timelets

“However, artificial wheels are made separately and then added onto a vehicle, whereas biological wheels would have to grow in situ. How could a freely rotating body part either be linked to the rest of the body through nerves and blood vessels or else function without being so linked?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”

When it was the Nine Hundred and Thirty-first Night,

She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that every time the owner of an article came to the dyer he would put him off with any pretext[FN#185] and would swear to him; nor would he cease to promise and swear to him, as often as he came, till the customer lost patience and said, "How often wilt thou say to me, 'To-morrow?' Give me my stuff: I will not have it dyed." Whereupon the dyer would make answer, "By Allah, O my brother, I am abashed at thee; but I must tell the truth and may Allah harm all who harm folk in their goods!"

[FN (footnote) #185] It is interesting to note the superior gusto with which the Eastern, as well as the Western tale-teller describes his scoundrels and villains whilst his good men and women are mostly colourless and unpicturesque. So Satan is the true hero of Paradise-Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary; and Mephistopheles is much better society than Faust and Margaret.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3443/3443-h/3443-h.htm#chap23

Influenza, usually raging throughout the Northern Hemisphere this time of year, has become virtually invisible.

It is a small bright spot amid Covid-19, although the number of people saved from a flu death pales next to the number dying from the new pandemic. It also presents questions that doctors around the globe will likely be wrestling with for years: If flu can be nearly wiped out this season, why not every season? Which steps help the most to stop the flu from spreading?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-has-nearly-wiped-out-the-fluhow-do-we-keep-it-from-coming-back-11611230410

and formal prosecution of Pheidias was made in the assembly. Embezzlement, indeed, was not proven, for the gold of the statue, from the very start, had been so wrought upon and cast about it by Pheidias, at the wise suggestion of Pericles, that it could all be taken off and weighed, and this is what Pericles actually ordered the accusers of Pheidias to do at this time.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Pericles*.html

“...said Nestor. ... So, my plan is that Argus, Tiphys and his men dismantle the Argo into portable sections which we take overland from the eastern shore of the Propontis to the western shore of the Euxine Sea, thus circumventing the Symplegades entirely.

Phineus sprayed fruit and bread everywhere as he snorted with derisive laughter. ‘Circumventing, you say? Oh dear me, that’s a good one. Circumventing. The land between, your ‘circumventing land’ bristles with bandits, some of them only half human. They hide in the bushes, shoot arrows and wait for you to die of your wounds. You’ll never see them. For all your crew of musclebound heroes you’d be better turning for home than trying such a foolish thing. Suppose they only got ten of you – that would be ten pieces of your ship you vitally need. Circumvent that.”

--- Stephen Fry. “Heroes: Volume II of Mythos.”

“I often got phone calls from (people) in other countries asking, ‘Do you guys have your own special medicine or something?’” Aso said at an Upper House finance committee meeting on June 4.

“I told these people, ‘Between your country and our country, mindo (the level of people) is different.’ And that made them speechless and quiet. Every time,” Aso boasted.

Mindo is a word often used by politicians and others to invoke Japanese nationalism and ethnic superiority and can refer to things like culture and social manners.
...
“We have kept the fatality rate very low, and it was done just by asking people to (minimize their infection risk). People in other countries can’t do that, even being forced,” he said.

“I guess everybody (in Japan) just took it and sweated it out. There were no fines, no violations,” he said. “I believe the Japanese should be more proud about that.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13432875

Japan’s fertility rate, or average number of children a woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime, dropped to 1.36 in 2019, going below the 1.40 mark for the first time in eight years.

It marked the fourth consecutive year of decline, according to data released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on June 5.

The fertility rate for 2019 slid by 0.06 point from the figure for 2018, significantly down from the 0.01 point level of the preceding three years.

The fertility rate of 1.36 put Japan far from the target of 2.07, the level needed to maintain the population.

By prefecture, Okinawa had the highest fertility rate at 1.82, while Tokyo reported the lowest at 1.15.


http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13436216

A new concept of the body was then emerging in the West to take the place of the humoral system, one based not on the balance of fluids but on cycles of input and output. The analogy was no longer a scale but an engine.

The crux of this shift was the discovery, in part through analysis of steam engines, of energy: the overarching force unifying what had been thought of as discrete phenomena, including motion, heat and light.
...
By 1900, the new science of nutrition had applied thermodynamics to human physiology via the calorie, a unit of measure that expressed the needs and abilities of the body in common terms—inputs and outputs, food and work. On its own, the calorie didn’t resolve questions about coffee, which contains very few calories per cup. But the calorie did provide a stable framework for understanding coffee’s physiological effects since it made work look like the basic function and natural condition of a living body, much like an engine. This ascendant biology of drudgery informed a new consensus on coffee: It was lubricant for the “human machine.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-coffee-became-a-modern-necessity-11585972861