Pollyanna greets the Holiday Season

Pollyanna, Titan and YandA want to wish all of our readers a happy Succot holiday season. We are supposed to build little huts with tree branches for roofs to remind us of the sojourn in the wilderness. Some say it is to challenge God to rain on us in our flimsy tabernacles.  We also wave palm, myrtle and willow  branches around with citrons and everyone has fun.  This is the time of year when Israel mostly folds up and everyone awaits that messianic time, "after the holidays." In fact, people start to become a bit fed up with holidays.  The Lord certainly takes note of this in that He commands us to rejoice in these holidays, whether we like it or not:

: "ושמחת בחגיך אתה ובנך ובתך ועבדך ואמתך והלוי והגר והיתום והאלמנה אשר בשעריך" דברים טז

 DEUTERONOMY XVI

	14 And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the Levite, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.
	15 Seven days shalt thou keep a feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose; because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the work of thy hands, and thou shalt be altogether joyful.

 Then from Leviticus XXIII

	40 And ye shall take you on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook, and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days.
	41 And ye shall keep it a feast unto the LORD seven days in the year; it is a statute for ever in your generations; ye shall keep it in the seventh month.
	42 Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are home-born in Israel shall dwell in booths;
	43 that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

God help you if you do not enjoy all this...

OK, on with the Pollyanna fun:
As usual we start by calling your attention to our Human Rights Action Update blog.  Please check it out and act for people whose human rights are being abused and whose lives are anything but enjoyment.

RELIGION AND ANCIENT HISTORY
Pollyanna does not wish to get into the fray involving insults to this prophet or that.  She would like to point out that there exist traditions that run counter to firmly held beliefs of countless people and nonetheless no one is being attacked or killed.  We call your attention to an interesting scholarly analysis of an ancient Coptic scroll that refers to the wife of Jesus.   Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.

Photograph Karen L. King

 Translated  legible text:

not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe]

The disciples said to Jesus

deny. Mary is worthy
of it

Jesus said to them,
“My wife

she will be able to
be my disciple

Let wicked people
swell up

As for me, I dwell with her in order to

an image

 

The document was presented at an international meeting on Coptic studies that took place in Rome.  Pollyanna is pleased that the Pope did not send the Swiss Guards to behead the presenter, Dr. Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School.

 While dealing with ancient history, we note the  discovery of a huge Roman mosaic in southern Turkey in a part of the Roman Empire that has traditionally been considered marginal.  The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation.

Each section of the mosaic features its own geometric design.
CREDIT: University of Nebraska, Lincoln

View full size image

The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home. The city of Antiochia ad Cragum, founded in the first century, has a number of Roman features, including bathhouses and markets.

OLD BOTTLES
We sometimes joke about the post office using bottles cast into the sea as a means of transporting our mail.  The idea brings to mind castaways on islands hoping for rescue etc.  In the real world, it turns out that bottles at sea have some use.  A fisherman pulled up a bottle from the sea near Scotland that had been floating well below the surface for nearly a century. It will find its place in The Guiness Book of Recordsds.  The bottle was released in 1914 to track deep sea currents.

SCIENCE GOODIES
NAVIGATION
We travel around in unfamiliar places with the aid of a GPS system called WAZE (it is free so we can give them the plug) in our Blackberry.  We are guided by a charming female voice whom we have named Mabel, after the love interest in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance.  In the first act, Mabel sings a coloratura aria that reminds us of our Mabel, as you may note:


While we require satellites in orbit and computers to find our way, the humble bumblebee navigates beautifully with its own little brain and solves the famous or infamous  Traveling Salesman's Problem with great skill. 

PIT STOP: Bumblebees don’t need a map to know where they’re going. A large-scale experiment that outfitted the insects with radar antennas (shown) revealed that bumblebees are adept at figuring out the optimal route among several flowers, a tough computational problem. Andrew Martin

 We salute the little guys.

FLIRTY FLOWERS
One does not usually think of the sex life of plants as being full of triangles, competition and intrigue.  New findings indicate that female plants exercise choice and that male flowers compete for the ladies' favors.  It is in someway analogous to the peacocks tail and other phenomena in male animals that decrease survival probability and  consume energy, but provide a higher probability of mating success and propagation of genes, which is what fights in bars are all about.  This is definitely worth a read.

MALE FIGHTS Pollen grains from the Scots pine (bottom image) may compete to fertilize a female sex cell. When pitted against another strain, pollen dubbed P595 faced a 46 percentage point drop in germination rate (left graph). That wimpy showing may explain why a third strain, E88, held its own against P595 (right graph).Steve McWilliam/Shutterstock

TINY BEAUTY
The Nikon camera company conducts an annual competition in which photographers vie to show the most beautiful pictures taken through a light microscope.  We show an example, but suggest that you click on the link and take a walk through a fascinating slide show.

