Natural selection is cleverer than you are

April 1, 2022 • 1:07 pm

The title of this very short post is widely known in our trade as “Orgel’s Second Rule” after evolutionist Leslie Orgel. Of course the Rule doesn’t mean that natural selection is conscious or has a pre-planned goal or outcome: simply that sometimes natural selection can achieve a result so wild and unexpected that it looks as if there was a clever mind behind it. (I say this so that the ID types won’t attribute to me a “mind” behind evolution.)

I lectured about this during this trip when explaining how, in Antarctic “icefish”, the gene making the enzyme trypsinogen—produced by the pancreas to help digest food in the intestine—became duplicated over evolutionary time, and thereafter one duplicate became rearranged by natural selection so it produced a bizarre glycoprotein having a small amino-acid sequence repeated many times over. That sequence allows the new protein (the old one’s still there) to glom onto the small particles that would enable ice to form and grow in the body. It is an anti-freeze protein that, produced in large quantities, reduces the freezing point of the fish’s blood below the -1.9° C of Antarctic waters. Therefore the fish’s cells don’t freeze and it can survive in water that would kill most other fish.

We know the evolutionary source of this antifreeze protein because it bears, at the beginning and end, the “start” and “stop” bits of the DNA that makes trypsinogen. Those “vestigial sequences” are evidence of evolution—of the ancestry of the antifreeze protein.

But I’ve digressed. I wanted to talk about something I just realized. I took my daily half-hour constitutional on the top deck (daily when the weather’s good, that is), and came back thirsty. It was gloriously warm and sunny outside, and I grabbed my aluminum water bottle from the cabin fridge. (We all get these bottles to save plastic, as Hurtigruten is green.)

I don’t like “hydrating”, but this time I needed to. And this time, because I had a thought, I timed how long it took me to take the several deep swallows needed to slake my thirst. It was about five seconds.

Now over those five seconds, my body didn’t have time to absorb and use the water that it needed. The thirst, of course, is a signal that your body needs water. But what struck me is this: I drank sufficient water for my body’s needs before those needs had even begun to be satisfied!

In other words, not only is thirst a way of telling you need water (and hunger for food and so on), but the slaking of thirst is a way of telling you when you’ve had enough water. It’s as if by simply ingesting a medicine you need, you’re cured before the medicine even does its thing. Or it’s as if you have an infection, and the infection starts to go away five seconds after you swallow your antibiotic. Or it’s as if your headache went away the minute you swallowed your aspirin.

Of course, we didn’t evolve to take antibiotics, but we did evolve to drink water when needed. And natural selection has been clever enough to find a way to tell us that we’ve drunk enough before that water has entered our system.

Presumably the “that’s enough” reflex evolved because you don’t want to drink too much water. You could get bloated, or perhaps a predator is lurking nearby to snatch you as you guzzle from the water hole. I don’t know how it happened, but it did happen.

Maybe this seems tedious and obvious to you, but it still amazes me. What mechanism operates in your throat and stomach to let you know that you can stop drinking?

UPDATE: Well of course biologists have thought about this problem before; I certainly didn’t think I was the first. And, sure enough, in the first comment below Cyrus Martin, senior editor of Current Biology, steered me to a paper in his journal that dealth with the issue, “Thirst,” by David Leib et al.

Here’s the most relevant part, but the article has lots of information about the generators of thirst and the physiological distress it signals:

 Drinking quenches thirst in anticipation of water absorption

There is a delay of tens of minutes between the ingestion of water and its full absorption into the bloodstream. However, drinking can quench thirst within seconds, long before the ingested water has had time to alter the blood volume or osmolality. Thus, thirst is not quenched by the reverse of the process that generates it; instead, the brain terminates thirst by using sensory cues from the oropharynx to track ongoing water consumption and then estimate how this water intake will alter fluid balance in the future, after the water has been absorbed. These anticipatory signals are transmitted from the oral cavity to the SFO [JAC: the “subfornical organ” i the brain that detects changes in blood osmolarity and partly generates the “thirst signal”] where they inhibit the same thirst neurons that respond to change in the blood volume and osmolality. This circuit organization allows SFO thirst neurons to make a comparison between the physiological need for water, which they measure directly by monitoring the blood, and the amount of water that has recently been consumed, which they measure by tracking oropharyngeal signals of fluid intake. SFO thirst neurons compare these two values to decide when drinking should be terminated. It is likely that a similar integration occurs within other structures of the lamina terminalis that control drinking behavior and hormone release.

That IS clever, isn’t it? But wait—there’s more:

The specific oropharyngeal mechanisms that are used to track water consumption are not well defined. One signal appears to be temperature, because cold liquids inhibit SFO thirst neurons more efficiently than warm liquids, and oral cooling alone can reduce both thirst and the activity of these SFO cells. One explanation for this temperature-dependence is that water ingestion tends to cool the oropharynx, and as a result animals may learn to associate changes in oral temperature with the post-ingestive effects of water consumption. In addition to temperature, other somatosensory signals that report on the sensation of water in the oral cavity are likely to be important. There is also evidence that signals from further down the gastrointestinal tract, such as stretch receptors and osmosensors in the stomach, may play a role in thirst satiation. In none of these cases, however, is the identity of the relevant sensory neurons and the neural pathway by which they transmit information to the lamina terminalis clear.

