Welcome to Monday, April 13, 2026, and National Thomas Jefferson Day, celebrating the birth of our third President in 1743, Having produced offspring by an slave, Jefferson is no long extolled, but Bill Maher, in a post later today, has a few words on how we’re supposed to regard someone who did both good and bad things. He was probably a religious nonbeliever, but in those days you didn’t declar ethat publicly. He was also author of a secular bowdlerization of the Bible:
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson compiled the manuscripts but never published them. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting, with a razor and glue, numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson’s condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine.
Here’s the title page of the Jefferson Bible written in his own hand:
It’s also National Peach Cobbler Day and Scrabble Day, celebrating the birthday in 1899 of Alfred Butts, the game’s creator. The game was devised in the early 1930s but not trademarked until 1948:
Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their letters. A key to the game was Butts’s analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used. He then used each letter’s frequency to determine how many of each letter he would include in the game. He included only four “S” tiles so that the ability to make words plural would not make the game too easy
. . . To memorialize his importance to the invention of the game, a street sign at 35th Avenue and 81st Street in Jackson Heights is stylized using letters with their values in Scrabble as a subscript.
Here’s the sign (near where Scrabble was invented), erected mysteriously (the city denies responsibility) and then mysteriously vanishing in 2008. It’s reported to have been re-installed.
And I had a dream last night, for I slept pretty well and had it right before I woke up, so I remember the details. I was assigned to give three lectures on various topics to school students, but didn’t have time to go over my first lecture, which was on sex determination. When I sent to the classroom, unprepared, I saw that the students were about eight years old and rowdy. When I showed my first slide, which was a complex slid of how sex is determined in humans, with busy pathways and pictures of molecules, the kids weren’t interested and began shouting sentences full of obscenities about copulation.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*From It’s Noon in Israel‘s daily war report, we have an article called “The Phony Ceasefire.”
Today, we seem to be living through a “Phony Ceasefire.” Following the supposed halt in hostilities with Iran, nations including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain reported attacks on their territory, with one impact in Bahrain reported as recently as yesterday. The Strait of Hormuz, while no longer actively engulfed in flames, remains largely closed. Meanwhile, both sides quietly prepare for another round.
. . . How many mines are actually in the Strait? The number is unknown, but much like the threats issued by the IRGC during the war, the mere possibility of danger is sufficient to deter commercial passage.
Yesterday, the U.S. began its efforts to deprive Tehran of this leverage. Two U.S. destroyers tested the Strait, daring Iran to enforce its closure and laying the groundwork for the resumption of safe passage. U.S. mine removal operations have been announced to begin this week, and Qatar has already announced it will resume operations “for all types of maritime vessels and ships.”
There exists an ironic deterrent to resuming hostilities: Trump’s threat. By declaring he would devastate Iran’s energy infrastructure unless an agreement was reached, Trump armed a nuclear bomb that only negotiations can defuse. Iran fears this bomb will explode in Tehran—perhaps not returning them to the Stone Age, but utterly devastating the country. Trump, meanwhile, fears the fallout in global energy markets.
Trump has the option to disarm his threat by pivoting to a different target. But short of taking dramatic actions—like seizing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, conquering Kharg Island, or forcibly reopening the Strait, all of which demand an unpopular ground campaign—he has few options to resume the war and eventually re-enter negotiations from a position of greater power.
Regardless, unless something fundamentally shifts in Islamabad, this state of affairs—much like the Phony War—is destined for conflict.
More pessismism and more anxiety.
*The latest news as of Sunday afternoon was Trump’s announcement of a naval blockade of Iran. And this morning Iran threatened all Persian Gulf ports if the U.S. won’t let ship into or out of Iranian ports. The WSJ’s take from this morning:
Iran said no port in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Oman would be safe if its ports are threatened, after President Trump confirmed that a U.S. blockade on ships entering or exiting Iranian ports would take effect at 10 a.m. ET Monday.
After peace talks stalled between the U.S. and Iran at the weekend, Trump said he doesn’t care whether Tehran returns for another round of negotiations.