HEISENBERG MAY HAVE SLEPT HERE
Generations of physicists have grown up on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says that one cannot achieve arbitrary accuracy in a given quantum measurement and that it is  possible at a given moment to know either the position or momentum of a particle, but not both. While the Principle itself is still solid, new research indicates that there are subtleties  that Heisenberg did not envisage.  The new results may well have importance in the domain of  quantum information and also present a profound philosophical problem.  Food for thought.
DYNASTIES
In many fields of human endeavor, we see generations of parent-child continuation of excellence.  The Braggs, father and son, shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for their work on x-rays and crystallography. The Curie family took five such prizes, Marie getting two.  In general, there has been a clustering of Nobel prizes in extended families:
Here is the clustering by families: 
Married couples
Marie Curie Pierre Curie    
Irène Joliot-Curie Frédéric Joliot    
Gerty Cori Carl Cori
Alva Myrdal Gunnar Myrdal          
           
Mother & daughter
Marie Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie          
           
Father & daughter
Pierre Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie          
           
Father & son
William Bragg Lawrence Bragg    
Niels Bohr Aage N. Bohr    
Hans von Euler-Chelpin Ulf von Euler
Arthur Kornberg Roger D. Kornberg    
Manne Siegbahn Kai M. Siegbahn    
J. J. Thomson George Paget Thomson
           
Brothers
Jan Tinbergen Nikolaas Tinbergen

We are aware that there are dynasties in music and art as well.  Johann Sebastian Bach was a descendant of a long line of talented musicians. In an article in the Guardian a few years ago, Ian Sansom wrote about the Bach family.  This article leads us to this week's book review.  The late Edward Said discussed in 2001, in the London  Review of Books, the scholarly magnum opus:
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Oxford, 599 pp, £25.00, March 2000, ISBN 0 19 816534 X
The review is a bit of a heavy read, but we found it well worth the effort and when we retire will find time to get the great book itself.
WHAT IF?    XKCD's readers provide good questions and Randall spares no effort in answering them.  He also has a nice try at modernizing the traditional mnemonics that people use to remember series of words.

 On color coding, he obviously does not like to use the chauvinistic mnemonic that we were  taught in undergraduate physics lab for resistors and  capacitors.  At the risk of being non PC, here it is: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly. OK, Pollyanna is piqued at the moment, but there is hope she will forgive.
He also has a horrible example to warn us all from getting too deep into Google.

Shana Tova from Pollyanna, Titan and YandA

 Pollyanna, Titan and YandA want to wish all of our readers a Shana Tova, a year of peace and blessing and only things to be glad about. We apologize in advance for typos, bad style and other shortcomings.  Our editor Y is enjoying a family shindig in the form of the wedding of her nephew for which she flew off to Sicily for a few days. Our attempts to get Pollyanna and Titan to edit each others blogs have been unsuccessful.
As usual we start by calling your attention to our Human Rights Action Update blog.  Please check it out and act for people whose human rights are being abused.
Pollyanna wishes to express her shock and regret over the loss of life at US legations caused by a film offensive to Islam made in California. The reaction in the Muslim world is totally disproportionate and certainly the US government cannot be blamed for the acts of individuals who enjoy freedom of expression. The film is revolting, but the violence is nonetheless unjustified, certainly the killings in Libya.
FISH OR SNAKE OILS
We have long believed, along with everyone else, that by taking fish oil pills, known as Omega 3, we were reducing our risk of heart disease. Now we are told that this is not the case. A review of 20 studies covering nearly 70,000 participants finds no statistically significant evidence that supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), commonly referred to as fish oil supplements, is linked to a lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or premature death. The results have been published in JAMA. This follows the debunking of the organic food mythology. Our colleague Bob Park at the University of Maryland has been hammering at the snake oil salesmen with connections in Congress for years. We suggest you look through his blog What's New and search for what he has to say about food supplements. You might also find his article on bogus science worth reading. We are sure that in the case of Omega 3 there was no attempt to deceive on the part of the scientific community.
JUNK FOOD AND OUR BRAINS 
While we are on the subject of food and food additives, we might take a look at what happens to us when we binge on junk food. We know about obesity in children and adults and the growing spread of bad eating habits.  Now there is another aspect that is coming up, the dreaded disease of old age, Alzheimer's.  A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.  The fact that the food industry is so lightly regulated means that huge economic interests have an interest in making us overeat.  As George Monbiot writes in the Guardian:

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry. 

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

It is criminal and we sit still for it.  Pollyanna is not glad about this at all.

