Thursday: Hili dialogue

49 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

1. I’m with the drive it until entropy overwhelms the mechanism. There was a book “Drive it Forever” with lots of easy driving tips to avoid unnecessary wear and tear.

   1. When I arrived at NASA Langley Research Center, joining some 3000 engineers, often known for frugality, I was told by my mentor that I could easily identify the laboratory Director (formerly known as “Chief Engineer”) because he drove the oldest car at the lab. Yes, he must be the best engineer because he could keep his car running the longest. Of course this was still in the days when all undergrad engineering programs had a shop course and a design, fabricate, and operate capstone course.

   2. Agreed. And if I do wind up having to get another car, I am going to buy a used car. I can’t stand the way they do things on newer cars.

      1. Agreed DrB…..though, luckily, I do have children and grandchildren that I can access for user consultation and support when I can neither read nor understand the nano-font user manual from the glove box.

         1. That is another thing that is amiss with newer cars — a user manual of any use.

            1. Or indeed a user manual of any sort. All too many modern devices have a manual that can be accessed only online.

      2. People apparently want robots, not cars. I am operating a machine, not cruising passively while reclining in luxury.

      3. On a podcast Steve Wozniak expressed similar concerns about Tesla.

   3. I like to keep each of mine for over 20 years. But when the transmission and radiator get simultaneously trashed due to a design flaw in the transmission cooler line, then the nearly $14,000 dollar bill for a (very) used transmission, a new radiator, and standard maintenance makes little sense on a 17-year-old vehicle with 170,000 miles. Thanks Honda!

      Had they notified owners of this recurring problem, then one could have made a minor and inexpensive fix and staved off mechanical disaster.

2. 1. MAOC used some Alchemy of Communism the other day in saying if any “kids are harmed” on campus it will be the fault of anyone but the “kids”.

   2. Click and Clack – and, perhaps, Robert Pirsig approve :

   maintain well and prosper

   And remember your mechanics — treat them well!

   [ Zen sign of some sort ]

   1. Would a Zen Zen sign be distinguishable from the sound of one hand applauding the fall of a tree in an unobserved forest?

      1. [ Orson Welles applause in Citizen Kane ]

         The Tao is not The Tao when it can be talked about

         … is that clear? LOL

         1. Clear as mud.
            Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been at work when the Geol.Soc had the headline conference for their “Year of Mud” a few years ago. Important stuff, mud.

3. The tortoise v. black tape incidents must be one of them “reptile misfunctions” they’re always advertising on tv and radio.

   1. Quoth, I think, Sid James, “You’re meant to put the pill in your EAR, not hold it between your knees.”

4. From the Free Press today. Please step aside Titania McGrath. You have been replaced in real life!

   https://twitter.com/NoahPollak/status/1785420015963103580

   Next Johannah will probably be appointed as Columbia’s new woke president. What are they doing over there???

   1. Favourite part of that whole episode was the looker in the crop top standing behind King-Slutzky as she spoke to reporters.

      “Does this keffiyeh make me look fat?”

   2. The Community Notes feature on eXTwitter never ceases to be a source of amusement!

5. Regarding the map…. Not only is U of Chicago missing, our local encampment is also not shown. The UW-Milwaukee encampment is ongoing. Every morning we have news helicopters overhead checking them out. (We live a few blocks away.)

   I’ll wager that there would be twice (or more) the number of red dots if all were shown.

   1. Our local station interrupted Judge Judy to report on the disassembly of the encampment at UTD.

6. Jerry, you repeated your long quote in the piece about campus protests.

7. I was recently commenting that spending $1300 for new brakes on my 2011 Toyota Camry was cheaper than buying a new car, and with any luck it will continue to run well for another 12 years. But I did want to parse the figures for the “average” cost of a new car that you quote from Edmunds — $46,600 — and note that this includes very high end cars that can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. The basic sticker price of a Camry (the most popular car in the U.S.) in 2024 is around $25,000, and only goes up to about $33,000 when fully tricked out. That’s still a lot of money for many people, but it’s a whole lot cheaper than the average price quoted.

