Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 13, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Чухал өдөр” in  Mongolian): Wednesday March 13, 2024 and National Chicken Noodle Soup Day, also known as Jewish Penicillin:

“Eli’s Jewish Chicken Soup – Ingredients 06” by Eli Rosenblit is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. View a copy of this license here.

It’s also Donald Duck Day, celebrating the pantsless mallard’s appearance on screen, though that was in the animated short “The Wise Little Hen,” on June 9, 1934. Why it’s today I don’t know.  Further, it’s National Chicken Noodle Soup Day, National Coconut Torte Day, National Ginger Ale Day, National Riesling Day, Ken Day (the doll may have been introduced on this day in 1961, and National Elephant Day in Thailand

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Times of London reports some good news:  children in the UK will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics. (h/t Christopher)

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed.

The ban was welcomed by the government as a “landmark decision” which would help ensure care is based on evidence and is in the “best interests of the child”.

Puberty blockers pause the physical changes of puberty, such as breast development or facial hair. They will now only be available to children as part of clinical research trials.

It follows public consultation on the issue, an interim policy and an independent review of gender identity services for under 18s which was commissioned by NHS England in 2020.

The review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, had been prompted by a sharp rise in referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which is closing at the end of March.

Referrals to Gids numbered more than 5,000 in 2021/2022, compared to just under 250 a decade earlier. The clinic has come under repeated scrutiny.

From the Guardian:

A spokesperson said: “NHS England has carefully considered the evidence review conducted by NICE and further published evidence available to date.

“We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”

. . . From now on, children and young people will only be able to get them if they are taking part in a clinical trial. At least one such trial is due to start later this year, but no details, such as who will be eligible to join it, have been published.

. . . Maria Caulfield, the health minister, said: “We welcome this landmark decision by the NHS to end the routine prescription of puberty blockers and this guidance which recognises that care must be based on evidence, expert clinical opinion and in the best interests of the child.

“The NHS must ensure its Gender Identity Services protect, support and act in the best interests of children and we will continue to work with NHS England to protect children in this area.”

Stonewall voiced its concern about the new policy. “All trans young people deserve access to high quality, timely healthcare”, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ rights charity said.

I’m glad to see England joining the enlightened countries of Europe in regarding this drug as an experimental treatment.  In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that nobody should transition medically until after puberty, when they have the maturity to make a decision. Further, there remain unanswered questions about side effects of blockers on health and fertility, as well as about reversibility. A “clinical only” approach will deal with infrequent cases that seem to demand the pausing. If only the U.S. could be as sensible as these European countries!

*The Wall Street Journal reports on “A new terror threat that is emerging in Europe linked to Iran, Gaza War.” This terrorism usually involves Muslims attacking Jewish targets in Europe, though one—the proposed attack on the Cologne Cathedral, can’t really be anti-Jewish.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

In one previously unreported investigation last December, police in Austria and Bosnia arrested two separate groups of Afghan and Syrian refugees who carried arms and ammunition, including Kalashnikov assault rifles and pistols.

Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones, which they said suggested they were motivated by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

This followed the arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

Then, on Monday, Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the U.S. and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

Investigators said the separate incidents suggest Europe’s terror threat isn’t only growing but also coming from new sources, complicating the work of security agencies. A wave of attacks that hit the continent starting in 2015 was largely inspired, and in part directed, by Islamic State, the Sunni terror militia in Syria and Iraq. Now the threat is coming not just from Islamic State Khorasan, Islamic State’s Afghanistan-based successor organization, but also from Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

No suprise that it’s coming from Iran, the puppeteer of much Middle Eastern terrorism. So far Iran is avoiding direct combat with the West, but, given their support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, we might as well be at war with them. They’re playing their cards in a canny way.

*Yesterday there was a UN Security Council meeting on sexual violence against Israeli women associated with the October 7 attack by Hamas and its aftermath.   Here’s the executive summary released by the sexual violence group after visiting Israel and the West Bank.

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency session on Monday — called jointly by the United States, Britain and France — to discuss accusations of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and against hostages held captive in Gaza.

