Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 7, 2022 • 6:30 am

Welcome to another Hump Day, or, as they say in Zulu, Usuku Iwe-Hump. Today is Wednesday, September 7, 2022.  It’s also National Beer Lover’s Day, once again implying, with the placement of the apostrophe, that only a single person who loves beer is being fêted. Who is that person?

It’s also Salami Day, National Acorn Squash Day (this odious “vegetable” doesn’t deserve its own day), Grandma Moses Day (born Sept. 7, 1860, died December 13, 1961), and National Feel the Love Day.

The sign below has been in the window of Katz’s Deli in NYC for ages. And “your boy” doesn’t even have to be Jewish! When I occasionally returned to Davis, California after I did my postdoc there, the well-known geneticist Mel Green (also a landsman), always asked me to bring him a “good kosher salami.”  I brought Hebrew National, of course.

Stuff that happened on September 7 includes:

Can you believe that the Wikipedia article on this guy doesn’t even mention the origin of his nickname?

The Mormons killed 120 peaceful members of a wagon train heading to California from Arkansas; the cause was a rumor that the people in the wagons had mistreated Mormons. All adults and children over seven were slaughtered. Eventually one Mormon was convicted and executed for plotting the massacre. Here’s the first part of a short two-part video about the massacre (I can’t find part 2):

Here’s Jesse James’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he was betrayed and shot by fellow gang members at the age of 34:

James around 1882, the year he was killed:

He didn’t do it! Here’s Apollinaire in 1902; he died of the “Spanish flu” during the 1918 epidemic:

Here’s the winner of that first pageant: Margaret Gorman, all decked out in patriotic garb:

This brief entry is ineffably sad:

  • 1936 – The last thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial named Benjamin, dies alone in its cage at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.

And here’s some rare footage of Benjamin alive, pacing neurotically in his cage.  Some people think that tylacines are still alive.

  • 1940 – World War II: The German Luftwaffe begins the Blitz, bombing London and other British cities for over 50 consecutive nights.
  • 1978 – While walking across Waterloo Bridge in London, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Gullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella.

It took Markov four days to die (there’s no antidote for ricin.) Although we’re not sure that Gullino was the assassin, they did find a tiny pellet with holes in it in Markov’s leg (below). It’s also not clear that the poison was ricin. Here’s a diagram of the bullet; Wikipedia notes:

The pellet measured 1.70 millimetres (0.067 in) in diameter and was composed of 90% platinum and 10% iridium. It had two holes with diameters of 0.35 mm (0.014 in) drilled through it, producing an X-shaped cavity. Further examination by experts from Porton Down could not detect any remnant of poison. Considering possible poisons, scientists hypothesized that the pellet might have contained ricin.

Porton Down scientists also thought that a sugary substance had been used to coat the tiny holes, creating a bubble that trapped the poison inside the cavities, with a specially crafted coating designed to melt at 37 °C (99 °F): human body temperature. After the pellet was inside Markov, the coating might have melted and the poison released to be absorbed into the bloodstream and kill him.

Da Nooz:

*The UN inspectors of the nuclear power plant in the Russian-occupied area of Ukraine have inspected the facilities and are “gravely concerned” that shelling around the plant could cause a major disaster:

In a report on its findings, the agency said that shelling should be “stopped immediately” and that it was prepared to start consultations with both sides in the conflict over security at the plant, which is the largest in Europe.

For weeks, fighting around the large facility — which was seized by Russian forces in March but is operated by Ukrainian engineers — has raised fears of a nuclear accident. A dry spent fuel storage facility was damaged last month and, in recent days, there has been a fire and loss of outside power to the plant. On Monday, renewed shelling caused a fire that once again led to the plant being disconnected from Ukraine’s national power grid, which Ukraine’s energy minister said placed critical cooling systems at risk of relying solely on emergency backup power.

“While the ongoing shelling has not yet triggered a nuclear emergency, it continues to represent a constant threat to nuclear safety and security with potential impact on critical safety functions that may lead to radiological consequences with great safety significance,” the report said.

The report calls for establishing a “security protection zone” around the plant, but did not place blame or chastise one side or the other.

*The Washington Post reports on the downfall of humanities studies in college. The proportion of people studying humanities is falling compared to STEM majors, and the proportion of students who regret having majored in humanities is rising, with regretfulness much less among STEM majors. Here are a few plots:

Regrets, I have a few. . . .