I was just wondering last night why cold water is so much more desirable when you’re thirsty, and why people don’t just guzzle lukewarm water when they’re thirsty. This temperature-dependence, as it says above, may be a phenomenon involved with learning the relationship between temperature of water and how well your body is satisfied with the water. But, as usual, we don’t know the full answer.

I was just wondering last night why cold water is so much more desirable when you’re thirsty, and why people don’t just guzzle lukewarm water. This temperature-dependence, as it says above, may be a phenomenon involved with learning the relationship between temperature of water and how well your body is satisfied with the water. But, as usual, we don’t know the full answer.

This year’s Golden Steve nominees for motion picture achievement

April 1, 2022 • 9:00 am

My nephew Steven’s website now has only about one post per year: his list of the “Golden Steve Awards”—both nominees and winners for Steven’s best movies of the year. In the post below (click on screenshot), you can see his nominees from this year, but in the post below I list only the Big Six categories plus “Best Foreign Film” (the latter for the reason given below).

The winners from each of the categories below will be announced on April 10.

My nephew cannot be described as modest, but he knows his onions, so I’d pay attention to his choices and view them if you can.

I quote Steven’s introduction to the nominations

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 165 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:

1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.

2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.

3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.

Best Picture

Drive My Car
The Lost Daughter
Pig
The Power of the Dog
Red Rocket
The Worst Person in the World

Best Director

Sean Baker, Red Rocket
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Michael Sarnoski, Pig
Joachim Trier, The Worst Person in the World

Best Actor

Nicolas Cage, Pig
Clifton Collins Jr., Jockey
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Winston Duke, Nine Days
Hidetoshi Nishijima, Drive My Car
Simon Rex, Red Rocket

Best Actress

Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Isabelle Fuhrman, The Novice
Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza
Brittany S. Hall, Test Pattern
Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World

Best Supporting Actor

Richard Ayoade, The Souvenir Part II
Anders Danielsen Lie, The Worst Person in the World
Mike Faist, West Side Story
Vincent Lindon, Titane
Will Patton, Sweet Thing
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Best Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
Ann Dowd, Mass
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Toko Miura, Drive My Car
Ruth Negga, Passing
Suzanna Son, Red Rocket

And I’ll add this category, since Steven mentions if below.

Best Foreign Language Film

Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
A Hero (Asghar Farhadi)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodovar)
Petite Maman (Celine Sciamma)
The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)

When I asked Steven what he thought of the “offcial” Oscar awards, he said this:

I don’t agree with any of the main winners, and would nominate only Campion. CODA is predictable, feel-good pabulum. Its win derives from a ranked balloting system in place since 2009, in which voters order their choices from 1-10 instead of checking the box of their favorite film. As such, it’s better to be everyone’s second or third choice than divisive (and possible to win without a single #1 vote). But of course nearly all great films are divisive, and middle-of-the-road picks like The King’s Speech, Argo, Green Book, and now CODA are black marks on the Academy’s record.

A rare bright spot was the victory of the truly exceptional Drive My Car. It’s the first Japanese film ever nominated for Best Picture, and a most deserving choice for Best International Film.

And here are the Rotten Tomatoes ratings (click on latter to read critics’ reviews):

Friday: Hili dialogue

April 1, 2022 • 6:45 am

Where we are now: We left Castro later than expected last night as there was a problem affixing the lifeboat or tender to the ship. The ship’s real-time map shows that we’re now cruising north toward Valparaiso, where we expect to land on April 3.

We are bypassing the large city of Puerto Montt, and will pass through a strait that takes us to the open sea for the rest of the trip.  Puerto Montt is at the end of the Reloncaví Sound, the north terminus of the inland passage along the coast.

From the dining room at breakfast: the Sun makes a crack between the sea and sky:

Greetings on the first day of the month; it’s Friday, April 1, 2022, and April Fool’s Day, but I promise not to fool you. It’s also National Sourdough Bread Day and National Soylent Green Day (but Soylent green is people!).

And as for the month (and one included week), all of April celebrates these comestibles:

National Florida Tomato Month
National BLT Sandwich Month
National Soft Pretzel Month
National Soyfoods Month
National Grilled Cheese Month
National Garlic Month
April 12-18: National Egg Salad Week

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for April 1 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

*Here’s this morning’s NYT headline. For the second day in a row they’ve replaced a banner headline with a smaller headline at upper left (the place where the most important news goes). Click on screenshot to read:

And the top three latest developments:

Weeks into a relentless Russian siege of the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, there were hopeful signs on Friday amid the deepening humanitarian crisis there, with an aid convoy on its way to the port city.

Peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials were also expected to resume by video link on Friday. Ukraine’s government has said it is willing to discuss forsaking any aspirations of joining NATO, as well as making territorial concessions if other nations provide security guarantees.

After discussions in Turkey this week, Russia vowed to reduce its presence around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and in the country’s north. But Western defense officials have said that Russia appears to be holding ground around Kyiv and repositioning troops rather than withdrawing them. And Britain’s Defense Ministry said in an assessment on Friday morning that air and missile strikes had continued in the Chernihiv and Kyiv regions.