Less than a week into a cease-fire between the two countries, Trump has warned that the U.S. would “finish up the little that is left of Iran” and said its water and electric plants would be “easy to hit.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard navy said that any approach by military vessels toward the Strait of Hormuz would be treated as a violation of the cease-fire, according to a statement cited by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.
U.S. Central Command said the blockade won’t impede vessels going to and from non-Iranian ports.
The U.S. and Iran have dug into their positions since talks stalled, but both sides signaled they were open to a diplomatic solution.
Tehran’s lead negotiator said Washington had failed to earn its trust.
Oil prices jumped, while U.S. stock futures fell.
From the WaPo:
“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social, his social media site. The president also said he had instructed the Navy to interdict all ships that have paid a toll to Iran for traversing the strait, calling Tehran’s expanded control of the waterway “EXTORTION.”
A U.S. official told The Washington Post that the U.S. and Iran failed to reach agreements on ending all uranium enrichment and retrieving highly enriched uranium; dismantling all major nuclear enrichment facilities; accepting a broader de-escalation framework involving regional allies; ending funding for terrorist proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; and fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz with no tolls for passage. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.
In an interview Sunday morning with Fox News, Trump said he expected “numerous” countries to help with the blockade, which he compared to the U.S. operation to block the flow of oil ships out of Venezuela earlier this year, saying it would be “very similar to that but at a higher level.”
Well that ain’t gonna happen. If those countries wouldn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, why would they want to get involved even deeper in the war by blockading Iran?
The blockade in the short term, at least, might risk worsening a war-driven global energy crisis by halting all cargo traffic through the strait, and Trump acknowledged that price of oil and gas may continue to increase in the U.S. for some time. While Iran would potentially suffer the most economically, the move may come as a blow to the rest of the world as well, especially nations in Asia, which rely heavily on oil and gas, petrochemicals, and other essentials shipped from the Persian Gulf.
The tight geography could also make naval operations in the Gulf perilous. U.S. ships could be vulnerable to attacks by small craft, as well as drones and missiles. Trump in his post said other countries would be involved in imposing the blockade but offered no specifics.
Despite failing to reach a deal, Trump expressed optimism that one would still be struck with Iran and reiterated Vice President JD Vance’s earlier remarks that the main sticking point was disagreement over Iran’s nuclear program.
“It was a good meeting yesterday, really, a good meeting, except for one problem — and it’s 95 percent,” Trump told Fox. “They want to have nuclear weapons. It’s not going to happen.”
. . . Except for one problem. But that is a huge problem, and I can’t imagine Iran giving way on its nuclear ambitions. Or they could do what they usually do—lie about them and then hide their efforts to get a bomb. And of course the Strait of Hormuz is also a big problem, and Iran’s ace in the hole that it’s not keen to discard.
Oh, and I still think that the NYT and WaPo want the U.S. to come out badly in the Iran war, or even lose it. Their news is palpably positive for Iran and negative for the U.S., as this morning’s war headlines show (click to enlarge):
*Harvard has proposed curbing grade inflation by capping the “A”s in a course, which now, including A-s, stand at around 80% of all grades. Grades there, like at many schools, have become a joke. The Harvard faculty voted the A curb, but delayed its approval until next month. And perhaps in the end it won’t get approved. The efficacy of the plan is that it will be implemented by all courses, so no professor need fear being singled out as a hard grader. In an editorial-board op-ed called “Harvard’s grade inflation experiment,” the Washington Post recommends that the plan be implemented ASAP:
The Harvard Crimson says this:
Where the Class of 2015 had a median grade point average of 3.64 at graduation, the Class of 2025 clocked in at 3.83. And since the 2016-2017 academic year, the median Harvard College GPA has been an A.
Back to the WaPo:
Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.
. . .The result is a collapse in the informational value of grades, especially at the high end. “As GPAs accumulate against the wall of 4.0,” a Harvard faculty committee report noted earlier this year, “the small numerical differences that remain are less reflective of genuine variation in academic performance than random noise in the grading process.”