Nearly 2 in 5 American college graduates have major regrets.

That is, they regret their major.

The regretters include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues. When he delivered his 2011 State of the Union address in the shadow of the Great Recession, former president Barack Obama plugged math and science education and called on Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Since then, the number of new graduates in the arts and humanities has plunged.

. . . The burgeoning regret among humanities and arts majors may help explain why humanities graduates are a dying breed.

“There’s a pretty significant change underway,” historian and digital humanist Ben Schmidt said. “The numbers have dropped by 50 percent, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rebound.”

By 2021, disciplines such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s heyday, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body, according to Schmidt’s analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Here’s the choice of majors over the last 35 years, pitting all the humanities against just computer science, which are now equal in enrollment:

Proportional change in majors in the last decade. Note that the growing areas are proportional to how “sciencey” a discipline is, though I am surprised at the growth of “exercise science” (I don’t even know what that is).

In the decade since our national pivot to STEM, the number of people graduating with computer science degrees has doubled. Every STEM field notched significant gains. Nursing, exercise science, medicine, environment, engineering, and math and statistics are all up by at least 50 percent. Among the humanities, only two increased: cultural, ethnic and gender studies, and linguistics.

I can’t say that nobody anticipated this change: a lot of it is simply a matter of getting jobs that are good and have decent wages (there’s also a plot of how much STEM majors earn, though not a comparable one for humanities).

Nor do I think this is a good thing, as I’m a big fan of humanities. But as the purpose of college changed from getting educated and exposed to the world’s greatest thinkers to getting a credentials to land a job, of course STEM and computer sciences are going to nose out humanities. What I do deplore is the increase in “studies” majors, which is going to leave us with an oversupply of people in those fields, many of whom will then enter the hot market of DEI consultants.

*According to the NYT, over a million undocumented immigrants have entered the U.S. since Biden took office (notice that the paper calls them “asylum seekers,” implying that they are coming for political reasons, or to escape crime or harassment, not for economic reasons). All we know is that they’re undocumented. Referring to some immigrants living in Portland, the paper says this:

They are among the more than one million undocumented immigrants who have been allowed into the country temporarily after crossing the border during President Biden’s tenure, part of a record-breaking cascade of irregular migration around the world.

Distinct from the hundreds of thousands who have entered the country undetected during Mr. Biden’s term, many of the one million are hoping for asylum — a long shot — and will have to wait seven years on average before a decision on their case is reached because of the nation’s clogged immigration system.

. . . The million who have been allowed in since Mr. Biden took office — a figure that comes from internal Homeland Security data and court filings — are from more than 150 countries around the globe. With few pathways to enter the United States legally, crossing the border without documentation is often the only option for those fleeing crime and economic despair.

Of course this is an anti-Biden talking point for Republicans, but the concern is bipartisan:

. . .  it is not just conservatives who are upset about the situation. There has long been consensus across parties that Congress needs to update the nation’s immigration laws to face the current challenge.

Mr. Biden’s detractors say that his welcoming message to immigrants during his campaign amounted to an invitation to cross illegally; even his own Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, suggested as much when he was interviewed recently as part of a lawsuit filed by the state of Florida. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned migrants not to make the dangerous and expensive journey to the border.

With no federal assistance once they are released, it falls to local communities and states to help the new immigrants get to where they are going and keep them from living on the streets. And lately, that challenge has grown.

Let’s face it: Biden, despite what he says now, implicitly invited the mass movement across our Southwestern border. For many the problem is now out of hand, and shouldn’t the Democratic Congress have done something about this? After all, immigration reform can and should be bipartisan. But the Republicans are satisfied to let Democrats take the blame, and to some extent they should: they’ve been sitting on their hands. But now that Trump and the economy are big issues, there’s no strong impetus among Democrats to tackle immigration.

On the other hand, maybe we should just have open borders, as some people maintain. .  . .

*Facing a long jail sentence scheduled to be handed down this month, Elizabeth Holmses, the Theranos huckster, has found a reason to ask for a new trial. However, I’m not sure this is a valid reason for a new trial. The Wall Street Journal, the best source for information on l’affaire Theranos, reports:

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of defunct blood-testing startup Theranos Inc. who was convicted of fraud, has asked a federal judge for a new trial after she said one of the prosecution’s star witnesses visited her house to express regret for his role in her trial, according to a new court filing.