The second item is the one that most concerns me, as it’s Zelensky saying that he’s willing not only to forsake joining NATO, but is also willing to make “territorial concessions”, i.e., give up part of Ukraine to the Russians. That is precisely what should not be happening. And another NYT article about these “security guarantees” spells them out:

Ukrainian officials envision an arrangement in which a diverse group of countries — potentially including NATO members like the United States, Britain, Turkey, France and Germany — would commit, if Ukraine were attacked, to defending it. To some security analysts, however, that sounds very much like NATO’s doctrine of collective defense by another name.

It’s not just another name for collective defense; it is NATO’s doctrine of collective defense. And it commits us and our allies to fighting Russia if it goes for other parts of Ukraine not covered in the “concessions.”

The advantage of this arrangement is that it stops the killing. The disadvantage is that it is a genuine victory for Putin: in the end he’s gotten what he wants, and I don’t think he cares that much about the death of Russian soldiers (and surely not about the death of Ukrainians), nor about the sanctions imposed on Russia. If this is the way that peace will be brokered, then I think the sanctions on Russia should remain in place so long as Putin remains in power. (And if his successor keeps his policies in place, the sanctions should also remain.)

*The Red Cross is traveling to Mariupol to ensure that the safe passage promised by the Russians actually takes place. It’s estimated that 100,000 people are still trapped in the city. And these “humanitarian” promises by Russia have failed before. But there are no guarantees:

It was not clear if the ICRC [The International Committee of the Red Cross] would be able to enter the besieged city — an adviser to the Mariupol mayor’s office warned residents that “the city remains closed to entry and very dangerous to leave in private vehicles.”

*A surge of terrorist attacks has again ignited clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, and, as usual, it’s Palestinians who initiated the attacks.

Clashes with the Israeli military in the West Bank left two Palestinians dead and an Israeli was stabbed on a bus by a Palestinian amid the deadliest surge of terrorist attacks in the country in years.

In the northern West Bank town of Jenin, Israeli forces conducting an arrest raid came under fire and a shootout ensued, leaving two Palestinians dead and 15 injured, including three seriously from bullet wounds, according to the Israeli military and the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Separately, a 30-year-old Palestinian stabbed and seriously injured an Israeli on a bus near the West Bank settlement of Elazar, near Jerusalem, according to the Israeli military. An armed civilian on the bus shot and killed the assailant, the military said.

Israel has been hit by a wave of terrorist attacks in which 11 Israelis have been killed in the past week. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told civilians in a video message, “Whoever has a license to carry a weapon, this is the time to carry it.”

The attacks have come before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The month is usually a time of heightened tensions, especially around Jerusalem, where tens of thousands of Muslim worshipers travel to the Aqsa Mosque to pray. Israel earlier this week also hosted a summit of American, Arab and Israeli diplomats aimed at boosting economic and security ties and helping build an alliance against Iran.

Palestinians are angered up not just by Ramadan, but by the fact that Israel is actually fostering better relationships with Gulf States like the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. As these ties strengthen, Palestine’s influence in the Middle East wanes.

*There may be a new covid-19 wave coming—and this useful article will help you prepare. (h/t Jean):

The culprit this time is BA.2, a subvariant of the highly infectious Omicron variant. Nobody knows for sure how much havoc it will cause, but BA.2 has already led to a surge of cases in Europe and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the United States and around the world.

Researchers are tracking an uptick in cases in the United States, and they’ve detected a rise in the viral particles recovered from nearly 150 wastewater-surveillance sites. Because people can shed the coronavirus even if they never develop symptoms, pieces of the virus collected in wastewater can serve as advance warning several days before official case counts rise, said Bronwyn MacInnis, who directs pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Over the past two weeks, Dr. MacInnis’s group has seen a rapid increase in levels of the BA.2 subvariant in the Northeast.

“I don’t think we’re looking at a crazy lockdown scenario in this part of the world with BA.2,” Dr. MacInnis said. “But we can’t be sure that we won’t have another curveball from this virus in the future.”

The suggestions for preparation including keeping those masks on hand, getting some rapid test kits just in case, get that second booster shot when you’re eligible and if you’re 65 and older or immunocompromised (my doctor disagrees, but ask your own physician), make sure you’ve at least gotten your first booster, get a pulse oximeter to monitor your blood oxygen (!), and familiarize yourself with the new oral antiviral medicines for people at high risk.

*You’ll certainly want to read this NYT article, “Want to see the weirdest of Wikipedia? Look no further“, especially after you read the first two paragraphs. This is how to grab a reader:

Did you know that there’s a Swiss political party dedicated to opposing the use of PowerPoint? That some people believe Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a look-alike? Or that there’s a stone in a museum in Taiwan that uncannily resembles a slab of meat?

Probably not — unless, that is, you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who follow @depthsofwikipedia. The Instagram account shares bizarre and surprising snippets from the vast, crowdsourced online encyclopedia, including amusing images (a chicken literally crossing a road) and minor moments in history (Mitt Romney driving several hours with his dog atop his car). Some posts are wholesome — such as Hatsuyume, the Japanese word for one’s first dream of the year — while others are not safe for work (say, panda pornography).