The session follows a 23-page U.N. report, released on March 4, written by a team led by Pramila Patten, a special envoy on sexual violence and conflict. The team spent two weeks in Israel to look into the accusations.

The report found signs that sexual violence was committed in multiple locations on Oct. 7, including three sites where rape and gang rape likely occurred, and that hostages in Gaza were subjected to rape and sexual torture. The report said it was reasonable to believe sexual violence against hostages could be ongoing.

The report described a pattern of victims, mostly women, being naked and bound and shot and said that, “although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”

In briefing the council about the key findings of the report, Ms. Patten called for a full-fledged human rights investigation by U.N. bodies, saying the scenes she encountered in Israel were “unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality resulting in intense human suffering.”

I’m collecting a passel of information about the report and other sources, to address the many misguided claims from rape denialists—often, I think, motivated by hatred of Israel—that there’s little or no evidence that Israeli women were raped by Hamas. (For one misguided and tendentious example of this denialism, see here). But there’s a lot more out there that needs to be collated, s stay tuned.

*One more bit about the war from the Times of Israel.  Hamas has warned Palestinians that they face dire consequences if they help Israel secure humanitarian aid being sent to Gaza. What? How is that in the interests of Palestinian people, touted by the media as facing widespread starvation?  This of course reflects the desire of Hamas to control and get its hands on all the goods that come into Gaza.

A Hamas-linked website warns Palestinian individuals or groups against cooperating with Israel to provide security for aid convoys amid the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Those who do will be treated as collaborators and be handled with an iron fist, the Hamas Al-Majd security website says, quoting a security official in Palestinian terror forces.

The warning comes in response to reports that Israel is considering arming some Palestinian individuals or clans in Gaza to provide security protection for aid convoys into the enclave as part of wider planning for humanitarian supplies after the fighting ends.

“The occupation’s attempt to communicate with the leaders and clans of some families to operate within the Gaza Strip is considered direct collaboration with the occupation and is a betrayal of the nation that we will not tolerate,” the Hamas-linked website says, quoting the official.

“The occupation’s (Israel) efforts to establish bodies to manage Gaza are a ‘failed conspiracy’ that will not materialize.”

It seems to me that Palestinians would prefer to have their countrymen guarding the trucks rather than the IDF, something that has also been suggested. Wouldn’t they trust fellow Palestinians rather than the enemy?  The thing is that Hamas can intimidate Palestinians but not the IDF. If they want to get food to the people who need it, instead of into the sticky hands of Hamas, I’d say that the IDF should handle driving and guarding. Not only does this allow the IDF to identify and eliminate people who shoot at food trucks, but also saves the lives of Palestinians. But, of course, given the sentiments of Palestinians towards Hamas and its butchery of Jews (highly positive, in case you didn’t know), perhaps arming them is not such a great idea.

*As Greg notes, “In a change, the NY Times has a writer who’s not enamored of the extraterrestrial hypothesis; he’s also taking the mickey out of some schmo from Harvard.”

In January of 2014, a meteor fell from space off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That might have been the end of it, but several years later Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard, drew on seismic data from near the site, looked for crash remains on the ocean floor and proposed that the remains “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”

Dr. Loeb has previously been accused by his peers of wild speculation and sensationalism. Last fall, Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, led a team that re-examined the nearby seismic signals and concluded that they were not evidence of the extraterrestrial, or anything close to it.

On Tuesday, Dr. Fernando will present the data in detail at scientific conference. Recently, he sat down with The New York Times to preview what his team had found. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A few Q&A with the skeptic Fernando:

In one paper, Dr. Loeb and a co-author wrote that they “confirmed the fireball location” in the ocean from “the timing of the strong seismic signal.” But you’ve determined that the seismic information wasn’t coming from a meteor. What do you think it was coming from?

A truck.

As in, a hyperspeed alien truck?

No, it was an ordinary truck, like a normal truck driving past a seismometer. Not being seismologists, the Loeb team may have misunderstood the data. In reality, all they did was find a truck.