Ms. Holmes said in a filing Tuesday that Adam Rosendorff, a former Theranos lab director who testified for five days in her criminal-fraud trial, showed up unannounced at her home Aug. 8. During his visit, Dr. Rosendorff spoke to Ms. Holmes’s partner and said that the government had twisted his testimony that Theranos was “working so hard to do something good and meaningful,” and that he felt guilty “to the point where he had difficulty sleeping,” according to the court filing.

Ms. Holmes is arguing that Dr. Rosendorff’s alleged statements to her partner qualifies her for a new trial or a hearing to discuss the evidence.

Dr. Rosendorff declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California declined to comment.

Seriously, the guy says he didn’t commit perjury, but the government “twisted” his statements during his examination:

At his Aug. 8 visit, Dr. Rosendorff didn’t speak directly to Ms. Holmes but to her partner, Billy Evans, who answered the door, according to Mr. Evans’s account of the exchange, which was filed into court record. Dr. Rosendorff looked disheveled and his voice trembled as he explained that “he feels guilty,” according to the account. “He said he is hurting,” according to Mr. Evans. Dr. Rosendorff explained that he “tried to answer the questions honestly” during the trial but that the government made things sound worse than they were when he was up on the stand during his testimony. He said he felt as though he had done something wrong, according to the account.

Oh for crying out loud!  If Holmes manages to get a new trial, it will once again take months, and I doubt the result would differ. But “feeling as if you did something wrong even though you told the truth” doesn’t seem to me a good reason to bring the circus back to town again.

*The NYT also has an article called “The unexpected power of random acts of kindness,” and it will make you want to go out and do some of those acts. And the results are based on science! The article starts out describing a random act of kindness at Starbuck’s, and then talks about the study (with a link):

New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, corroborate just how powerful experiences like Ms. Alexander’s can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

“We have this negativity bias when it comes to social connection. We just don’t think the positive impact of our behaviors is as positive as it is,” said Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends,” who did not work on the recent research.

“With a study like this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of kindness,” she said.

And a description, which is longer than this:

The recent study comprised eight small experiments that varied in design and participants. In one, for example, graduate students were asked to perform thoughtful acts of their own choosing, like giving a classmate a ride home from campus, baking cookies or buying someone a cup of coffee.

In another, researchers recruited 84 participants on two cold weekends at the ice skating rink at Maggie Daley Park in Chicago. They were given a hot chocolate from the snack kiosk and were told they could keep it or give it to a stranger as a deliberate act of kindness. The 75 participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to guess how “big” the act of kindness would feel to the recipient on a scale from 0 (very small) to 10 (very large), and to predict how the recipient would rate their mood (ranging from much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal) upon receiving the drink. The recipients were then asked to report how they actually felt using the same scales.

In that experiment — and across all others — the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated how much it was actually appreciated, said one of the study’s authors, Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, Austin.

“We believe these miscalibrated expectations matter for behavior,” he said. “Not knowing one’s positive impact can stand in the way of people engaging in these sorts of acts of kindness in daily life.”

Unsurprisingly, both the gift and the gesture itself were rated more highly than the giver thought.  It’s unsurprising because we’re simply not used to strangers doing nice things for us without recompense, and it braces your faith in humanity. There’s a bit at the end about how to do these acts, which for some reason stresses out givers. Don’t overthink it, and incorporate what you’re good at in your gesture. (If you can’t bake, don’t make cupcakes for strangers!). Maybe readers can describe one of their random acts.

Here’s a related act that’s not purely voluntary, but makes me happy nonetheless. In one of the fancier restaurants where I occasionally dine, you can bring your own wine, but the “price” of corkage is that you must donate three ounces of your wine to a complete stranger in the room. And you get to pick the recipient. It’s big fun to pick out someone who looks like they could use a tipple, and to see their smile when the waitperson gives them a glass (I bring only very good wines to this place.) And then you get to exchange smiles and waves.