   1. 1300 bucks for brakes?
      I did the front discs on my VW not long ago – parts were under a £100 (so, $120?), I already had all the tools I needed. Hoses were in good nick. Pads and drums for the back run a little more, I think (and I might have needed £10 for a pry bar, or £20 for a slide hammer, but I generally count tools as an investment, not a consumable).
      I infer you paid garage fees, and had to have some of the lines – probably the hard lines – replaced.
      Actually, if one line needs replaced, you can make a good argument for biting the bullet and replacing all the under-car ones. Certainly if corrosion rather than stone-strike was the reason.

      1. I collapsed a set of repairs into the simple description “brakes,” but if you need a more detailed account, the $1300 bill included a new battery, new wiper blades, a front suspension stabilizer bar link, a “geomet coated rotor,” in addition to disc brake caliper and bracket assemblies — and $297 for labor. Also a state inspection for $21. No “garage fees” — I’m not even sure that is — or lines replaced.

         But the point was that $1300 is a small price compared to the cost of a new car, and considering that the most I’ve spent on this car in 12 years is for new tires, the $1300 seemed like a good deal.

         1. By garage fees he simply meant having the work done by a mechanics shop rather than you doing the work yourself.

            1. That sounds like a rather puzzling double charge. Kind of like getting a bill at a restaurant that includes the tab for the food and an additional charge for the cooking having been done in a restaurant….. Is that common in the UK? As far as my experience goes here in the U.S., a care repair garage charges you for two things: materials and labor. I suppose it is possible that they could add a fee for storing your car if you cannot pick it up when the work is done (that is what I though might be a “garage fee”), but that is not what you seem to mean…..

            2. David,

               Sorry for not being clear. Gravel Inspector was asking if you took your vehicle to a mechanics shop to have the repairs done, which you did. That’s what he meant by ‘garage fees.’

               The alternative he had in mind was you going to an auto parts store (or website), buying the parts, taking them home and installing / replacing them yourself.

         2. Ditto. About 10 years ago the brake lines corroded in my 2000 Civic driven frequently in the salt belt for the first 6 years of its life. (I bet Jerry’s is green, too, because that’s the only colour I could get.) I wondered if it was worth spending $2000 (Canadian) to replace them on a 14-year-old car.

            Best $2000 I ever spent. Now that I’m retired I don’t drive it in winter. I rode my bicycle to the commuter rail station for most of my (and its) working life. My insurance is pay-as-you go and Ontario no longer charges to renew registration plates. So it costs me literally nothing as stand-by if my wife has her car out somewhere. It doesn’t even have any rust on it and doesn’t burn oil.
            .
            Jerry and I should both get some kind of plaque from Honda for keeping two of their cars going so long in salt country. (They do, you know…)

8. I bought my car new in 2014 for a little over £30k. I’ve just checked Autotrader to find it is worth roughly £10k now. That means it has cost me £2,000 a year just to own it. On the assumption that depreciation follows an exponential decay curve, it is financially insane to buy a car new.

9. Regarding the news about cannabis’s status within the Controlled Substances Act, a move from Schedule I to Schedule III is lame. For those of you who are interested, I explain why here, if it’s okay for me to post a short essay I wrote back in January: https://lyonsnyc.medium.com/dont-reschedule-cannabis-42ae82e439bb?sk=771495101841708a20b15e5ac532132e

10. Speaking of chocolates. Thanks for recommending See’s: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/11/29/wednesday-hili-dialogue-457/

    Delicious!

11. You may be surprised that the NYTimes leaves Chicago off their map, but the real surprises is that they leave UCLA off the map. That is where the biggest clashes have taken place, and their own article discusses them!!!!!!!

12. The complaint about divestment is a moral argument: the arms companies won’t go out of business just because the university investment funds sell their stocks, and the IDF won’t run out of weapons as a result. But the university’s moral stance would be improved if it avoided complicity in the business that supports conflict. That’s the argument I think?

    The argument seems empty to me because the folks making it don’t apply the same moral reasoning to other aspects of the conflict. They hold Hamas morally blameless for precipitating the invasion of Gaza, and consider Palestinians to have merely done what any oppressed group would do in response to the history of the whole conflict. The Palestinians have no moral agency and couldn’t be expected to avoid murdering & raping & kidnapping Israelis on October 7. Only the Israelis are expected to behave morally and stop the invasion of Rafah, and this moral reasoning is only applied to the supporters of Israel in other countries but not to the supporters of intifada.