The proposal under consideration would cap the share of A’s an instructor can give to 20 percent of the class plus four students. That means that in a large introductory course, the share of students who could get A’s — 24 out of 100, for example — would be lower than in smaller courses, which tend to be more advanced. Up to eight A’s would be available in a class of 20.
The overall effect would be to cut the share of A’s in half from the last academic year, to around a third, according to the Harvard Gazette. There would be no limit on A-minuses.
. . . This effort matters because Harvard has the stature to prompt similar changes across the rest of higher education, where grade inflation has also been rampant. Princeton and Wellesley both tried to respond to grade inflation with caps but abandoned their efforts in 2014 and 2019, respectively.
A major objection from students at Harvard is that going back to grading on a curve will discourage them from participating in extracurricular activities. But the core purpose of campus life is learning, not socializing or networking, and academics have been excessively devalued at Harvard in recent decades. This would help restore the balance.
An admirable plan, for the students at Harvard have not gotten uber-smarter in the last decade—the higher grades reflect professorial inflation of marks. Another suggestion, which I think should be implemented in all schools that have transcripts, is to put the overall median grade for each course on a student’s transcript.. Even if other schools are too timorous to curb grade inflation, at least the median will give people scrutinizing transcripts an idea of how inflated the grades really are.
Grok tells me this about my school (the U of C doesn’t release the data): “Unofficial estimates from students, alumni, and forums (Reddit, College Confidential, Quora, Wall Street Oasis, etc.) consistently place the current average/median undergraduate GPA in the 3.3–3.5 range, often around 3.3.” That is a B+, and at least we grade harder here than they do at Harvard.
*Reader Reese called my attention to an Atlantic article called “The most beautiful moment of the Artemis II mission” about naming new craters on the far side of the Moon, including on in memoriam of an astronaut’s late wife. A short excerpt from the article:
On Monday, while flying around the moon, the crew tried to live up to this elevated standard of naming. During the livestream, Hansen said that the crew hoped that a crater on the moon’s far side might share the name of their spacecraft, Integrity. You can understand why they might have been feeling gratitude for the little vessel at that moment. In carrying them farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled, it had bested the Santa María, the H.M.S. Endeavour, and every single one of the Apollo crew modules. For days, its thin walls had been the only thing separating their soft animal bodies from the lethal vacuum of space.
Hansen said that the second crater was especially meaningful to the crew. It was located close to the boundary line between the moon’s near and far sides, and can be seen from Earth for part of the year. Hansen proposed that it be named for a departed loved one from their “astronaut family.” To his right was Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander, who in 2020 lost his wife, Carroll, to a five-year battle with cancer. The couple’s two daughters were teenagers at the time, and since then, he has raised them on his own. “We would like to call it Carroll,” Hansen said of the crater. His voice cracked as he spelled it out. C-A-R-R-O-L-L. The astronauts wiped away tears, and all four of them floated up to the top of the capsule, in a group hug—an image of human tenderness, beamed down to a planet that badly needed one.
The naming of Carroll starts about 1:15 in. The sound cuts out towards the end before resuming, but that’s because there are tears and hugs. It is indeed moving.
*If you’re a baseball fan, you might have heard that a game played between Los Angeles and the Seattle Mariners on April 4 has been labeled “the greatest single defensive game in major league history.” What happened was this:
On April 4, 2026, [Los Angeles outfielder Jo] Adell became the first player in MLB history to rob three home runs in one game, when he did so in a 1–0 win over the Seattle Mariners. He first robbed Cal Raleigh‘s first potential homer of the year in the first inning, before robbing Josh Naylor of a home run in the eighth. In the ninth inning, the third took place when he robbed J. P. Crawford of a home run, leaping into the right field stands in the process.The previous record, as tracked by Sports Info Solutions was two, by Nook Logan in 2005 and Jesús Sánchez in 2025.
