Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 13, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, October 6, 2024, and National Yorkshire Pudding Day. a day of arrant cultural appropriation. But they’re good! Here’s a big one in a cast iron pan:

RjCan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also English Language Day, National No Bra Day (this was the norm when I was in college, but times have changed), Good Samaritan Day, and National M&M Day.  Here’s a video about how M&Ms are made (they leave out the secret candy-coating part); note the proportion of different colors that is standardized for each bag:

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

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports on a new documentary about Christopher Reeve, the handsome “Superman” actor who became paralyzed from the neck down in a horse-riding accident, living 9 years after the accident (and being a disability activist), dying at age 52. The movie recounts the close friendship between Reeve and Robin Williams, who were roommates at Julliard, and doesn’t avoid the dark side of Reeve or his illness. It sounds like it’s a movie worth seeing. The article is archived here.  Excerpts:

The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.

It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.

The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.

. . . . The unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”

In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.

One mainstay: his friendship with Williams. They called themselves brothers and were godfathers to each other’s children. Williams, the comedian and Oscar winner, was one of the first to visit Reeve in the hospital after his accident. He did so in character, as a Russian proctologist; being able to laugh then, Reeve later said, strengthened his will to survive.

Williams, who had Lewy body dementia, died by suicide in 2014. In the film, Close, a friend of both actors, says, “I’ve always felt if Chris was still around, Robin would still be alive.”

. . . That line drew gasps during production, the filmmakers said, and they struggled with whether to include it, fearing it might offend some intimates. But it also showed the depth of the bond between two men who had both known darkness amid great success.

And one more excerpt so I can show you the video clip below:

Reeve’s emotional appearance at the 1996 Oscars — less than a year after his accident — was a personal and social turning point. He had surpassed medical expectations from the start. Emerging to more than a minute-long standing ovation from a tearful audience, he appeared to bask in the welcome.

*I’m neglecting politics today because I’m pretty sick of it. Why not some science instead? The WaPo recounts how AI was involved in AlphaFold, the protein-folding program that can take the amino acid sequence of a protein and accurately predict its three-dimensional structure, a task that once took ages, and a result with vast and salubrious implications. As I reported the other day, two of AlphaFold’s creators won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (Note: for some reason this is an “opinion” piece.) The whole article is archived here.

One of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered work on the neural networks that undergird artificial intelligence, has warned that machines might someday get smarter than humans. Perhaps. But this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry honored a real-world example of how AI is helping humans today with astounding discoveries in protein structure that have far-reaching applications. This is a development worth savoring.

Proteins are biology’s lead actors. As the Nobel committee pointed out, proteins “control and drive all the chemi­cal reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.” In the human body, they are necessary for the structure, function and regulation of tissues and organs. All proteins begin with a chain of up to 20 kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in DNA. Each chain folds into a unique structure, and those shapes determine how proteins interact with other molecules.

Looking like a tangled ball of twine, proteins have a complex and precise design of moving parts that are linked to chemical events and bind to other molecules. Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that bind to foreign molecules, including those on the surface of an invading virus, such as the spikes on the coronavirus that causes covid-19.

. . . . This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry went to three scientists who revolutionized the field. David Baker of the University of Washington built entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind, a Britain-based firm that is part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, developed an AI and machine learning model that can predict the structure of proteins, decoding the amino acids that make up each. The model, AlphaFold, can do in minutes what once took years.

AlphaFold takes advantage of neural networks that can locate patterns in enormous amounts of data. The system was trained on the vast information in the databases of all known protein structures and amino acid sequences. AlphaFold has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, or nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, including those in humans, plants, bacteria, animals and other organisms. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database makes this data freely available.

To design new drugs and vaccines, scientists need to know how a protein looks or behaves. The AlphaFold result is a prediction — a visual representation of a protein’s expected structure — but such predictions can accelerate biomedical research.

The AlphaFold blog recounts the story of scientists searching for a better vaccine against malaria, a disease that afflicts 250 million people a year and causes more than 600,000 deaths. Because malaria is caused by a shape-shifting parasite, vaccine researchers had long struggled to characterize the structure of one surface protein they needed to target to interrupt the infection. Then AlphaFold’s prediction of the right structure snapped it into focus. Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford said the breakthrough helped his team decide which bits of the protein to put in the vaccine, which trains the body’s immune system to detect it and act. This helped advance his research from “a fundamental science stage to the preclinical and clinical development stage.”