For some reason that made me laugh. Two more:

How did you conclude that we’re not being invaded by aliens?

We looked at two weeks of data around the time of this event. We saw hundreds of similar signals like the one Loeb studied. If there are hundreds, they can’t all be meteors. Of those hundreds of signals, most occur during daylight hours. The one Loeb saw, the ones we saw, all happen much more during the day. That’s an indication of anthropogenic noise.

Human-created noise?

Yes.

Then we looked at the exact signal he was looking at, and it was coming from a main road. Over time, it moved from a main road in the direction of a hospital, and then back to the main road. So, from analyzing the data, it looks to us like the signal is much more likely to have come from a truck turning off the main road, driving past the seismometer near the hospital and then driving the other way.

There was no meteor involved whatsoever.

What’s the bigger lesson from all this?

There are two: One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if you check with a seismologist first. The other is, it’s not aliens.

The NYT, as Greg suggests above, does have a weakness for woo, but at least they corrected Loeb’s wild speculations (you can see more of his “evidence” in this 2023 NYT article).  Fernando also deals with Loeb’s idea that material recovered from the ocean floor after a putative meteorite strike must have been of alien origin.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is busy a-hunting:

Hili: Do you see something there?
Hili: No, but I’m vigilant.
In Polish:
Ja: Coś tam widzisz?
Hili: Nie, ale jestem czujna.

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Strange, Stupid of Silly Signs:

From Masih; an Iranian woman fights back against a puritanical mullah objecting to a few stray strands of hair. First, the Google translation from Farsih:

An angry mullah: We clarify the task of you and Masih Alinjad, and this brave and strong woman gave the answer! Iran’s resistant women have been kicking mullahs in the mouth for years, and of course every traditional person who doesn’t let them be themselves. “I go around as I want. Do whatever you want to do. If you want to clear your duty with whoever you want, clear it.” This is what this young woman used to tell them years ago when she was holding her camera like a weapon and rebelled, and they told her, “You want to send the video to Christ.” “If you are provoked by my four hairs, think about yourself” This saying no to women is as old as history. We have a torch in our hand that is passed from hand to hand, each of us takes it in our hands according to the time, place and time conditions. Women’s struggle is not single-faced, it has thousands and thousands of figures. Hit each one and you will get another body. The more they tried to isolate us by personalizing the struggle of women and the community of sexual and gender minorities, the worse their situation became. Women’s action became more intense. Those who don’t know to know, the women who stood in front of the mullah who rules our dear Iran and said “I am defending my right” are not afraid to constantly marginalize their struggle with personal attacks on women. It was from these resistances that Sepideh Reshno, Jina, and Nikah were born. We have paid more than we should have to resist this gender apartheid, so much that we will absolutely not be shortchanged. “We are dominant” is a spontaneous outburst of women who are tired of being humiliated with these words. This is our rebellion and we have long known that we have nothing to lose but the chains that bound our feet.

The woman really tells off the mullah at the end. “My hijab is just like your tongue: it doesn’t stay in one place.” She then blames the mullah for helping ruin Iran.

From Luana. If SJP would just obey campus rules, they wouldn’t get into messes like this:

A mother d*g does a good deed, but really, this is no way to raise ducks!

Some amusing cats from Malcolm:

A wonderful video of an elephant rescuing its baby from water. Look how clever it is!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a man who lived but 20 days before perishing at Auschwitz:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is a duck with Happy Feet being entertained. The song is appropriate.

I may have posted this before, but the preservation is remarkable:

24 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I saw The Zone of Interest yesterday. A curious movie, contrasting the “banality of evil” with the banality of cleaners working at the Auschwitz museum. How the family of Höss was corrupted! Threatening Polish servants, stealing choice clothing and diamonds from the dead, all while a Polish girl goes out at night to leave apples and pears for the inmates to find at their worksite (this part shown as a negative, perhaps to reflect how it is the very inverse of the rest of movie). A strange and disconcerting experience.

    1. Thanks for this note Christopher. Zone is playing locally, but I do not think that I am strong enough to watch it, especially since the current day realities of Oct 7.