And here’s the video:
Whether this is the greatest defensive performance in MLB history is arguable (you might say that pitching a 9-inning perfect game is a great act of defense), but that last catch, judged by the bot as caught before Adell left the field as well as a fair ball, was a doozy.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is giving advice so generalized that it’s useless:
Hili: We must be principled.
Andrzej: In what matter?
Hili: I don’t know yet.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy być pryncypialni.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Jeszcze nie wiem.
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From CinEmma:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih doesn’t like Iranians associated with terrorism to have luxury lives in the U.S. when they’re not even citizens. The son of “Screaming Mary” has been arrested and is scheduled for deportation.
This is Masoumeh Ebtekar, the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage-taker spokeswoman, once ready to “shoot American hostages in the head, here she responded to my investigation into her son’s luxury life in Los Angeles.
She laughs, nervously and claims her son is “just another student”… pic.twitter.com/BGtOyliR5Z
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 11, 2026
From Simon: Larry the Cat, like Hili, doesn’t much care for humans:
Lucky blighters https://t.co/vrS0X6iAPu
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 6, 2026
From Luana; the decline of Caltech and the decline of MIT. Caltech is attracting the smartest math students.
From Malcolm, making a point I’ve always emphasized:
Owls are just cats with wings pic.twitter.com/htwcM2v4jr
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 5, 2026
One from my feed: I’m not sure what this bird is (a starling?), but note the “Community note”: “Not shown on X: This video was taken from Instagram user inkydragon without proper attribution. https://www.instagram.com/inkydragon”. There: it’s properly attributed. Now sound up.
Imagine being lost in the woods hearing this pic.twitter.com/1vSkcRgd4g
— Nature Videos (@naturevideos) April 11, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch girl was gassed, together with her mother and five bothers and sisters, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T12:48:55.600Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. You can buy this fly all painted up, but it costs £800. They also give you the printing directions if you have access to a 3D printer. Awesome!
Who does not want an AMAZING 3D printed fly???? This Drosophila was printed for me today as a prop for a talk at the @rigb.org It caused a minor commotion on the tube on my way home. And I LOVE IT – @bittelmethis.bsky.social 🤓🪰🤘
— Erica McAlister (@flygirlnhm.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T20:26:00.934Z
From Artemis II posted by astronaut Katie Mack:
Whoa 🤯The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0…
Meanwhile, over at FreeFromThoughtBlogs, resident fash Marcus “Jews can go back to Europe” Ranum, has a post up putting forth a JFK-style “magic bullet” conspiracy theory for the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Alex Jones would be giving him the thumbs up…
More Da Nooz:
Péter Magyar and his party, TISZA, have won the Hungarian parliamentary elections in a landslide victory. His party now holds a two-thirds majority and can therefore repeal the numerous laws that Viktor Orbán and his party, Fidesz, have enacted over the past 16 years to undermine democracy and secure their power.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/viktor-orban-concedes-defeat-as-opposition-wins-hungarian-election
Which laws passed by Orban actually “undermine democracy”?
For now, I can only offer German articles.
https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/illiberale-demokratie-ungarn-100.html
https://home.uni-leipzig.de/jmcoe/blog/ungarn-ist-eine-wahlautokratie/
I’m aware that the EU leadership and much of the press have long deplored Orban. This seems to be mostly because he disagrees with EU orthodoxy. In particular he doesn’t think that admitting multiple millions of third-world migrants into Hungary is in their interests, so refused EU requests to take quotas of migrants (and thus earned the enmity of the EU, and Soros, and much of the media). But that is not anti-democratic, since most of the people in his country and in the rest of the EU agree with him, and most of what he’s done has been in line with his electorate’s wishes, who voted him in 4 times (though they are now preferring someone else, which is how democracy works). But, in all this, what is rather lacking is specifics on how he’s actually “undermining democracy”.
“”…admitting multiple millions of third-world migrants into Hungary…”?
