Wednesday, December 30, 2020
RIP, Dawn Wells
Sad to hear:
Dawn Wells, who played the lovable castaway Mary Ann Summers on "Gilligan's Island," died in Los Angeles on Wednesday from Covid-19 complications, her publicist Harlan Boll confirmed to CNN.
She was 82.
Born in Reno, Nevada, Wells represented her home state in the Miss America pageant in 1959.
That opened the door for her to start a career in Hollywood where she appeared in a multitude of television shows, including "77 Sunset Strip," "Maverick," "Bonanza," "The Joey Bishop Show" and "Hawaiian Eye."
She beat out 350 other actresses to nab the role of girl-next-door Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," which aired on CBS from 1964 to 1967 and later in syndication.
A New Beaked Whale Species?
Cool Stuff!:
"The Perrin's beaked whale [has] teeth … right at the end of the rostrum, they're right at the end of the jaw," Henderson said. "And so when we started looking at the photos, we realized that the teeth are further back, so they couldn't be Perrin's. And then when we started to look at other characteristics, including different color patterns and its size …. it's like a jigsaw puzzle. Once we started putting all the pieces together, we realized that not only was it not Perrin's, but it really didn't seem to match any of the other characteristics of described beaked whales."
Life Expectancy Plummets
Death statistics for 2020 don’t look so good. Three-year drop in life expectancy, Covid was third leading cause of death, illicit drug-quality issues caused many deaths, and less auto traffic didn’t lead to fewer highway deaths (maybe because the maniacs just drove faster and more carelessly when traffic declined):
This is the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths expected to top 3 million for the first time — due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends.
The nation’s overall mortality rate fell a bit in 2019, due to reductions in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy inched up — by several weeks — for the second straight year, according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But life expectancy for 2020 could end up dropping as much as three full years, said Robert Anderson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Evicting The Neighborhood Bats
They are trying to evict responsibly. Nevertheless, the freeway is home to thousands of bats, plus many birds. (I’ve listened to them myself with my ‘Bat Finder’). Local populations will take a major hit:
Why did Caltrans bolt hundreds of upside-down traffic cones to the underside of the W-X freeway in downtown Sacramento? The answer is almost as odd as the sight of rows of orange cones clinging like bats to the belly of a concrete bridge.
In fact, the whole endeavor involves actual bats.
Thousands of bats and birds and even some owls reside in the crannies and crevices of the elevated freeway. Caltrans has decided to evict them so they won’t be in the way of a major upcoming Highway 50 widening project.
Each cone covers one of the structure’s “weep holes,” the holes that allow moisture to drain out of the bridge deck during the rainy season. Those weep holes have been serving another, informal, purpose: Birds and bats use them as entrances to hideaways in the structure where the bats roost and the birds build nests.
Workers screwed a short plastic tube to the narrow end of each cone, then they duct-taped a short plastic sheath to the end of the tube. Bats and birds who are inside the structure can exit the bridge through the center of the cone, the tube and the plastic sheath. But they cannot get back in because the sheaths’ sides press back together, closing up.
“It’s an ingenious way that is inexpensive, easy to make and install,” said Caltrans biologist Shawn Duffy, who is advising on the project.
Evicting the bats and birds means those species will not be around to nest or reproduce in the structure during the upcoming construction period, Duffy said. “We don’t want them having their young while we are working on it. They might abandon their young, which we don’t want them to do.
“You try to approach it with the idea that you are going to prevent any harm to these creatures that are using the structure, with the idea they can come back and take up residency again” as soon as the project work finishes in each bridge section.
Damned Dry
Rainfall totals have improved somewhat this dreadful 2020 rainy-season-so-far in Sacramento, but still, we are far, far behind, at about 32% of normal. It does give me a bit of solace, however, to know that at this point in the rainy season, the following years were even drier: 1878, 1883, 1905, 1910-12, 1917, 1923, 1930, 1939, 1956, 1958-59, 1976, 1980, 1986, 1999, 2013.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Octopuses Observed Punching Fish, Perhaps Out of Spite, Scientists Say
I understand. We all get tired of fish:
In fact, this antisocial fish-punching phenomenon – which scientists term "active displacement" of fish – occurs in the midst of collaborative hunting efforts, in which octopuses and fish team up to chase and trap prey together.
Sunday, December 13, 2020
Chirality in "Breaking Bad"
"Breaking Bad" is so elegant.
In "The Cat's in the Bag," Walt tells his students about chirality: mirror-image molecules. Two chiral molecules can contain the same atoms, but behave utterly differently from one another.
