Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Monday, June 3, 2024, the start of another damn week and National Egg Day. Remember when eggs were bad for you? Here from Wikipedia are some bird eggs of various colors and sizes. Look at the size of that ostrich egg (I guess the sea urchin is there for size comparison, as it’s not an egg, and, anyway, the chicken egg will suffice.

It’s also National Chocolate Macaroon Day (remember the difference between “macaroons” and “macarons”; the picture erroneously shows the latter), World Cider Day (an estimable drink in the UK if you can get a pint of properly kept cider from the keg), National Itch Day, World Clubfoot Day, Opium Suppression Movement Day in Taiwan and World Bicycle Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Netanyahu’s between a rock and a hard place after Biden announced a deal that, he said, was from Israel, and told Hamas to accept it. (It’s still not clear to me if that deal, which may leave Hamas in power, really was proposed by Israel.) Thus the NYT article called “Netanyahu may face a choice between a truce and his government’s survival.”

On Friday, Mr. Biden outlined broad terms that he said were presented by Israel to the American, Qatari and Egyptian mediators who have been pushing for a deal to pause the fighting and free hostages in Gaza. Israeli officials confirmed that the terms matched a cease-fire proposal that had been approved by Israel’s war cabinet but not yet presented to the Israeli public.

Now, analysts say, it is crunchtime for Bibi, as the prime minister is popularly known.

Mr. Biden “booted Netanyahu out of the closet of ambiguity and presented Netanyahu’s proposal himself,” Ben Caspit, a biographer and longtime critic of the prime minister, wrote in Sunday’s Maariv, a Hebrew daily. “Then he asked a simple question: Does Bibi support Netanyahu’s proposal? Yes or no. No nonsense and hot air.”

The leaders of two far-right parties in the coalition — Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister — have pledged to bring Mr. Netanyahu’s government down if the prime minister goes along with the deal outlined by Mr. Biden before Hamas is fully destroyed. Some hard-line members of Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud party have said they will join them.

At the same time, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former military chiefs who joined the emergency government for the duration of the war, have threatened to withdraw the support of their centrist National Unity party by June 8 if Mr. Netanyahu fails to come up with a clear path forward. And opposition parties have begun organizing to try to topple the government.

The cease-fire proposal involves three phases. Under the plan, groups of hostages would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, a temporary cease-fire would turn into a permanent cessation of hostilities, and an internationally backed effort would be launched to rebuild Gaza.

This is what worries me: first, the release of convicted Palestinian terrorists, who would simply go home and take up their business again. The hostages are not equivalent to prisoners, and Israel should not insist on a trade, or a bit-by-bit release. They should all be released NOW.

Second, a “permanent cessation of hostilities” is likely to leave Hamas in power, and so nothing will have been resolved. If you ask me what my solution is, I would say “no ceasefire until Hamas has become powerless”, and a demand for unconditional surrender. That’s not realistic, of course, but it’s not realistic to leave Hamas in power, either. Thus I think the title of the article should have been: “Netanyahu may face a choice between a truce and his country’s survival.”

*My colleague Dorian Abbot just republished on Heterodox STEM an essay by an anonymous author posted three weeks ago on his Substack site, an essay called “DEI: The great misunderstanding“. The author appears to be of Russian or East European origin (the first paragraph tells you why):

In my view, the problem here is that many Westerners misunderstand what DEI is, how it works, and why it is so destructive. They misunderstand it because they were born, grew up, and lived in democratic, capitalist societies that valued individual freedoms and responsibilities, while DEI at its core is a collectivist ideology. Therefore, its comprehension comes easier to those of us who experienced collectivist notions first-hand.

A good example of this misunderstanding is the term “DEI hire” that is being applied to individuals, most recently the disgraced former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay and the democratically elected Mayor of Baltimore Brandon M. Scott. The problem is that DEI does not operate at the level of individuals, but on the scale of the entire society, by modifying the selection criteria for admissions, hiring, and promotion. The term, therefore, is an oxymoron; everyone hired in academia in the past decade or so has been a DEI hire, and that is precisely why the ideology is so destructive. DEI works by replacing selection criteria that have previously been based on merit with those based on an allegiance to the ideology, propagating its destruction in the space of multitude of institutions, and in time—through generations of faculty and students. Whereas in the past, hiring and admission decisions were based on one’s ability to do the job, thirst for knowledge, and aptitude to pursue it, now they are based on one’s ability to perpetuate the ideology and its growing bureaucracies. The result is a communist dream, where those who were nothing, are becoming everything—with the associated destructive consequences.

