Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 10, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Cat Sabbath: April 10, 2020: National Cinnamon Roll Day. (Now you’re talking!) It’s also American Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Day, National Farm Animals Day, Siblings Day, and National Hug Your Dog Day. (It’s also World Homeopathy Day, but we aren’t celebrating quackery.)

News of the Day:

The editorial board of The Washington Post has raised the alarm that Vladimir Putin is trying to slowly kill his activist opponent Alexei Navalny, who was sent to a “severe” prison camp after returning to Russia:

Mr. Navalny, whom the Russian secret police unsuccessfully sought to kill last summer with a banned chemical weapon, is now being held in a prison camp known for its harsh conditions about 60 miles from Moscow. Since his arrival there in late February, he has been systematically deprived of sleep through hourly wakings and denied proper medical treatment for serious ailments, including herniated and bulging disks in his back and a respiratory ailment Mr. Navalny believes may be tuberculosis. Since last week, Mr. Navalny has been on a hunger strike to protest his treatment; his lawyers say his weight is down 30 pounds and is falling by two pounds a day.

The board says that one solution is to apply pressure to Putin by freezing the assets of the 35 oligarchs who protect Putin’s private fortune, and to deny them travel visas as well.

Several news sources today, including the odious HuffPost and the un-odious Federal Trade Commission, emphasized that you should not post pictures of your coronavirus vaccination card on social media. It can lead to the theft of your identity, or fraud since others can use your information to pretend that they were vaccinated. Keep your card in a safe place (I laminated mine; others put it in a plastic card holder), and make a Xerox or a photograph of both sides to serve as backup (email it to yourself as well). Blank card forms are being sold in various dark corners of the Internet to facilitate this fraud.

Why are smooth, rounded, fist-sized stones found in Wyoming a geological match to quartzite found 1,000 miles away in Wisconsin? Six scientists have published a paper (blurbed in the NYT) suggesting that these stones were “gastroliths,” swallowed by sauropod dinosaurs and used to digest plant material. The dinos, they say, carried the stones on their migrations. The hitch is that these reptiles aren’t known to have moved that far, and the stones haven’t yet been associated with dinosaur remains. Stay tuned. Here’s a photo of the putative gastroliths:

Photo by Joshua Malone

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 560,531, an increase of 956 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll stands at 2,931,073, an increase of about 13,400 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on April 10 includes:

  • 1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, comes into force in Great Britain.
  • 1858 – After the original Big Ben, a 14.5 tonnes (32,000 lb) bell for the Palace of Westminster, had cracked during testing, it is recast into the current 13.76 tonnes (30,300 lb) bell by Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

Remember that “Big Ben” is the name not of the clock tower (now called “Elizabeth Tower” after the Queen), but of the largest of the five bells that chime. Here’s a picture of the real Big Ben with the striking hammer. (I wonder if they rotate the bell so the same place doesn’t get hit all the time.)

  • 1865 – American Civil War: A day after his surrender to Union forces, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his troops for the last time.
  • 1912 – RMS Titanic sets sail from Southampton, England on her maiden and only voyage.

Here’s an interesting contemporary newsreel showing the last scenes of the ship leaving Belfast for Southampton before the disaster, the captain of the Titanic, who went down with the ship, and some scenes of the survivors arriving in New York on the Carpathia:

He was pretty badly shot up; you can see the photo of his body here.

The book didn’t sell that well when it came out (it’s now a staple of high-school English classes, though there have been noises about cancelation), but a first edition with the famous “eyes” dust jacket went for between $100,000 and $150,000 in 2013:

This is the second deadliest submarine accident in history; here’s the ship on the surface. Nobody knows for sure what went wrong, though one guess is that the form of welding of the pipes contributed to the sinking. The remains have been found—in several pieces—2,600 metres (8,400 ft) below the surface.

  • 1970 – Paul McCartney announces that he is leaving The Beatles for personal and professional reasons.
  • 1998 – The Good Friday Agreement is signed in Northern Ireland.
  • 2019 – Scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope project announce the first ever image of a black hole, located in the centre of the M87 galaxy.

Here’s that image, with the Wikipedia caption,

“The supermassive black hole at the core of supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, with a mass about 7 billion times that of the Sun, as depicted in the first false-colour image in radio waves released by the Event Horizon Telescope (10 April 2019). Visible are the crescent-shaped emission ring and central shadow, which are gravitationally magnified views of the black hole’s photon ring and the photon capture zone of its event horizon. The crescent shape arises from the black hole’s rotation and relativistic beaming; the shadow is about 2.6 times the diameter of the event horizon.”

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1794 – Matthew C. Perry, English-Scottish American commander (d. 1858)
  • 1847 – Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-American journalist, publisher, and politician, founded Pulitzer, Inc. (d. 1911)
  • 1917 – Robert Burns Woodward, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
  • 1932 – Omar Sharif, Egyptian actor and screenwriter (d. 2015)
  • 1988 – Haley Joel Osment, American actor

Those who croaked on April 10 include:

  • 1909 – Algernon Charles Swinburne, English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic (b. 1837)
  • 1919 – Emiliano Zapata, Mexican general (b. 1879)
  • 1955 – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest, theologian, and philosopher (b. 1881)
  • 1962 – Stuart Sutcliffe, Scottish artist and musician (b. 1940)

Sutcliffe, below left, was a bass guitarist for the Beatles (there were five members then) before he left the band in 1961 to become an artist. He died a year later from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Here’s the very early band with Pete Best on the drums.

