as it’s 1344 pages long (it’s a page-turner, though!). Click on the screenshot to go to its Amazon page:

  • 1916 – Betty Grable, American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 1973)

Here’s Grable’s iconic photo from 1943, which adorned the walls of millions of soldiers’ quarters. She was pregnant at the time, so it doesn’t show her front:

  • 1922 – Esther Lederberg, American microbiologist (d. 2006)
  • 1939 – Harold E. Varmus, American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

In August of 2018, Varmus interviewed me at the Kent Presents meeting (and signed the auction copy of Faith Verus Fact), and also, in a separate event, had a discussion with Robert Lang, engineer, origami expert, and contributor to this site. Here’s Varmus (right) interviewing Lang:

  • 1946 – Steve Biko, South African activist, founded the Black Consciousness Movement (d. 1977)
  • 1946 – Steven Spielberg, American director, producer, and screenwriter, co-founded DreamWorks
  • 1963 – Brad Pitt, American actor and producer
  • 2001 – Billie Eilish, American singer

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge to Oblivion on December 18 include:

  • 1829 – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, French soldier, biologist, and academic (b. 1744)
  • 1971 – Bobby Jones, American golfer and lawyer (b. 1902)
  • 1975 – Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ukrainian geneticist and biologist (b. 1900)

Dobzhansky was my academic grandfather—the advisor of my Ph.D. advisor, Dick Lewontin, who got his own degree with Dobzhansky (called “Doby” or “Dodek” by his friends) at Columbia. Dobhanzky was a Russian immigrant who came to the US in 1927 to study with T. H. Morgan in the Columbia “fly room”. He wrote the book that’s regarded by many as the founding work of the Modern Synthesis: Genetics and the Origin of Species(1937).

My copy of the first edition of that pathbreaking book, previously owned by A. E. Emerson, a famous zoologist at the University of Chicago:

The depiction of meiosis, the symbol of Columbia University Press’s biology series, is wrong on the book’s spine: the chromosomes are going in the wrong direction! (They should be going toward the outside rather than the middle, pulled by the centromeres so that the “V”s are facing up and down.) This was corrected in later editions.

Two more who died on this day:

  • 1997 – Chris Farley, American comedian and actor (b. 1964)
  • 2008 – Mark Felt, American FBI agent and informant (b. 1913)

He was, of course, “Deep Throat”.

  • 2016 – Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian-American actress and socialite (b. 1917)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a Senior Moment:

Hili: What was it I wanted to say?
A: I don’t know.
Hili: So who is supposed to know?
In Polish:
Hili: Co ja chciałam powiedzieć?
Ja: Nie wiem.
Hili: To kto ma wiedzieć?

And little Kulka is walking all over the printer. She was spayed yesterday!

From Stash Krod, a cat song for Hanukkah:

A picture that will be familiar to all those with bird feeders:

From Jesus of the Day:

Reader Simon has a bee in his bonnet:

Tweets from Matthew. That’s quite a vortex!

I got this original tweet from Matthew and retweeted it:

And I retweeted this one, too. Look at those ears move!

I never saw the Colonel as a stick figure, but this makes sense:

Is it the full moon or something? Even the loons are getting loonier.

Some soothing biology about an unusual migratory moth. There are more tweets in the thread, but I’ve put up four below:

30 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. How Stacy Nelson has come to believe the things she thinks will happen on day 1 of Biden’s Presidency or expects anyone else to believe them (I love that ‘huge if true’!) is unfathomable. I guess we can be generous and give her a few months but at some point she is going to be faced with an embarrassing climb-down!

    1. I thought the orderlies in those places were supposed to keep electronic devices out of the patients’ hands…

    2. I cannot help to assume that Stacy Nelson and others know that, in order to keep the Q idiots feeding at her monetized web pages, the lies must get bigger and bigger.

    3. It left out that in 2419 Buck Rogers will awaken from his accidental hibernation, and begin battling the Chinese control of North America.

  2. Say, are you still feeding the squirrels or are they hibernating now? Just wondering. (No squirrels where I live.)

    1. I don’t feed piles of them on my windowsill like I used to, but there are two or three squirrels, including the Golden Squirrel, who clean up after the ducks have had their corn and pellets.

  3. A great (and engagingly well-written) look at the nexus of politics and science can be read in harold varmus’s 2009 book, “The Art and Politics of Science” (norton) in which he draws on his perfect range of experiences in academe, research labs, and close to the highest reaches of national policy-making in government to relate history that will help any lab scientist or student better understand the external forces on science and engineering support in the u.s. the book provides both for an understanding of “why is this happening to me?” and a bit of optimistic inspiration to science and engineering majors to enter government positions to try to makes things better.

  4. The daily report of the COVID death count continues to horrify me. Whenever I think it can’t get worse, it just keeps going up and up. 3,700 deaths in one day in the USA. 3,700. Over here in the UK we have approximately the same incidence of COVID per capita. I was shocked when Jerry reported the number of deaths in the USA as hitting 100,000 and thought it can’t possibly get to 200,000. How high can it go? 500,000? A million? It’s getting to the stage where it seems normal and banal, which is also terrible.

    Look after yourselves everyone.

