Saturday: Hili dialogue

26 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

1. Does Matthew’s petroleum fly support the old Tommy Gold ideas of a “deep, hot biosphere” origin of life?

2. On this day:
   1265 – The first English parliament to include not only Lords but also representatives of the major towns holds its first meeting in the Palace of Westminster, now commonly known as the “Houses of Parliament”.

   1649 – The High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I begins its proceedings.

   1783 – The Kingdom of Great Britain signs preliminary articles of peace with the Kingdom of France, setting the stage for the official end of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War later that year.

   1788 – The third and main part of First Fleet arrives at Botany Bay, beginning the British colonization of Australia. Arthur Phillip decides that Port Jackson is a more suitable location for a colony.

   1841 – Hong Kong Island is occupied by the British during the First Opium War.

   1887 – The United States Senate allows the Navy to lease Pearl Harbor as a naval base.

   1909 – Newly formed automaker General Motors (GM) buys into the Oakland Motor Car Company, which later becomes GM’s long-running Pontiac division.

   1929 – The first full-length talking motion picture filmed outdoors, In Old Arizona, is released.

   1936 – King George V of the United Kingdom dies. His eldest son succeeds to the throne, becoming Edward VIII. The title Prince of Wales is not used for another 22 years. [The rumour that his last words were “Bugger Bognor”, a reference to the town of Bognor Regis which had added “Regis” to its name after he had stayed there, is probably untrue but it is certain that the King disliked the town.]

   1937 – Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner are sworn in for their second terms as U.S. President and U.S. Vice President; it is the first time a Presidential Inauguration takes place on January 20 since the 20th Amendment changed the dates of presidential terms.

   1941 – A German officer is killed in Bucharest, Romania, sparking a rebellion and pogrom by the Iron Guard, killing 125 Jews and 30 soldiers.

   1942 – World War II: At the Wannsee Conference held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, senior Nazi German officials discuss the implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”.

   1954 – In the United States, the National Negro Network is established with 40 charter member radio stations.

   1961 – John F. Kennedy is inaugurated the 35th President of the United States of America, becoming the youngest man to be elected into that office, and the first Catholic.

   1972 – Pakistan launches its nuclear weapons program, a few weeks after its defeat in the Bangladesh Liberation War, as well as the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

   1981 – Twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States of America, Iran releases 52 American hostages.

   1986 – In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated as a federal holiday for the first time.

   1986 – In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated as a federal holiday for the first time.

   1991 – Sudan’s government imposes Islamic law nationwide, worsening the civil war between the country’s Muslim north and Christian south.

   2009 – Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America, becoming the first African-American President of the United States.

   2021 – Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States of America. At 78, he becomes the oldest person ever inaugurated. Kamala Harris becomes the first female Vice President of the United States. [Who will be inaugurated on this day next year?]

   Births:
   1573 – Simon Marius, German astronomer and academic (d. 1624).

   1703 – Joseph-Hector Fiocco, Flemish violinist and composer (d. 1741).

   1741 – Carl Linnaeus the Younger, Swedish botanist and author (d. 1783).

   1775 – André-Marie Ampère, French physicist and mathematician (d. 1836).

   1856 – Harriot Stanton Blatch, U.S. suffragist and organizer (d. 1940).

   1873 – Johannes V. Jensen, Danish author, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1950).

   1883 – Forrest Wilson, American journalist and author (d. 1942).

   1888 – Lead Belly, American folk/blues musician and songwriter (d. 1949).

   1894 – Harold Gray, American cartoonist, created Little Orphan Annie (d. 1968).

   1896 – George Burns, American actor, comedian, and producer (d. 1996).

   1900 – Dorothy Annan, English painter, potter, and muralist (d. 1983).

   1907 – Paula Wessely, Austrian actress and producer (d. 2000).

   1910 – Joy Adamson, Austria-Kenyan painter and conservationist (d. 1980).

   1920 – Federico Fellini, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 1993).

   1923 – Slim Whitman, American country and western singer-songwriter and musician (d. 2013).

   1926 – Patricia Neal, American actress (d. 2010).

   1930 – Buzz Aldrin, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut.