I’ve left the links in because you’ll surely want to look at them—and others. the Instagram account was started by Annie Rauwerda, 22, as a pandemic project, and now she has nearly 780,000. The world is hungry for weirdness!

Her followers often pitch her Wikipedia pages to feature, but these days it’s hard to find an entry that will impress Ms. Rauwerda. “If it’s a fun fact that’s been on the Reddit home page, I’m definitely not going to repost it,” she said. “For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world. I’ve known about that for a long time, and it went around Twitter a couple days ago. I was shocked. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.’”

Here’s one Wikipedia entry that I found on her page:

And here’s the “Meat-shaped stone” in Taiwan, which, according to Wikipedia, is a famous tourist attraction. I looked it up because I had to see it:

The Meat-Shaped Stone (Chinese: 肉形石; pinyin: ròuxíngshí) is a piece of jasper carved into the shape of a piece of Dongpo pork, a popular Chinese way of cooking pork belly. It is part of the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. Although of only moderate importance from the point of view of art history, it is a great popular favourite with visitors and has become famous.

Well, you be the judge!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has been reading Sartre:

A: Where are you going?
Hili: In quest of freedom.
In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: W poszukiwaniu wolności.

A great meme from Diana MacPherson:

From Science Humor (I was born in St. Louis):

From Su. How Ceiling Cat makes rain:

From Titania. For once I think she’s been conned, as I can find no record of these people participating in that event. And even this item, especially the person on the right, is too bizarre to be real—even in these days when you can’t tell satire from truth. I’ve never seen Titania wrong, but this may be a first. Still . . . there is an announcement.

A tweet from Barry:

From Andrew, interspecific play:

From Dom. I wasn’t aware of these flies, and am having it checked out. But if it is real, I suspect it’s not to fend off ants but other predators who are afraid to attack ants (they can taste nasty, bit, and especially squirt formic acid on predators.

Tweets from Matthew. I still have my Christmas wreath up, but it’s a round pillow on the door of my flat, and I think it’s festive to leave it up. But these people have an even better reason:

This boy has a brilliant future ahead of him!

The difference here seems to be mainly sartorial:

The world would be a better place if it were like Dodo World:

 

Antarctica (Patagonia): Days 30 and 31

March 31, 2022 • 12:30 pm

We’re out of the land of ice and penguins, and into the land of fishing boats, small villages, and sleepy dogs.  In other words, we land in Valparaiso in three days and then, the next evening (if all goes well and I don’t have Covid), I fly home.

But the last two days have been pretty swell anyway. We made only one landing, this morning, but the channels we went through, mostly between the mainland and islands off the mainland, were lovely.

In one of them lay the isolated hamlet of Villa Puerto Edén, population listed as about 176. Two notable facts from our crew and Wikipedia: it’s said to be the most isolated village in Chile except for Easter Island, and it’s where the last Kawéshkar people, once nomads and now residents of this lovely and remote place. The only way to get there is by boat.

(Be sure to click on the photos to enlarge them.)

We stopped here two years ago, and they disgorged loads of people from the ship into the town, which you can circumambulate in about 10 minutes. I felt bad because, aside from the ladies selling their wares at the landing site, we didn’t see a single inhabitant; it was clear that they all went inside. I felt like a gawker visiting a display, and was glad that we didn’t disturb the locals this time.

Wikipedia has a note about the climate:

Villa Puerto Edén has an extremely wet subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc) and is widely reputed to be the place in the world with the highest frequency of rainfall,[2] though according to Guinness World Records the highest frequency of rain in a year occurred at Bahia Felix, a little further south, with only eighteen rainless days in the whole of 1916.

The weather is mercurial here, and it can be overcast one minute and fully sunny ten minutes later. We had some glorious sun sailing along the coast:

Traversing smooth water:

We saw some fishing boats, although they seem to be connected to a long string of cages. As far as I can gather, these cages are where they put the caught fish, so they’re a kind of “fish farm.” Perhaps readers can give more details about these operations:

Each boat is connected to a very long string of submerged cages.

And glory be: we sailed through the Darwin Channel, described by Wikipedia this way:

The Darwin Channel forms a westward continuation of the Aisén Fjord and links it to the Pacific Ocean at Isquiliac Island. It is located in the coast of Chile at approximately 45.4° south latitude. This is one of the main channels situated between the islands of the Chonos Archipelago. Darwin Channel opens in the northern part of Darwin Bay and is considered the best of those which lead to Moraleda Channel, its navigation is free of dangers.

Here’s a panorama, though it’s much like many of the channels we’ve seen.

And here are a large and a small map of the channel. I’m not sure if Darwin actually went through here, but I fortuitously had my Darwin tee shirt on while sailing through:

Fishing operations became more numerous over the day:

And then it was bedtime (dinner at bottom). When we woke up, houses along the bank and fishing boats were quite common, for we were approaching the large town of Castro.

We dropped anchor (yes, that’s what the captain said; we never used our anchor in Antarctica) in Castro’s harbor. On one side it looks like this, with fish farms and smoke (are they smoking the fish?)