You have a limited understanding of how Orbán has transformed Hungary into an illiberal, antidemocratic and authoritarian state in the last 16 years. Please read the following articles for a better understanding.
https://democratic-erosion.org/2022/04/20/viktor-orbans-hungary-a-democracy-backsliding/
https://verfassungsblog.de/constitutional-complaint-as-orbans-tool/
https://constitutionnet.org/news/voices/hungarys-14th-constitutional-amendment-cementing-incremental-political-takeover-judicial-power
With that, I would like to wrap up this point so as not to violate the rules.
As you say, Da Roolz prevent us from pursuing this, but briefly, I still await an actual example of an “undermining democracy” law. I’m aware of the large amounts of anti-Orban commentary, but, picking an example, one of your links complains that he has reined in the power of unelected judges to over-rule an elected government. One might be for or against that, but I fail to see how it is anti-democratic. If anything, it’s too much democracy, from the point of view of the EU elites who think they know what’s best (being what they call “populism”)
Eddie: that quote was what he has refused to do, earning him the enmity of the EU elites who want to impose mass migration against the wishes of the people.
Defending Orban is a bad look. Even the conservative WSJ editorial board does not try to defend him.
He’s completely corrupt, enriching his family and friends while turning Hungary into the poorest country in the EU.
He also defends Vladimir Putin, using his EU membership to block funds for Ukraine.
It is nice to describe Orbán as mainly criticized for his anti-immigration stand.
Meanwhile:
He was a close ally of Putin to the point arguably betraying Hungary’s allies. During the last year or so he flooded the country with a very aggressive and dirty anti-Ukrainian propaganda and the state media he controlled was long parroting Russian propaganda on every international issue.
And for anti-democratic: he turned every organ of the state into an organ of his party and transformed the state media into a lying propaganda machinery that would have been too much for the late communist dictator Kádár, you have to look back at the time of Stalin (Rákosi in Hungary) to find something like this in the past of Hungary.
He also actively used the state’s power to destroy, dismantle, drown any and every organization that was not directly serving him. Apolitical ones very much included.
And yes, he brought formerly unimaginable, South-Asian level, corruption into the country. This will be a big problem for the new government, because not only they start with record high deficit, but also the reserves of the country are robbed dry.
Also, on the law side the big problem were not the laws they enacted, but the fact that they blatantly ignored even their own laws whenever they pleased, undermining the rule of law in the country both in practice and in the mind of the people.
Victor Orbán was and is a despicable criminal. He and his accomplices caused long lasting damage to the Hungarian society. His anti-immigration stand is not the issue at all.
Slumbery’s response sounds exactly like Trump’s USA. One could simply replace Orban with Trump and it would ring true for the USA at the moment.
Orban apparently wasn’t very effective at being an autocrat and rigging the system given his landslide election loss.
He supports Putin, as does Trump. What more proof do you need that he’s “anti-democratic”? Sheesh, that’s too easy.
Or do we not judge people or infer their character by the people they buttress?
The links from RPGNo1 are enlightening, since I’m not familiar with Hungarian domestic politics. The take-away from the first one is this: “None of Orbán’s constitutional actions are illegal, but . . . corrosive to democracy.”
Judicial review of the legislature is contentious everywhere. The United Kingdom needs no written Constitution or “Constitutional Court” because in establishing itself as supreme over the Monarch, the English Parliament gave itself the power to pass any law it wanted to. Centuries of tradition and simple Acts of Parliament, not a written Bill of Rights, protect civil liberties (to the degree compatible with order and security in the moment.) The High Court needed only to hear appeals from the trial courts. Parliament saw no cause to give the Courts the additional role to strike legislation that Parliament had passed. Why on earth would it? Parliament is supreme. Is this where Mr. Orbán was coming from?
There are dangers from a supreme unchecked Parliament.
1) Minority rights may be trampled on. But sometimes appointed activist judges discover rights out of thin air and strike laws, or exempt certain “equity-seeking” miscreants from laws that seem like common sense and well within legislative political prerogative. Reining in judges in Canada, Orbán-style, might be a good idea.