A detour is needed here to address one of the most pervasive myths behind the need for DEI: that academia was never a meritocracy. This nonsense is being repeated ad nauseum in the hopes that repeating it will somehow make it true. One argument is that it could not possibly have been a meritocracy because the applicant pool was limited: e.g., women were not admitted to educational institutions, quotas were instituted limiting the admission of Jewish candidates, etc. Yes, imposing such limits on the applicant pool is a bad thing. Progressive societies have been doing away with these practices (unlike regressive societies, cue the Taliban). Yet, the principles that were used to select candidates from the limited pool – those principles were based on ability and aptitude and were, at their core, meritocratic, much like sex-segregated athletics or chess remain meritocratic in each sex category.

A more poignant criticism is not that academia wasn’t meritocratic, but that meritocracy itself is imperfect; that the failure of nominally meritocratic procedures resulted in the selection of the proverbial “wrong man for the job”. This, of course, is true: anyone who’s ever set foot on a university campus has no doubt encountered people of very questionable qualifications. Coupled with limited applicant pools, such failures of meritocratic selection evoke a deep sense of unfairness: why should someone incompetent be selected over someone who had no chance to compete in the first place? They shouldn’t, of course.

DEI grew out of authoritarian ideologies and is repeating their tried and tired destructive paradigms. It is based on the fallacy that a fair selection must reflect the composition of the population, on fighting “overrepresentation”—the same notions were used by the Nazis to justify their antisemitic policies in German and Austrian universities, and beyond, in 1930s; It is based on the notion that everyone must first and foremost be an activist, guarding ideological purity and promoting contemporary notions of morality and social justice—the notion adopted in the USSR, where every act and statement were imbued with political significance, one that was either in accordance the party line, or against it.

There follows a rather weak analogy to natural selection:

. . . Those, who survive the selection based on DEI ideology, are fit for activism, cowardice of mobs, bigotry, antisemitism and other forms of racism, violence and destruction. This is exactly what we see in today’s campus protests, and this has always been the point: to produce generations of activists who not only lack knowledge, but who were robbed of the skills needed to develop it, of the curiosity to seek answers to their questions beyond the “party line”. There never were any good intentions.

But all professors, by the author’s admission, have survived the selection, and so all faculty should be unthinking activists. Surely this is not the case, so while DEI can be blamed for the rise of activisim born of ignorance, it doesnt explain why all faculty aren’t activists. Or perhaps you can save the hypothesis by saying that only younger faculty are activists, as those were the ones hired and raised in the Era of DEI. And indeed, younger faculty are the most common among faculty involved in war protests, but there are plenty of younger ones who have sense, too.

*The Shroud of Turin is renowned as the “burial shroud of Jesus”, and there are still many people who think it was, despite dispositive evidence that it was not—that it was made long after the event is supposed to have happened, the image is pigemented, not made from blood, and and it’s not anatomically correct. The “body image” is best seen when you look at a negative of a photo of the shroud, and see this:

I happen to have read the most thorough analysis of the shroud, this long book by Andrea Nicolotti (click for Amazon link), which recounts the history of the “artifact” and then concludes it’s a fraud. (Many people hate that conclusion as they want to believe in Jesus.)

In Michael Shermer’s new Substack Post on Skeptic, “The shroud of Turin,” he, with the help of Massimo Pigliucci, who happens to be in Turin and hosted by Nicolotti, persuaded the author to give an excerpt of the book showing why it’s most likely a forgery. The post and the book are long, so I’ll just give a few salient points. Prose is Nikcolotti’s:

While this approach is legitimate, what people most want to know about holy relics like the Shroud of Turin today is their authenticity, particularly during the Age of Science with its emphasis on evidence-based belief. Unfortunately for believers in the Shroud and related relics, the likelihood of being fake becomes almost 100 percent when it has to do with people who lived at the time of Jesus or before.

The Shroud of Turin is part of the trove of Christ-related relics that were never mentioned in ancient times. When the search for relics in the Holy Land began—with the discovery of the cross, belatedly attributed to Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine—no one at that time ever claimed to have found Jesus’ burial cloths, nor is there any record of anyone having thought to look for them.

