from Bruce
Anecdotes
Wisdom
• According to a Sufi legend, after God created Adam, He commanded the angel Gabriel to allow Adam to choose one of the three most precious pearls in the treasury of heaven. Gabriel therefore showed Adam the pearl of wisdom, the pearl of faith, and the pearl of modesty. Adam chose the pearl of wisdom, but when Gabriel attempted to lift the other two pearls to return them to the divine treasury, he was not able to. The pearl of faith and the pearl of modesty then said to Gabriel, “We will not separate from our beloved wisdom. We could not be happy and quiet away from it. From all eternity, we three have been the three compeers of God’s glory, the pearls of His power. We cannot be separated.” Even today, wisdom is found in the company of faith and modesty.
• Pope John XXIII once met a boy who had been born a Jew but who had converted and been baptized into the Catholic faith. The Pope urged the boy to continue to support the Jewish community, saying, “By becoming a Catholic, you do not become less a Jew.” At the Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII said, “We do not intend to conduct a trial of the past. We do not want to prove who was right and who was wrong. All we want to say is, Let us come together. Let us make an end to our divisions.”
Work
• The caliph Omar once met a group of people who were loafing around and doing nothing. When they answered that they were people who trusted to God for everything and put their affairs in His hands, Omar grew angry and said, “You are nothing but parasites upon other people’s work. The person who truly trusts God first plants seeds in the earth, then puts his affairs in God’s hands.”
• Chaplains are employed by the Armed Forces. In this case, we have the government paying the salaries of priests, rabbis, and preachers, but such an expense has been judged necessary by the government. The Bill of Rights grants everyone, including soldiers, the right to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, and chaplains are necessary for that to occur.
• The town’s leading citizens met at a dinner celebrating the 75th anniversary of a business. The mayor praised the business, pointing out that 75 years is a long time and an important anniversary, then he asked if anyone in the audience represented a firm that had been in business longer than that. A preacher stood up and said, “I have that honor.”
• Sydney Smith, a clergyman and a wit, was once accosted by a county squire who angrily told him, “If I had a son who was an idiot, by Jove I’d make him a clergyman.” Sydney calmly replied, “Very probably, but I see that your father was of a different mind.”
• As a boy, actor Rod Steiger was a Gentile surrounded by Jews. This came in handy, as he readily found work in the neighborhood — lighting stoves for Jewish families on the Sabbath. The neighborhood women referred to him as a Shabbos goy.
Yom Kippur
• Before Yom Kippur, Rabbi Israel Salanter was walking on a public street when he met a crying man. Rabbi Salanter spoke to him and discovered that the man was terrified of the judgment that would be made against him on Yom Kippur; Rabbi Salanter also noticed that the man’s public display of grief and terror was upsetting other people in the street. Therefore, Rabbi Salanter advised the man, “Your heart is a private place, and so you may cry there as much as you want. However, the street is a public place. Remember that you do not have a right to burden other people with your personal problems.”
• While in prison, a Jew was told that he could choose one day of all the days in the year to perform the mitvos [commandment, worthy deed]. The Jew thought hard. Which day would be best to perform the mitvos? Would Yom Kippur be best? Finally, the Jew made his decision; he would perform the mitvos the very first day he could because when it comes to performing the mitvos, no one should procrastinate.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. responded:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Black Betty"
Album: DUCK & COVER
Artist: The Isotopes
Artist Location: Rochester, New York
Info:
“The Isotopes have been crafting brutal face-melting instrumental rock 'n roll since 2001. These former scientists, and the women who love them, have been pleasing fans with incendiary live shows, tight songcraft, instrumental fireworks and lots of flashing lights.”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $5 (USD) for 22-track album
Genre: Instrumentals. Surf. Covers.
Links:
DUCK & COVER
Isotopes on Bandcamp
The Isotopes on YouTube
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce's Blog #1
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David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Race Strategy
New Venture
Michael Egan
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The French Family
My recent obsession - The French Family
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Running late - blue screen o'death. Argh.
$12 Million
Leonardo da Vinci
Would you pay over $12 million for a drawing the size of a Post-It Note? The answer for one art buyer was a resounding yes.