2) A strong Prime Minister may be able to dictate to Parliament, as a Canadian Prime Minister with a Majority routinely does. Then we get rule by an elected term-limited executive dictator against an emasculated Opposition. Our PM has many Hungarian-style powers expressed in somewhat different cultural ways that still rhyme. This might be where Mr. Orbán is coming from, too. But the people decided they’d had enough of it, and he left office peacefully, as Canadian Prime Ministers always have, too.
The U.S. Supreme Court came late to having the temerity to strike a Congressional or State law that contravened, in its sole, un-over-rideable opinion, any of the Bill of Rights. Its legitimacy for doing so comes from the Founding Fathers’ desire to create a limited government that could exert only so much control over the people, and no more. Parliamentary countries don’t recognize this. The King used to have absolute power over his subjects. Now the elected Parliament does. Hungary’s democracy under Mr. Orbán doesn’t look much like America’s. But then very few do.
He rigged the election system to favor him massively by continuously increasing the weight of the rural constituencies, by changing the constitution to give his wins there more impact, by delaying in part the installation of broadband internet so the people rely on the state media that he built to broadcast propaganda instead of balanced news.
His corruption is so obvious, that barely a month goes by without a scandal that would end government in other European nations. He sold out to Russia, he sold out to China. He leaked confidential material from EU consultations directly to Russia… the list just goes on and on.
RPG: “. . . numerous laws that Viktor Orban and his party, Fidesz, have enacted over the past 16 years to undermine democracy and secure their power.”
I’m amused to see not the slightest bit of self-reflection from Orban’s critics. We have been told for years that he is an autocrat, an authoritarian strongman, an illiberal blight on Europe. Apparently, we should now add “incompetent” strongman given that he lost a democratic election by a landslide and quickly conceded. One might conclude that Orban’s critics don’t really believe their own words.
Frau Katze notes that “Defending Orban is a bad look.” Perhaps. But it is this mentality, overly conscious of peer approval and implicit threats of reputation destruction, that has destroyed many left-leaning organizations over the last 15 years. It has led many formerly-sensible liberals to abandon common sense and truth, to care less for the political concerns of the broader population, and to fixate instead on the insular positions of the professional class.
One reason so many on the American right embraced Orban is because they, being largely ignorant of Hungarian politics, simply assumed Orban was getting the same smear treatment that prominent right-wing politicians do throughout the West: Nazi, racist, sexist, transphobe, Islamophobe, ad nauseam. Orban, in their eyes, is unafraid to offend “liberal” sensitivities and to dissent from the increasing coercion with which such people enforce their pieties.
I suggest you read around a bit. Do you really think the conservative WSJ editorial board is “smearing” him?
I consider myself somewhat on the conservative side too. But conservatives used to supported free countries, not Putin’s Russia.
With due respect, perhaps you shouldn’t assume what people have read.
His defeat was simply so obvious, that he would have needed to try for a coup to stay in power and I don’t think the military would have been on board. If it is a tight race, you can fudge the margins. This was a blowout under the eyes of international observers.
Orban was getting love from the Trump administration because he is kissing Trump’s backside shamelessly while being innovative in the area of subversion of democracy.
“We have been told for years that he is an autocrat, an authoritarian strongman, an illiberal blight on Europe.”
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… I don’t know who is being “told” he’s a duck? I agree with Ms. Cat, it seems you haven’t kept up on him. Or you appreciate authoritarians, which is fine, many people do.
Sorry to hear you aren’t sleeping well. I suppose, though, that it is come consolation to the rest of us to learn that teachers also have school-anxiety dreams. 😉
Maybe Harvard should just go pass/fail like Brown?
Harvard Medical School already does.
Katie Mack is not an astronaut. She is an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.
https://perimeterinstitute.ca/people/katherine-mack
https://www.astrokatie.com/
Still, thanks to Katie and Matthew for bringing this incredible shot with Earthshine showing lunar surface features during a total solar eclipse event to the attention of WEIT readers.
Absolutely!