*The AP’s Covid explainer, “Is COVID-19 winding down? Scientists say no”, is pretty damn depressing. The virus is not going away before we die, we have to keep updating the vaccines as the virus mutates, it could mutate into a much worse incarnation of its present state, and people will continue to die from it. A bit of the future:

Experts say COVID will keep causing serious illness in some people. The COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub made some pandemic projections spanning August 2022 to May 2023, assuming the new tweaked boosters adding protection for the newest omicron relatives would be available and a booster campaign would take place in fall and winter. In the most pessimistic scenario — a new variant and late boosters — they projected 1.3 million hospitalizations and 181,000 deaths during that period. In the most optimistic scenario — no new variant and early boosters — they projected a little more than half the number of hospitalizations and 111,000 deaths.

Even the “Spanish flu” of 1918, while more of a killer, eventually went away.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili saw something amazing!

Hili: I’ve seen a battalion of motorized Don Quixotes.
A: Where?
Hili: They were driving towards a wind farm.
In Polish:
Hili: Widziałam batalion zmotoryzowanych Don Kichotów.
Ja: Gdzie?
Hili: Jechał na farmę wiatraków.

************************

From Stash Krod, a great Jon Adams cartoon. Imagine all the viewers slavering over those donuts!

From Atheism on FB:

A B. Kliban cartoon from Stash Krod:

The Tweet of God with an irrelevant but funny response. The content of the second tweet is NOT “sensitive”!

Ducks plus capybaras equals an unbeatable combination. But this duck thought it had killed the rodent!

From Luana:

From Barry, a learning experience:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. The first is in honor of his new P.M.:

Someone save this cat! As I told Matthew, I could use the same caption for Philomena:

Live and Learn Department (read the article). I wonder how they survive the winter.

45 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Dr. Rosendorff explained that he “tried to answer the questions honestly” during the trial but that the government made things sound worse than they were when he was up on the stand during his testimony.

    Isn’t this why the defence council is allowed to cross examine prosecution witnesses? Are you allowed a retrial on the grounds that your lawyers weren’t good enough to get you off?

    1. A convict can seek a new trial based upon a deprivation of the right to effective assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. But the standard for prevailing on such a motion is extremely demanding — essentially that no reasonable lawyer would have conducted themself as trial counsel did and a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unreasonable conduct, the outcome of the trial would have been different.

      Such motions are most frequently raised in a collateral attack on the conviction, brought, in federal cases, under 28 USC section 2255 (the modern substitute for the ancient writ of habeas corpus), after the convicted defendant has exhausted his or her direct appeals.

      It’s doubtful in the extreme that, based solely on the statements attributed to Rosendorff, Holmes can meet the threshold showing to obtain an evidentiary hearing on a motion for new trial at this stage of the proceedings.

      1. That’s what I thought. Holmes is basically arguing for a retrial based on her lawyer allegedly not doing a good enough job of cross examining a witness. If that were reasonable grounds, everybody who gets convicted would be doing it.

  2. … and National Feel the Love Day.

    Seems an appropriate opportunity for the Allman Brothers’ tune “Revival”:

    1. Thanks for this! A nice bit of background music to listen to whilst reading the rest of Hili and the comments!

  3. “It’s also National Beer Lover’s Day, once again implying, with the placement of the apostrophe, that only a single person who loves beer is being fêted. Who is that person?”

    Brett Kavanaugh.

    L

  4. The Tweet of God with an irrelevant but funny response.

    I have no idea what God is talking about, so I can’t tell if the response, although funny, is irrelevant.

    Regarding the empty files: Does the government know what they might have contained?

    Does linguistics include computational linguistics, or does that come under computer science?

    Elia Kazan was born on this day.

    2. Regarding the empty files, if I understand things correctly the government knows what files Trump took with him when he left the White House. These sorts of documents have strict handling and record keeping procedures. Even if they weren’t properly checked out it would be straightforward to see that documents that are supposed to be in the archive are not there and the government has had quite some time to review the archives.

      Of course that doesn’t mean that they know where the documents are now. Except for the ones they’ve recovered, obviously. But it is very likely that, yes, the government knows what the empty files contained.

      1. Yet if it knew which restricted-distribution secret files walked out of the White House on Inauguration Day, why did it take the FBI 18 months to apply for a search warrant to get them back? One leak said the FBI learned of them only recently from a mole inside Mar-a-Largo. Reporting the existence of a mole during an investigation makes sense only if you don’t really have one but want to sow paranoia and hostility among the encircled bad guys, and to hide the true manner in which you learned the info. So full marks for doing that but we’re still in the dark. I suppose we always will be. State secrets have to be kept from the public even if every spook in Casablanca knows them.