    1. Yes. In the u.s., we are now apparently on the steepest upslope of the logistic curve, a lazy “s” shape which mathematically describes cumulative infections (and with a few weeks lag, deaths) over time. Its shape is determined most basically by the ratio of susceptibles to infecteds which at around 50% of each reaches its steepest. We do not know how many of our 330 million citizens have been infected…cases are about 17M and there are estimates that actual infections are maybe five to ten times that. If ten times, then we are approaching steepest slope now. Of course we can impact these awful numbers through simple public health measures of masking, distancing, and staying home…and of course, now, through vaccination. Thank you for your kind thoughts.

  5. If you want a hollow feeling in your stomach, read Elizabeth Bruenig’s NYT piece on her trip to Terre Haute, Indiana, to witness the federal execution of prisoner Alfred Bourgeois.

    I ever had only one client who ended up on death row. And his case was reversed by the Florida Supreme Court, as to both the conviction and the death sentence. Since his case was on direct appeal, there was never a signed death warrant for him, but, while he was on death row, I would sometimes dream about getting the call to come witness his execution. The dream was never about the execution itself (which, at the time, would have been conducted by electric chair), since that was a place my subconscious imagination didn’t seem capable of going, but about the hours and minutes spent with the client awaiting the execution.

  6. Regarding the death of Archduke Ferdinand, if you wish to hear a detailed account of what happened that day, listen to Dan Carolina’s Hardcore History podcast. If you enjoy learning about history and like podcasts, his account of the Great War is worth a listen.

  7. Ham Salad Day reminds me a something that happened to a friend of mine. She and her future husband, having gotten serious, went to visit his family in Iowa. He had warned his relatives that she was a vegetarian, and so they made ham salad….

  8. “… Tchaikovsky has been accused … so one might question …”

    [ subscribes to post ]

  11. I have fond memories of going to see The Nutcracker every year when I was a child, despite my family and me being Jewish. I absolutely adored it. A wonderful ballet!

  12. The entity formerly known as the Trump campaign sent out this :

    Email:
    I did something BIG

    Christmas is Great Again

    PRESIDENT TRUMP SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER DESIGNATING CHRISTMAS EVE A FEDERAL HOLIDAY

    [name of recipient]

    I promised you that we would MAKE CHRISTMAS GREAT AGAIN, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

    Recently, I signed an Executive Order to designate Christmas Eve as a Federal Holiday – something that should have been done long ago. Now, hard working Americans from around the Nation can enjoy more time with their family and loved ones during the Christmas season.

    This is a HUGE victory in the Democrats’ pathetic WAR ON CHRISTMAS, and I want YOU to be a part of it. I’m giving YOU the unique opportunity to co-sign my Executive Order. Together, we’ll show the Left that Americans proudly celebrate CHRISTMAS!

    Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to support your favorite President and to co-sign my Executive Order.

    [ web links ]

    I’ve asked to see a list of EVERY AMERICAN who co-signs this Executive Order. I’m reviewing ALL signatures TOMORROW morning – will I see your name?

    Add your name by 11:59 PM TONIGHT to get on the list of supporters I see.

    Thank you,

    President Donald J. Trump
    Signature
    [photo]
    Donald J. Trump
    President of the United States

    1. I do not think that this is anything new. As a federal employee for many years, it seems that wewere always given dec 24 off even when the 25th was on a weekday. If not the whole day on the 24th, at least the afternoon…as long as there was a secretary at our nasa field center to answer the phonecall from nasa hq to tell us to leave in the days before email.

    2. “Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to support your favorite President and to co-sign my Executive Order”

      It doesn’t explain how adding my name immediately supports President William Henry Harrison…?

  14. Technical details: Pfizer’s RNA generates the spike protein, Moderna’s a segment of the spike protein. With both, there is a tweak. Two codons in the RNA have been altered to specify proline residues. This has the effect of locking the conformation of the spike protein/segment into that of the un-docked (to the host’s membrane-bound angiotensin converting enzyme aka ACE-2) spike vs. the docked version, which is just what you’d want – an immune response to the free-floating spike vs the one attached to the virus that has already docked and delivered its payload to generate more virus.

    This is a triumph of basic research, understanding of protein structure, x-ray crystallography etc, only 102 yrs after we didn’t know what a virus was (during the 1918 pandemic), about 90 or so yrs since we began to grasp that proteins were strings of amino acids, 62 or so yrs since the first xtal structure of a protein (myoglobin), 57yrs since the advent of Ramachandran plots that pointed to the restriction about the peptide bond / limitation of phi/psi angles where proline residues were involved, maybe 20yrs or so since rapid DNA sequencing, in advance of all the work that went into hitting on the solution of how to use RNA as a vaccine, the story of which I’m eager to read.

  15. Ears, FWIW: Once upon a time, maybe 50yrs ago, I discovered that I could wiggle one ear. I let it go at that for awhile, and then when I think in college or maybe grad school I wondered if I could figure a way to wiggle the other one. That would depend on some sort of innate discovery of the nerves to the muscles attached to that ear. So I concentrated on that and in short order found them! I have no idea how that all works, but it did, and I’ve been moving each from time to time ever since….

  18. That KFC stick figure tweet was hysterical. I too can’t see it differently now. I even did an image search, and some were crazy funny. My wife was wondering what I was laughing about and she came over, the hilarity ensued. It also plays into the idiom of someone having “chicken legs”.

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