And on the other side was the town of Castro. It’s actually a city on Chiloé Island, with a population of about 42,000, and is the capital of Chile’s Chiloé Province.  It’s also, according to Wikipedia, the third oldest city that has existed continuously in the country, as it was founded in 1576.

It has a lovely situation, and I took the big tender (lifeboat) in with a lot of other people who wanted to walk on their own and stay off the big buses. I had a lovely 1.5 hour walk, which was good exercise as a lot of the town is hilly.

The tender, which can harbor a lot of people as a lifeboat.

And the port. You can see one structure in the background that resembles the palafitos, (traditional wooden houses on stilts for which Castro is famous, but the best view of them is obtained from the water and they’re so close together I couldn’t see many stilts.

Here are some of the stilt houses from a picture on Castro’s Wikipedia page:

A church on the town square, which reminded me of the square of Punta Arenas, where I stayed one night in 2019. I love the use of wood instead of stone.

Like the stilt houses above, many of the homes and shops of Castro are painted in bright colors.

You wouldn’t think that purple and green would harmonize, but I like this combination:

There were plenty of d*gs in town, nearly all of them sleeping. They looked to be in pretty good condition.

Look at this big boy! I don’t know what breed it is but surely a reader will know. It looked like a lion dog!

A lovely face!

Continuing on, I saw a car with a trailer, and sitting in the trailer was a sleeping CAT. I believe this is the first felid I’ve seen on this trip, so I took three pictures of it.

A calico! I did a bad thing because it woke up when I took its picture, and as we all know, it’s a sin to disturb a sleeping cat. (Look up the story of Muhammad and his cat Muezza.)

The cat, too, was in good condition. I’m sorry I woke you up, kitty.

There was a lot of street food in Castro, and I didn’t have any Chilean pesos! I had figured I’d get some from an ATM, but every ATM in town had a huge line of people in front of it. Otherwise I could have sampled one of these empanadas. This place was doing a land-office business.

The prices were low. One chilean peso is worth only one-eight of a cent, so 1800 pesos is about $2.30 U.S. (There are about 785 pesos to the dollar.)

Food trucks aren’t only in America. One street was lined with them, and they were well patronized

Freshly fried churros–my favorite! Alas, I had not a peso to spend. Six for about $2.50

I saw this statue of what looked like a Chilean laborer by the harbor. The plaque at its base translates like this: “Work completed in 2019, being Mayor Don Juan Eduardo Vera Sanhueza, the ‘Sculpture Marino Chilote’ was built by mandate of the Honorable Municipal Council.”

I’d guess this is a generic Chilean seaman. Nice statue!

Empanadas and churros weren’t on tap for me today, but here’s last night’s dinner: pork and shrimp dumplings followed by a round of chicken tortillas, washed down with a blueberry milkshake.

x

I swear this will be the last picture of a milkshake I foist on you. But it may also be the last picture of this trip, for now we steam north without stops.

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 31, 2022 • 6:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that we’ve sailed a ways up the coast of South America and proceeded inland, where there’s a north-south channel. We’re heading toward Chloé Island, where we’ll dock and spend the day in Castro, the largish town that’s the capital of Chloé Province. The town is especially notable for its houses built on stilts (palafitos) to keep the water at bay. There are several paid excursions ashore, but I will forego the bus and wander around on my own. Pictures should be forthcoming.

In the map below, “Castro” is covered up by the blue symbol with an anchor, and at this writing (6:15 a.m.)., we appear to be close to the town.

And a photo of the sunrise at breakfast:

Welcome to the last day of the month: Thursday, March 31, 2022: Oysters on the Half Shell Day.

O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
      You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
      But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
      They’d eaten every one.”

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 31 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

*The NYT has dispensed with its large banner headlines about the war, and today we see this (click on screenshot to read):

And the latest NYT developments:

Despite Russia’s promises to scale back its offensive in parts of Ukraine, the war ground on into its sixth week on Thursday with no end in sight — and worrisome signs that its consequences for Ukrainian civilians and global economies were widening.

Diesel prices are soaring. Germany is taking steps toward rationing natural gas in anticipation of Russia’s potentially cutting off deliveries. The number of Ukrainian refugees has surpassed four million, half of them children. And the United Nations is forecasting the most dire hunger crisis since World War II for a world ordinarily reliant on Ukraine and Russia as major exporters of wheat and other grains.

Video negotiations between Ukraine and Russia will resume Friday, but don’t expect much. Once again the Russians have promised to create a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol (don’t expect much again; they’ve promised this before), and the NYT adds that “Russian forces have accidentally shot down their own aircraft and refused to carry out orders, one of Britain’s spy chiefs said on Thursday.”

*In his NYT column “What if Putin didn’t miscalculate?“, Bret Stephens raises the possibility that Putin didn’t screw up after all—that everything he’s doing conforms to a nefarious but misunderstood plan:

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

It sounds weird, and the conventional scenario may be right, but I’ve thought of rational answers to objections. Why is he attacking Kiev and western Ukraine? Because he wants to destroy so much of the country that they’ll concede to Putin what he wants. What about his despotic censorship of dissent at home? Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of autocracy he wants, and the dissent gives him the chance to impose it.  I’m no pundit, but I don’t think we should sell Putin short. And I don’t want Zelensky to concede one inch of his country.