The drawing was a sketch from Leonardo da Vinci, and one of the rare sketches from the Italian Renaissance master to hit the auction floor in the last 20 years.
Titled "Head of a Bear," the piece was created using a technique called silverpoint, which involves artists employing a thin, silver wire held on a makeshift stylus to make etchings on paper.
This tiny 2.7-by-2.7-inch sketch was auctioned off for $12.2 million to an unknown buyer at Christie's London on July 8, under the auction house's "The Exceptional Sale." Christie's did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider on the identity of the piece's buyer.
The auction house also noted that the piece had a "distinguished provenance," having previously been in the private collection of British portrait painter and collector of old master drawings, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Interestingly, the sketch was sold at Christie's way back in 1860 for just 2.50 pounds ($3.40), equivalent to around 311 pounds ($428) today.
Leonardo da Vinci
Gets Official Classification
Winchcombe Meteorite
The Winchcombe meteorite is now official.
The rocky material that fell to Earth in a blazing fireball over the Cotswold town of Winchcombe in February has had its classification formally accepted.
Details have just been published by the international Meteoritical Society in its bulletin database.
Early work by UK scientists indicates the Winchcombe object dates back to the very beginning of the Solar System, some 4.6 billion years ago.
Formal classification basically means the dark grey-to-black material picked up in Gloucestershire earlier this year is now absolutely recognised as being meteoritic in nature, and it means also that the name "Winchcombe" can be used to describe it.
Winchcombe Meteorite
Still Charging Taxpayers
Hotels
Taxpayers are facing further charges for Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up)’s security team, who have been staying at his hotel in Bedminster, New Jersey, in recent months.
As receipts seen by The Washington Post revealed, the former US president charged the Secret Service $10,200 (£7,400) for staying at his hotel in Bedminster.
The records are for the first four weeks of his stay at the golf cub in May, where he has been residing for the summer, after four months at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
It follows receipts of more than $40,000 (£29,033) so that agents could stay close to the former president at Mar-a-Lago, The Post reported.
Records seen by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) revealed that agents filed $140,000 (£100,000) in receipts for travelling with Eric, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr in February alone.
Hotels
'Galactic' Patterns
Ancient Islamic Tombs
Thousands of medieval Islamic tombs in eastern Sudan were arranged in hard-to-detect patterns, with sacred "parent" tombs hosting subclusters of emanating burials, according to archaeologists who studied the funerary monuments with a method designed for cosmology.
The team used satellite imagery to identify the locations of more than 10,000 monuments in the Kassala region of eastern Sudan. The monuments include tumuli, which are made of stone and are "relatively simple raised structures, widespread throughout African prehistory and history," and "qubbas," which is a term that referred to Islamic tombs and shrines in the pan-Arab world, a team of researchers wrote in a paper published July 7 in the journal PLOS One.
After the team mapped the funerary monuments, they had trouble interpreting the data, given that few of the monuments had been excavated.
"We faced the challenge of interpreting the creation of the funerary landscape with almost no traditional archaeological data, but [we had] a large enough data set to be able to hypothesize the presence of complex processes both at regional and local scale[s]," Stefano Costanzo, a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of Naples L'Orientale in Italy and lead author of the journal article, told Live Science.
"To the naked eye, it was clear that the clustered tombs were conditioned by the environment, but deeper meaning may have been implied in their spatial arrangement," Costanzo said.
Ancient Islamic Tombs
Sentenced To 2 1/2 Years
Michael Avenatti
A tearful, repentant Michael Avenatti, the brash lawyer who once represented Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up), was sentenced Thursday to 2 1/2 years in prison for trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity.
Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence by sparring publicly with Trump, but criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted his rapid ascent. He was convicted last year of attempted extortion and other charges in connection with his representation of a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer who was upset that Nike had ended its league sponsorship.
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe called Avenatti’s conduct “outrageous,” saying he “hijacked his client’s claims” and “used those claims to further his own agenda, which was to extort millions of dollars from Nike for himself.”
Avenatti, the judge added, “had become drunk on the power of his platform, or what he perceived the power of his platform to be. He had become someone who operated as if the laws and the rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to him.”