If you want to play around with this, there is an AlphaFold Protein Structure Database where you can enter the name of any of 200 million proteins and it will give you the predicted structure.  I put in human myoglobin, and got a cool picture that you can examine from all angles on the site by using your cursor:

*Is there any woman today who doesn’t wear Spanx at a formal or dress-up occasion? Well, I don’t know, but the inventor of that body-control garment, Sara Blakely, became a billionaire for thinking it up. Now, as the WSJ reports,
“Spanx made her a billionaire. Will Sneex be her undoing?” Indeed, for her new product Sneex is—get this—a high-heeled sneaker. Who needs that? And it costs $500! Read on:

Since founding Spanx in 2000, Sara Blakely has become one of America’s most prominent and admired entrepreneurs. The 53-year-old billionaire has racked up business accolades from Time’s most influential people to Forbes’ most powerful women. When she sold a majority stake of her shape-wear company to Blackstone in 2021 in a deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion, her shiny personal brand only grew. Married with four children to motivational speaker Jesse Itzler, she’s a serious philanthropist and a friend to Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey—but still beloved for her humble, real-talk persona.

So when Blakely announced this year that she was finally unveiling what she called her “life-changing” next innovation, a product a decade in the making, she had the world’s attention. Her follow-up to Spanx, a garment which is in the MoMa design collection and has spawned countless imitators? Sneex, a hybrid stiletto-sneaker with a velcro strap.

It’s “the shoe no one asked for,” said Molly Hudson, a Dallas personal stylist.

With a splashy marketing campaign including a helicopter video launch, a baseball game opening pitch, a skydiving stunt and appearances on television and at Witherspoon’s “Shine Away” conference, Blakely has dumped her $500+ shoe on women relentlessly over the past few months. Some, like Blakely buddy Gayle King and online fans, enthused about the funky, comfy shoe. Others were excited for the launch but then felt confused and even, as one told me, “punked.”

“I thought it was April fools,” said Dallas-based Olivia Chapman, who runs a coaching school for executive women. Though she said she identified with Blakely’s “values as a businesswoman, mother and wife,” Chapman couldn’t get behind the new design. “I don’t know how else to say it, but it is so unattractive,” she said.

She’s one of many ardent Blakely disciples who are scratching their heads at her latest product.

“It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of shoes,” said Hudson. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

Well, see for yourself in the video below, in which Blakely introduces Sneex, and then go peruse the Sneex product line. In my view they’re a butt-ugly shoe, but I appreciate the pain that high heels impose upon women. Is it possible that they could be a success? I’ll let the women weigh in.

Here’s “The Blake”, only $549:

 

*What is up with CBS? First they called journalist Tony Dokoupil on the carpet for asking hard questions about Israel and Palestine to icon Ta-Nehisi Coates, and now the Free Press asks, “Does CBS News know where Jerusalem is?” (archived here). Why the question? Because CBS put the city in limbo!

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

. . . Memmott’s Jerusalem guidance is in keeping with our previous reporting on the turmoil at CBS—and what The Free Press has heard from multiple people inside CBS today: that a double standard exists for journalism at CBS when it relates to Israel and Jews.

. . . One CBS employee said that the response to Tony Dokoupil has exposed a number of double standards at the network. “There is a huge difference between how all ethnic or minority groups are treated and how Jews and Jewish issues are treated. The rule of thumb is: If you are Jewish and you are interested in reporting on Jews or Jewish issues, that’s a ‘hold on’ or a ‘no,’ whereas for any other group it would be an enthusiastic ‘yes.’ ”

Nothing surprises me any more. I used to be an avid CBS News fan back in the days when Walter Cronkite, the epitome of clear and objecting reporting, was the anchorman for the evening news. How low the mighty have fallen!

*My friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard and writes about the history of science, sent me a talk he gave before the Cambridge Entomological Society that he titled, informally, “Beetles are the key to the theory of evolution.” He’s an excellent lecturer. It’s more about evolution than beetles. He’s written books about Alfred Russel Wallace, and you’ll see his slides in the “video”.  Have a listen!

*And some self-aggrandizement: my critique on this website of the misleading Guevara paper was highlighted in yesterday’s reading list on Real Clear Science (h/t Suzi).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili joins the many people who believe that history repeats itself.