      1. I think you’d be strong enough to watch it. The film has no gore or extreme violence and does not show any part of Auschwitz beyond the house of the Höss family.

        My primary objection to the film is that it’s a one-trick pony. The banality of a Nazi family enjoying bourgeois family life within a concentration camp is quickly grasped and not enough to sustain a feature film. The same point could have been made in a half-hour short.

  2. But Avi Loeb is so well-credentialed…Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, former PCAST member…. But so is Simone Gold of Frontline Doctors. And the surgeon general of Florida. And I guess some of my engineer colleagues at NASA rejected evolution and were vocal about it. So who to believe? Which medical docs? Which physicists? Who is a quack and who is just an outlier or iconoclast? So it goes.

    1. Just to be clear: not directed against Jerry, but against some of those he quotes on this matter.

      Loeb has about a thousand refereed-journal papers. An average career astronomer his age maybe one or two hundred. And a couple of patents. He is one of the very few to rise up through the ranks at Harvard to full professor; they usually recruit from elsewhere. Despite recent valid criticism of woke Harvard, Loeb is a very good scientist. (Most of the wokeness is not at the research level, but more at the student level, and Loeb is vocally anti-woke.). For some reason, it’s become some sort of sport to bash him. Why, I don’t know. Jealousy? In any case, those who disagree with his refereed-journal papers should write their rebuttal in a refereed-journal paper. Talk is cheap. But Loeb also does a good job rebutting cheap talk: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Opinion.html If you can point me to something in his rebuttals which is wrong, I’d be curious. Or even in his papers. Of course, there is not a consensus on all things, and debate is a part of healthy science. But Loeb is the guy in favour of polite, non-ad-hominem debate about the issues.

      Many who bash him have never read any of his works, just sound bites from elsewhere, sometimes out of context. I’ve known about him for decades as he has written some papers in my field (cosmology), some of which I’ve had occasion to cite. I also reviewed a recent “controversial” book and, though of course he favours his own interpretation, it is a balanced account: http://www.astro.multivax.de:8000/helbig/research/publications/info/extraterrestrial.html

      1. Ah, just the type of answer that I was hoping for from WEIT readers. Thank you, Phillip. We from outside of a field must simply or, sometimes not so simply, weigh competing claims, their sources, and put some amount of trust in the claims of those we have traditionally found to be…well…trustworthy. I do not care so much on the issue of extra-terrestial life right now, but do care strongly about medical advice.

        Oh, and I guess, do not define someone by the one viewpoint or article that makes into the mainstream media.

      2. I agree Phillip. But you don’t emphasise one of Avi’s best characteristics which is that he is prepared to work on risky topics, try things out, and stick his neck out. Very few scientists are like that. Most pursue safe topics and make incremental progress. Fritz Zwicky took risks and so did Fred Hoyle. Hoyle once asked his colleagues how often they were right in their published papers, to which the answer was ‘nearly all the time’. Hoyle replied that we was happy if he was right half the time. And at the same time Avi is a genial character, which can’t really have been said of Zwicky and Hoyle!

        1. I did mention that in my review.

          I remember when he wrote a paper reviving the idea (going back to 1962 at the latest, perhaps earlier, though there were only a handful of papers for the first few decades) of redshift drift, i.e. the cosmological redshift of an object changing with the time of observation. I remember people saying that measuring it was completely unrealistic. There is now an ESO key programme for it.

    2. I learned all I need to know about extraterrestrials on earth many years ago.
      My Father was at the time in a position to know exactly what information DOD had on the subject.
      I asked him about it. He told me that he could not confirm or deny classified projects, or even admit that they are ongoing.
      However, he told me that he personally does not believe in alien visitation.

      So unless something new and different happens, I don’t need to wonder about that.

  3. Kurt Gödel shows us the limits of deductive reasoning, and Karl Popper the limits of inductive reasoning.

  4. On this day:
    1639 – Harvard College is named after clergyman John Harvard.

    1781 – William Herschel discovers Uranus.