  5. Per the Lower East Side accent that prevailed at Katz’s Deli, especially pre-gentrification, “salami” and “army” rhymed.

  6. I checked the French version of Wikipedia on Louis the Stammerer (because I can read French) and it just says that he was nicknamed like that because he had a stammer. Now sometimes nicknames are made up or of disguised meaning, but often they just describe the individual 😉

    1. The bar graph shows the proportion of grads in each major who regretted their choice of school, not their choice of major.

      From the third graph, I’m glad to see nursing holding up strongly as a career choice among young people. Anecdotally I heard that applications to nursing programs remained strong even during the pandemic, so this increase does not represent merely a rebound.

  7. I agree that the trend to consider a college education as an advanced vocational training school as opposed to the notion that it should serve as a place to expand a student’s mind about the nature of the world and humanity is a disturbing trend, although understandable because people want to secure employment with a decent income. As more and more people become educated drones, knowledgeable about their little niche of training, and knowing next to nothing about everything else, the country becomes more susceptible to demagogic appeals since fewer people have any background to refute them. For example, how can one reject assertions that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War when that person knows nothing about the country’s history? Three or four humanities classes (but not “studies” classes) should be required for a degree regardless of the major. To put it another way, college as a purely vocational school represents a threat to democracy. The threat may be long-term and work below the surface, but it is real.

    2. Do you have thoughts regarding science and math requirements for humanities majors? What is the current state of that?

  9. If Dr. Adam Rosendorff now claims he wishes to recant his testimony from Elizabeth Holmes’s trial because that testimony was perjurious, let him execute a sworn affidavit to that effect and submit to the court.

    If all he’s claiming is that he feels bad because the prosecution elicited his trial testimony in a light unfairly incriminating to Holmes — well, hell, that’s precisely why the Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the opportunity to confront the prosecution’s witnesses through cross-examination (which the famous American legal scholar John Henry Wigmore called “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth”).

    1. That was more or less my thought – the obvious question about changing testimony would be “did you perjure yourself before or are you perjuring yourself now?”, with “neither” not being an available answer.
      Rosendorff may now feel sorry for Holmes, but that is hardly a reason for anything as far as the trial is concerned.

  11. I certainly regret my damn near useless history degree. I enjoyed what I learned but it did absolutely nothing for me. I’m lucky to have this crappy $30k a year job but nobody else in my office even has a bachelors so if the goal of a degree is to assist in gainful employment, I wasted my time. I could have done the same job for the same money at age 18, straight out of high school.

    Interesting side note: the last tweet is to tet zoo, Darren “Mr. Anti-Nazi” Naish. Wonder if he’s offended that the article is by Audubon, that “racist, white supremacy” bird organization.

  12. Your note on random acts of kindness brought to mind an intitiative my friend started in my hometown to honour the life of her daughter who died in April this year. She was 15 and I had known her since she was a bump. Her selfless attitude in life was an inspiration and, if people are so inclined, they can visit the FB page and find out more about the “butterfly effect” of doing nice things for strangers

    https://www.facebook.com/Evelynsbutterflyeffect

  13. For some inexplicable reason I had to click to see the Chris Farley thing with Boss Tweet because it was “sensitive”.

  14. The story I heard about the Mountain Meadow Massacre is considerably different than what is above. I heard it from a Mormon who learned it in school in Utah. He told me the wagon train came through, and asked the locals about the Indians, and was told they were friendly, not to bother circling the wagons. That night, the men of the community came through, killed all the men and older boys, took the women, girls, and younger boys. The women and girls were married to the Mormons, and the boys raised as good Mormons. Basically, that’s the story I’ve heard for years, until you posted the bit above. Which is true? I dunno.

    1. Everyone was killed except seventeen very young children. The wikipedia article on the massacre is pretty accurate. A really good book about the event is Blood of the Prophets by Will Bagley.

  15. So, are you saying some people are having major major regrets?

    I never regretted “settling” for my Liberal Arts degree. Of course, it didn’t prepare me for a specific profession, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, anyway. I got into a tech field, and worked my way up the semi-corporate ladder. I always thought my general well-roundedness served me well. In particular, an ability to write coherently was helpful.