*The media have finally admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop issue is a Thing, after claiming it was a right-wing fiction. The Washington Post analyzes the deals with the Chinese found on the laptop, deals that, while not directly implicating Joe Biden, show that Hunter benefited from his position as Biden’s son (and didn’t Joe know about this?):

 . . . the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.

*Two days ago President Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022 into law. (If you don’t know the horrifying story of this Chicago lad, read about it here.) When I saw that on the MSNBC News, I thought “but there hasn’t been a lynching in decades.” It turns out that “lynching” is being used to denote “a hate crime that results in death or serious bodily injury.” And it’s a federal hate crime that can get you up to 30 years in prison (that’s on top of state laws against assault and murder). In a NYT column, for example, Charles Blow argues that Ahmaud Arbery was lynched.”  I suppose assaults on anyone because of their ethnicity or gender can now be considered “lynching”, but I don’t much care because we already have hate-crime laws.

*New York Magazine has a fawning article on AOC, who is worried about the midterm elections coming up in a few months.  She’s worried about Biden’s low approval ratings sinking the Democratic control of the House, but her solution is this: more progressive Democrats. She faults Biden for promising to reach across the aisle, which implicitly calls for an end to bipartisanship.

“I think that there is a sense among more senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times, that we can get back to this time of buddy-buddy and backslapping and we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out. I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.”

But those days, she says, have been over for a long time. And the fact that Biden and others don’t realize it, she says, could spell disaster in the fall’s elections. With Biden’s low approval numbers and the historic tendency of the president’s party to lose, on average, 26 House seats in the midterms, the Democrats face an uphill battle to keep control of Congress — a situation that requires firing up the party’s progressive base, Ocasio-Cortez said.

“We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen,” she said.

Now some of the reforms that she’s been calling for are fine with me (environmental efforts, etc.), but others, like immigration reform, aren’t going to fly well with Democratic voters who aren’t “progressive”.  And of course one could make a good case that if the Democratic Party becomes more “progressive”, our chances of staying “in the game” are even worse.

*This Is a Job for the Webb Space Telescope Department: According to the Washington Post, reporting on a new paper in Science, the old Hubbell Space Telescope has detected the farthest individual star yet seen.

In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope.

That makes the star 4 billion years older (or its light 4 billion years older) than the next-oldest star, a substantial difference. But there are a few caveats:

As with any stunning claim, this carries caveats and uncertainties, starting with the possibility that it is not a singular star at all. It’s possible Earendel is a pair of stars, or even a trio or more, a common stellar phenomenon in which one bright member of the group does most of the illumination. (Alpha Centauri, the closest sun-like star, is part of a triplet).

Another possibility is that Earendel is, at its core, a black hole — the remnant of a massive individual star that has collapsed. Black holes are invisible, of course, but their gravity can lure rapidly moving and visible material, known as an accretion disk.

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to go online in a few months, should be able to sort out these possibilities.

*The NYT has a short profile on one of my favorite bluegrass guitarists: Molly Tuttle.  (SHe and Billy Strings are the Doc Watsons of our era.) Tuttle actually spurns the label “bluegrass musician”, but in my view that’s what she’s best at. (Here new bluegrass album, “Crooked Tree,” comes out tomorrow.) It also discusses her extreme case of alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that attacks hair follicles. In her case, it’s taken every hair off her body, so she wears wigs in concert. Hair loss seems to be the only effect, and she’s otherwise healthy. (She discusses the condition openly on her website.) There’s also a video of a song from her new album, though I can’t see it on the ship.

*Finally, according to the Daily Fail, an unnamed teacher at the well known Colchester Grammar School in Essex has been suspended for carrying a Jesus and Mo mug on the playground  (h/t  Steve)

The staff member is said to have been photographed carrying the item in the playground at Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex.

The white mug appears to feature a cartoon of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad.

In speech bubbles, the Jesus figure appears to say ‘Hey’, with the Prophet Muhammad figure responding: ‘How ya doin?’

How damning! (That’s the same image that got two University Students threatened by their college when they wore it on tee shirts at a UCL fresher’s fair in London.) There’s more:

Launched in 2005, the simply-drawn webcomic chronicles the lives of two religious prophets – Jesus and Mo – based on the Christian and Islamic faiths and generally understood to represent Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad.

The cartoons poke fun at various aspects of religion, such as arguments for the existence of God.

A school spokesman said: ‘We have been notified that an image has been shared online of an individual appearing to use a cup that has an offensive image on it.

‘At this time we are looking into the matter.

The worst part is this: the paper reproduces a picture of the cup, but blotted out the image:

(From the Fail): said to have been photographed carrying the white mug (above), which appears to feature a cartoon of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, in the playground at Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex

What a cowardly thing to do, but of course the consequences of showing an innocuous depiction of Mohammad could be dire.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to fly, but you know it’s only so she can more easily catch birds!

Hili: I’m looking and thinking.
A: And?
Hili: I would like to be able to fly.
In Polish:
Hili: Patrzę i myślę.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Chciałabym umieć fruwać.