    1845 – Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto receives its première performance in Leipzig with Ferdinand David as soloist.

    1862 – The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves is passed by the United States Congress, effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.

    1930 – The news of the discovery of Pluto is announced by Lowell Observatory. [Coincidentally, Percival Lowell, who founded the observatory and had unwittingly captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19 and April 7, 1915 that were not recognized for what they were, was born on this day in 1855.]

    1943 – The Holocaust: German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków.

    1954 – The Battle of Điện Biên Phủ begins with an artillery barrage by Viet Minh forces under Võ Nguyên Giáp; Viet Minh victory led to the end of the First Indochina War and French withdrawal from Vietnam.

    1969 – Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.

    1988 – The Seikan Tunnel, the longest tunnel in the world with an undersea segment, opens between Aomori and Hakodate, Japan.

    1996 – The Dunblane massacre leads to the death of sixteen primary school children and one teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. [Tennis players Andy Murray and his brother Jamie were both at the school that day, but were uninjured.]

    2003 – An article in Nature identifies the Ciampate del Diavolo as 350,000-year-old hominid footprints.

    2020 – President Donald Trump declares the COVID-19 pandemic to be a national emergency in the United States.

    2020 – Breonna Taylor is killed by police officers who were forcibly entering her home in Louisville, Kentucky; her death sparked extensive protests against racism and police brutality.

    Births:
    1683 – Johann Wilhelm Weinmann, German botanist (d. 1741).

    1770 – Daniel Lambert, English animal breeder (d. 1809). [He died weighing 52 stone 11 pounds (739 lb; 335 kg). Despite his coffin being built with wheels to allow easy transport, and a sloping approach being dug to the grave, it took 20 men almost half an hour to drag his casket into the trench.]

    1855 – Percival Lowell, American astronomer and mathematician (d. 1916).

    1892 – Janet Flanner, American journalist and author (d. 1978).

    1898 – Henry Hathaway, American director and producer (d. 1985).

    1907 – Dorothy Tangney, Australian politician (d. 1985). [Served as a Senator for Western Australia from 1943 to 1968. She was the first woman elected to the Senate and one of the first two women elected to federal parliament, along with Enid Lyons.]

    1908 – Myrtle Bachelder, American chemist and Women’s Army Corps officer (d. 1997). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1910 – Sammy Kaye, American saxophonist, songwriter, and bandleader (d. 1987). [“Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye”.]

    1911 – L. Ron Hubbard, American author (d. 1986).

    1920 – Ralph J. Roberts, American businessman, co-founded Comcast (d. 2015).

    1925 – Roy Haynes, American drummer and composer.

    1935 – David Nobbs, English author and screenwriter (d. 2015).

    1939 – Neil Sedaka, American singer-songwriter and pianist.

    1941 – Donella Meadows, American environmentalist, author, and academic (d. 2001). [Best known as lead author of the books The Limits to Growth and Thinking In Systems: A Primer.

    1942 – Scatman John, American singer-songwriter (d. 1999).

    1947 – Lyn St. James, American race car driver. [One of nine women who have qualified for the Indianapolis 500, she became the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year award (oldest to win the award at 45, a record she held for 30 years until Jimmie Johnson won it when he was 46 in 2022).]

    1950 – William H. Macy, American actor, director, and screenwriter.

    1960 – Joe Ranft, American animator, screenwriter, and voice actor (d. 2005).

    1992 – George MacKay, English actor.

    2004 – Coco Gauff, American tennis player.

    Everybody dies. There’s no avoiding it, and I do not believe for one second that butter is the cause of anyone’s death. Overeating may be, but not butter, please. I just feel bad for people who make that mistake. (Nora Ephron):
    1619 – Richard Burbage, English actor (b. 1567).

    1842 – Henry Shrapnel, English general (b. 1761). [Inventor of the shrapnel shell.]

    1906 – Susan B. Anthony, American activist (b. 1820).

    1912 – Eugène-Étienne Taché, Canadian engineer and architect, designed the Parliament Building (b. 1836).

    1938 – Clarence Darrow, American lawyer and author (b. 1857).