  16. An example of the benefits of Classical Studies that I just came across the other night while reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘Abducting a General,’ about the successful abduction of German General Kreipe and transporting him from Crete, 1944: On waking one morning at a hideout cave (Crete seems to be full of them), the General started to recite, half to himself, the opening line of the Ode to Horace. By luck, Fermor knew the rest, and completed it from memory.

    The General seems to have been relatively complacent thru the whole abduction, but this little incident helped to strengthen the bond between the two.

    (It is also worth noting that Kreipe had only recently replaced the bloodthirsty General Müller (who was executed after the war). Müller had been the intended target when the operation, and had he not been replaced the outcome of the abduction might likely have been quite different. Kreipe died naturally in 1976; he and Fermor met again amicably a few years before that.)

  17. “I wonder how they survive the winter.”

    The natural range of Rhea goes as South as the San Matias bay in Argentina. Winters are colder, but not that much colder around Lübeck than there. Also I suspect low precipitation is the reason why they won’t go even more south in Argentina and not the colder winters.

    1. A pasture near our home has a few Rhea running around with the horses and donkeys. When you see a Rhea up close, especially the legs and feet, it seems obvious that they are dinosaurs.

  18. I wonder how they [the Greater Rheas] survive the winter.

    I am linking an article from the German popular science monthly “Spektrum der Wissenschaft”.

    “In harsh winters, the number of half-hatchlings usually declines significantly, as they can hardly find food in the deep and resinous snow. But under moderate temperatures, about two-thirds of the offspring survive the cold season. Old animals normally defy all kinds of weather, says Philipp: “Frost or snow do occur in partial habitats of the Greater Rheas. And the Greater Rheas living with us are descended from animals that have lived in enclosures longer and have adapted better to the climate from generation to generation.” So those that survive their first winter have a good chance of reaching sexual maturity at two to three years old and living up to 15 years. Thus, the number of little brown-yellow chicks continues to increase with each passing year.

    https://www.spektrum.de/news/nandus-verbreiten-sich-in-mecklenburg-vorpommern/1390664

  19. ” The proportion of people studying humanities is falling compared to STEM majors, and the proportion of students who regret having majored in humanities is rising, with regretfulness much less among STEM majors.” Not to worry. The campaign to impose DEI loyalty oaths across all of higher education is accelerating [see
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/higher-ed-new-woke-loyalty-oaths-dei ]. As a result, all of higher ed, including STEM departments, will soon enjoy the atmosphere of rote, theocratic conformity that has done so much for the humanities fields in recent years. After that, graduates will no longer regret their particular major, but instead regret having gone through higher education at all.

  21. For Sale: One Used Sandpiper
    by Lorna Salzman

    I was googling the other day and came across a letter from someone complaining about how his used Sandpiper wasn’t working very well. I momentarily considered responding to tell him
    that he should get another one on e-bay or a brand new one, but then remembered that it is illegal to trap wild birds.

    Reading further I then realized he was talking about some obscure kind of motor or motorized vehicle. So why was I googling sandpipers in the first place? I – and apparently hundreds of other bird watchers – are DESPERATE to know why shorebirds stand and even hop on one leg. They do it while they rest, sleep or move away from photographers, bird watchers and dogs. They will hop away on one leg in preference to flying, which one would think is a more effective survival strategy.

    It was comforting to see that I was not the only one asking this question. There were dozens and dozens of postings on this very topic and responses from bird watchers, hunters, scientists, university professors and others. But it was less comforting to discover that no really satisfactory answer was forthcoming.

    Some were humorous of course: “They stand on one leg because if they lift it up they would fall down”. Others tried to come up with reasonably scientific answers. Of these only two seemed to have any merit: heat regulation and ability to detect danger.

    Several people said that on one leg, the bird can more quickly swivel around to look in all directions before taking off if there is danger. I don’t buy this argument because bird’s heads swivel quite satisfactorily in many directions when they are on two legs. Another said that it could take off more quickly from a one-leg position, but another respondent dispelled this notion quite credibly. The response that got most support was that of heat regulation, though even this raises questions.

    A bird’s legs and bill, being unfeathered, are the major sites of heat loss; raising one leg conserves heat as does tucking the bill under the feathers when it rests or sleeps. But as one person (from Australia, naturally) pointed out, they do these things under all climatic conditions, cold or hot. Maybe in this case, as in so many others, we need to look for the simplest explanation (Occam’s Razor theorem): that the bird is giving the invisible leg a rest. That’s the fun of it. It’s called serendipity. It’s like catching that big fish: there are no guarantees but the payoff when it comes is worth the time spent.

