Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 27, 2017 • 7:00 am

It’s Hump Day: Wednesday, September 27, 2017, and we’re nearly into October. My beloved mallard Honey hasn’t shown up for two days, and I wonder if somewhere there’s another duck-struck sucker feeding her in another pond. It’s National Chocolate Milk Day, and I have to admit that that’s the kind of milk I wanted as a kid. Does anybody remember those chocolate-filled straws you could use to suck up regular milk, turning it chocolatey?

It’s Google’s official birthday, too, but that seems to be a made-up date. There’s an animated spinner, and when you stop it, you get to play one of the old Google games, but on full screen. The Independent lists them, and tells you how to bypass the spinner and go to a game you want. Click on the screenshot to go to the game:

 

As I noted two days ago, on September 25 of 1066, the Brits defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Well, two days later in the same year, William the Conquerer and his forces set sail from France on their way to conquer England. It was a rough year for the natives of Britain. On this day in 1822,  Jean-François Champollion announced that he’d at last deciphered the Rosetta Stone (do you remember the three languages in which it’s written)? On this day in the “miracle year” of 1905 for Einstein and physics, der treue Albert published his paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” in Annalen der Physik. That paper contained everybody’s favorite equation, E=mc².

The paper is here (it’s only three pages), and I couldn’t find the equation in that form, but I believe it’s on the page below in the fourth paragraph from the bottom: “Gibt ein Körper die Energie L in Form von Strahlung ab, so verkleinert sich seine Masse um L/V².”

My rough German translates this as “If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, then  its mass will be reduced by L/V²”.  Rearranging, if mass is M, then the energy accompanying that loss of mass, where I use “m” to stand for mass, is L = mV².  Clearly Einstein was using “V” instead of “c” to stand for the speed of light, and, as he says, energy is “L.” If you use “E” and “c”, then E = mc². (I probably screwed up something here, but this is the best I can do at 6:00 a.m.)

On this day in 1908, Henry Ford turned out the very first Ford Model T at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. Finally, on this day in 1962, Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring was published, launching “the environmental movement” and eventually leading to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Notables born on September 27 include Samuel Adams (1722; his beer is ok, but Sam Smith’s is better), Sam Ervin (1896), Albert Ellis (1913), Meat Loaf (1947), and Avril Lavigne (1984). Those who died on this day include Edgar Degas (1917), Engelbert Humperdinck (1921; not the pop singer!),  Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1956), Clara Bow (1965) and Donald O’Connor (2003). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is throwing caution to the winds, and starting her annual Winter Thickening:

Hili: This is excellent cream.
A: Aren’t you afraid of gaining weight?
Hili: Tasty things are not fattening.
 In Polish:
Hili: To doskonała śmietanka.
Ja: A nie obawiasz się nadwagi?
Hili: Dobre rzeczy nie tuczą.

Here’s a tw**t from Matthew Cobb. Don’t know what a fossa is? Go here.

I’ve stolen three tweets from Heather Hastie, but in return I’ll plug her post that has an excellent Twitter analysis of the Saudi’s lifting their ban on women driving.  First, though, look at these adorable wild sand cat kittens (Felis margarita):

Cats with eyebrows, split faces, and hearts!

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/912844762801217536

And a parrot dancing to the Beach Boys. I wonder if the music was put in later:

https://twitter.com/VistaEarth/status/912503814862917633

At last, Saudi Arabia allows women to drive

September 26, 2017 • 6:00 pm

Up to today, Saudi Arabia was the world’s only country that barred women from driving. That’s changed now, with the government announcing that, as of next June, women can get behind the wheel.

One obstacle down, but a lot to go. The guardianship laws remain for many things, requiring women to have a male guardian to do simple things like travel, enact official business, get some medical procedures, etc. They must still cover themselves in public, sexes are segregated, and, well, it goes on and on.

Still, one medium leap for womankind. . .

“Afternoon Delight”

September 26, 2017 • 3:00 pm

To end this wretched and hot day, when I feel debilitated and uninspired, I’ll play a song that, I suspect, is a guilty pleasure for many of us. I refer, of course, to “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band, which topped the U.S. “hot 100” charts in July, 1976. At the time it was considered racy, as it’s clearly about having sex in the afternoon, but nobody would bat an eye at that today.

It’s #20 on a list I didn’t know existed: Billboard‘s “50 Sexiest Songs of All Time.” You could do worse than look at that list (spoiler: #1 is—ugh—”Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, but #5 and #6 are hotter).

Here’s the one-hit wonder, the Starland Vocal Band, doing their song live:

From Wikipedia:

The group began as ‘Fat City’, a husband/wife duo of Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. The band was also composed of Jon Carroll (keyboards and vocals) and Margot Chapman (vocals). Carroll and Chapman were also married after meeting as members of the group, but later divorced. Their son Ben Carroll is also a musician.

Why do I like the song? Not because of the sexual overtones, but the catchy tune and, especially, the close harmony at the very end (3:17 in this live version, 2:56 in the original recorded version).  This is the kind of song you’d hear on the radio on a road trip with your squeeze and, after singing it, try to harmonize with the radio (and each other) at the end. I bet a lot of you of a certain age know all the words.

I’ll admit to one other schlocky song that’s a guilty pleasure (actually, I don’t think it’s schlocky, but others do): “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphey (a great live version here).

Now you have to put your guilty-pleasure songs in the comments.

The Left eats itself: Antifa fractures along race lines over punching Nazis

September 26, 2017 • 11:20 am

This kind of fractiousness was inevitable. First, though, let me say that I can’t vouch for this video being completely authentic. It seems like something from the Onion, but these days almost all the news does.