Interesting trivia on Jefferson’s birthday: from his gravestone at Monticello, birthdate given as “April 2, 1743 O.S.” The Julian/Gregorian calendar kerfuffle took place in England during his early years and 11 days were added on to give today’s date of April 13. Short write-up and 90 sec video at url
https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/jeffersons-gravestone
Also a good time to remind ourselves of what Jefferson himself thought his three most important contributions were: 1. Author of the Declaration of American Independence; 2. author of the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom; and 3. Father of the University of Virginia.
Not an insignificant life!
Yikes: just noticed I apparently wrote “statue” not “statute” of Virginia… above. Mea culpa. Do not know if it be aging brain me or an ai editor “helping” me out, but sorry!
The starling sounds like an alien because the sounds have been slowed down. Doesn’t mean the song is not remarkable, only that one would not hear the sounds in the video in the wild.
Interestingly, bottom tier colleges can have less of a problem with grade inflation. Like many (see last week’s WSJ article about St. Michael’s), we’ve enjoyed a reputation for preparing students for medical school. If our students were applying with low MCATs and high GPAs, that reputation would be destroyed.
I was watching the Mariners game on TV when Adell made those three catches. They were all very good plays, especially the last one, when Adell fell into the stands in right field. Was it the greatest defensive performance of all time? Well, the ball came toward Adell three times, each time threatening to be a home run. Each time, Adell leapt and made the catch. The last catch was pretty amazing, but the thing that was unusual was not that Adell made the catches, but that he had three chances to rob home runs. I didn’t see an interview with Adell, but my guess is that he’d say that the ball came his way three times, so he made the three plays. They were very good plays, and the Mariners lost the game.
Three left-handed hitters pulling to deep right field but not quite pulling it off. He was playing them deep it looked like. Really fun to watch!
To a cricket fan the surprise is that the last catch counted. In cricket he would have had to knock the ball up into the air back into play, then go back onto the field to catch it. If you catch it but step over the boundary line then it’s a six.
Actually, for this cricket fan the surprise is that baseball wimps need to wear those ludicrous catching gloves. They ought to try it bare handed – like real men and women.😎
Regarding gloves. I wonder if cricketers drop more catches than baseballers. We would have to compare only high catches by outfielders because there are no baseball equivalents of slip catches, close catches etc.
I’ve seen relay catches in cricket: once in an ODI when the player threw the ball to a teammate before crossing the boundary.
I think we’d need to include catches from around point to cover to mid-off around to square leg as they seem to be a roughly similar distance from the batsman as basemen are to batters, and the deep outfield. But yeah, for sure cricketers would drop more catches. It seems to me (never having played baseball), that it’s a foregone conclusion a catch will be made in baseball once the fielder gets under the ball. As I’m sure you’re aware, Chetiya, high “flyballs” in cricket are always gonna be heart-in-mouth moments for everyone competing, watching….and wondering🙂.
In Israel, Monday night marks the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Hebrew calendar). Aside from the official programs, it is marked by media interviews with survivors and their families, as well as other related stories.
Today, one radio station played recordings of antisemitic demonstrations around the world—those happening today. Not pro-Palestinian demos, but the ones with speakers and their followers calling for the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel. A translation was provided. The demonstrations quoted were about 70% left, 30% right.
Somewhat frightening—it is amazing how little time it took for antisemitism to become stylish after the Holocaust. Ny wife never knew her grandparents. I only knew those on my mother’s side—they were born in the US.
At the risk of sounding like a (still) proud Zionist: Next week marks the observance of Memorial Day (for Israeli soldiers and victims of terrorism) and Independence Day, immediately following. The proximity of those days to Holocaust Memorial Day is no accident. We know why we fight.
Thank you, Jerry, for the posting of the pictures and descriptions of the Holocaust victims. And thank those of you who take a moment to read those posts. It means a lot.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the past few years, Starwolf: like many I considered most (non-Muslim) antisemitism pretty much a thing of the past or a hobby for powerless weirdos.
Then the pop-up demos of Oct 8th and the revelation – especially in Europe and especially in the UK – of wild, Islamic-Leftist (“green-red”) antisemitism. It is fortunate we now KNOW this has been just under the surface AND that the rest of society has been given an object lesson in what the Islamosphere – here and there – REALLY believes. (The whole “Religion of Peace” lie has bugged me for 3 decades).