 COOL SCIENCE
MOLLUSC SEX SWITCH
It is fascinating that an Antarctic mollusc, Lissarca miliaris is hermaphroditic and can change sex as required by the reproductive cycle in the extremely cold waters of Antarctica.  It had long been known that the females brood their young from egg to fully shelled mollusc, but the new results show that males also contain eggs.

Lissarca miliaris young develop inside the shell

The research team suggested that the bivalves reproduce as males while they are still in the "small" stages of development, switching to female organs once they are large enough to brood a significant number of eggs. Let us hope we do not drive them extinct. There is serious fear that up to 20% of non-vertebrate species are tottering on the verge of extinction.

Nautiluses move through the water by pumping air into and out of gas filled chambers within their shells

 It is a matter of major concern.

JUNK IS NOT REALLY JUNK
For a long time it was believed that a large part of the DNA molecule, the parts that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins, was unessential junk.  Now we know better, thanks to a major effort by a large number of dedicated scientists in the ENCODE project.  These bits of DNA  once were dismissed as “junk” but turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches. The implications for medicine are colossal.  The greater part of DNA consists of molecular switches that control which genes are used in a cell and when they are used, and determine, for instance, whether a cell becomes a liver cell or a neuron.
The discoveries were published on last week in six papers in the journal Nature and in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology. In addition, The Journal of Biological Chemistry is publishing six review articles, and Science is publishing yet another article.
Pollyanna is more than glad, she is thrilled and delighted and cheers the efforts of the  ENCODE project. 

GENETICS, DNA AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

Image Credit: Photos.com

 Pollyanna of course knows the Biblical story of the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon.  The Ethiopian tradition says that she had a child by him from whom the Ethiopian nation is descended.  Recent research involving genome comparisons of of Ethiopian people has discovered similarities to those of populations in Israel and Syria, thus providing genetic evidence that may support the tale of the legendary Queen of Sheba.

“We found that some Ethiopians have 40 percent to 50 percent of their genome closer to the genomes of populations outside of Africa, while the remaining half of their genome is closer to populations within the African continent,” study co-author Toomas Kivisild of the University of Cambridge said, according to HealthDay News reports. “We calculated genetic distances and found that these non-African regions of the genome are closest to populations in Egypt, Israel and Syria, rather than to the neighboring Yemeni and Arabs.”

Of course, the dating cannot be extremely accurate, usually +- a few hundred years, but the gene flow story is consistent with the legends. 

Likewise, Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, co-lead author of the study, told Briggs, “Genetics can tell us about historical events… By analyzing the genetics of Ethiopia and several other regions we can see that there was gene flow into Ethiopia, probably from the Levant, around 3,000 years ago, and this fits perfectly with the story of the Queen of Sheba.”

It would appear, says Pollyanna, that Her Majesty had quite a pleasant visit to Jerusalem.
WEIRD PULSARS
It is hard to think of a pulsar without thinking of weirdness, but at a meeting in Beijing last month, the astrophysics community came out with some super weirdos in the pulsar family. Presenters cautiously discussed several new — indeed, some very new — discoveries, including a millisecond pulsar parked in the heart of a triple system, another “planet”-pulsar pair similar to the (erroneously named) diamond planet, and a very distant, mysterious burst resembling the controversial Lorimer burst discovered in 2007 in archived data.

The burst after dedispersion and channel summing has been applied, shown as a function of time

Stay tuned.
We once attended a meeting in Snowmass CO on the similarities between Jupiter and pulsars.  It was interesting, but not much was in common except weirdness. Note the declension of the adjective:

We confess to having scanned this out of The New Yorker, nostra culpa.
POLLYANNA'S FEMINIST RANT:MARRIAGE FOR LOVE
 In Pakistan, as in much of the Muslim world, marriages are usually arranged by the parents with the couple, certainly the woman, having little or nothing to say.  Recently, however, since a change in law in 2003 made free choice marriages legal, more and more young women are marrying for love and not at the behest of parents.  For many of them this can be a very dangerous decision and Pollyanna is raising her voice in protest.  We consider this a fundamental breach of basic human rights.  We applaud the courage of these young couples and would like to see the sort of cultural and political change in Pakistan and elsewhere that would grant women the right to make their own decisions without fear.  The Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organization active throughout Pakistan, is making a major effort along these lines.  We would like to quote Mahnaz Rahman, resident directorof the foundation:

  “Things are changing; the girls are becoming bolder, they are continuously taking steps, and they are not afraid to die.  They know that they will be killed, but even then they are taking these steps because they can’t conform to the values of their parents. They are the girls of this modern age.”

When a woman disagrees with her parents’ choice of husband, she has few options, Ms. Rahman said. If she wants to marry someone else, the two must elope and leave the family home behind. By leaving the home, though, the daughter is considered to have dishonored her family, and that is where culture, custom and the legal system intersect with retribution.
Pollyanna has hope for better days for these brave women.