The staircase at DEA Headquarters (in Albuquerque's Simms Building lobby) descends to the left, like most spiral staircases do. The staircase in the Superlab, however, descends to the right. For right-handed people, the Superlab staircase would be uncomfortable to use.
Law enforcement and criminality are chiral worlds.
I'm Choked With Rage About This Vote Steal Shit
I can't believe that a person I thought was a friend, a lawyer, believes all this stuff. Here's a screen cap from November 14th post (which I didn't notice until Dec. 10th). I'm the fellow he describes as "naïve." Fuck him.
Sacramento Far Behind The Mark Again
(Dec. 11):
So, I looked back in weather records, back to 1877, to see where 2020 stands. To my surprise, dreadfully-dry rainy-season starts aren't all that uncommon. The ends of the years 1910, 1911, 1917, 1958, 1959, 1976, 1986, and 2013 had similarly bad starts. Still, it looks like only 1911 had a worse start than 2020 has.
Mother Nature had better start getting serious with the rain here.
(Dec. 13 update, after the rain): Now we're about 37% of normal! Keep going!
Titanic Factoid
I ended up watching some National Geographic TV specials about the world’s most interesting subject, the Sinking of the Titanic. I learned a factoid I hadn’t even thought about before. Even though it took 2 hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg for Titanic to break into two halves and vanish below the waves, it took only five or ten minutes for the wreckage to reach the ocean bottom more than two miles deep. A waterlogged steel boat doesn’t float, it sinks, and fast too, with the stern in particular shredding into pieces as it raced through the cold, dark water. For some reason, 108 years later, that speedy death plunge really bothers me.
Noem and Newspeak
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem:
"The only reason you know who I am today is because the liberals have been busy kicking me in the head for all the decisions I've made for my people in South Dakota. But let me tell you, my people are happy. They're happy because they're free."
From George Orwell’s “1984”:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
Albuquerque Monolith
It's here, it's there, it's everywhere!:
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The mystery continues — another monolith has been spotted.
This time, the monolith was found in Albuquerque. Mayor Tim Keller tweeted a photo of the monolith Monday morning, which appears to be near Pan American Freeway and Montano.
Sorry For Not Posting Of Late
I've been rewatching "Breaking Bad" and did not want to disturb concentration. Found some fun new things for my February Salvador Dali talk for SWPACA (which unfortunately will be remotely).
Visited the zoo a couple of times.
Had a Covid scare, but apparently it was a false alarm.
Been working quite a bit with Dan.
Friday, November 27, 2020
Saturday, November 21, 2020
The Advance of Covid-19 in Europe is Beginning to Slow
But the disease continues to accelerate in United States:
Aztec Death Whistles
Like Erik says: "Aztec Death Whistle is the name of my next band":
When odd, skull-shaped grave items were found by archaeologists decades ago at an Aztec temple in Mexico, they were assumed to be mere toys or ornaments, and were catalogued and stored in warehouses. However, years later, experts discovered they were creepy ‘death whistles’ that made piercing noises resembling a human scream, which the ancient Aztecs may have used during ceremonies, sacrifices, or during battles to strike fear into their enemies.
That Absence of Shared Sacrifice
Casting about for meaning:
That same call for the sacrificial spirit of the Greatest Generation has echoed across the media landscape, as both a rallying cry and a censure: urging Americans to sacrifice to save lives and deploring how selfish we have become. Yet this appeal to the past misunderstands just how reluctant Americans in the 1940s were to abide by the new restrictions of the wartime economy. Understanding today's self-centered, rule-breaking, comfort-craving Americans in accurate relation with our past matters, because it reveals that the problems we're facing now reflect a failure not of American spirit but of American leadership.
Conservatives are a Bunch of Weirdos
Perverts:
Hospital administrator Kyle Hansen told the Provo City Council this week that about five people have attempted to get inside because they question whether the ICU is as full as some say.
A few of them also brought video cameras.
"We have individuals trying to sneak into the hospital to visualize and videotape this themselves," Hansen said.
So far, it seems no one has been successful getting in.
However, Hansen said what the conspiracy theorists did has forced the hospital to take extra precautions when it comes to visitors and people being admitted.
"You really can only get in if you're here for an appointment yourself or you have to be listed in a log that we track as a designated visitor for a patient. But we've had some people get pretty creative in how they've lied about coming in for an appointment or other things," Hansen said.