And here is Andrzej with Karolina from Kyiv, who’s now going to the school in Dobrzyn and picking up Polish rapidly. Malgorzata sent a report on Karolina’s progress:

She goes to school and she loves it. There is another Ukrainian girl her age in her class and the two are now friends but they do not isolate themselves from others: they play with and talk to their Polish classmates. Karolina and the other refugee girl understand more and more Polish and all the kids manage to communicate somehow. The Polish kids have accepted the two girls and when I hear how well it’s  going I have trouble believing in this idyllic picture. But a huge smile on Karolina’s face when I ask her how the school was does much to convince me that this idyll really exists.

Good news! She’s smiling below, too:

From Ducks in Public (but do NOT give them bread!)

From Nicole:

A perpetually surprised cat from Divy:

x

Titania is remarkably prescient (second tweet)!  I haven’t read the article in which “science” is stymied by defining “men” and “women”, but the simple biological answer is the disparity in gamete size. However, it wasn’t fair to ask Justice Jackson to give the biological answer, since few people know it. The first tweet is from last year, also showing La McGrath’s prescience.

From tweets that now come suggested to me by email (how did that happen?):

I can’t vouch for it, but this reminds me of Palestinian propaganda videos in which children bearing arms swear to destroy Israel:

I think this d*g has been trained to do this!

Reader Ken has two tweets for us, with commentary:

Here is a member of the Russian State Duma, on Russian State TV, calling for “regime change” in the US, so that Russia’s “partner” Donald Trump can be restored to the US presidency:

This is on top of Donald Trump’s appearance on the right-wing  tv show “Real America’s Voice” calling on Vladimir Putin (in the middle of the war in Ukraine) to release political dirt (relating to an unfounded conspiracy theory) on sitting US president Joe Biden:

Two tweets from Matthew:

Something has gone badly wrong at this journal!

Antarctica (Patagonia): Days 28-29

March 30, 2022 • 12:30 pm

This post extends through lunchtime yesterday: March 29.  There were two Big Activities to see and do on days 28 and 29: our second passage through the White Narrows, headed back east, and then, on Tuesday, a closeup view of the largest glacier in South America.

As usual, click the photos once or twice to enlarge them.

We left Puerto Natales in the late morning of the 28th and headed west through the fjords and mountains back toward the  “White Narrows“. I’ve previously posted about our west-to-east transit through this most treacherous of passages, but I’ve since learned a bit more and was better prepared to take pictures.

The approach to the Narrows from either direction is lovely, with snow-capped mountains on either side.

The White Narrows is a gap in the channel between the mainland and a small island, with shallow waters below. The minimum width of the Narrows is 80 meters (260 feet), while the beam, or width, of the Roald Amundsen is 24 meters (79 feet). That means that if we went straight through the middle, we’d have a gap of 28 meters (91 feet) on each side. 

But we don’t go through the middle, as the south side of the narrows is shallower than the north side. That means we thread the needle by going closer to the north than the south side. It looks and feels as if you could reach out and touch the trees on the mainland to the north.

Below is the gap through which we’ll pass (photo taken from the east side). The arrow shows the infamous narrows:

This site provided a cool picture of another ship making the transit; I believe this was taken with a drone. Note that the ship is staying closer to the north than to the south side of the Narrows.

Photo: Ross Vernon McDonald

You can traverse the narrows only during “slack water”: that period between low and high tide when there is very little current—a short period that occurs only four times a day. This is the time when the current through the Narrows is around 1 knot or less (about 1.2 mph). If it’s higher, it can make the ship harder to steer, as well as causing eddies that can throw off the navigation.

The only way to measure the current through the narrows, and determine an auspicious time for passage, is to send out a Zodiac with the proper instruments. That small inflatable ship, carrying a Chilean pilot, a navigator, and other bigwigs from the ship, goes into the gap about an hour before the ship does. The people on the Zodiac, I’m told, are constantly communicating with the bridge of the ship, giving information about currents, wind, and so on. Sometimes they stay in one spot and sometimes the Zodiac moves back and forth across the narrows testing the water flow.

Here’s what you see from the ship. Since you never know when the time is right, if you want to experience the passage you must go on deck roughly when the small ship enters the narrows, and wait for about an hour.

See the tiny Zodiac in the photo below?

Closer up (more zoom on my lens):

Finally, without fanfare, the bridge and narrows-watchers decide that the time is right for the ship to go through, the ship starts moving, and we approach the opening slowly and carefully:

Almost there. . .

And the passage through. This is the south side, where we’re farther from land.

And the closer north side, where people are amazed that they’re so close to land. It’s sure less than 90 feet to the rocks!

I was told by the Expedition Leader, who’s in charge of determining our itinerary, that he was on the bridge during the transit as the ship was steered MANUALLY through the gap. GPSs won’t do here because the currents and eddies change rapidly. The leader said that the captain loudly told all the interlopers on the bridge to remain absolutely quiet, as he had to concentrate on steering the ship.  There’s also a Chilean pilot on the bridge, who doesn’t steer the ship but is there to give advice.

And we’re through! Another great feat of navigation.  The sheep has to steer left immediately after going through to stay in the middle of the passage.