BOOK REVIEW
We have not had a book review on the blog for a while. A history of Bell Labs, the famous research center in New Jersey, where we spent a few years as post-doc in the old days has come out.  Bell Labs was really a university lab masquerading as part of a large industrial complex, AT&T.  The book, ‘The Idea Factory,’ by Jon Gertner, is reviewed in the New York Times by Walter Isaacson.
The Idea Factory describes the history of the Laboratory from its inception in 1925 up to its decline late in the century.  During its days of greatness, when AT&T could pour money into it at will while enjoying its monopoly on telephone service in the US, Bell Labs produced the transistor, the laser and information theory that underlies our world of communication and computers along with countless other innovations.

Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and courtesy of the AT&T Archives and History Center

Bell Labs technicians prepare the Telstar 1 communications satellite before its launching in 1962.

 The cosmic background radiation was also discovered at Bell Labs by Wilson and Penzias who took a Nobel Prize for it.

We recall it as as great place to do science, even in space physics which was a bit of a sideshow at the Labs.

WHAT IF? XKCD ANSWERS THE PUBLIC
 This week's question is quite ridiculous, but amusing in a puerile sort of way.

 BACK TO SCHOOL
 As we all know, this is the time of year when children are sent back to be incarcerated in the institutions we have set up to give them something resembling an education and preparation for life.  All went back, some happy about it as our granddaughter Shira in Winnipeg and some less so, such as our little friend Cynthia from Gene Weingarten's strip. OK, back to school with you Cynthia and maybe you will have less time for nasty tweets.
 

You may ask why Cynthia, daughter of a millionaire, is in public school. We note that her family has a true commitment to democracy.

Pollyanna winds up August

Pollyanna is happy to be back with you and will try to lift a bit of the gloom left by brother Titan's rants from a week ago.  She agrees with him totally, but her job is to try to raise the morale a bit, so let us have a try. First a few details.
THE WEEKLY COMMERCIAL PLUG
Usually Titan and Pollyanna shun what Click and Clack of Car Talk call shameless commerce. We are making an exception  to plug a hotel in Yucatan, Mexico run by the daughter of dear friends and her partner. Please check out the Mayan Beach Garden Inn-Hotel if you plan a vacation in Mexico.

Pollyanna would like to call your attention to our weekly Human Rights blog and to ask you to act on the cases listed there.  She would also like to link you to our daughter Dr. Hadass Eviatar

who is running for the Canadian Cancer Society and would appreciate your donations.  All four of us, Pollyanna, Titan and YandA are requesting that you click and give.


IN MEMORIAM
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, died this week at age 82. Whatever some of us might think of manned spaceflight and the circus-like atmosphere surrounding it, the Moon landings represented a watershed for mankind and certainly great courage must have been required to participate in the program.

 Indeed robots are much better than people at carrying out scientific missions in space, but the romance of human beings off the planet is apparently necessary to hold interest and to keep space science funded and moving along. Armstrong was indeed a "reluctant hero" and did not try to make political or personal capital out of his achievement. We are now getting a rehash of all the gossip of why he rather than Aldrin was chosen to be commander and to be the first out of the spacecraft, all of which is irrelevant. We say, Rest in Peace, Neil Armstrong. We append an obituary from the Guardian.


WOMEN'S RIGHTS ISSUES
Before we get on to the good stuff, there are a few issues relating to the rights of women and girls that Pollyanna would like to sound off about.  As you all know, when these matters come up she can be as ranty as brother Titan and makes her voice heard.  The first is the call for the ratification and implementation of a treaty to abolish prostitution.  It sounds utopian and impractical, but the criminalization of the customer side has reduced prostitution by 50% in Sweden.  The global campaign to criminalize clients of prostitution, otherwise known as johns or punters, is being driven by Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France's minister of women's rights.   Please read the article and sign on.
The second issue is the demand for accountability of the government of Brazil for  the tragic and entirely avoidable death of Alyne da Silva Pimentel, a poor pregnant Afro-Brazilian woman who was repeatedly denied timely quality medical care.
It has been more than a year since the  United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) struck a blow for women worldwide when it recognized—in the first preventable maternal death case to go before an international human rights body—that governments have an inescapable obligation to guarantee maternal health services to every woman regardless of her circumstances.  During that time the Brazilian government has done nothing to live up to its obligations under CEDAW.

WONDERFUL NEWS: POLLYANNA IS GLAD FOR KEHILAT NATAN-YA, THE REFORM SYNAGOGUE OF NATANYA
We are delighted to announce that we are moving to the congregation's new location at the corner of Beckman and Dizengoff Streets.
Erev Shabbat Service every  Friday at 18:30.
Shachrit Le’Shabbat at 09:00.
Please come and rejoice with us.