I've Always Been Attracted by the Idea of Cliodynamics
It's nice seeing that others are attracted too:
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
It's Going To Get Harder For Republicans To Win
Grifters Gotta Grift
Republican dismay over Trump's defeat presents the golden grifting opportunity of the decade, and the grifters are scrambling:
Montgomery resurfaced in 2013, as a “confidential informant” for controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Arpaio was embroiled in a federal case over his department’s treatment of Latino drivers, and furious at the federal judge who had ruled against him. According to reports and court testimony, Montgomery convinced Arpaio that he had a software called “Hammer” that could prove that the federal judge was colluding against Arpaio with the Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder.
Arpaio bought into Montgomery’s claims, even as Arpaio’s lawyers and detectives fumed that the “proof” Montgomery was providing about the judge was fake.
At one point, Arpaio reportedly exploded at his subordinates after they complained that he was wasting money on Montgomery and pointing out the controversy over Montgomery’s al Jazeera software. Still, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office paid Montgomery $120,000 for the data he provided Arpaio in his fight with the judge.
By 2017, with Trump supporters furious at the intelligence community and former FBI Director James Comey over the investigation into the Trump’s campaigns, Montgomery reinvented himself as an aggrieved intelligence whistleblower.
New Mexico's Sinkhole Problem
Manmade, as you might expect:
On a July morning in 2008, the ground below southeastern New Mexico began to shift and crack, shooting a huge plume of dust into the air. Within minutes, a massive sinkhole emerged, which eventually grew to roughly 120 feet deep and 400 feet in diameter.
“At the time, it was an unfortunate situation, but most people considered it to be a one-off,” says Jim Griswold, a special project manager with New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department. But a few months later, in November, dust once again streamed toward the sky as another similarly sized sinkhole opened, cracking a nearby roadway.
Both holes — and later, a third in Texas — emerged at the site of brine wells, industrial wells through which freshwater is pumped into a subterranean layer of salt. The freshwater mixes with the salt, creating brine, which is brought to the surface for industrial purposes; in this case, oil drilling. After the second sinkhole emerged, Griswold’s department head gave him a new task: Characterize the stability of the state’s 30 other brine wells and report back on where the next crisis might arise.
What he found has been a source of near-constant worry for the past decade. While the first two sinkholes opened in remote areas, the next one, Griswold discovered, could hit the southern edge of Carlsbad: a city of 30,000 people.
Friday, November 06, 2020
An Echo of QAnon
Ronna McDaniel's vague accusations of irregularities are annoying. If she has complaints, she should state them clearly!
The campaigns have appointed observers of the vote-counting process. Self-appointed observers busting through the doors are trespassing and need to be bounced by security personnel.
I think McDaniel's statement shows the effect of QAnon on Republican rhetoric. Keep the accusations mysterious, vague, and ominous. She seems to think that being asked to provide specific accusations shows a perverse mentality in the questioner, like being asked to provide clinical descriptions of pedophilia. Nevertheless, lawyers can only really work with specific allegations. It is irresponsible to remain vague:
McDaniel said the party had discovered the same software was being used in dozens of other counties across the state, but did not provide any evidence such an issue had cropped up elsewhere. She referenced a glitch in a separate county that wrongly decided a local race but was also corrected, but likewise did not allege any specific instances of fraud in the county, which Biden carried by 14 points.
She repeatedly accused the leaders of Democratic-run counties of booting Republican observers from watching votes be counted, referencing chaos at a Detroit convention center being used to tally votes, and called the Democratic secretary of state "dishonest" for contending an equal number of Democratic and Republican poll watchers had been asked to leave due to a lack of space.
And she accused a Detroit election worker telling colleagues to change the date on mail-in ballots, allegations that were refuted in court this week.
On Fox News, she described “hundreds of witnesses who talk about being disenfranchised and being removed from counting centers as election workers cheered as they were removed,” saying the party had been filing lawsuits and alleging that such moves were “systematic.”
“The fact that we were there has allowed us to show what happens when person after person in Detroit was removed. If you left to go to the bathroom you weren't allowed back in. I'm not hearing this from reports or hearsay or the internet,” she argued. “I know these people.”