Hili: I have a feeling that everything has already happened.
A: You are not alone with that feeling.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że wszystko już było.
Ja: Nie jesteś w tym sama.

And a picture of Szaron and Baby Kulka on opposite sides of the window.  They are friends: it’s Hili who hates Kulka.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

 

 

From Texas omigosh:

 

From Masih. Although the video is in Farsi with no translation, the situation is that Ismail Qaani is head of Iran’s “Al Quds” force, a subgroup of the Revolutinary Guard dedicated to spreading the Iranian revolution throughout the world.  He was unaccountably absent from the Israeli bombings in Beirut that killed both Iranian and Lebanese terrorists, and then showed up afterwards from Jordan. He was thus suspected of being a spy for Israel, and apparently freaked out and had a heart attack during his interrogation. The last I heard, Qaani was in the hospital.  Who knows what will happen to him, but I doubt he’s an Israeli spy.

University of Chicago assistant professor Eman Abdelhadi, on the scene and on the side of every anti-Israel protest, is unfortunately unaware of the meaning of Henry Moore’s sculpture.  Regardless of her and the protestors’ ignorance, whoever did this act of vandalism should be punished.

From Luana:  Trevor Noah gets unhinged interviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates about his CBS interview.  Somehow Noah has morphed into a big-time wokie and Israel hater, and there was nothing wrong with Dokoupil’s questioning:

It is time to get rid of UNRWA, in effect a partner in terrorism with Hamas:

Two from my feed. I love this guy: he saved a stray kitten and gave it a forever home.

How a European hamster defends itself:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one who survived. The link to the story worked for me, but you can find it here

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one makes fun of J. D. Vance, but perhaps the guy is just computer illiterate (though it seems that turning the camera upside could NOT fix this issue!)

It was I who dubbed owls as Honorary Cats.

28 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Never worn Spanx and hate any kind of high heels🙀Love the widdle wescue kitty😻🐾🐾

    1. I’ll second that. Never heard of Spanx and the shoes look ghastly.

      Rescued kitty adorable! 🐈

    2. Another woman here who will never wear Spanx nor any high heels.

      Plus that hoomin laughing at the defensive hamster is just mean.

  2. Nobel Prizes are given in science for experimental discovery.

    For example, the Higgs boson was theoretically described and decades later experimentally demonstrated.

    What chemistry experiment did Demis Hassabis John Jumper design and conduct and which discovery about chemistry did that experiment confirm?

    Note that, discoveries and experiments leave no room for exceptions, such as the Higgs boson story. As I understand it- I am not a physicist – the boson was first observed as something unresolved in the theoretical calculations.

    WaPo:

    “The model, AlphaFold, can do in minutes what once took years.”

    This is entirely false.

    A computer or computer program does not and will never clone, purify, crystallize, prepare EM slides of, prepare NMR samples of, collect X-ray, EM, or NMR data — to say the absolute least. Computers are necessary throughout but not sufficient, and steps in the pipeline can be automated but not all experiments are guaranteed to sail through.

    2. I’m using the SpaceX YouTube channel live stream.

      It’s Elon yammering about crypto currency for the last 40 minutes, but it sounds like AI!

      What’s going on with this?

      1. I never listen to musk on his naked xtwitter channel and seldom on SpaceX channel. Pretty much Always filter his stuff through Space.com, an independent reporting site on all things space. Much better than Nasa channels, I think, and I say that as a retired 32 veteran of Nasa.

  4. Sneex are an abomination and I would never wear them.

    I think it would be easy and accurate to say West Jerusalem is in Israel, while East Jerusalem is in the ‘occupied territories’. By the way I wish people would add more context when they used ‘occupied territories’. Like, Israel didn’t Russia-Ukraine the Arabs in 67, they fought yet another war the Arabs started, won, and took territories as a security precaution.

    1. Just for the records: Part of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were illegally occupied by Jordan after Jordan invaded 1 day old Israel in May 1948 (renamed by Jordan “West Bank” in 1950). Similarly, Gaza Strip was illegally occupied by Egypt for the same time (1948-1967). All Jews on these territories were either killed or ethnically cleansed. In peace treaties both Jordan and Egypt renounced any claims to these territories.