BEAUTY AT SATURN
Pollyanna wants to thank our colleague Dr. Carolyn Porco for the latest release of beautiful color images of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft.  Here is a  picture of Saturn with Titan naturally getting in front of the camera.

 In the second shot, he is put in his place by the real big guys, the rings...

You are invited to go to the link and revel in the beauty of nature.


MONKEY BUSINESS
Here we start from the fascinating and sublime and end up with the silly and ridiculous.  Bear with us please because even the latter will make a point. Bonobo monkeys are very closely related to us and are known both for their intelligence and their very active sex lives.  Researchers at Haifa University (unabashed plug, our daughter Zohar is a professor there) have found that bonobos are capable of making stone tools far more varied in purpose than previously known, reaching a level of technological competence formerly assigned only to the human lineage.  The article is fascinating.  Since the video in the article did not come up, we are showing the youtube of Kanzai using tools

OK, interesting, even fascinating.  In 2009 Gene Weingarten reported in his Below the Beltway column on research on human sexual responses that showed that while men have predictable responses to erotic images, women are turned on even by pictures of bonobos mating.  Gene engages in a rather amusing discussion with  Gina Barreca, the feminist scholar.

Poor Gene, outcourted by an ape

 Later, the Washington Post found it necessary to apologize for the piece, lest someone think that women are being compared to giant apes.  We think that this is carrying PC'ness too far and a little humor can be allowed, especially since Gina's responses on female sexuality put the male half of the species in its place so well-"It's simple recognition. Every woman's sexual history includes at least one bonobo. "Oh, look, that's Vinnie from ninth grade!"" So, dear friends, let us drop all the hypersensitivity and learn from Gene and Gina how to laugh at ourselves a bit.  We can comfort ourselves that we do not live in Monkey's Eyebrow, Toad Suck, Bad Axe or Embarrass, or any such place.

 POT IS BAD FOR YOUR BRAIN
In a study of the effects of cannabis on mental ability, an international team found those who started using cannabis below the age of 18 - while their brains were still developing - suffered a drop in IQ.  One might think that smoking the stuff at any age is an indication of an IQ deficiency to start with, but that might be unfair re young teenagers who lack the maturity to see ahead and comprehend the implications of what they are doing, possibly under peer pressure. We wonder what sort of argument can be brought to deter teenagers from doing this to themselves. Health type arguments fail with respect to tobacco smoking.  Someone should come up with a way of making these harmful activities uncool and unpopular.

 BLACK HOLE ANNUAL BANQUET
 Way out there, about 290 million light years from here there exists an interesting and somewhat anomalous black hole known to its friends as HLX-1..  Its brightness varies with a period of about 366 Earth days, a coincidental result of the orbital parameters of the star that orbits it and from which it grabs some material whenever the star gets close enough. There should be many such objects out there, similar to HLX-1, which is 10,000 times as massive as the sun and the only known specimen in its weight class. Middleweights like HLX-1, which should be numerous, are intermediate between the supermassive black holes at galactic cores — as massive as billions of suns — and the featherweights with just a few solar masses.   The source of its light is an unresolved question and astronomers are having fun coming up with theories.  Hit the link above and read all about it.

Enlarge

HLX-1, the only known intermediate-mass black hole (circled), hovers above the plane of a nearby galaxy, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Astronomers are debating the source of the light coming from the area around the black hole.NASA, ESA, S. Farrell/Sydney Institute for Astronomy

While we are on topic with astronomy, we are told that Kepler, the orbiting telescope designed to look for exoplanets, has come up with something really wild.  Less than a year after the announcement of the first circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. This system, known as a circumbinary planetary system, is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

PEDANTIC POLLYANNA
 Pollyanna agrees with everything brother Titan had to say last week about the mob violence on the streets of that oh! so holy city, Jerusalem.  She would like to point out, however, that the use of the English loan word "lynch" to describe what happened is inappropriate.  The word lynch is a transitive verb: (dictionary)
 Definition of LYNCH
: to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction
— lynch·er noun
The associated noun is lynch law
Definition of LYNCH LAW
: the punishment of presumed crimes or offenses usually by death without due process of law
According to our guru Michael Quinion, the term derives from the name of a person or persons in the USA in the 1780's during the Revolutionary War.  What happened in Jerusalem was simply mob violence and terrorism, with no connection to any presumed offenses. None of this pedantry detracts from the monstrous nature of these disgusting actions.
 WHAT IF? FROM XKCD
 This week's question deals with soul mates--what if each of us had one soul mate assigned to us by random chance at birth.  Randall delivers a rather chilling scenario.  Let us stick to life as it is.
MUPPET FANS IN SWEDEN AND THEIR CHEF
We all love the Swedish chef, but what do they think of him in his native country?