   1934 – Tom Baker, English actor. [Mum and Dad knew him years ago. I think they met through Mum’s Dickens connections rather than Dad’s acting ones, which is also the case with Miriam Margolis.]

   1946 – David Lynch, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

   1948 – Nancy Kress, American author and academic.

   1951 – Ian Hill, English rock bassist. [Best known as the bassist and the sole continuous member for the heavy metal band Judas Priest. Along with lead guitarist Glenn Tipton, he is the only member who has appeared on all of the band’s studio albums.]

   1952 – Paul Stanley, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

   1953 – Jeffrey Epstein, American financier and convicted sex offender (d. 2019).

   1956 – Bill Maher, American comedian, political commentator, media critic, television host, and producer.

   1965 – Heather Small, English singer-songwriter.

   1967 – Kellyanne Conway, American political strategist and pundit.

   1969 – Nicky Wire, Welsh singer-songwriter and bass player.

   1971 – Gary Barlow, English singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer.

   1972 – Nikki Haley, American accountant and politician, 116th Governor of South Carolina.

   1975 – Zac Goldsmith, English journalist and politician.

   Death is no different whined at than withstood. (Phillip Larkin):
   1568 – Myles Coverdale, English bishop and translator (b. 1488). [In 1535, Coverdale produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English. He was exiled three times and died in poverty.]

   1779 – David Garrick, English actor, producer, playwright, and manager (b. 1717).

   1837 – John Soane, English architect, designed the Bank of England (b. 1753).

   1841 – Jørgen Jørgensen, Danish explorer (b. 1780).

   1859 – Bettina von Arnim, German author, illustrator, and composer (b. 1785).

   1875 – Jean-François Millet, French painter and educator (b. 1814).

   1900 – John Ruskin, English painter and critic (b. 1819).

   1901 – Zénobe Gramme, Belgian engineer, invented the Gramme machine (b. 1826). [It was the first generator to produce power on a commercial scale for industry and was inspired by a machine invented by Antonio Pacinotti in 1860.]

   1907 – Agnes Mary Clerke, Irish astronomer and author (b. 1842).

   1915 – Arthur Guinness, 1st Baron Ardilaun, Irish businessman, philanthropist, and politician (b. 1840).

   1921 – Mary Watson Whitney, American astronomer and academic (b. 1847).

   1965 – Alan Freed, American radio host (b. 1922).

   1984 – Johnny Weissmuller, American swimmer and actor (b. 1904).

   1990 – Barbara Stanwyck, American actress (b. 1907).

   1993 – Audrey Hepburn, British actress and humanitarian activist (b. 1929).

   1994 – Matt Busby, Scottish footballer and coach (b. 1909).

   2005 – Miriam Rothschild, English zoologist, entomologist, and author (b. 1908). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

   2012 – Etta James, American singer-songwriter (b. 1938).

   2018 – Naomi Parker Fraley, American naval machiner (b. 1921).

   2022 – Meat Loaf, American singer and actor (b. 1947).

   1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild DBE FRS (born 5 August 1908, died on this day in 2005) was a British natural scientist and author with contributions to zoology, entomology, and botany.

      Rothschild was a pioneer among women in entomology and became the first woman trustee of the Natural History Museum (1967–1975), the first woman president of Royal Entomological Society (1993–1994), the first woman to serve on the Committee for Conservation of the National Trust, and the first woman member of the eight-member Entomological Club.

      A member of the Oxford genetics school during the 1960s, she wrote about 350 papers on entomology, zoology, and other subjects.

      Rothschild was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and was granted the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2000.

      Her father, Charles Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family, had described about 500 new species of flea, and her uncle Lionel Walter Rothschild had built a private natural history museum at Tring. By the age of four she had started collecting ladybird beetles and caterpillars and taking a tame quail to bed with her. World War I broke on the eve of Miriam’s sixth birthday in 1914, while the Rothschilds were holidaying in Austro-Hungary. They hurried home on the first westward train but, unable to pay, had to borrow money from a Hungarian passenger who commented “This is the proudest moment of my life. Never did I think that I should be asked to lend money to a Rothschild!”