    My favorite bird joke: Why do birds fly south in the winter? Because it’s too far to walk.
    ——————————————————————————————————————–

    1. Sitting here with my left leg crossed over and resting upon my right knee, I cannot help but wonder why I do that just as much as I wonder why a flamingo or a used sandpiper might do so. I’m not even standing but I routinely do this, alternating legs from time to time. My legs are likewise unfeathered but they do sport a fair amount of good shaggy Scottish fur. I, too, do this under all climatic conditions. What I do know is that razors, be they Occam’s or mine own, will never come between myself and my pelage.

      1. So, you’re explaining shifting weight. I have little pelage, but I broke my femur at a young age and now, almost 50 years later, my right leg is 1/2″ shorter than my left. After the break (I was 7) “healed” the leg was 2.5″ shorter, but thanks to a healthy puberty growth spurt my right leg got within the aforementioned 1/2″. Over the years, that small difference has made a big difference, not debilitating by any means (yet), but that’s for another comment. Just wanted to point out, sometimes humans do it because of strange leg lengths, injuries, hip problems, arthritis, having worked too long as a cashier…a myriad of shifting legs! That still doesn’t explain the stance of a flamingo, though.

  22. The chimp and the duck/capybara videos brought me a lot of joy. So glad I got to see these without the burden of being of being on social media. Thank for the curation.

  23. Re: “The unexpected power of random acts of kindness,”

    I had an experience in high school in the 70’s that forever re-enforced this idea.

    It was a very large high school and since there was a large Jamaican (and surrounding areas) community nearby, there were quite a number of students with that background.
    I shared a locker area with many of these students.

    Many of those students took a band class with the only black teacher in the school (I think Jamaican descent), which mixed band instruments with steel drums. I’ll refer to him as “Mr. X” because I can’t remember his name. I noticed that there was often a happy buzz when the students were coming from that class.

    One day in particular a group of the Jamaican students were talking happily about what a great teacher Mr. X was, and how much they loved his class. Not long after they had departed Mr. X came strolling down the hallway. I thought “my father is a teacher and I know how much it would mean to know the positive things students have to say about the class” so I stopped Mr. X who looked at me puzzled. I explained to him what I just heard: I repeated a number of the extremely positive things his students had said about his class and about him as a teacher. I’ll never forget the way his look of puzzlement slowly turned in to one of the most deep, joyfull expressions I’ve seen.
    He was so touched, and deeply thankful to me for letting him know. He carried on smiling all the way down the hall.

    That taught me a lesson: if you have something good to say or to tell someone…say it! Don’t hold it in. It will be good for both of you! And I’ve tried to practice this ever since. A recent example: We had an old friend of my wife’s over to stay. She has always been a funny, eloquent speaker. She’d just regaled us with some tale and I was thinking about how much I simply enjoy listening to her speak. So instead of just thinking it, I told her how much I loved listening to her speak, and why. It could have been awkward, but in fact it clearly made her day.

    1. Nice anecdotes and thanks for sharing (instead of holding it in). The most common act of kindness I do is simply compliment what someone is wearing. I try and do it frequently, because I see a lot of clothing I dig, and it always brings an honest smile. And I started doing it because I always get a kick of happiness when someone compliments something I’m wearing- usually a t-shirt of some sort. T-shirts seem to be a tribe thing, so not surprising. I try to compliment style, if possible, but if I see a T-shirt I like, I’ll compliment that too.

      1. While I appreciate another’s complimenting my attire and thank them, I usually also express my appreciation for the skills of the person who made the object. It’s a lot easier to wear the item, such as a fine pair of western boots, than it is to create it.

        Once upon a time, a noble soul, looking at a garment I was wearing, with great epistemic humility announced ex cathedra from Mount Olympus, “That’s just weird.” I did not respond in order to Keep The Peace, as we were part of a group going out to eat and to putatively enjoy one another’s company. No doubt, he said this in order to optimize good will between us,

  24. Re “Regrets, I have a few. . . .”, the red bar-graph shown is not the one regarding majors (which is the blue one at the linked article), but schools.

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