Is this guy the inspiration for the Swedish Chef?
Courtesy Lars "Kuprik" Bäckman/The Jim Henson Company.

 For those who live in symbiosis with a dog, such as our Murphy, we offer empathy with Dagwood:

 Pollyanna and Titan, as she approaches 100 and he approaches 4.6 billion, have empathy for those who are growing older by the day
 
 
  and for anyone who has a smart phone or is thinking of buying one (att. Yosefa)

Finally (you must be fed up with us by now) we present a few statements by NBC commentators at the recent Olympic games that they probably would like to retract:
1. Weightlifting commentator: This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing.

2. Dressage commentator: This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother.

3. Gymnast: I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.

4. Boxing Analyst: Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.

5. Softball announcer: If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.

6. Basketball analyst: He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces.

7. At the rowing medal ceremony: Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the IOC president is hugging the cox of the British crew.

8. Soccer commentator: Julian Dicks is everywhere. It's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field.

9. Tennis commentator: One of the reasons Andy is playing so well is that, before the final round, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them... Oh my God, what have I just said?

Pollyanna is recovering nicely from the Olympics and is enjoying looking around at her world.  She also would like to tell you that her scatterbrained brother Titan told our readers about a rediscovered story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was rejected by The New Yorker in 1936 but forgot to give you the link to the story itself, which was published recently in the New Yorker.  Enjoy!.
She also would like to call your attention to our weekly Human Rights blog and to ask you to act on the cases listed there.  In particular, the Pussy Riot sentence is beyond the pale.
THE WEEKLY COMMERCIAL PLUG
Usually Titan and Pollyanna shun what Click and Clack of Car Talk call shameless commerce. We are making an exception  to plug a hotel in Yucatan, Mexico run by the daughter of dear friends and her partner. Please check out the Mayan Beach Garden Inn-Hotel if you plan a vacation in Mexico.


MARS AHOY!
Pollyanna is delighted with the successful landing and deployment of Curiosity on Mars.

The technical achievement is great and we can all look forward to much and illuminating data about Mars and the possibility that it might have harbored life in the distant past.  Of course, then there is the more recent past...





HAREDI IDIOCY MOVES ON
Pollyanna is more than a bit amused by the latest modesty gimmick of our ultra orthodox coreligionists (?).   Thanks to Hadass for calling it to our attention.  They are now using special glasses that blur their vision beyond a few meters so that they can be spared the vision of our immodestly clad wives, partners, daughters whatever.

Photo from Mynet.co.il

As pointed out by  Allison Kaplan Sommer  in Haaretz, this is really a great idea, mainly because it inconveniences them and their base impulses rather than the objects of their desire, women. In fact, we will not be terribly sorry if they bump into a few trees or poles, but they really should not wear them while driving.

A Haredi man gazing at the Jerusalem skyline. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

We were at the beach today and noticed that extreme poverty has indeed caused some girls to settle for less than complete bathing suits. We have noticed at weddings and other social events that this socio-economic problem pervades our society.  We think our haredi friends should devote more thought to making the means to purchase complete dresses and blouses available to our poor womenfolk and less to their lecherous leanings.  OTOH, maybe it would be OK for them to drive with their new glasses in their own neighborhoods.
Pollyanna is not in the least amused by the story of a woman who is suing El Al for being forced out of her prebooked seat because of orthodox men and sent to fly in the back of the plane. We sympathize with her and hope she wins her lawsuit, but no one forced her to fly a crappy air line like El Al. We boycott them as much as possible because we are not comfortable with being flown by Israel Air Force alumni who have a near certain probability of being war criminals.
IN MEMORIAM
 Helen Gurley Brown, the long time editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and the author of Sex and the Single Girl, died this week in New York at the age of 90.

Helen Gurley Brown

Her book is credited with being a major step to revolutionize single women’s attitudes toward their lives. The book, published a year before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” sold millions of copies and became a cultural touchstone with its message that single women didn’t need to be married to enjoy sex and didn’t need to apologize for it, either. She was both praised and attacked by feminists, the latter for presumed objectification of women.  We append an obituary from the Washington Post and leave the evaluation of her life and work to you.  

  Pollyanna definitely agrees that nice girls do!

While on the subject of women, we would like to share with you a speech by Meryl Streep in which she introduces Hilalry Clinton.  Thanks to Yosefa for passing it on to us.



Pollyanna is very pleased that the US government has come out for the first time ever with a detailed strategy to fight violence against women.  It is a sad statistic that one of every three women in the world experiences sexual abuse during her lifetime. 
 The strategy’s four key goals are:

    Increase coordination among U.S. government agencies and other stakeholders such as human rights organizations;
   
    Fully integrate gender-based violence protection and response efforts into existing U.S. government work;
   
    Improve research and data collection to improve gender-based violence prevention efforts; and

     Expand and enhance U.S. government programming that addresses gender-based violence.

