Meanderings, 19 February 2022
We saw some slow arrivals of Spring in Chicagoland this week, some melting, some sun, some cold, some snow, and some melting. C’mon Spring! We have a wide variety of stories and links this week. Enjoy!
Photo by Ralph Katieb on Unsplash
I don’t believe I’ve said this here so I’ll say it: our son, Lukas, has recently accepted a Senior Scout position with the Cleveland Guardians (aka, or formerly known as the Cleveland Indians). We are now Guardians fans. Go Guardians, beat the Cubs!
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful — to quote whom?
When New Dover United Methodist Church in Edison, New Jersey, closed its doors in 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, parishioners went home and made sandwiches.
To date, members of the New Jersey church have made almost 100,000 of them.
“When the pandemic hit, people were calling and asking, ‘What can we do?, What can we do?’” said the Rev. Chuck Coblentz. “We needed to figure out a way people could be involved, given the circumstances, without being here.”
And that’s how a sandwich ministry was born.
People could make sandwiches at home and then drop them off at the church to be delivered to nearby organizations that were feeding the hungry. To keep the sandwiches from getting soggy, a small group of volunteers added condiments right before delivery and packaged them with healthy sides, Coblentz explained.
(RNS) — The United Church of Christ has now paid off more than $100 million in medical debt for people across the United States.The UCC announced Monday (Feb. 14) that it used $200,000 from one of its annual Giving Tuesday campaigns to purchase and pay off $33 million in medical debt for residents of Ohio, where the mainline Protestant denomination is based.
That brought the total medical debt the UCC has purchased and paid off since late 2019 to more than $104 million.
The donation comes as part of RIP Medical Debt’s “A Nation That Cares” campaign, rallying churches and other Christian nonprofits to raise $5 million to relieve roughly $500 million of medical debt across the country. The UCC was one of the first groups to donate to the nonprofit’s campaign, and its donation so far is the largest, according to RIP Medical Debt.
The donation also culminates efforts to purchase and pay off medical debt by the United Church of Christ that started at Thanksgiving more than two years ago.
The effort was launched in Chicago when Trinity United Church of Christ joined with churches from a number of denominations in that city to raise $38,000 to pay off $5.3 million in medical debt. Trinity’s pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, said the aim was to help the “poorest of the poor” on the city’s South Side.
LONDON.- For more than a century, Charles Dickens scholars have tried, without much success, to decipher a one-page letter written by the author in symbols, dots and scribbles.
The letter sat for decades, unread, in a vault in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, until recent months, when two Americans with backgrounds in computer science were able to make substantial headway in decoding the letter. They were motivated by a challenge from the University of Leicester, which posted a copy of it online and promised 300 British pounds, or $406, to the person who could make the most sense of it.
The winner of the competition, Shane Baggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, California, had never read a Dickens novel before. He transcribed more symbols than any other of the 1,000 people who entered — helping to crack a 163-year-old mystery about one of the world’s most celebrated authors.
“After getting mostly C grades in literature, I never dreamed anything I’d ever do would be of interest to Dickens scholars!” Baggs said in a statement. Ken Cox, a 20-year-old cognitive science student at the University of Virginia, came in second place.
Baggs, who spent about six months working on the text, mostly after work, said that he first heard about the competition through a group on Reddit dedicated to cracking codes and finding hidden messages. The Dickens competition caught his eye because the puzzles involving shorthand had stayed unsolved the longest, he said.
Baggs participated in three free “deciphering” workshops on Zoom, hosted by Claire Wood, a lecturer of Victorian literature at the University of Leicester, and Hugo Bowles, who teaches forensic linguistics at the University of Foggia in Italy. The sessions focused on the obsolete form of shorthand that Dickens learned when he was 16 from a manual called “Brachygraphy,” written by an 18th-century shorthand writer, Thomas Gurney.
Early in his career, Dickens was a court reporter and a parliamentary reporter, where having a system for quick note-taking came in handy. Over time, the symbols and abbreviations he used evolved so that his personal shorthand became unintelligible to outsiders. (Dickens himself referred to it as “that savage stenographic mystery” in his most autobiographical novel, “David Copperfield.”)
Dickens’ letter, written in 1859, has been held at the Morgan Library since at least 1913. It was likely a copy that Dickens made for himself based on the full-length version written to John Thaddeus Delane, then the editor of The Times of London. The full-length version is lost, said Bowles, one of the organizers of the competition and the author of “Dickens and the Stenographic Mind.”
He said that he had tried to decipher the texts for years, but made “very little progress.” “I could be sure of maybe about 10 of the symbols in the letter,” he said. “It has been the same for everyone who has studied the letter for the last 150 years.”