      2. THAAANK YOU! The whole “occupied…” is such bs in an Israeli context. Boils my blood every time I hear it. Usually from a female British accent keening over dead terrorists. I pointlessly yell at my screen: “Sucks to start a war of annihilation against a stronger regional super power, eh?”

        Britain is not sending us its best women.

        D.A.
        NYC

  5. I would argue that it not a Yorkshire pudding if it doesn’t have a cup shape so that gravy can be contained within. The picture is just batter.

  7. Re wars of rebellion and liberation, Trevor Noah version.
    Even if you sympathize with the goals of the colonists in the American Revolution (or War of Independence), the fact remains that Britain had the customary right to oppose the colonists with military force once the colonists adopted armed sedition against the British state (i.e. the King.) Even if there had been no preceding violence, the unilateral Declaration of Independence was a seditious act and would have justified the arrest and trial of the signatories. Since they presumably wouldn’t have submitted peacefully, the King’s men would have had to have shot them and their bodyguards. (By 1776 things had got to where the British authorities couldn’t simply arrest anyone they felt like.)

    Where the apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah go wrong is positing that just because the American colonists eventually got their independence by defeating Britain in battle, every other armed insurrectionist movement ought to get theirs just for being first to use violence. The target state should just roll over and accept the insurrectionists’ demands at whatever cost to itself and save everyone the nuisance of warfare. The apologists don’t even recognize that the entity being rebelled against has interests of its own. As long as it is the oppressor it should yield. (Was the United States the oppressor in 1861, and the Confederacy the oppressed?)

    Of course the way Jew-haters fight against Jews and their allies puts them beyond the pale of civilization. My argument is for those who lump all rebellions and freedom causes into one with the 13 Colonies and don’t care too much about methods and goals. Self-determination for the Hell of it. (Literally)

    1. “Was the United States the oppressor in 1861, and the Confederacy the oppressed?”

      You mean in the War of Northern Aggression? Some US Southerners still use that term.

      1. My back door neighbor; his mother was a card carrying member of Daughters of the Confederacy; flies a stars and bars confederate battle flag in his front yard, seasonly joined by a trump for president sign.

  8. I absolutely love the man who rescued the kitten–and let her crawl all over him with those little needle-sharp claws. The rescues from yesterday were also wonderful. At least something good has happened in the world. It might not make a difference as far as the world is concerned, but it certainly means the world to those particular cats.

    I’ve also been enjoying the birds of Hawai’i and look forward to the next installment.

    As for Sneex, forget it! The one good thing about them seems to be that the wearers’ toes will have more room and not be squashed together. I haven’t worn heels of any sort (even 1 1/2″ ones) since the mid 1970s and don’t intend to start.

  9. ‘Put on your high heel sneakers
    and your wig hat on your head.’
    Tommy Tucker, ‘High Heel Sneakers’
    1964

  10. I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Berry’s lecture on beetles and evolution, absorbing and entertaining too.

  11. Kudos for trying to step away from politics today. The state of affairs seems awfully dumber than usual, which is already dumber than the historical average. (This fracas with TNC and the pro-Hamas contingent being a prime example. Everyone cheering him on has beclowned themselves.)

  12. The New York Times also published an obituary for Lily Ebert, at “https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/books/lily-ebert-dead.html”. Here is the headline, sub-headline, and first four paragraphs:

    Lily Ebert, Holocaust Survivor, Author and TikTok Star, Dies at 100

    She survived Auschwitz, wrote a best-selling memoir, “Lily’s Promise,” and spoke to a following of 2 million fans on TikTok.

    By Emmett Lindner
    Oct. 9, 2024

    In July 1944, when Lily Ebert was 20 years old, she and most of her family were packed onto a train and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where on arrival she watched as her mother and two of her siblings were led to a gas chamber. She would never see them again.

    That Yom Kippur, as she, her two sisters and others were squeezed together, praying in the barracks, Ms. Ebert promised herself that her mother and younger siblings would not have died for nothing. If she survived, she would tell the world what had happened to them, and to those who had no one to tell their stories.

    Ms. Ebert did survive, and she spent the rest of her life fulfilling that vow. She spoke publicly about her experiences, wrote a memoir, “Lily’s Promise,” which became a New York Times best seller, and educated millions of young followers about the horrors of the Holocaust on TikTok, through an account she shared with her great-grandson Dov Forman.

    She died on Wednesday at her home in London, Mr. Forman said. She was 100.

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