But assuming this is genuine, it shows an Antifa Woman of Color hectoring a White Male Antifa for NOT PUNCHING A NAZI, thereby demonstrating his “height of white performativeness” and not being an “ally”. (What, by the way, is “performativeness”?) He’s told he’s “inherently racist” because he won’t punch a Nazi, and that “racism” is in his blood and his DNA.

Now maybe the woman is pulling a joke, but I’m guessing not. My only comment is that this is absolutely pathetic. Unless you PUNCH SOMEONE, you’re not a real ally, and are, in fact, a racist! It’s pathetic that the guy is so eager to demonstrate his bona fides that he allows himself to be harangued in this way.

That aside, I’m wondering when the Southern Poverty Law Center will classify Antifa as a “hate group.”

Trumpiana: The “President” urges football rules for standing during National Anthem, but wants more brain injuries

September 26, 2017 • 10:00 am

Trump continues to harangue the National Football League (NFL) about not firing players who refuse to stand erect and show “respect” during the pre-game playing of the National Anthem.  Here’s one of his tw**ts from this morning.  The irony is that the NFL appeared to be divided on this issue—brought to the fore by Colin Kaepernick—but showed a rare political unity among different players and teams—almost certainly because of Trump’s unhinged harangues, like this one:

and this one:

But he also said this in a speech in Alabama on Friday:

“You hit too hard, 15 yards throw him out of the game,” Trump said. “They had that last week, I watched for a couple of minutes. Two guys, just a really beautiful tackle, boom, 15 yards. The referee gets on television, his wife is sitting at home, she’s so proud.”

Clearly, Trump doesn’t like penalties against hard hits.

This is invidious, especially in light of the recent announcement that lawyers for former NFL player Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself in jail in April (he was doing time for murder), had filed a lawsuit against the league for failing to protect Hernandez. Hernandez had a severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and one of its symptoms can be violent mood swings and aggression. (Think about that when you’re pondering the punishments that should be doled out for murder, especially because at present CTE can be diagnosed only post mortem.)

CTE is a progressive and degenerative brain disease that leads to dementia, and has been found in the brains of 99% of NFL players donated for scientific study. Now this may be an overrepresentation since players may be more likely to donate their brains if they show dementia and abnormal behavior. But the disease is known to result from repeated head trauma, and the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed 202 football players and 111 NFL players. 110 of the latter showed CTE.  That’s not a small sample. And increasingly, living players are reporting CTE symptoms as well. If you don’t think it’s an issue, see this list of living and deceased NFL players who had or may now have the disease.

I don’t watch football precisely because of this violence, and it’s even worse now when I see segments on the sports news showing hard hits. While players may be assessing the risk of CTE and balancing it against the financial and exposure rewards of being a pro football star, it’s something the NFL needs to work on. They’ll never eliminate it entirely under the present rules of the game (some would say that this is a reason to eliminate football), but all football organizations—be they professionals or school teams—need to fix the rules, devise better helmets, and increase player awareness.

It’s ironic that while Trump tries to protect the US flag from “disrespect” by players, he has no interest in protecting the players from dementia. In fact, he seems to oppose measures that would reduce dementia.

h/t; Ken

 

 

Earthworms, look away now

September 26, 2017 • 9:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

Jerry sent me this link, which is to a video that has been seen a staggering 25,817,000 times. It’s pretty gruesome, even if you aren’t an earthworm:

As the title indicates, it’s taken from a BBC series called Wonders of the Monsoon, and features two annelids at war – an oligochaete (earthworm) being nommed by a hirudinid (leech).

Both these animals are members of the phylum Annelida, which means ‘small ring’. As you can see, they both have segmented bodies, in the shape of externally-visible rings.

Random oligochaete facts (add your own in the comments!): mainly terrestrial, some freshwater, very few aquatic. There can be tens of thousands of them in a square metre of soil. Most are detritivores (i.e. they eat decaying matter). They can be tiny (mm scale) to meters long. The name ‘oligochaete’ means ‘few bristles’ – if you put an earthworm on a piece of paper and listen carefully, you can hear the noise of the bristles scratching on the paper. And finally, there are no indigenous earthworms in Canada or the northern parts of the USA. During the last ice age that was no place for an earthworm to be, and the worms that are now there have been introduced by humans.

Random hirunidae facts (add your own in the comments!): they are found in all environments – terrestrial, aquatic and marine. They are either predators (like the one above) or suck blood. This ability led to them being used in medicine, right up until the mid-20th century.

If you want to know more about leeches, this book, by my friends and colleagues Rob Kirh and Neil Pemberton is excellent. You’ll also learn lots about how leeches have been viewed through history.

9781780230337

Probably the most famous leech-related scene in cinema is this, from Rob Reiner’s excellent Stand By Me (1986), featuring Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix:

Google Doodle celebrates Gloria Anzaldúa

September 26, 2017 • 7:30 am

With this Doodle (click on screenshot to get there), I’ve become convinced that Google Doodles are the HuffPo of search engines. For today, with all possible birthdays to be celebrated (see previous dialogue), it’s marking the 75th birthday of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, described as “an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.” Google definitely has an ideological agendas behind their Doodles: Here’s part of her Wikipedia entry (she died in 2004):

Anzaldúa described herself as a very spiritual person and stated that she experienced four out-of-body experiences during her lifetime. In many of her works, she referred to her devotion to la Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe), Nahuatl/Toltec divinities, and to the Yoruba orishás Yemayá and Oshún. In 1993, she expressed regret that scholars had largely ignored the “unsafe” spiritual aspects of Borderlands and bemoaned the resistance to such an important part of her work. In her later writings, she developed the concepts of spiritual activism and nepantleras to describe the ways contemporary social actors can combine spirituality with politics to enact revolutionary change.