      Her father took his own life when she was 15, after which she became closer to her uncle. She was educated at home until the age of 17, when she demanded to go to school. She thence attended evening classes in zoology at Chelsea College of Science and Technology and classes during the day in literature at Bedford College, London.

      During the 1930s Rothschild made a name for herself at the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth, studying the mollusc Nucula and its trematode parasites (Rothschild 1936, 1938a, 1938b).

      During World War II, Rothschild was recruited to work at Bletchley Park on codebreaking with Alan Turing and was awarded a Defence Medal from the British government for her efforts. Additionally, she pressed the UK Government to admit more German Jews as refugees from Nazi Germany. She arranged housing for 49 Jewish children, some of whom stayed at her home at Ashton Wold. The estate also served as a hospital for wounded military personnel, including her future husband, Captain George Lane. Lane, a Hungarian-born British soldier, had changed his name from Lanyi in case of enemy capture.

      Rothschild was a leading authority on fleas. She was the first person to work out the flea’s jumping mechanism. She also studied the flea’s reproductive cycle and linked this, in rabbits, to the hormonal changes within the host. Her New Naturalist book on parasitism (Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos) was a huge success.

      Along with Professor G. Harris, Rothschild determined that myxomatosis, a virus affecting tapeti and brush rabbits, was spread by fleas, not mosquitoes as previously understood. The Rothschild Collection of Fleas (founded by Charles Rothschild) is now part of the Natural History Museum collection and her six-volume catalogue of the collection (in collaboration with G. H. E. Hopkins and illustrated by Arthur Smith) took thirty years to complete.

      In addition to her work on fleas and other parasites, Rothschild studied insects in the order Lepidoptera. Specifically, she was interested in chemical ecology and mimicry. To learn more about mimicry and its role in Lepidopteran predation by birds, Rothschild adapted greenhouses on her Ashton Wold estate to serve as aviaries for owls and other potential predators. This led to further work to identify the compounds synthesized by insects such as Burnet moth and collaboration with Tadeusz Reichstein to show that a monarch butterfly’s toxicity comes from milkweed, its larval host plant. It also resulted in work to demonstrate the importance of plant-derived carotenoids in insect coloration. Rothschild discovered that Large white cabbage butterfly caterpillars fed a diet without carotenoids did not match their background as they typically would and Monarch butterfly caterpillars’ pupae had silver threads instead of gold.

      Another area of Lepidoptera research that Rothschild pursued was that of the production of antibiotics by butterflies. This work was initially inspired by observations Rothschild made during an anthrax outbreak in the 1930s, but did not begin in earnest until around 60 years later. Rothschild drafted a manuscript on the subject and the results were eventually published 12 years after her death.

      Later in her career, Rothschild grew interested in hay meadow restoration. In response to a comment that it would take 1,000 years to reproduce a medieval meadow, she said “I could make a very good imitation in ten…it took me fifteen.”

      Rothschild was a vegetarian and had a close connection to her pets and wild animals that she befriended. Rothschild supported many social causes including animal welfare, free milk for children in schools, and gay rights by contributing to the Wolfenden Report which resulted in decriminalising “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private”.

      She founded the ‘Schizophrenia Research Fund’ in 1962, in honour of her sister Liberty after Liberty was diagnosed and hospitalized with schizophrenia. In March 2006, following Miriam’s death, the name of the Fund was changed in her memory to the ‘Miriam Rothschild Schizophrenia Research Fund’.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Rothschild

      1. Thanks so much for these, and for this one in particular. I read Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos when I was a graduate student and loved it — if readers can find a copy, I highly recommend it!