    1951 – Ants “the Terrible” Kaljurand, Estonian anti-communist, freedom fighter and forest brother (b. 1917).The

    1961 – Lise Lindbæk, Norwegian journalist and war correspondent (b. 1905). [Commonly regarded as Norway’s first female war correspondent.]

    1995 – Odette Hallowes, French nurse and spy (b. 1912).

    1998 – Judge Dread, English singer-songwriter (b. 1945). [Notorious for smutty songs – he is the artist with the most records banned by the BBC – following his death, Rolling Stone reported, “He sold several million albums throughout his 25-plus year career and was second only to Bob Marley in U.K. reggae sales during the 1970s”. Dread was the first white recording artist to have a reggae hit in Jamaica.]

    2006 – Robert C. Baker, American businessman, invented the chicken nugget (b. 1921).

    2009 – Betsy Blair, American actress (b. 1923). [An investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, led to her being blacklisted for some time. She resumed her career with a critically acclaimed performance in Marty (1955), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.]

    2016 – Hilary Putnam, American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist (b. 1926).

    2018 – Emily Nasrallah, Lebanese writer and women’s rights activist. (b. 1931).

    2021 – Murray Walker, English motorsport commentator and journalist (b. 1923).

    2022 – William Hurt, American actor (b. 1950).

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

      Myrtle Claire Bachelder (born on this day in 1908, died May 22, 1997) was an American chemist and Women’s Army Corps officer, who is noted for her secret work on the Manhattan Project atomic bomb program, and for the development of techniques in the chemistry of metals.

      Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Middlebury College in 1930, and became a high school science teacher and athletics coach in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts. She received her master of education degree from Boston University.

      During World War II, Bachelder enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in November 1942, at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters. After training, she was assigned to the Company ‘D’ WAC Detachment of the Manhattan District, United States Army Corps of Engineers. Her secret assignment was to lead a group of 15 to 20 women from the WAC, stationed in Des Moines, Iowa, to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and from there to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She and the women under her command arrived at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on October 21, 1943.

      In the clandestine laboratory at the remote Los Alamos desert site, Bachelder was responsible for the analysis of the spectroscopy of uranium isotopes and discovering techniques for x-radiation. Since the uranium-235 isotope is fissile, whereas the uranium-238 isotope is not, her role in the project was a crucial task: to ensure the purity of the sub-critical material, and therefore the nuclear explosion, of the world’s first atomic bombs.

      These methods were used during the preparation of plutonium-239, the fissile material used in the construction of the atomic bomb for the Trinity nuclear test, on July 16, 1945. Analogous methods were used for the uranium weapon, code-named “Little Boy”, which destroyed Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, and for the plutonium bomb which destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, leading to the Japanese surrender.

      The secret program was under the general direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Bachelder described as a “pencil and paper man”, immersed in physics theory, who was more than a little amazed by the Los Alamos lab machinery. Bachelder recalled Oppenheimer standing in front of her lab’s most important and expensive instrument punching buttons at random: ‘He asked “What does this do?” Then he’d punch another button … He might have wrecked the machine if he hadn’t finally been persuaded to leave it alone.’

      The conclusion of the Second World War was also the dawning of a new “Atomic Age”, in which the peacetime potential of nuclear energy began to be explored. Bachelder was among the scientists who opposed the May-Johnson Bill of October 1945, a Congressional bill proposed by the Interim Committee, which would have maintained military control over nuclear research. The bill was defeated in Congress and superseded by the McMahon Atomic Energy Act. In January 1947, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission approved the declassification of 270 previously secret documents. These included discoveries related to X-radiation and purification of uranium ores, which had been made by Bachelder during the course of the war effort. At this time, the rarity and importance of Bachelder’s achievements as a woman in science were also acknowledged.

      After leaving the Army, Bachelder became a research chemist at the University of Chicago, where the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction had been achieved in 1942. Nobel Laureate James Franck had been director of the Chemistry Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory during the earlier phases of the Manhattan Project. Bachelder joined the University’s Institute for the Study of Metals (renamed as the James Franck Institute in 1967), and she conducted further research in metallochemistry.