Thursday, November 05, 2020
Complacent
It may be that the Trumpies believed their own propaganda, and became complacent. I like this analysis:
Observing the US elections from Europe with a very cynical eye (and getting even less sleep than your journalists), I get the impression that the Trump team made a miscalculation in its cynical and well-prepared attempt to steal the election: they set the stage perfectly by pre-emptively badmouthing mail-in votes in their communication, encouraging their own voters to turn out in person, and barring pre-election ballot counts; but they must have expected a slower count. Both their court action and their Brooks Brothers Riot 2.0 (which I was expecting with 100% certainty) came too late to prevent the flips; in Detroit’s case, too late to prevent Biden’s lead from moving well past recount territory. From the communication of election boards, I also get the impression that this miscalculation was because they didn’t consider the effect of their rhetoric on the election boards themselves: no one wants to be at the centre of a media storm like in Florida 2000, so people did everything to speed up the count.
Wednesday, November 04, 2020
The Golden Moth
I've wondered, what is the Golden Moth in "Breaking Bad," and what does it represent?
Both "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" appear to be influenced by the works of surreal artist Salvador DalÃ, so I looked at DalÃ's various bugs to see if there were any hints. Sure enough, the surreal film "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalà features what is probably the first film appearance of the ominous, squeaking Death's-Head Hawkmoth.
Breaking Bad's Golden Moth appears to be an abstracted silhouette of the Death's-Head Hawkmoth. Without the skull-face, the Golden Moth is only slightly-less potent as a symbol of death.
The Death's-Head Hawkmoth has proved to be popular with filmmakers, and appears, for example, in the cover art for the 1991 film, "The Silence of the Lambs."
Saddle Up
With his loose but widely-predicted call to end the counting of legitimate ballots in Pennsylvania, Trump sent out a clarion call for civil war. You want a fight? You got one.
Tuesday, November 03, 2020
Annual Visit to the Top of my Roof
The theme this year is ash. The roof is covered in ashes. You can’t burn down multiple forests in all directions without some impact. First rain will be a mess.
In the U.S., There is a Maddening Lack of Uniformity on Voting Rules
Each state goes their own way:
Amber Pflughoeft beamed with pride as she filled out her ballot for the first time last month. A 20-year-old who'd been fighting bone cancer for a decade, she was fascinated with politics, her mother Tiffany Pflughoeft remembered. And after spending the last midterm election in the hospital following a bone marrow transplant, she was determined to vote this year. But just a few days after she mailed in her ballot, Amber's condition took a sudden turn for the worse. She went back to the hospital and died in late September. Now, her ballot will be thrown out under Wisconsin election law.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
New Oven Installed Oct. 24th
Now I’m cooking with gas. (I was cooking with gas before - I just wanted to use the catchphrase.)
Rachel helped me inaugurate the new stove with an apple pie.
Mask It Or Casket
I figured eventually a study would come out that shows counties with no mask requirements suffer a lot more Covid than counties with mask requirements, and now such a study from Tennessee is available:
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine looked at the current COVID outbreak in Tennessee and broke the hospitalization numbers down by the counties patients were coming from and whether those counties had masking mandates. The results are stark. The growth in hospitalizations is greatest in counties without masking requirements. Indeed, the inverse relationship between masking and hospitalization lines up across the spectrum from areas with little masking to those where mandates are widespread.
Gotta Go, Got A Zoom Meeting
(Via Heather Poduska on Facebook - Bravo To Cooper Chiropractic of Wayland, Massachusetts.)
On The Eve of Liberal Domination
The history of California 1994-2010 is a preview of what will happen in the rest of country. In a little over a week, Joseph Biden will be elected President. He will be the first of a string of Democratic Presidents that will occupy the Oval Office for the rest of the 21st Century. Without the whip hand of power, the Republican Party will completely collapse. I'm glad I have lived long enough to see it happen.
The Hope of Herd Immunity is a Mirage
Manaus, Brazil is the only place on Earth that appears to have reached herd immunity. Since Covid transmission there continues, they can't relax protective measures. The only long-term hope is for an effective vaccine:
“We believe that, theoretically, herd immunity for COVID-19 would be around 60 per cent of a population resistant to the virus, and this is why this research points to herd immunity in Manaus,” says Granato, a professor of infectious diseases at the Federal University of São Paulo, who did not participate in Sabino’s study.
These findings mean that the virus will find less new victims in Manaus. But, Granato warns, “there’s still more than 30 percent of the population to infect there.”
Sabino agrees: “Transmission might have slowed down in Amazonas state, but it’s still happening.”
Thursday, October 22, 2020
The Neighborhood Giant Skeleton is on a Rampage
October 15th
October 18th. Shelob the giant spider must live around here too.
Kerfuffle in the Neighborhood
A neighbor put up a BLM flag....
So a jerk spray-painted a message on the old DMV building. Since it's state property, the message was painted over by sunset.
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
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