  • 1966 – Evelyn Waugh, English soldier, novelist, journalist and critic (b. 1903)
  • 1975 – Walker Evans, American photographer (b. 1903)

Evans is most famous for his photographs of Depression-era poverty in the South, a project for the Farm Security Administration (the photos are part of the famous book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men).. Here’s one photo,  “Alabama, 1936”, showing a sharecropper family:

And his photo of another sharecropper’s wife, Allie Mae Burroughs. She was but 27 when this photo was taken:

And the family, with her husband Floyd:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili dialogue is explained by Malgorzata, “Hili sees some kind of insect and, remembering Heisenberg, she calls this unknown to her insect a mobile uncertainty.”

A: What do you see there?
Hili: A mobile uncertainty.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Ruchliwą nieokreśloność.
And a picture of Little Kulka—who should now be called Medium Kulka. Look at her resemblance to Hili!

From Facebook:

From Bruce:

Pareidolia from Seth Andrews: a cinnamon bun resembles Mother Teresa. Seth’s caption is “This will never not be funny.”

Titania has a new edition of Things that Are Racist:

From Barry: a very needy raccoon:

Tweets from Matthew. About the first one he says, “This could be you in about five weeks.” And I think he’s just about right, with both the situation and the timing:

And this is a true story; read the horrifying article. The guy lived, but barely. . .

I think this badger had too much coffee:

And a tweet from Dr. Cobb himself. He teaches this stuff, so what he says is true:

As we saw in yesterday’s tweets, Carmen the mallard hen nested in a plant pot seven floors up. And now we learn that she produced 16 ducklings! But they’ll be okay, as they’ve all been rescued and taken to an appropriate place of by wildlife experts. And, like Honey, Carmen the duck nested on that very same balcony a year ago!

Ducks!

11 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. The drummer in the Beatles pic isn’t Best. I think it’s Johnny Hutchinson, but I’m not positive because I don’t have any of my Beatles book at hand.

    Reply

    1. It is Johnny Hutchinson. The photo was taken at an audition in May, 1960, and he filled in because Tommy Moore, the Beatles’ drummer, hadn’t arrived. Pete Best joined in August that year. Yes, I’m a Beatle nerd.

      Reply

  3. After the original Big Ben cracked during testing,

    The second bell was transported from the foundry to the tower on a trolley drawn by sixteen horses, with crowds cheering its progress; it was then pulled 200 ft (61.0 m) up to the Clock Tower’s belfry, a feat that took 18 hours. It is 7 feet 6 inches (2.29 m) tall and 9 feet (2.74 m) diameter. This new bell first chimed in July 1859; in September it too cracked under the hammer. According to the foundry’s manager, George Mears, the horologist Denison had used a hammer more than twice the maximum weight specified.

    The bell was eventually patched and rotated an eighth of a turn so that the hammer didn’t hit the repair. It appears that it hasn’t been rotated since, so the same point is always struck and has been since 1862 when the patched bell came into use. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ben#Bells

    Reply

  4. It’s embarrassing that US citizens have only a handwritten piece of paper to prove they’ve been vaccinated. There’s no national database for this information because of silly privacy concerns or just gross inefficiency, take your pick. There are usually other records of your shots but it’s kind of hit or miss. When companies and countries start requiring proof of vaccination for travel, sports events, etc. I expect a real mess. Even if American organizations waive proof, foreign ones won’t.

    I’m a bit surprised that the news media and others are recommending emailing a photograph of the card to one’s self. That’s not all that secure, though it won’t really matter as these cards are very easy to fake.

    Reply

    1. When I was in the military, which I realize was long ago, the individual was responsible for their shot records. From the day you entered basic training and the shots began, you had your own official little book of all your shots and the dates they were given. If is often just as important to know when you had a particular vaccine and we had lots. I do not know what the penalty was for losing your shot records, I never lost mine.

      Depending on where you were going certain shots were required. If you did not have your shot records it could be very painful. Does anyone remember when they were giving vaccines with the guns. I thought that was pretty good and much faster. But they stopped using the guns, I think a few years later.

      Reply

      1. I read an article about these COVID vaccination cards which suggested that each state’s health department kept vaccination records and had links to their websites. I went to my state’s (CA) and it allowed me to request a copy of my vaccination record. I filled it out and some hours later they sent me an email with a link that allowed me to download it as a PDF. It did contain my COVID shots and other recent inoculations but nothing from my childhood, which wasn’t too surprising.

        Reply

  5. I have a putative dino gastrolith, along with a definite dino bone fragment from a private site near the dinosaur national monument in (I think) Utah. Long, long ago. So I now wonder what that smooth rock is.

    Reply

  7. “The hitch is that these reptiles aren’t known to have moved that far”

    I’m trying to think of how that could be known, even in principle.

    Reply

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