Luck and unluck

Last Saturday, when the US election was decided, was a lucky and unlucky day, depending on what you think.  This coming Friday is an unlucky day, if you think so.  It’s the year’s second Friday the 13th.

Perhaps the only real interest of such a thing is the dry interest of its arithmetic, and I’ve now put that into another piece to be found under “Astronomical Calendar Any-Year” in the menu at the top.  It may not be all I need to say, because I have some notes about Friday falling on the 13th more often than any other day does, and I’m not sure that’s true, and need to take time to verify it, so you might want to come back to that space.

Today, Tuesday, when I’m writing this, we’ve learned of some luck for humanity.  It was revealed yesterday that a vaccine against Covid-19, with, so far, a 90% success rate and no bad side effects, has emerged from a town in Germany, and from a couple of Germany’s sometimes less than welcomed Turkish immigrants.  Magic!   Or so such feats seem to us, partly because news articles don’t answer natural questions such as what procedures look like in biochemistry labs – do the scientists use lasers on molecules, or what?

Earlier ages, ravaged by their plagues, could only imagine salvation embodied in miracle-workers such as the Pied Piper of Hamelin –

Hamelin town’s in Brunswick
Near famous Hanover city.
The River Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side,
A pleasanter place you never spied,
But when begins my ditty
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin was a pity.
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats
and bit the babies in the cradles,
Ate the cheese out of the vats,
Licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…

I’ve typed that much from memory, and you may by googling it find any errors and then enjoy the rest of that delightful ballad, based on medieval legends.  A mysterious personage with a costume of pied colors pops up in parts of the world from Tartary and Bagdat to Hamelin in Germany, exorcising plagues of scorpions and rats and vampire bats with the irresistible tunes his lips produce from his pipe.  Would that real cures for every pandemic could flow so easily from scientists’ pipettes.

Obfuscation of the Week

“Due to operational security, we are only able to confirm removal flights once they have landed in the designated country,” an ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] spokeswoman said.

Translation:  “We will not tell you whether we will go ahead despite protests and put Cameroonian refugees on a plane and fly them back to Cameroon, where they will be killed, until after we have done so.”

__________

ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.