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Independence Day next week? Of course, Hebrew calendar…i never thought about anything except May 14 until just now. My thoughts will be with you tonight, tomorrow, and especially next week, Starwolf.
I just finished reading Rabinovitch’s very powerful “Yom Kippur War” and the commitment of the boys fighting these existential wars has become very real to me.
I know. I see it everywhere, left and right. I don’t understand it. ☹️
As cute as they are I bet owls are a bi*ch to keep as pets. On that score, I’m pleased that in the last 15 years there are now a ton of youtubes to help you train your puppy. For my first puppy, 15 years ago I was on my own!
Love the fruit fly model. If they were cheaper I’d get PCC(E) one for his birthday!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I had an injured short-eared owl in a room in my house, for several months, fed with dead mice we got from a university lab. He was not confined. I don’t know what other owls are like, but this one was not in any way “tame” or friendly. My husband, feeling friendly to the owl, got too close and was badly clawed.
I was once fishing in a tidal river in northern NSW when a large brown bird drifted upriver some distance from me. Some time later I saw it coming down-river on the ebb tide, so I surmised it was injured or unwell. It greedily devoured the very fresh bait I threw it, and I lifted it from the water and took it back to my camper van. It would not feed unless I floated it back on the river several times a day where it fed, always with it’s head under the surface. It regained it’s strength after about ten days and soared away into the wild blue yonder. Best as I could surmise, the bird was a muttonbird/short-tailed shearwater.
The story I have about an oil-soaked fairy penguin I found at a beach I reserve for another time.
What a kind deed. That must have filled you with the best feeling ever. Did you ever figure out what type of injury it had? Thank goodness you picked up on its need to feed in the water. So cool.
Fruit flies are a pain. I worked at an institute that had a few fly labs. Like all such labs, precautions are taken to make sure that no flies escape. And like all such labs, a few flies do escape. And any time, anywhere, that anyone would open a bottle of wine or put vinegar on their salad in the lunchroom, Hey Presto! Flies magically appear out of nowhere.
This may be a bizarre question, but is the “Hey Presto!” expression common where you live (or in your family, or what have you) or did you pick it up from Meriadoc Brandybuck in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book1, Chapter 5: A Conspiracy Unmasked as I did?
It is not common, but I am pretty sure that I first encountered it in a different fantasy novel. I cannot recall which, and it is now going to cost me some sleep.
Sorry!
The Artemis shot of the solar eclipse is spectacular, but did any of you pause to wonder “where’s all that light surrounding the Moon coming from?” After all, this is a shot in space, which is a vacuum, right? Well, actually, space is not a perfect vacuum and what you’re seeing is called zodiacal light. It’s light reflecting off gas and particles within the Solar System, in this case between the Earth/Moon system and the Sun.
This is the best example of zodiacal light I’ve ever come across!
βPer
Grade inflation is a consequence of the “student as customer” mindset – I’m paying big $$$ for this degree, I should get the highest grade!
When I was a student in Canada in the 80s/90s, the mean grade for each course was reported alongside my grade on the transcripts. An A was much more meaningful if the class mean was C than if everyone got an A.
Indeed. One reason I am so glad I retired from academia recently was the university’s total embrace of the student-as-customer model. The “customer is always right” philosophy led to countless complaints to the Deans whenever students found a course difficult, deemed it too much work, or failed to achieve top marks. I was pressured to massively dumb down a neuroscience course I had taught very successfully for decades. That was one of several final straws.
There’s also pressure to cram as many students into a class as possible, and to cancel classes with low enrolments – although at the last university I worked at, they kept raising the minimum number (first it was 10, then 16, then 30). It not only made it impossible to offer advanced classes, it also meant that any course that was difficult or challenging would be under-enrolled and then cancelled. By the time I left, there were senior level classes with no prerequisites.
I, for one, am disappointed that I could not locate the files for 3d printing the fly. I would absolutely print one tomorrow.