Survivors of sexual violence unite in Bogotá, Colombia.  1 in 3 women will be victim of violence worldwide. (Photo Corporación Sisma Mujer)

A POSSIBLE STEP FORWARD TO CURE AIDS
Pollyanna is excited and glad about a new result reported at an AIDS conference in Washington DC and called to our attention by Yosefa, thanks.  The famous "Berlin patient",  Timothy Brown, was treated for leukemia with a bone marrow transplant that happened to come from a donor with a genetic mutation that makes immune cells resist HIV infection. The transplant replaced his own infected cells with healthy, AIDS-resistant cells. He is HIV-free five years later.   Researchers are trying to make this lucky fluke something that can be utilized to help patients.  Two men unlucky enough to get both HIV and cancer have been seemingly cleared of the virus, raising hope that science may yet find a way to cure for the infection that causes AIDS, 30 years into the epidemic.  The key was that they received bone marrow transplants while undergoing chemotherapy.  We hope this can lead to a major breakthrough.  Over 25 million people have died of AIDS and 34 million are infected today. Read the full article here.

People look at quilts in memory of AIDS victims at the "Keep the Promise" rally of AIDS advocates in Washington on July 22. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a leading U.S. expert in the AIDS pandemic, said there is "no excuse" scientifically for not putting an end to the disease that has killed some 30 million people since it emerged in the 1980s. Speaking to reporters on the first day of the International AIDS Conference in the nation's capital, Fauci said science has the tools needed to combat HIV/AIDS. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP - Getty Images) Share 

  
THE DIASPORA IN GENES
Pollyanna finds it interesting that the wandering of Jewish migrants in the Diaspora in North Africa, Ethiopia, Yemen and the Caucasus can be tracked genetically.  The study is interesting and follows previous studies of Jewish genetic traces elsewhere.  We find it amusing that 10%  of the male Iberian population
still bear Jewish and Moorish genetic material.  The Reconquista was not totally successful at the molecular level.

OUR GREAT UNIVERSITIES
We are delighted to learn that three of our universities, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Haifa Technion and the Weizmann Institute have been ranked in the top 100 in the world by the prestigious Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking. When ranked according to specific fields, Israel fares even better. In Mathematics, three universities made it to the top 100; The Hebrew University in 16th place, Tel Aviv in 30th and the Technion in the top 74.  In Computer Science, four Israeli schools were ranked in the top 100. The Weizmann Institute was ranked 12th, the Technion came in 15th, the Hebrew University 27th, and Tel Aviv University - 29th.  We hope this is a sign that the long deterioration of education in Israel is being turned around.  Of course, someone will have to upgrade high school and elementary education as well.

RELIGION IN OUR LIFE
Pollyanna would like to call your attention to an article about religion and society by Scott Atran.  He an anthropologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, the University of Michigan, John Jay College, and ARTIS Research, and is  author of Talking to the Enemy and In Gods We Trust among many others.  He brings up some thought-provoking ideas.

WHAT IF?
Our friends at XKCD have instituted a What If? column in which they respond to readers' queries.  We recommend reading it  The link will take you to the latest one,  but you can easily scroll back to previous weeks.  They are all fun.

Also XKCD gives us an insightful comment on the blarney that is printed for our edification and stupidity on the wrappers of far too many products.

 Pollyanna shares some insights from Barney and Clyde--Gene, we miss Below the Beltway.

Pollyanna is with you again

Pollyanna is enjoying the Olympics despite all the garbage associated with such an event.  The athletes themselves are wonderful, but the hoopla and the press noise plus the obvious exploitation (little girls on bars and other equipment look a bit like abuse victims) do leave an unpleasant taste.

A COMMERCIAL PLUG

Usually Titan and Pollyanna shun what Click and Clack of Car Talk call shameless commerce. We are making an exception  to plug a hotel in Yucatan, Mexico run by the daughter of dear friends and her partner. Please check out the Mayan Beach Garden Inn-Hotel if you plan a vacation in Mexico.


IN MEMORIAM
Gore Vidal, one of the leading writers of the last century died this week in Los Angeles at age 86.  We have ready many of his books, enjoyed them all.  Our favorite by far is Julian, the story of the apostate emperor who tried to reverse the Christianization of the Byzantine Empire. We append an obituary from the Washington Post.

Gore Vidal was famous for his cynical attitude, acerbic wit and sharp tongue.  The Guardian has gathered a sample of quotes, 26 in number, which we think are worth reading.  We like them all, especially "A good deed never goes unpunished" and one, not in the Guardian list,  “I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, the politicians would abandon Washington in the summer; now they stay around all through the year, making mischief."

