jdilla.xyz

New to me, although maybe it shouldn’t be. Old Christmas is a relic of the Julian calendar, celebrated in rural parts of West Virginia until relatively recently on January 6th. From West Virginia Public Broadcasting:

In the late 1500s, Pope Gregory XIII changed the calendar to match the solar cycle more closely. To do so, the Julian Calendar had to be reduced from 376 to 365 days, eliminating 11 full days. Some countries, though, resisted the change and kept the old Julian Calendar. It took nearly 200 years for England and Scotland to come around. Both countries adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752.

About this time, many of these English and Scots were emigrating to the Americas and settling in Appalachia. Some didn’t know about the change or refused to adopt the new Gregorian Calendar and kept the extra 11 days in their calendars. This meant that for them, Christmas fell on January 6 rather than December 25.

https://twitter.com/ag_guy04/status/1611023399509266432

From Why Not Mars by Maciej Cegłowski

"At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops[28], inside nuclear reactor cores[29], and in aerosols high in the stratosphere[30]. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there[31] than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea[32], are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals[33] or Antarctic ice[34] have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing[35] without so much as a cup of coffee."

As Ceglowski points out, this should make us pretty confident that microbial life already exists on Mars, if only from a stray asteroid.

As of 2020, the average undergraduate GPA at Harvard is 2020. From Aden Barton in The Crimson via Orin Kerr.

“If grade inflation continues at its 2021-2022 pace, for example, the average GPA of the Class of 2028 would be over 4.0.”

When I saw that David Epstein (who’s writing I love) was writing about Frances Hesselbein again, I sort of rolled my eyes. She is at the center of his book Range (which I love — probably the book that impacted me most in the past 5 years).

But his remembrance of her is too good not to share. My favorite nuggets:

• Her life philosophy as: “doing what’s needed at the time.”

• She repeatedly declines offers to move up through the ranks of the Girl Scouts, ultimately becoming the CEO and turning the organization around; reading between the lines, it seems like in some ways declining advancement gives her more space to maneuver as she isn’t invested in protecting her reputation.

• The ending quote: “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”