      2. Fascinating! I wonder why she chose fleas as her research subject.

         1. Her father had identified 500 species, so she was following in his footsteps.

      3. What an amazing woman.
         Thanks again JEZGROVE for these enlightening articles

      4. Not bad, but was she a MacArthur Fellow? https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2021/keeanga-yamahtta-taylor

      5. Thanks for all your kind words.

         I never know how BBC radio episodes work outside the UK, but this episode of Mark Steel’s in Town has some amusing (to me, anyway) bits about her uncle’s eccentric personal natural history museum, but it mostly has fun at the expense of his hometown of Tring. It was recorded live in the town in front of a local audience. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001bssk

      6. Great post!

3. I am dubious about the UAE/Hamas idea. First of all, as a practical matter, I think there would be issues with having a non-contiguous territory on the other side of a couple countries (the Austrians were forever trying to trade away the Netherlands for Bavaria). I think the real issue, though, is that that would make the Palestinians UAE subjects, and History has shown the UAE (and the other Arab states) doesn’t want them for whatever reasons. In truth they’d be bringing terrorists into their polity, who are unlikely to stop their attacks on Israel just because the UAE is at peace with her. Since Hamas does not want peace, it is even possible that it could begin terrorism in the UAE. There will be peace between the Palestinians and Israel only when the Palestinians decide that violence will not get them what they want. Given the support they receive, physical and moral, from the Arab world, that doesn’t seem likely any time soon.

4. Chris Simon and John Cooley at the University of Connecticut are the premier periodical cicada researchers. See Chris’s UConn website here:

   https://wp.chris-simon-lab.eeb.uconn.edu/

   and John’s Periodical Cicada Project website here:

   https://cicadas.uconn.edu/.

   The latter’s frontpage is all about the 2024 emergence.

   GCM

   1. An enjoyable read, particularly after pages of media hype.

   2. The “magic” of these cicadas goes deeper: each emergence of both 17-year and 13-year broods consists of 3 [or 4?] cryptospecies. Very slight morphological differences, but recognizably different call notes.

5. It is legal everywhere in Canada to restrict hiring to any group that is listed in a provincial or federal Human Rights Code as being illegal to discriminate against. If you want to specify that the next engineer your company hires must be an aboriginal woman or transgendered, or if the government or an NGO wants to provide funding for a position tying the money to those criteria, you are all perfectly free to go ahead and say so in the ad. What you can not do is restrict the position to a white person or to a male person, or to a person with no criminal record, because non-whites, non-males, and felons are protected classes.

6. I suppose that the amount of Arab support for Hamas isn’t surprising. But it is disturbing.

   That said, a trillion Cicadas emerging almost at once will be amazing. I wonder if their collective sounds will create a resonance that will cause the atmosphere to blow away. Stay tuned for the empirical test this spring.

   1. It is relevant that Jazeera and others Arabic language news sources have largely ignored Hamas atrocities. Polls of public opinion in the Arab world will necessarily reflect the impoverished/biased content of their sources of information.

7. RE that Princeton University professor of African-American Studies who wants to abolish the police:
   Jerry, you could not be more wrong about her. She’s a genius! Em, in 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
   Just kidding!
   She got the fellowship but she is obviously not a genius.
   And it’s not because she probably does not know about the Montreal police strike of 1969 (I mean who does except those who have read Pinker’s The Blank Slate?).
   Ask yourself a simpler question: Which of the following countries gets by without a police force: Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden? The correct answer: All these countries – which I take to be the most civilized countries on this planet – have a police force.
   And then there is the pesky fact that when you poll blacks in the US, asking them whether they want the police to spend less time in their neighborhoods, about 80% say “No” (60% respond “Same amount of time” and 20% answer “More time”) [Gallup poll from June/July 2020]
   https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx

   1. I wouldn’t be quick to discredit Prof. Taylor’s intelligence. The civilized countries you cite are (or were) all almost entirely not only white but also almost entirely ethnically and linguistically Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, or Swedish with high levels of workforce participation, high social trust, and low religiosity. The police forces of all those countries, particularly Sweden, are now struggling with violent crimes committed by unassimilable, religiously militant migrants who are allies of people like Prof. Taylor. Abolishing the police in those countries would accelerate their ascendancy. She knows exactly what she is advocating for.