    1. I suppose the argument is, too, that the sudden sale of arms-company stock would depress the stock prices and somehow punish the companies. But the market would price in the information that the sales were political and not fundamental. Buyers would immediately take advantage of a stock (briefly) selling below its true value and would buy the stocks for their own portfolios, quickly erasing any price fall. The universities would lose any voices they had as shareholders to attend annual meetings to grill the Boards and senior management on company policies, being replaced by shareholders concerned only about bottom line.

       Additionally, the divestment movement is simply a power play. Can we get the university to do something contrary to its best interests just because it is afraid of us?

    2. Oppressed peoples have no moral agency and no self control.
       They cannot be expected to have intelligence or to be able to control their physical responses to emotions. Thus they should be given the ability to access systems controlled by the oppressors regardless of traditional values of merit, law-abiding, or achievement. To balance the scales of equity, teh government should be given ultimate authority to take from those who have, provided they are of the oppressor class, and redistribute to those who have not, provided they are of the oppressed class.
       This is the modern progressive stance, which is racism repackaged.

13. On this day:
    1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason and witchcraft.

    1611 – The King James Version of the Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker.

    1808 – Outbreak of the Peninsular War: The people of Madrid rise up in rebellion against French occupation. Francisco de Goya later memorializes this event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

    1885 – Cree and Assiniboine warriors win the Battle of Cut Knife, their largest victory over Canadian forces during the North-West Rebellion.

    1920 – The first game of the Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis.

    1941 – World War II: Following the coup d’état against Iraq Crown Prince ‘Abd al-Ilah earlier that year, the United Kingdom launches the Anglo-Iraqi War to restore him to power.

    1945 – World War II: The Soviet Union announces the fall of Berlin.

    1945 – World War II: The US 82nd Airborne Division liberates Wöbbelin concentration camp finding 1,000 dead prisoners, most of whom starved to death.

    1945 – World War II: A death march from Dachau to the Austrian border is halted by the segregated, all-Nisei 522nd Field Artillery Battalion of the U.S. Army in southern Bavaria, saving several hundred prisoners.

    1952 – A De Havilland Comet makes the first jetliner flight with fare-paying passengers, from London to Johannesburg.

    1964 – First ascent of Shishapangma, the fourteenth highest mountain in the world and the lowest of the Eight-thousanders.

    1969 – The British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 departs on her maiden voyage to New York City.

    1982 – Falklands War: The British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror sinks the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano.

    1986 – Chernobyl disaster: The City of Chernobyl is evacuated six days after the disaster.

    1999 – Panamanian general election: Mireya Moscoso becomes the first woman to be elected President of Panama.

    2000 – President Bill Clinton announces that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the United States military.

    2011 – Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man, is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

    2012 – A pastel version of The Scream, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, sells for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new world record for a work of art at auction.

    Births:
    1660 – Alessandro Scarlatti, Italian composer (d. 1725).

    1729 – Catherine the Great of Russia (d. 1796).

    1797 – Abraham Pineo Gesner, Canadian physician and geologist (d. 1864). [Invented kerosene and was an influential figure in the development of the study of Canadian geology and natural history.]

    1813 – Caroline Leigh Gascoigne, English novelist and poet (d. 1883).

    1822 – Jane Miller Thengberg, Scottish-Swedish governess and educator (d. 1902). [Regarded as a pioneer of the education of girls and women in Sweden.]

    1828 – Désiré Charnay, French archaeologist and photographer (d. 1915). [Notable both for his explorations of Mexico and Central America, and for the pioneering use of photography to document his discoveries.]

    1859 – Jerome K. Jerome, English author and playwright (d. 1927).

    1860 – John Scott Haldane, Scottish physiologist, physician, and academic (d. 1936). [Famous for intrepid self-experimentation which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also experimented on his son, the celebrated and polymathic biologist J. B. S. Haldane, even when he was quite young. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body.]

    1860 – Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian Zionist philosopher, journalist and author (d. 1904).

    1882 – Isabel González, Puerto Rican activist who helped pave the way for Puerto Ricans’ American citizenship (d. 1971).