While on the topic of literature, Pollyanna is glad to note that J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame has written an adult novel that is due to come out soon.

Translation fears ... copies of the new book by JK Rowling (pictured with Harry Potter star Emma Watson) won't go out to foreign publishers in advance. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

What is strange is that, except for France and Germany, the book is being withheld from foreign publishers because of distrust of security and fear of piracy. This is unfortunate since it will result in rushed, ergo inferior, translations into other languages.  The problem is getting the book, in whatever language other than Hebrew and Arabic, onto bookstore shelves before the Christmas shopping season.  We are looking forward to the appearance in English of The Casual Vacancy which will be published on 27 September in the UK and the US. It will be interesting to see how she does outside the children genre.


EVOLUTION
While abroad we started to read Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.  We were stuck in the middle, so we went to the university library to borrow their copy.  As we signed it out, the librarian smiled knowingly and said "you do not really believe this evolution nonsense, do you?"  I wonder how she manages to work in the Life Sciences library, but we kept our comments to ourselves. The book itself is somewhat strange in that it moves backwards in time, but it is worth the read, albeit long and thick.  The Observer reviews it with the comment that Dawkins has done better, but pulls out a nugget of the importance of stars.  Of course, without stars there would be no atoms heavier than Lithium and certainly no life  'This does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see are stars.' Lovely indeed.

OOPS! ALMOST WIPED OUT?
Studies of the after effects of a super eruption about 70,000 years ago, most of humanity was wiped out and we are all descended from possibly 1,000 breeding pairs.  Food for thought and implications for racists.

ENVIRONMENT CHINA

Chinese environmental protesters stand on cars in Qidong, China. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

As you all know Pollyanna has strong views on environmental issues.  She also strongly disapproves of violence.  She is now of two minds about the successful stopping of a waste pipeline in China.  Indeed, the people are absolutely right, but she regrets the violence involved, in particular the beating of the policemen who were only doing their job.  It should be possible to demonstrate successfully without resorting to violence.  In the case of China, this may not be true and it is regrettable.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
The Center for Reproductive Rights has just had a legal catastrophe in Arizona.  From Nancy Northrup:
"We just got terrible news from Arizona. The federal judge overseeing the Center for Reproductive Rights' case denied our request to block the most extreme abortion ban in the country.


Plain and simple, today’s decision throws out decades of legal precedent and green lights an unconstitutional law banning pre-viability abortions—with almost no exceptions. A woman facing devastating complications in her pregnancy will have to risk her health and well-being unless she is facing a life-threatening emergency.


The battle doesn't end here. ... We’re immediately filing an emergency appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to prevent the law from going into effect—but we urgently need resources."
Pollyanna has donated and asks all of you to do the same.  She is really up in arms about this issue and not glad at all.
We are glad to report that the appeal was filed and an injunction granted pending trial.  Money is still very much needed.

CINEMA NOTES
WOODY ALLEN welcome back to good filmmaking.  We note good reviews for Midnight in Paris.  We also note that British Film Institute has anointed Vertigo by Hitchcock as the greatest film of all time, ending the 50 year reign of what is still our favorite, Citizen Kane by Orson Welles.  Your comments on this are invited.
GORILLA INTELLIGENCE
Pollyanna thanks Richard for calling this discovery   to our attention.  We actually see gorillas breaking up traps set by poachers for smaller animals, apparently in reaction to the killing of baby gorillas by such traps. This is indeed impressive and gives us an idea of how intelligent these creatures are.

BENEFITS OF CIRCUMCISION

Pollyanna notes that a recent study in Africa indicates that male circumcision is positively correlated with a decrease in the incidence of HIV infection.  This point should be stressed to those in Europe who are legislating against it. Besides the attack on the religious freedom of Jews and Muslims, the objection is also fatuous from the medical standpoint.   The practice  also appears to have a positive effect on the sexual well being of female partners, but now Pollyanna is beginning to blush and we shall drop this topic.



 IN A LIGHTER VEIN
From our friend, Michael Quinion, of World Wide Words, in his sic! section: John Pearson spotted a reader’s travel tip in the Guardian on 16 June: “The swordfish and revueltos (scrambled eggs) in particular are incredible and the wine list, concentrating on local wines from Málaga and Cádiz, never fails to disappoint.”

We have not checked out SMBC for a while.  For those who have had colonoscopies, we present

Gyroscopes are really interesting.  The old belief that the gyroscope effect kept bicycles stable has been debunked by research published in Science magazine and reported on CNET.  Nonetheless, both Pollyanna and XKCD think gyroscopes are cool.