Wednesday: Hili dialogue

50 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

1. On this day:
   1158 – The city of Munich is founded by Henry the Lion on the banks of the river Isar.

   1775 – American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Armed Forces.

   1777 – The Second Continental Congress passes the Flag Act of 1777 adopting the Stars and Stripes as the Flag of the United States.

   1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: HMS Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km (4,600 mi) journey in an open boat.

   1822 – Charles Babbage proposes a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society.

   1872 – Trade unions are legalized in Canada.

   1900 – Hawaii becomes a United States territory.

   1907 – The National Association for Women’s Suffrage succeeds in getting Norwegian women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

   1919 – John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown depart from St. John’s, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.

   1937 – U.S. House of Representatives passes the Marihuana Tax Act.

   1940 – World War II: The German occupation of Paris begins.

   1940 – Seven hundred and twenty-eight Polish political prisoners from Tarnów become the first inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

   1949 – Albert II, a rhesus monkey, rides a V-2 rocket to an altitude of 134 km (83 mi), thereby becoming the first mammal and first monkey in space. [Albert died upon reentry after a parachute failure caused Albert’s capsule to strike the ground at high speed. Albert’s respiratory and cardiological data were recorded up to the moment of impact.]

   1954 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill into law that places the words “under God” into the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

   1966 – The Vatican announces the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“index of prohibited books”), which was originally instituted in 1557.

   1982 – Falklands War: Argentine forces in the capital Stanley conditionally surrender to British forces.

   2017 – A fire in a high-rise apartment building in North Kensington, London, UK, leaves 72 people dead and another 74 injured.

   2017 – US Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and three others, are shot and wounded by a terrorist while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game.

   [Apologies for the long list – births and deaths will be posted separately.]

   1. No apology necessary…glad to have the lists! I remember being instructed, in first grade about the addition of “under g-d” in the pledge and that it was important to say the phrase “one nation under g-d” in a single breath with out pause between words nation and under. For some reason this was deemed to be very important to our teacher. Funny what we remember after 70 years.

      1. Or as I used to say it: “one nation … … with liberty and justice for all.”

   2. Often overlooked about our Revolutionary war, started in 1775, the battle of Bunker Hill, actually Breed’s Hill was one of the bloodies of the entire war. Over 1000 British and 400 Americans were killed. This took place in Boston before George Washington took command of the army.

   3. When asked by an MP* if they put the wrong numbers into his difference engine, “would it produce the correct answer?”, Babbage famously remarked;

      “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

      Over the years reading the “debates” with creationists, that quote from Babbage came often to mind.

      *not sure about that. It was someone from English gubmint though, I’m sure.

      BTW, thank you Jez, for the daily lists. It’s a feature of WEIT that I (and many others, I am sure) enjoy. So, thanks for keeping it up. Much appreciated.

      1. +1, yes, thank you Jez, for your assiduous list making!

   4. You don’t need to publish the whole list. Jerry used to edit it according to what he thought was interesting.

      1. The whole list was a LOT longer…!

2. “… the goal of diversifying the knowledge base of the entire human species …”

   This “goal” is more clearly understood in terms the world already knows a lot about :

   Seizing the means of knowledge production.

   I do not think that is a mistake.

3. Births:
   1444 – Nilakantha Somayaji, Indian astronomer and mathematician (d. 1544).

   1736 – Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, French physicist and engineer (d. 1806).

   1811 – Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and activist (d. 1896).

   1856 – Andrey Markov, Russian mathematician and theorist (d. 1922).

   1864 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist (d. 1915).

   1868 – Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1943). [Distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood. In 1937, with Alexander S. Wiener, he identified the Rhesus factor, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient’s life. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus in 1909.]

   1868 – Anna B. Eckstein, German peace activist (d. 1947).

   1877 – Ida MacLean, British biochemist, the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society (d. 1944).

   1909 – Burl Ives, American actor and singer (d. 1995).

   1919 – Sam Wanamaker, American actor and director (d. 1993).

   1923 – Judith Kerr, German-English author and illustrator (d. 2019).

   1924 – James Black, Scottish pharmacologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2010).

   1928 – Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Argentinian-Cuban physician, author, guerrilla leader and politician (d. 1967).

   1931 – Junior Walker, American saxophonist (d. 1995).

   1945 – Rod Argent, English singer-songwriter and keyboard player.