    1885 – Hedda Hopper, American actress and gossip columnist (d. 1966).

    1903 – Benjamin Spock, American rower, pediatrician, and author (d. 1998).

    1912 – Axel Springer, German journalist and publisher, founded Axel Springer AG (d. 1985).

    1915 – Peggy Mount, English actress (d. 2001).

    1929 – Link Wray, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2005).

    1936 – Engelbert Humperdinck, English singer and pianist.

    1945 – Judge Dread, English singer-songwriter (d. 1998). [Snodland’s finest.]

    1946 – David Suchet, English actor.

    1960 – Stephen Daldry, English director and producer.

    1969 – Brian Lara, Trinidadian cricketer.

    1972 – Dwayne Johnson, American-Canadian wrestler, actor, and producer.

    1975 – David Beckham, English footballer, coach, and model.

    1985 – Lily Allen, English singer-songwriter and actress.

    The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, isn’t it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options. (Bill Hicks):
    1519 – Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect (b. 1452).

    1819 – Mary Moser, English painter and academic (b. 1744). [Among the most celebrated female artists of 18th-century Britain. One of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 (along with Angelica Kauffman), Moser painted portraits but is particularly noted for her depictions of flowers.]

    1880 – Tom Wills, Australian cricketer, co-created Australian rules football (b. 1835).

    1915 – Clara Immerwahr, German chemist (b. 1870). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1957 – Joseph McCarthy, American captain, lawyer, judge, and politician (b. 1908).

    1964 – Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, American-English politician (b. 1879).

    1972 – J. Edgar Hoover, American 1st director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (b. 1895).

    1980 – George Pal, Hungarian-American animator and producer (b. 1908). [Nominated for Academy Awards (in the category Best Short Subjects, Cartoon) for seven consecutive years (1942–1948) and received an honorary award in 1944.]

    1995 – Michael Hordern, English actor (b. 1911).

    1997 – John Eccles, Australian neurophysiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1903).

    1998 – Justin Fashanu, English footballer (b. 1961). [The first professional footballer to be openly gay, and also one of the first footballers to command a £1 million transfer fee, with his transfer from Norwich City to Nottingham Forest in 1981. He committed suicide after fleeing to the UK after being charged in the US with second-degree sexual assault and first-degree and second-degree assaults punishable by up to twenty years in jail. In his suicide note he denied the charges.]

    1999 – Oliver Reed, English actor (b. 1938).

    2009 – Marilyn French, American author and academic (b. 1929).

    2010 – Lynn Redgrave, English-American actress and singer (b. 1943).

    2015 – Michael Blake, American author and screenwriter (b. 1945). [Best known for the film adaptation of his novel Dances with Wolves, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.]

    2015 – Ruth Rendell, English author (b. 1930).

    2016 – Afeni Shakur, American music businesswoman, activist, and Black Panther (b. 1947).

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

       Clara Helene Immerwahr (born 21 June 1870, died on this day in 1915) was a German chemist. She was the first German woman to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau, and is credited with being a pacifist as well as a “heroine of the women’s rights movement”. From 1901 until her suicide in 1915, she was married to the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber.

       Immerwahr was born on the Polkendorff Farm in Breslau (today Wojczyce, Poland), the youngest daughter of Jewish parents, chemist Philipp Immerwahr and his wife, Anna (née Krohn).

       She studied at the University of Breslau, attaining her degree and a PhD in chemistry under Richard Abegg in 1900, after 8 semesters of study (two more than required for male doctoral candidates). She was the first woman Ph.D. at the University of Breslau and received the designation magna cum laude. Her thesis defense was held in the main hall of the university and was attended by many young women of the city, interested in seeing “Unser erster weiblicher Doktor” (“our first female doctor”). A few months after obtaining her degree, she gave a public lecture entitled “Chemistry and Physics in the Household.”

       Immerwahr married Fritz Haber in August 1901, four years after she had converted to Christianity in 1897. The two had met years earlier at a dance lesson and started a brief romance, but Immerwahr turned down his marriage proposal at the time because she wanted to remain financially independent.

       Due to societal expectations that a married woman’s place was in the home, her ability to conduct research was limited. She instead contributed to her husband’s work with minimal recognition, translating some of his papers into English. On 1 June 1902 she gave birth to Hermann Haber (1902–1946), the only child of that marriage.