      1. Police abolition is
         a) utopian (the meaning of the word utopia is “no place”),
         b) it would immediately upon abolition lead to more crime (in the US, the victims would be disproportionately black) ;
         c) is politically infeasible because it would immediately lead to more crime which would make the politicians who championed it lose the next election (this already happened in the US at the local level, following reductions of the size of the police force that fell well short of abolition)

         Leslie, I don’t know what goes on in Prof. Taylor’s head, but I doubt that she wants more crime or that, as you write, she considers “unassimilable, religiously militant migrants” her allies.
         Why do intelligent people adopt weird and false ideas? Michael Shermer wrote a book about it:
         Why do people believe weird things. revised & expanded edition, W.H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2002

         Smart people, because they are more intelligent and better educated, are better able to give intellectual reasons justifying their beliefs that they arrived at for non-intellectual reasons. Yet smart people, like everyone else, recognize that emotional needs and being raised to believe something are how most of us most of the time come to our beliefs. The intellectual attribution bias then kicks in, especially in smart people, to justify those beliefs, no matter how weird they may be. (p. 299)

         Also relevant:
         Nils J. Nilsson: Understanding beliefs. MIT Press, 2014
         “We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to inspire, to be entertained, to feel good, and to buttress confidence.” (p.19)
         Add to this list “because our political activism is intersectional.” (on this, see Sasha Mounk: The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Penguin, 2023)

         And, of course, Steven Pinker’s book: Rationality: What it is. Why it is scarce. Why it matters. Viking, 2021

         In short, there are many reasons why people adopt false ideas.

         On a related note:
         What about the fluoridation of drinking water? Why has Jerry never posted about this [this website has been running for more than 10 years now!]? What is he hiding from us???

         “Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water? … Vodka, that’s what they drink, isn’t it? Never water. On no account will a commie ever drink water, and not without good reason … As human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water … Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we ever had to face? — Brigadier general Jack D. Ripper (US army), in: Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (1964)

         Watch the movie scene here (3 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67wKhddWu4

         1. I have to admit, I’ve never understood the point of water fluoridation if the aim is to prevent tooth decay. It seems a ridiculous measure given the tiny proportion of water that is either consumed or used in toothbrushing.

      2. Gun ownership is quite high in a number of Scandinavian countries with low gun crime although countries such as Norway have tightened the rules after the Anders Brevik massacre. Most of my Norwegian friends legally own firearms of various types. Sweden has one of the highest firearm ownership numbers in Europe.
         Abolishing the police might have unexpected results.

      3. Leslie, I appreciate you making this point. So much of what we hear in the name of Wokeness (DEI, critical social justice, call it what you will) sounds crazy, ignorant, or stupid. And many of its advocates are, indeed, either ignorant or stupid. But that doesn’t mean they all are. It is difficult for many educated people to wrestle with—or even to contemplate—the idea that some of their peers would welcome a collapse of civil society. Welcomed, that is, as long as those activists believe themselves positioned for power. Maybe now that we can see the same group cheering or excusing the rape of Jewish women, people might realize that the word “evil” does have its uses. And maybe their fellow travelers—those seduced by the dictionary definitions of those magic words “diversity” and “inclusion,” others who are stuck in old paradigms of “right” versus “left,” still more whose empathy, easily manipulated and triggered, can sometimes overwhelm their sense—will come to their senses and quit facilitating the Woke Intifada.

         But let’s set motivation aside. Be they stupid or evil or naive, if the activists continue to gain power through the governing institutions, codifying their dogma in regulations and laws, enforcing their dictates through the various professional institutions that are slowly strangling many of us, then we will in the not-so-distant-future be living in a very different world. I’ll leave it to others to determine whether it is a world to desire.

8. This deeply misguided woman is a professor at Northwestern since 2022. https://news.weinberg.northwestern.edu/2022/06/23/professor-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor-joins-department-of-african-american-studies-faculty/

9. I know it’s been said that girls just wanna have fun, but I think pandas just wanna have more fun.

   Thanks for the neat cicada and petroleum fly reports. Great stuff.

   There was a time when people thought it a good idea to flood the Hamas tunnels. After seeing the extent and size of these tunnels, I doubt that would work.

10. Walmart is currently offering a hot pink Valentine’s Day edition of the Stanley Tumbler for only $127.15. Such a deal! I kid you not!

    https://www.walmart.com/ip/Stanley-40-oz-Quencher-H2-0-FlowState-Tumbler-Cosmo-Pink-Valentines-Edition/5312154594?

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