      Among other achievements, Bachelder developed methods for the purification of the rare elements tellurium and indium. Other aspects of her broad scientific expertise found application in the field of marine archaeology, when she determined the chemical composition of brass cannons found in the Aegean Sea on sunken ships. She also made contributions to astrochemistry, when NASA asked her to analyze the chemistry of Moon rocks which had been collected from the Moon’s surface during the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972.

      Bachelder retired from the Franck Institute in 1973, and was subsequently active as an official of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). She died in Chicago on May 22, 1997.

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

  5. It’s nice to see that the NYT can still on occasion publish corrections when new data comes along that contradicts previously published articles. I wonder, given how much ink they spent on Hur’s statements about Biden’s age and memory, how much will they spend on reporting about what the recent congressional hearing about Hur’s report revealed?

    Hint, he lied. Who would have guessed? Given the unrelenting examples of the past several years, when will the press, and anyone really, stop assuming Republican politicians and appointees are acting within the norms and should be given the benefit of the doubt?

    1. And the press should be especially weary of any Republican, like Hur, who was appointed by Trump. Remember how they reported on Barr? They acted like he was an honorable statesman, above reproach…pathetic. And speaking of AGs,
      I also put a lot of blame on Garland for letting Hur’s “report” get published without any fact-finding or caveats about its unethical nature. If Biden gets re-elected, I sure hope he replaces Garland; he’s an honest, decent man, but these times demand an Attorney General made of sterner stuff.

  6. “One more bit about the war from the Times of Israel. Hamas has warned Palestinians that they face dire consequences if they help Israel secure humanitarian aid being sent to Gaza.”

    Read this as well. Am I surprised? No. The most powerful weapon that Hamas has is dead Gazans.

      1. Yes. I saw her interview with two survivors of the music festival massacre. She is among the bravest and the best out there.

        1. Thanks, jon. I had not seen the email trailer before and wondered. Shouda done a quick experiment.

  7. Maybe the bright, shiny Humanitarian Pier will distract the world’s attention from the fighting and let Israel get on with the grim job. IDF soldiers should not be driving aid trucks themselves, though, not under any circumstances. If Hamas is going to shoot Gazan drivers, what will they do to Israeli drivers?

    Perhaps there are volunteers from American and Canadian college campuses who would sign up for this vital humanitarian task of famine relief.

    1. Student volunteers?…as he inserts his pinky into the side of his mouth. That’s a rather e v i l suggestion Mr Macmillan (Number One?)
      I’ve seen a report where Egyptian aid truck drivers’ a refusing to drive over the border, smashed windshield and panels, bashed about, I guess that would put anyone off.

  8. That NYT aliens story made me laugh too! I’ve read Loeb’s book “Extraterrestrial” and it’s an interesting read and the object certainly peculiar, but he’s no doubt gone off the deep end with the ET stuff.

    I’m one of those in the minority it seems, who doesn’t believe in aliens full stop. Until I see more evidence than, “the universe is big so they must exist,” anyway. And Loeb isn’t producing any evidence.

  9. Dr Coyne,
    If you want to address the narrative gap between the UN report and what say the NYT narrative has been this should probably go to the original sources. I can suggest this interview
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKF7PMogF9A
    where Ali Abunimah goes through the UN report highlighting where it does and doesn’t corroborate his challenges to the NYT report narrative.
    I’m going to assume you agree that its quite important for this story to be based on what actually occurred on October 7th.

  10. I am going to just throw this one out here, it is something I have been thinking about. I have a lot of time to think without much human interruption.

    Anyway, I wonder if the push to get kids to take puberty blockers is in part driven by pedophiles?
    They do sort of have a preferred “type”, and a young person of legal age who has taken them is much more likely to conform to that type than others of the same age.
    What I do know is that kids in the trans pipeline are sexually active much earlier than other kids. That would seem to ease one of the difficulties in traditional grooming as well.

    Just my musings, so it might be off base or unoriginal.

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