       Haber continually neglected his wife and child, leaving for a tour of scientific facilities in the US when his son was only a few months old. When he was in the country, he often spent lunch hours and evenings at work or with his colleagues rather than at home. She wrote to her earlier mentor and supervisor Abegg:

       It has always been my attitude that a life has only been worth living if one has made full use of all one’s abilities and tried to live out every kind of experience human life has to offer. It was under that impulse, among other things, that I decided to get married at that time… The life I got from it was very brief…and the main reasons for that was Fritz’s oppressive way of putting himself first in our home and marriage, so that a less ruthlessly self-assertive personality was simply destroyed.

       During World War I, Fritz Haber became a staunch supporter of the German military effort and played an important role in the development of chemical weapons (particularly poison gases). His efforts would culminate in his supervision of the first successful deployment of a weapon of mass destruction in military history, in Flanders, Belgium, on 22 April 1915. Immerwahr reportedly spoke out against her husband’s research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” Immerwahr was also a witness to the accidental death of one of her former college classmates, Otto Sackur, who was attempting to tame cacodyl chloride in Haber’s lab as part of Haber’s research into chemical weapons.

       Shortly after Haber’s return from Belgium, Immerwahr shot herself in the chest using Haber’s military pistol. On 2 May 1915, she died in her son’s arms. The morning after her death, Haber left for the first gas attack against the Russians on the Eastern Front.

       Her suicide remained largely in the dark. Six days after her death, only the small local newspaper Grunewald-Zeitung reported that “the wife of Dr H. in Dahlem, who is currently on the front, has set an end to her life by shooting herself. The reasons for this act of the unhappy woman are unknown.” There is no evidence of an autopsy. The poorly documented circumstances of her death have resulted in considerable discussion and controversy as to her reasons, including that she opposed Haber’s work in chemical warfare and her suicide was a response to him personally overseeing the first successful use of chlorine gas during the Second Battle of Ypres, resulting in over 67,000 casualties. [Despite Haber’s contribution to the German efforts in WWI and his conversion to Christianity, he had to resign from his post as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and as a professor at the university, when the Nazis came to power. He was invited to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford pointedly refused to shake hands with him.]

       Immerwahr’s ashes were moved from Dahlem to Basel and buried together with Haber’s after his death in 1934. Subsequently, their son Hermann Haber emigrated to the United States, where he committed suicide in 1946 shortly after the death of his wife. [Hermann’s eldest daughter, Claire, also a chemist, killed herself in 1949 on being told that the funding for her research into an antidote to chlorine gas was to cease because research into nuclear weapons was a higher priority.]

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

14. There’s an entire doctoral dissertation in those tortoise videos! Does that behavior take place with all individuals of that species? Is is unique to that specific individual? What about other species? And what is it trying to accomplish? Is is a defensive behavior? Does it find the smell of the tape repulsive (or attractive)? Cool that it’s smart enough to pull its head into its shell before jamming into the black tape. Does it hate black shoes? (Can tortoises hate?) Maybe it sees the tape as a hole and it’s trying to crawl in. (But if it’s a hole, then why is he pulling his head into the shell to avoid a collision? So, it’s not perceiving the blackness as a hole. It seems to be attacking something!)

    I could go on… . Hoping that some of the herpetologists on this site will weigh in!

    1. As a (ahem) professional tortoise biologist:
       That’s male aggressive behavior. During the mating season, male tortoises run some of the highest testosterone titers known among vertebrates, and they are highly aggressive toward each other.
       I’ve had my boot attacked savagely by male desert tortoises many times.
       In this case the little pugilist is responding to the visual stimulus combination of general size & shape (shoe similar to tortoise) and dark pigmentation. It’s not about tape, as the last few sequences illustrate, just dark brown/black coloration of a vaguely tortoise-shaped shoe. He’s attacking a rival male, or anything that might be one.