   1946 – Donald Trump, American businessman, television personality and 45th President of the United States.

   1949 – Jim Lea, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer.

   1949 – Antony Sher, South African-British actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2021).

   1949 – Alan White, English drummer and songwriter (d. 2022).

   1961 – Boy George, English singer-songwriter and producer.

   1969 – Steffi Graf, German tennis player.

   They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body, that, in the morning, is going to be hanged:
   1801 – Benedict Arnold, American general during the American Revolution later turned British spy (b. 1741).

   1825 – Pierre Charles L’Enfant, French-American architect and engineer, designed Washington, D.C. (b. 1754).

   1837 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher (b. 1798).

   1877 – Mary Carpenter, English educational and social reformer (b. 1807).

   1920 – Max Weber, German sociologist and economist (b. 1864).

   1927 – Jerome K. Jerome, English author (b. 1859).

   1928 – Emmeline Pankhurst, English activist and academic (b. 1857).

   1936 – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, playwright, and novelist (b. 1874).

   1946 – John Logie Baird, Scottish-English physicist and engineer (b. 1888).

   1977 – Alan Reed, American actor, original voice of Fred Flintstone (b.1907).

   1986 – Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator (b. 1899).

   1991 – Peggy Ashcroft, English actress (b. 1907).

   1994 – Henry Mancini, American composer and conductor (b. 1924).

   1995 – Rory Gallagher, Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1948).

   2015 – Richard Cotton, Australian geneticist and academic (b. 1940).

   2015 – Anne Nicol Gaylor, American activist, co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation (b. 1926).

   2022 – A. B. Yehoshua, Israeli novelist, essayist, and playwright (b. 1936).

   1. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”—Jorge Luis Borges

      1. The Library of Babel, I make no doubt.

4. Looks like the cat may be studying Talmud rather than Torah.

   I remember first reading about green flash as a child in the late 50’s or early 60’s in Scientific American…when it actually provided science. It may have been the cover photo. My father had a long running subscription. Now I guess that was priviledge!

   1. Just googled it. Green flash was cover photo on January 1960 issue of SciAm. Cover price: 50 cents (cheap)

      1. (cheap)
         That reminds me of Mad Magazine where they always put “cheap” next to the price.

         Though .50 cents in 1960 is equivalent to $5.14 today, so about average for a magazine, though SciAm ain’t worth $5.14 anymore. 🙁

         1. Yep. It was meant as a Mad reference. What me worry?

            1. Aha, good one, thanks. I loved Mad in my teen years.

5. Sad news about Cormac McCarthy. I’ve read and admired quite a few of his books but not (yet) The Road. When it comes to dark novels, though, I’d have to say Child of God takes some beating!

6. It seems to me that the goal of science is to pursue and discover objective truths about the universe. That is, it attempts to make assertions about phenomenons in which the evidence for their truthfulness is so overwhelming (with the understanding that they are provisional with the slight possibly that they could be wrong) that they can be declared objectively true. For example, the claim that the composition of a water molecule as consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is objectively true. On the other hand, there is no objective truth about the nature of dark matter (as I understand it). This is because the pursuit of objective truth can be difficult and often encounters dead ends or science lacks the tools, at least currently, to reach it.

   Once the understanding of a phenomenon reaches objective truth status, science must stand back and take at the most an advisory role and let “society” determine its implications, if there are any. Objective truths in science are nothing more than a list of factoids (as interesting as they may be) if nothing is done about this knowledge. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of objective truth for knowledge’s sake. If an objective truth for the nature of dark matter is ever determined, it would be a great discovery, but it would still be a factoid unless some practical use for this knowledge is found. But, debates in science that interest the general public revolve around the practical use of scientific discoveries. For example, it is an objective fact that science has discovered the means to manufacture nuclear weapons of tremendous destructive power. Likewise, science has discovered the means to use nuclear energy to generate electric power. So, the question arises: under what circumstances, if any, should nuclear weapons be used or nuclear power plants be constructed? The answer to this question is purely subjective. Different societies will come up with radically different answers based on their particular circumstances.

   Quite simply, the purpose of science is to discover objective truths. It is the role of society to determine what to do with them.