After the transit, the exploration Zodiac returns to the ship, which is stopped to disgorge the measurement team and then hoist the boat into the bay.

I was also told twice that when Chilean pilots come aboard—several times during this trip—they don’t stop the ship because it’s expensive to stop it and start it again. Instead, both the small pilot’s boat and our big ship assume similar speeds, the Admunsen opens its door, a platform or a ladder comes out, and the pilot has to JUMP from one ship to the other on the fly.  This is, I’m told, nerve-wracking.

Above and below: the intrepid Measurement Team returns to the ship. As you see, four people are needed to man the Zodiac, make measurements, and advise the ship’s captain.

Right on the other side of the Narrows, the lovely scenery resumes.

Watching the transit works up one’s appetite. It was dinnertime (I eat at 6 pm, which is early).

I alternate between beer and wine at dinner (no booze at lunch though some people toss it down then). I like the wine because you can see the scenery outside the dining room reflected in the glass:

A man needs a hearty “Steakhouse Burger” after that nail-biting passage. I hadn’t had a burger in several days, and so why not?

And a chocolate shake for dessert.

We spent the rest of the day wending our way through the channel, and since the ship’s streaming video is down, I had no idea where we were headed the next day. At 8:15 each night they used to stream the next days itinerary over the cabin t.v. Now you have to go to the auditorium to hear it, but I didn’t want to be in a big crowd, covid-free though we seem to be.

I opened up my cabin window to see the scene below; we were in front of a huge glacier and my balcony was facing it directly.

It turned out to be the face of South America’s largest glacier, the Brüggen Glacier, indicated in the map below. Wikipedia gives ancillary information:

Brüggen Glacier, also known as Pío XI Glacier, is in southern Chile and is the largest western outflow from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Now about 66 km (41 mi) in length, it is the longest glacier in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica. Unlike most glaciers worldwide, it advanced significantly from 1945 to 1976, Brüggen surged 5 km (3.1 mi) across the Eyre Fjord, reaching the western shore by 1962 and cutting off Lake Greve from the sea. The glacier continued advancing both northward and southward in the fjord to near its present position before stabilizing. The growth covers a distance of more than 10 km (6.2 mi) north to south, adding nearly 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi) of ice. The glacier is named after the German geologist Juan Brüggen Messtorff.

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world’s second largest contiguous field, is the remnant of the ice field that covered much more of this area during the last big glacial period, about 40,000 years ago

It got sunny later in the day, and here you see a panorama of the glacier’s face (in the middle) and the surrounding area.

A morning selfie from my balcony. What a view I had!

The expedition leader and ship’s captain decided that it was sufficiently calm for us to go out in Zodiacs, though I didn’t expect that. I quickly threw on my warm clothes and was in the second boat to to out. The remarkable calmness of the water and relative quiescence of the glacier enabled us to travel very close to the face. (You never go right up to the face lest a deadly “calving event” occur.)

We were out early as the sun rose:

And we traveled in the Zodiac along the face for 45 minutes. Unlike Antarctica, it was relatively warm and I didn’t need gloves. There are no icebergs in this channel as the warmer waters melt the falling ice quickly.

It’s a moraine-ish glacier, with lots of dirt mixed in with the ice. That makes the waters in this fjord very silty, sometimes clogging up the water intakes of the Zodiacs.

You can see how close they let us get to the glacier:

As the tides go in and out, part of the glacier often overhangs the water:

 

Another view of the ice hanging over water:

The Amundsen lay in the distance. Perhaps I should have taken a later Zodiac when the sun came out, but I was eager and in fact had no idea whether there would be sun.

The Mother Ship waiting to receive its Zodiacs:

And the mountains around us:

I decided to have a “proper” lunch at the Aune restaurant because I had a tiny breakfast so I could rush to the Zodiac launch. Before lunch, though, I visited one of the things that they do for passengers: give them clay to make penguins and paint to paint their models. Then they fire the penguins and put them on display. Here’s the display from this trip’s workshop.

As you see, the quality varies. Two parents and their chick are on the left:

I don’t know who made this messed-up penguin head, but I give it the First Prize:

In the cabinet are penguin models from earlier trips:

Lunch yesterday in the Aune, just to show you the nature of the food. I translated the menu from German (the ship’s app with English menus was down)

Soup:  Traditional Ukrainian borscht (beet soup) with lamb and sour cream (I didn’t detect any sour ceam):

Main:  Beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes, sour cream, pickled vegetables, and beets

Dessert: Financier (a french cake), cream, and berry compote. As usual, dessert in the Aune is the best course .

And an after-lunch view of the fjord.  I have a few photos from later in the day, but I’ll combine them with photos of whatever happens in the next day or two. I asked our ornithologist what the rarest bird he’d seen was, and he said that he saw a local hummingbird fly by the ship (he was able to identify it, but I forgot the ID). Since we’re not often on land that has vegetation, there’s not much chance to see land birds.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ secularism

March 30, 2022 • 11:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “quite,” came with an email tag:”We thought they’d never end.” It’s surprising in view of the admission of the Divine Duo that it’s courageous to profess nonbelief in a world of believers. But of course what is “ending” here is the “religious world”, as the pair admit that the world is secularist (it really isn’t!):