15. The map also fails to note the protest at Portland State University in Oregon, where students (and others?) have occupied and trashed the campus library and painted graffiti for the last 3 days. Finally Portland’s small police force (ranks 48th out of 50 of America’s largest cities) is clearing the building and making a few arrests. The police I suspect didn’t want to get involved since: 1. They don’t have enough officers and 2. The ultra liberal prosecutor here will likely not prosecute the cases anyway.

    https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2024/05/police-move-to-end-portland-state-standoff.html

16. My apology if the below post shows up several times. I am using a spotty public Wi-Fi that I have used before, along with a VPN, and some of my attempted comments disappear into the ether with no indication of what—if anything—happened to them. Transmission problem? Moderation? Anyone else ever have a similar problem?

    I know that it sounds dramatic and retrograde to say that a law from “1864” or of “the Civil War era” is in force in Arizona. The media have parroted the phrases in unison since the Arizona story broke. But if we could set aside the emotions and political spin that seem inseparable from the abortion issue, then we might ask ourselves: when were our murder laws written? What about those governing intrusion into a person’s home? Horse thieves? Robbery of stage coaches? It is not the age of the law that is at issue. It is the nature of the act, its continuing relevance to society, whether one’s views about it should “change with the times,” and the degree to which change might be warranted. If age is what matters, then people may as well oppose Marbury v. Madison and the continuing role it plays in American jurisprudence. After all, it predates the Civil War by nearly 60 years. For that matter, the First Amendment is even older. How quaint that we still insist on its validity!

    1. Is it common for states to keep laws on the books that predate statehood? I certainly don’t know the answer to that, and would appreciate hearing from someone who knows. This law in Arizona dates to the time when Arizona was a territory. Apart from that, the law is absurd and obviously archaic; the first amendment is not.

       1. Yet the Second Amendment right after it is argued to be.

          What about habeas corpus? Right there in the body of your Constitution, probably our oldest right against capricious state tyranny. It goes back to Anglo-Saxon England, before William the Conqueror, before Magna Carta. Long before any of the 13 Colonies were even discovered, much less made “territories” of the British Crown and then independent states.
          http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4329839.stm
          (Canada, as always in these matters is murky.)

          Arizona’s abortion law is “absurd and obviously archaic” only if you support abortion as a human right, but that is begging the question. I find Doug’s analysis thought-provoking and I don’t like to see laws ridiculed as past their sell-by date just because they are old, and just because the writer wants a different law but doesn’t want to look partisan in a newspaper article.

17. The key to obtaining a first-rate antique car collection is to buy good used cars and never sell them.
    My daily drivers are a couple of 1936 fords, a coupe and a pickup. The coupe was my Dad’s first car, which he bought as a teenager from an elderly neighbor. It is on the second interior and third engine and paint scheme, but is doing great.
    My first car was a 1969 corvair convertible, which was 13 years old when I bought it, and has now become a classic.
    Of course, we have always had plenty of space, and we have decent mechanical skills.

    1. “It is on the second interior and third engine and paint scheme, but is doing great.”

       Reminds me of the idea that ~all of our cells replace themselves several or many times over our lives, so that we’re “doing great” at advanced age but no longer have any of our original parts. I’m a bit fuzzy on the half life of our noncellular bone materials (maybe some of them last forever).

       Also I love these insights into readers’ lives. Thanks!

18. One of (the many) reasons I have spent my adult life in Tokyo (for a few years as a young man) and then Manhattan is so I never have to have a drivers license or a car or anything that comes with it. I’m 53 now.

    If I move to Florida or something (I might, we spend a few months there over winter) I guess I’ll have to, but for now “east or west, home is best.”

    A friend parks his car in a building here which is insanely priced. As much as my first apartment here rent was 25 years ago.

    D.A.
    NYC

19. The National Day of Prayer happens on the first Thursday of May, which this year is May 2.

    The National Day of Reason always happens on May 4 — which may or may not coincide with the National Day of Prayer, depending on the year.

    https://www.nationaldayofreason.org/about

    1. May 4 is also, unofficially, Star Wars Day — “May the 4th be with you.”

       The Star Wars universe is, of course, permeated with supernatural mitochondria (a.k.a. “midi-chlorians”), so the fact that May 4 also highlights a day of reason is an interesting conjunction. So far I’ve not seen any clashes between atheists and would-be Jedi acolytes.

       https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian

20. Perfect analysis by Elica le Bon.

Comments are closed.