   1. Does it change anything to note that scientists Szilard and Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt urging him to develop a national scientific effort to learn more about nuclear fission for the express purpose of building an atomic bomb (before Germany did) should that prove possible? The state of the art at the time was Neils Bohr’s calculation that the two halves of a single fissioning uranium nucleus that had absorbed an extra neutron would fly apart with enough kinetic energy to make an adjacent macroscopic grain of sand bounce. But no one knew if it was actually possible, even theoretically, to make an atomic nucleus do that, much less to propagate a chain reaction that would make whole cities bounce. The effort to find out became the Manhattan Project. It consumed the theoretical physics brainpower of UCSF and UChicago with many fundamental discoveries made (which couldn’t be published), not just the building of the weapons themselves as applied technology projects. They were devoting their scientific gifts to a means of mass human destruction.

      Nuclear energy is often mentioned as the archetypal discovery made by apolitical scientists and then used by society for good or ill without ethical input from the scientists. Yet Tne Bomb drove the basic science program. All the Manhattan scientists (and the embedded Russian spies) and the ones at the Tube Alloys project in the U.K, knew they were working on something to smite Germany with. Even Bob Oppenheimer, with his “I am become death . . .” at the Trinity test knew what he had made. He might have been remorseful but certainly not surprised at “what society would choose to do with” his invention that he had delivered to it. None of the scientists were in the electricity business.

7. Cassowaries: Read my friend Andy Mack’s Searching for Pek-pek about research involving them in Papua New Guinea. As a bonus, there are a several accounts on the lack of brotherly love among the various missionary sects that have set up camp there. .

8. Regarding Paul’s critique, I thought that the concept of social engineering had been discredited? At any rate, if you don’t believe in objective truth, then you can justify doing (or not doing) anything in furtherance of your political goals.

   And on the definition of lesbian, I read it to my wife last night, and her conclusion was that “non-men” included animals. Even to me, a man, the identification of women as “non-men” seems incredibly degrading. Why do these people hate women?

   1. Non-men includes nearly everything in the universe – except men. I’m just glad that John Hopkins finally saw sense.

9. I think Jack Smith should have indited Trump in Washington. Cannon is a huge risk since she has been seen to be biased and she holds tremendous power to upend the Trump’s trial. She can influence jury selection and allow for absurd delays. I can’t see any really good reason that could justify Florida. In D.C. a guilty verdict is very likely. In FL probably unlikely.

   1. If you are hoping that the choice of venue will increase the chance of a guilty verdict, you aren’t being objective. Impeachments take place in Washington because they are political by nature. This is a criminal case against a private citizen who is entitled to presumption of innocence and every meticulous due process. If you want a conviction that will stick.

      Ken Kukec pointed out here how the venue has to match the location the crime is alleged to have been committed in, where such location can be nailed down to a specific place. Trump is not accused of taking documents illegally from the White House—whether he did or not is not alleged in the indictment. The main locality offence alleged is that he refused to return named military and intelligence documents in his possession that the government told him he had no right as a private citizen to have, and that he and his valet made illegal attempts to keep the government from finding them. All these offences (if they occurred as the indictment alleges) occurred in Florida, not in DC.

      Having read the indictment (as a layman) I am impressed with its clear sturdy-English exposition of the government’s case and its lack of apparent political motivation. There is nothing vague (like “counter-revolutionary activities”) in the charging. The government learned that a private citizen was in possession of government agency documents. He didn’t return them when it asked him nicely and then he tried to obstruct their lawful recovery attempts. These acts, if they happened as claimed, are clear crimes.

      The prosecutor no doubt knows that venue-shopping would inflame Trump’s supporters and risk failure of its case on constitutional challenge.

      Florida is where the money is.

      1. I’m hoping that Judge Cannon will learn from her experience of being harshly slapped down twice by the 11th Circuit for twisting the law to favor Trump. My hopes are not high though. Many very prominent prosecutors and former prosecutors are expecting her to continue to distort the law in his favor to the point that he may be aquitted of these extremely serious charges despite the hard evidence and facts. They have no confidence in her to do the correct thing and remain objective. Lawrence Tribe and others are calling for her recusal based on her execrable performance.

10. The Deboutta Paul critique of the “merit paper” is not compelling. It is just vague generalities about social justice. The only specific claim is that enforced racial, sex, and gender diversity will lead to the better viewpoint diversity that, he claims, will help resolve arguments between competing theories. While he concedes that new factual discoveries can resolve the question, say, as to whether the SARS-Cov2 virus came from a lab or an animal, he cites no evidence that black virologists, or female epidemiologists are going to be uniquely better at elucidating these facts from background noise just because they are black or female. If he went into more detail it would sound like special ways of knowing and I thinks he knows that wouldn’t fly.