. . . It was not until the second half of the 6^th century that pilgrims began to mention relics of Jesus’ burial cloths in Jerusalem, albeit with various doubts as to where they had been preserved and what form they took. The next step was the systematic and often unverified discovery of additional relics from the Holy Land, including the bathtub of baby Jesus, his cradle, nappy, footprints, foreskin, umbilical cord, milk teeth, the tail of the donkey on which he entered Jerusalem, the crockery from the Last Supper, the scourging pillar, his blood, the relics of the bodies of Jesus’ grandparents and the Three Wise Men, and even the milk of the Virgin Mary and her wedding ring. But no shroud.

. . .  The Turin Shroud first appeared in the historical record in France (a place that already hosted many competing shrouds) around 1355. It is different from all the previous shrouds in that the others did not display the image of the dead Christ, and until then no source had ever mentioned a shroud bearing such an image (although Rome hosted the well-known Veil of Veronica, a piece of cloth said to feature an image of the Holy Face of Jesus). The explanation behind its creation can be found in the contemporary development of a cult of devotion centered on the representations of the physical suffering of Christ and his wounded body.

. . . The clash between sindonology and science reached its peak in 1988; without involving STURP but with permission from the archbishop of Turin, the Holy See and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a radiocarbon examination was carried out that year involving 12 measurements conducted in three different laboratories. As expected, the test provided a date that corresponds perfectly with the date indicated by the historical documents, namely the 13^th-14^th century. As often happens when a scientific finding contradicts a religious belief, however, from that moment on attempts to invalidate the carbon dating proliferated on increasingly unbelievable grounds, including: conspiracy, pollution of the samples, unreliability of the examination, enrichment of the radiocarbon percentage due to the secondary effects of the resurrection, etc.

. . . The results were published in the world’s leading multidisciplinary scientific journal, Nature. Conclusion: the cloth of the Shroud can be assigned with a confidence of 95 percent accuracy to a date between AD 1260 and 1390.

If you read reviews of the book, you’ll still see people kvetching about the methods used to date the shroud, though the lack of historical provenance isn’t mentioned! There’s more, But I’ll quote one more bit; one of the many critiques by people who really the shroud to be real:

A more curious variant of the pollution theory suggests that the radiocarbon dating was performed on a sample that was repaired with more recent threads. This would force us to imagine that two widely recognized textile experts who were present on the day of the sampling were unable to notice that they had cut a piece so repaired, despite the fact that they had observed the fabric carefully for hours; to distort the result by 13 centuries the threads employed in the mending would have had to have been more numerous than the threads of the part to be mended. To eliminate any doubt, in 2010 the University of Arizona reexamined a trace of fabric leftover from the radiocarbon dating in 1988, concluding:

But read the rest; you’ll be well equipped to debunk the Shroud Lovers.  Or read the book, which I’ve done, but do be aware that it’s a long slog. The summary that Shermer gives tells you all you need to know.

*Speaking of Substacks, Friend of the Website and artist Kelly Houle has her own new Subtack called Ut Pictura Poesis (“As is painting, so is poetry“); do consider subscribing as a way of subsidizing natural-history art. Her first post, “Capturing the Queen: The problem of painting a nocturne,” is about of her favorite subjects: plants that bloom in the night. An excerpt:

This week I made a trip to Tucson to deliver a painting to Tohono Chul Park for this year’s Queen of the Night exhibit, an annual celebration of the night-blooming cactus that flowers en masse in the Sonoran Desert each summer. Each year Tohono Chul celebrates its world famous collection of Peniocereus greggii or night-blooming cereus, with an exhibition in the Entry Gallery. Artists are asked to contribute works that represent any part of the Peniocereus greggii plant. This year the exhibit includes 15 works by local artists and will run from June 1st through July 28th.

Capturing The Queen is no small feat. For weeks the horticultural staff at Tohono Chul measures the buds of the night blooming flowers daily to try to predict when the bloom will occur. It’s a tricky business, as the mechanism that causes the flowers to open on the same night isn’t well understood. When the flowers do decide to put on a show, they often give only a few hours notice. Anyone who wants to witness the event in person must be willing to drop everything and head out into the desert. For the months of June and July serious garden partiers are on call. For me, it’s a two-hour drive from Phoenix, so I need to make my hotel reservation and leave within an hour of the initial announcement. I’ve been able to make the trip twice in the last ten years.