Eagles and lead poisoning; so sad.
America’s national bird is more beleaguered than previously believed, with nearly half of bald eagles tested across the U.S. showing signs of chronic lead exposure, according to a study published Thursday.
While the bald eagle population has rebounded from the brink of extinction since the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT in 1972, harmful levels of toxic lead were found in the bones of 46 percent of bald eagles sampled in 38 states from California to Florida, researchers reported in the journal Science.
Similar rates of lead exposure were found in golden eagles, which scientists say means the raptors likely consumed carrion or prey contaminated by lead from ammunition or fishing tackle.
The blood, bones, feathers and liver tissue of 1,210 eagles sampled from 2010 to 2018 were examined to assess chronic and acute lead exposure.
“This is the first time for any wildlife species that we’ve been able to evaluate lead exposure and population level consequences at a continental scale,” said study co-author Todd Katzner, a wildlife biologist at U.S. Geological Survey in Boise, Idaho. “It’s sort of stunning that nearly 50 percent of them are getting repeatedly exposed to lead.”
Lead is a neurotoxin that even in low doses impairs an eagle’s balance and stamina, reducing its ability to fly, hunt and reproduce. In high doses, lead causes seizures, breathing difficulty and death.
The study estimated that lead exposure reduced the annual population growth of bald eagles by 4 percent and golden eagles by 1 percent.
How useful are rebuttals? [SMcK: if you haven’t noticed, I don’t think they are worth the time. How many actually change their minds through a rebuttal?]
Regular readers will have noticed that coronavirus content around here has been steadily decreasing. I think we’ll stay at about where it is now - occasional updates and background pieces - and I very much hope never to get back to the days when it was all coronavirus all the time. But I’ve had quite a few requests to do some thorough debunking on articles and interviews that are being handed around among anti-vaccine folks. Honestly, I’m tempted, but not tempted enough to actually do it. There are several reasons. The first is that I think that a great number of people who are persuadable have actually gotten themselves vaccinated by now. Going after-anti vaccine propaganda line by line is chasing diminishing returns. That’s not to say that it might do some good, perhaps, but it’s not commensurate with the effort.
The effort is high because of the hydra-style argumentation on the anti-vaccine front. There’s a steady supply of “But what about. . .” type questions, and it apparently doesn’t matter how many of these are weird, unreasonable, or unsupported by actual data, because here come some more. When you experience these in real time, you are getting the good ol’ “Gish Gallop”, named after the debating style of one of the big creationist nuisances of years past, Duane Gish. His method was to rapid-fire his list of objections, inconsistencies, and gotcha-style questions at a pace that precluded a thorough answer to any of them. Anyone who tried to deal with one as it shot past found themselves hit with yet another list. Gish’s goal was to present the pro-evolution folks as simply unable to deal with the staggering number of problems with their Godless views and flailing helplessly under an onslaught of unanswerable clinchers from the creationist side.
I’m not playing that game. It almost always takes more time to answer a question than it does to pose it, even if the question is reasonable and asked in good faith, so the Gish Gallop is always available to the unscrupulous.
DENVER (KDVR) — More snow is on the way for many parts of the country.
It falls every year, but have you ever stopped and thought to yourself, “Why is snow white”?
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research said there is a scientific reason why snow looks white, and it’s all about light.
“Light is scattered and bounces off the ice crystals in the snow. The reflected light includes all the colors, which, together, look white. While your red sweater absorbs all colors except red and reflects red back out for people to see and a yellow tennis ball absorbs all colors except yellow and reflects yellow back out for people to see, snow reflects all colors. And all the colors of light add up to white,” UCAR said. “Snow can also look blue or purple or even pink depending on how the sunlight hits it and whether it is in shadow.”
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – The squeamish should look away.
The Lee County Mosquito Control District in Southwest Florida posed a question on social media Wednesday – “Ever wonder what 1 million mosquitoes looks like?”
According to LCMCD, the mosquitoes were part of a trapping project that happened on Sanibel Island last summer.
Lee County, home to Fort Meyers, is comprised of many acres of salt marsh and other wetlands, according to LCMCD. This offers “some of the most prolific mosquito breeding habitats on earth.”
The agency monitors adult mosquito activity throughout its district each night from May to October. When thresholds are met or mosquito-borne disease becomes a threat, LCMCD will begin “control operations.”
According to the Florida Department of Health, there are over 80 different species of mosquitoes known to occur within the state. Several are able to transmit pathogens that can cause disease in humans, horses, and other animals.