    All he’s really arguing is it will be better for the careers of black and female scientists if they are mandated into research teams through quotas, and that this will be somehow better for society than if those positions had been filled on merit.

11. Matt Taibbi, reports that now the “wet lab” theory of coronavirus origin is back in the dumpster again.

    Maybe this is just the transatlantic language gap, but I would have thought putting something in the dumpster meant you were throwing it away. The rest of the story suggests that the wet lab theory has been fished out of the dumpster.

    1. I think Jerry means the “wet market” (not lab) theory is back in the dumpster. It’s true the sources are still unnamed in that story, and the reporters promise that other outlets will follow up by naming the sources who IDed the WIV researchers as the earliest infected with SARS-Cov-2. So I’m still only about 70-30 in favour of lab leak vs. wet market. As I said here a few months ago, why *that* wet market, just a few miles from WIV but hundreds of miles outside the range of horseshoe bats? But agreed it’s still not totally convincing.

       [edit: oops should have kept scrolling SP beat me to it]

    2. IMO, Matt Taibbi has become a hack and shill for outre conspiracy theories. At this point, I wouldn’t believe him if he said the sky was blue.

       1. Yeah, Taibbi has lost his credibility. Too bad, he used to be a damn good journalist.

       2. New Yorker Magazine begs to differ.

          “I’m certainly not going to feel guilty for having success at Substack for saying things I believe are true. I’ve been very consistent over the years in saying the same things,” Taibbi said. “I feel pretty strongly that the only thing that’s changed is that the New York media world once agreed with the things I was saying, and now they don’t.”

          https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/what-happened-to-matt-taibbi.html

          And as our host often says, it’s not the author it’s the information. Taibbi could be wrong or his unnamed government sources could evaporate, but the story is still the story that named senior WIV researchers doing active lab work were the first to be infected in November 2019.

12. My thought exactly, but I wonder if Jerry actually meant “wet market”.

13. “Non-binary people who may also identify with the label.”

    They misspelled “appropriate.”

14. The fact that Waltine Nauta requested an extension on making a plea at arraignment makes me wonder if his defense and the prosecution are working on a plea deal. Get the little dog to turn on the big dog.

    The Johns Hopkins glossary imbroglio (Rowling’s tweet was perfection) is why the backlash is increasing. How many lesbians did JH — and the trans activists in general — just alienate? The trans-rights community ought to take a page from the gay rights movement and stick to advocating for individual rights.

    1. Nauta was not arraigned because he is not currently represented by a member of the Florida Bar and of the trial bar of the Southern District of Florida, requirements of the SD Fla Local Rules for counsel to file a permanent notice of appearance in a case and a necessity for proceeding with an arraignment.

       I don’t think Nauta will flip on Trump — at least not so long as he believes that Trump will be reelected president and have the power to pardon him if he is convicted (or if the charges are still pending should Trump take office again). If and when, however, Trump no longer is in a position to pardon him — if Trump fails to win the Republican nomination or if Trump loses the general election — it would not surprise me to see Nauta strike a deal to cooperate against Trump.

       1. I do hope he turns on Trump.

       2. Thanks for the context, Ken. I wasn’t aware that he was not yet represented by counsel in Florida.

          1. Nauta has a lawyer, Dean, but he’s from out of state (and paid for by one of Trump’s PACs). In the Southern District of Florida, defendants are required to have a local lawyer. The local lawyer can then move to allow the out-of-state lawyer to make a special appearance in the case (known as a pro hac vice appearance.)

             You know lawyers and their arcane Latin phrases. 🙂

             1. If you don’t try to decode the Latin, pro hac vice sounds like it would be a special elite force tasked with cleaning up Trouble in River City, trouble with a capital P.

15. The article you quote from Public, written by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, may be found eventually to be credible but the responses to it are truly mega-paranoiac, anti government, angry populist, anti intellectual and at their core anti science. Taibbi long ago abandoned his honest journalism and Shellenberger’s rants about nuclear power reveal him as a complete charlatan who knows nothing about energy or science. Their being the authors of this piece raises serious doubts about both their knowledge and their agenda. But the commenters and others now have more ammunition for their attacks on government, science and the media, and reveal them as right wing conspiracy theorists, not independent impartial scientists. I suspect that this new source calling itself Public has an agenda that in no way promotes honest journalism or the public interest. As always, caution is needed as well as research to find out the politics and finances behind any new news source. Whoever is behind Public needs to be uncovered.