. . .Seeking out the night-blooming cactus requires a sense of adventure. For a homebody like me, even venturing out to the botanical garden a bit of a big deal. If I have to travel I tend to turn into Emily Dickinson in a letter to Elizabeth Holland complaining about having to move:

“I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my “effects” were brought in a bandbox, and the “deathless me,” on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes – but it was lost in the melee…”

I’m usually very happy to stay at home in my routines that allow me to paint and write with as little interruption as possible. Travel is difficult for people like me, but I make an exception to commune with the night-flowering. My bag is packed. On bloom night I will be out with lanterns looking for myself.

Here’s what the flower of this species looks like (every flower on every cactus in one area blooms on the same night); the photo was taken by Kelly:

*The WSJ reports that lung cancer, once equivalent to a death sentence, is now being cured or held at bay for years—all thanks to new drugs and gene sequencing that allows targeted therapy on cancer-causing mutations.

There is more hope than ever for people diagnosed with the deadliest cancer.

Declines in smoking and the advent of screening and newer drugs have transformed the outlook for patients with lung cancer, once considered a death sentence. Progress against the disease has propelled the drop in overall cancer deaths in the U.S. over the past three decades.

And there is more to gain. More patients can fend off the disease for months or years with targeted or immune-boosting drugs, results released this weekend at a top cancer conference showed. That includes patients with forms of the disease that are notoriously tough to treat.

“It had such an abysmal prognosis. And now we have people who are being cured who we never thought would be cured,” said Dr. Angela DeMichele, a medical oncologist at Penn Medicine.

AstraZeneca’s drug Tagrisso can contain lung cancer nearly three years longer than chemotherapy and radiation alone for some stage-three patients, one study released Sunday showed. Another found that some patients with aggressive disease survived nearly two years longer with the company’s immunotherapy drug Imfinzi, the first advance for that lung-cancer subtype in decades.

Another study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago found that 60% of advanced patients were alive without their disease advancing at five years after taking Pfizer’s Lorbrena, a drug that targeted a genetic mutation in their tumors. That compares with just 8% of patients on an older drug with the same target.

“These results are really outstanding,” said Dr. David Spigel, chief scientific officer at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Tennessee, lead researcher on the Imfinzi trial. “A really major step forward in lung-cancer care.”

Tagrisso, Imfinzi and Lorbrena are all approved by the Food and Drug Administration and in use.

. . .More than 234,000 Americans are diagnosed with lung cancer annually. It is the leading cause of cancer death among men and women, killing some 125,000 Americans each year. The lung-cancer survival rate has increased by some 20% in the past five years, according to the American Lung Association.

Projected U.S. cancer deaths, 2024Source: National Cancer Institute

LungColorectalPancreaticBreastProstateLiverLeukemiaNon-Hodgkin lymphomaBrain/nervous systemBladder040,00080,000120,000

Lung cancer has responded to newer drugs such as immunotherapies better than some other cancers, doctors said, in part because its tumors tend to have many mutations that make it easier to find and attack.

Here’s a figure showing the change in survival rates of lung cancer versus other cancers. Lung cancer is by far the most common form of cancer, probably because of the prevalence of smoking, but the mortality rate has dropped significantly. But so has that of all cancers combined, a story that’s not told in the article.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is supervising another editorial meeting of Listy.

Hili: That’s the end of the editorial meeting.

A: But are we taking Liat’s article?

Hili: You and Małgorzata decide.

3 June 1935 | A French Jewish boy, Jacques Moncarz, was born in Paris.

He arrived at #Auschwitz on 13 February 1944 in a transport of 1,500 Jews deported from Drancy. He was among 1,229 of them murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. pic.twitter.com/UtF2Odh0pc

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 3, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first came from his work on Crick’s biography, and Matthew adds this: “If you don’t know who David Liu is, he is a Harvard chemist who has developed a new, incredibly safe single-base pair form of gene editing that is being used in therapies. He is amazingly smart and nice. Make sure you click to see all our interactions.”

Great knows great. Yes, this is *the* @davidrliu. He had developed a neural network model of visual attention, which (unknown to him) was similar to something Hinton was working on. He was only 16 at the time. Did they meet? I don’t know yet. pic.twitter.com/GPK44XdXrP

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) April 27, 2024

I didn’t know about this one:

The juror who identitified himself as right wing & his main news sources as Fox and Truth Social saying ‘of course he’s fucking guilty’ is low key one of the most New York things I’ve ever seen, hilarious

— Justin Sherin (@wychstreet) May 31, 2024