In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole:
(#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space
Two things: the service window; the black hole.
Briefly noted. From my 8/9/23 posting “The states of matter: coconut X”:
I discovered the melting point of coconut X several summers ago. My air-conditioning aims to cool things to 80 F, so when it gets hot outside, inside my condo the spreadable coconut fat ([a semi-solid cream] used for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77 F) to to a free-flowing liquid that’s very hard to cope with.
So this morning I put the jar in the refrigerator (where it’s probably between 35 and 40 F) — and discovered another state of the substance, a very firm solid that is also almost impossible to deal with; I have to chip away chunks of the stuff with a pointed implement, chunks that alas, do not spread (though I can get small amounts of the liquid state by using the (roughly 97 F) body heat in my hands to melt a chunk).
That was on an early August day, in the dog days of summer. Today is March 20th, the first day of spring — the vernal equinox — here in the northern hemisphere. But also another day of record-breaking heat in the southern SF bay, set to soar once again to over 90F. When I went to oil my legs and feet at 6:30 am, it had already melted to a messy liquid. (I got up at 3:30 am to enjoy the cool and quiet of the night, and did in fact finish a posting then. After which I turned into a reptile stunned by the heat.) Tomorrow the temperature will drop by 20 degrees, and I’ll be able to walk in the neighborhood again. May it be so.
The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.
As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.
This is a brief return to posting on my blog, an experiment in re-learning how to use my computer, after a couple of months in a vale of great sicknesses (about which, more eventually); I am seriously damaged, but plucky.
This is in memory of the excellent Antonino Zichichi, who died on 2/9. First of all, for having a wonderful Z name, even more entertaining than Zwicky. For his groundbreaking research in nuclear physics. And for a lifetime devoted to causes benefitting the common good.
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.
I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291
But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):
(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)
I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.
An Amy Hwang cartoon in the latest — 10/23 — issue of the New Yorker that I found hugely funny, for reasons I couldn’t at first explain:
(#1)
Well, there are people who can fall asleep (pretty much) anywhere, as they say — I’ve been such a person for about 70 years now — but I have never just lain down for an impromptu nap on the ground out in the world, as the snail in #1 seems to have done, preposterously.
Actually, the cartoon snail is lying flat as a flounder, in such a way that it’s hard to be sure that it’s only somnolent and not in fact deceased. It could well be not merely sleeping, but dead — reversing the customary formula, of many applicabilities, that someone or something isn’t dead, but only sleeping. Snail3 in the cartoon looks a lot like the Monty Python pet-shop parrot: this is an ex-snail, gone to meet its maker, and its snail buddies are just slip-sliding along in denial.
So #1 is wonderfully absurd. It’s also an excellent example of a cartoon existing equally in two worlds: visually, the world of snails (lacking males, since snails are generally hermaphroditic; bereft of speech; and also exhibiting dormancy but not, apparently, actual sleep); behaviorally, the world of human beings (where Snail1 can remark that he — Snail3 — can fall asleep anywhere).
But then I was carried away into the complexities of sleep in human beings and in other creatures (where it contrasts with rest and dormancy, not to mention death) and into the behavior of snails, where I will report — surprise! — on a 2011 study from the Journal of Experimental Biology about a common pond snail:
Behavioural evidence for a sleep-like quiescent state in a pulmonate mollusc, Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus)