16. When I was a kid, I always thought of angel food cake like oatmeal raisin cookies – a lesser version of real desserts, pawned off on us by mothers and grandmothers who were trying to trick us into thinking we were getting a treat, but without it being quite as unhealthy as the real deal. I mean, who would want such an insubstantial mockery of a cake in angel food cake, when you could have a good, dense, filling pound cake? Traditional strawberry shortcake definitely fell into that lesser imitation of a dessert, being composed of both angel food cake and fruit, with the only real dessert ingredient being the whipped cream. That New England version with a biscuit looks pretty good.

    Nowadays, I’ve come to realize that there are people who actually like angel food cake. I suppose it takes all types.

    1. I feel similar about angel food cake. I’m OK with it, but it’s not my first choice. Or 2nd, or 3rd.

       BUT. I recently discovered chiffon cake, a close cousin, and it’s great. Almost identical to angel food cake except that it has egg yolks in it as well as lots of egg whites, while angel food has only whites. And chiffon cake is usually flavored.

       Awhile back during a deep dive down the youtube rabbit hole I came across a recipe for Earl Grey Chiffon cake. I’m not really a baker but I love Earl Grey tea and so decided to give it a try. I was a bit worried about pulling it off, baking can be very technical and I’ve little experience, but it came out great. The frosting, also flavored with Earl Grey tea, is simply whipped heavy cream stabilized with a modest amount of gelatin. It was a big hit.

       About a month ago I had the idea to try the same chiffon cake recipe but flavored with orange instead. I simply replaced the tea with orange peel, orange juice and a bit of orange oil. And spiked the frosting with Grand Marnier. I was amazed at how well it turned out. Even my wife was impressed, which is saying something. She even texted her mother to tell her about it.

       1. Hmm. I’ll have to keep that in mind next time I’m in the mood for baking. That’s for the suggestion.

17. Cassowaries get a bit of an overhyped ‘deadly’ reputation. There are only two documented human fatalities – one a 16 year old who tripped and fell while attacking a cassowary with a club, when the cassowary got off a kick towards his neck that cut his jugular. The other was a 75 year old man who was clawed to death after falling. I haven’t heard of any documented cases of cassowaries disemboweling people.

18. According to reports, the author of the “non-man” definition was a trans woman.

    1. If true—and who but a man with bitter hatred of women would refer to a woman as a non-man?—it raises an interesting question of branding. The Biden administration was “proud” to name the first trans-gender full admiral (albeit a ceremonial courtesy rank) as head of the Public Health Service. Lia Thomas was “proud” to be the first transgender athlete to win a women’s swimming title. Some dude from New Zealand was “proud” to make history by bumping a woman off the Olympic weightlifting team. Will Johns Hopkins be willing to say how “proud” they are to have appointed their first transgender director of the secretariat for inclusive language? Let’s ask them. Likely they will tell us that the hospital does not discuss human resource matters with the public.

19. Hats off to Albert II must have been terrifying for the poor bugger.

20. I was long skeptical about the green flash (I am 67), but had to keep an open mind because my father who lived on the tenth floor of a block of flats in Cape Town overlooking Table Bay and the South Atlantic swore that he had seen a couple of them on perfectly calm days with a clear horizon, something that seldom happens there (and never where I live in the midwest). Well, last year I sailed across the Pacific from Panama to Fiji, and twice saw a green flash, as my Dad noted, on perfectly calm afternoons with no clouds on the horizon, again, something that happened seldom in the six months I was sailing. My approach was to keep my focus just off to the side of the setting sun until the last moment and then move focus to it as it disappeared, and twice there was a brief green flash just above the horizon where the sun had disappeared. So I am no longer a skeptic.

    1. That’s exactly what I did on the beach in Martinique in 1986. I was just watching the sun set before going for dinner. I was avoiding looking straight at it even though it was a red orange and not super bright but I knew sunset watchers have burned their foveas. Then as the upper limb disappeared my gaze just by chance snapped back to where the sun had set and there was the flash. Years later I mentioned it to a west coast dweller and asked him if this was regarded as commonplace or rare. He said rare.

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