Gardephe said some leniency was deserved because prosecutors declined to charge Mark Geragos, a prominent attorney who played a critical role in the scheme. Geragos first reached out to a Nike contact and remained silent at meetings and on phone calls as he and Avenatti shared a “good cop, bad cop routine.”
Michael Avenatti
'Constant Gaslighting'
Google
A senior privacy software engineer at Google said he quit the tech firm, citing "constant gaslighting" following its prior dismissals of two AI experts, including the high-profile case of Timnit Gebru.
Damien Desfontaines, who goes by TedOnPrivacy on Twitter, announced the news Thursday.
"Personal news! Today's my last day at Google. My "shields down" moment was the firing of @timnitGebru, then @mmitchell_ai, and all the constant gaslighting since then. I will not be taking further questions at this time," he said, before adding a smiley face emoji.
Gebru, the AI ethicist who said Google fired her in December, commented on his post and said, "Thank you so much for your support and I hope your future is full of being at environments that value and nurture you."
Google fired another ethicist that Desfontaines referenced, Margaret Mitchell, just two months later in February because of what the company said were "multiple violations" of its rules.
Google
Canada
Shellfish
Tens of thousands of clams, mussels, sea stars, and snails were found boiled to death in a Vancouver, Canada, beach during the country's record-breaking heat wave.
Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, was alerted to the deaths when he smelled a foul stench coming from Vancouver's Kitsilano Beach on Sunday.
British Columbia hit record-high temperatures three days in a row in late June, hitting 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit on June 29.
It is not clear when the shellfish died. Harley told the CBC that most intertidal animals can only bear a temperatures of up to 86 Fahrenheit; thermal imaging on June 28 showed that the temperature on the Vancouver coastline hit about 122 degrees.
The death of these animals will temporarily affect water quality in the area as mussels and clams filter the sea, Harley said, according to CBC.
Shellfish
Fractals, Fibonacci, And The Golden Ratio
Cauliflower
It's long been observed that many plants produce leaves, shoots, or flowers in spiral patterns. Cauliflower provides a unique example of this phenomenon, because those spirals repeat at several different size scales—a hallmark of fractal geometry. This self-similarity is particularly notable in the Romanesco variety because of the distinctive conical shape of its florets. Now, a team of French scientists from the CNRS has identified the underlying mechanism that gives rise to this unusual pattern, according to a new paper published in Science.
Fractal geometry is the mathematical offspring of chaos theory; a fractal is the pattern left behind in the wave of chaotic activity. That single geometric pattern repeats thousands of times at different magnifications (self-similarity). For that reason, fractals are often likened to Russian nesting dolls. Many fractal patterns exist only in mathematical theory, but over the last few decades, scientists have found there are fractal aspects to many irregular yet patterned shapes in nature, such the branchings of rivers and trees—or the strange self-similar repeating buds that make up the Romanesco cauliflower.
Each bud is made up of a series of smaller buds, although the pattern doesn't continue down to infinitely smaller size scales, so it's only an approximate fractal. The branched tips, called meristems, make up a logarithmic spiral, and the number of spirals on the head of Romanesco cauliflower is a Fibonacci number, which in turn is related to what's known as the "golden ratio."
The person most closely associated with the Fibonacci sequence is the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Pisano; his nickname was "filius Bonacci" (son of Bonacci), which got shortened to Fibonacci. In his 1202 treatise, Book of Calculation, Fibonacci described the numerical sequence that now bears his name: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... and on into infinity. Divide each number in the sequence into the one that follows, and the answer will be something close to 1.618, an irrational number known as phi, aka the golden ratio. And there is a special "golden" logarithmic spiral that grows outward by a factor of the golden ratio for every 90 degrees of rotation, of which a "Fibonacci spiral" is a close approximation.
Scientists have long puzzled over possible underlying mechanisms for this unusual patterning in the arrangement of leaves on a stem (phyllotaxis) of so many plants—including pine cones, daisies, dahlias, sunflowers, and cacti—dating all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci. Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (who coined the term "phyllotaxis") noted that these spirals exhibited either clockwise or counterclockwise golden ratios in 1754, while French brothers Auguste and Louis Bravais discovered in 1837 that the ratios of phyllotaxis spirals were related to the Fibonacci sequence.
Cauliflower
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