"Feeling Good" (Nina Simone, 1965)

"Feeling Good" (also known as "Feelin' Good") is a song written by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It was first performed on stage in 1964 by Cy Grant on the UK tour.

Nina Simone recorded "Feeling Good" for her 1965 album I Put a Spell on You. The song has also been covered by other famous artists [list at the link is extensive]... In 2022, American Songwriter ranked "Feeling Good" number one on their list of the 10 greatest Nina Simone songs.

Posted to accompany the cystic fibrosis post.

Related:  My "Sinnerman" (Nina Simone)  post from 2019 has the full-length version with lyrics superimposed; the video embedded below is abbreviated and combines the music of Sinnerman with a mashup of movie scenes of people running:

Trikafta for cystic fibrosis

"... word began spreading of a forthcoming three-drug combination from Vertex. In clinical trials, neither patients nor doctors are told who is on the placebo and who is on the experimental drug. But in this trial, everyone could tell. The triple combo made patients’ lung function jump by a shocking 10 percentage points. Overnight, they woke up smelling for the first time the distinctive scent of their home. They could even taste their sweat becoming less salty. This was Trikafta.

In the fall of 2019, Trikafta was approved by the FDA... Jenny received her first box of Trikafta on November 17, 2019, at the end of yet another two-week hospital stay. She had gotten sick again in Nashville. Actually, she had been fighting off a cold before she left, and despite assiduously staying in her hotel room to keep up her treatment routine, she felt an infection settling into her lungs. At the conference, she heard a lot about Trikafta, but she didn’t expect to get it so quickly. CF centers were being inundated with calls from patients asking for the new drug.

In the hospital in Utah, she recorded a video that she sent to her sister with CF, Teresa, who now lived in Ohio. She is sitting on her hospital bed. “My Trikafta is here,” she says, her voice shaking and her eyes tearing up. The miracle drug she had been promised her whole life was now in her hands.

Teresa was also able to start the drug not long after. For her, Trikafta’s impact was immediate and unmistakable. The Purge [expectoration of voluminous amounts of sputum] started on the drive back from the doctor’s visit where she took the first dose. The mucus coming up was so thin that she was confused; it was nothing like the sticky gunk she’d had to work so hard to cough up. A month later, she went back for a sweat test, and her salt level was normal. Based on the results, you would not know she had cystic fibrosis.

“I think of it like, ‘Oh, back when I used to have CF,’ ” Teresa said on a recent call with Jenny and me. “I don’t feel like I have CF. I feel completely normal.” She has been able to stop using her vest and inhaled medications, freeing up that time for her adopted children and the farm where she lives with her family. Before Trikafta, every small exertion was a negotiation with her lungs. Should she go upstairs? How many breaths would that take? Now she’s running around milking the goats, trimming their hooves, throwing 30 bales of hay into the barn..."

If you have a family member with CF or a friend with such, or a friend who has a family member etc., I urge you to read The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything.  It's quite a remarkable (and happy) story.  

Image cropped for size from the original at the link.  Credit Fumi Nagasaka for The Atlantic,

The Milky Way behind the Three Merlons

This was an Astronomy Photo of the Day last week.  I had to look up The Three Merlons:

The Tre Cime di Lavaredo (Italian for 'Three Peaks of Lavaredo'), also called the Drei Zinnen (German for 'Three Merlons'), are three distinctive battlement-like peaks, in the Sexten Dolomites of northeastern Italy. They are one of the best-known mountain groups in the Alps.

Today I learned about "epenthetic schwas"

I've seen several online articles recently about the grammatically correct way to write the plural or possessive forms of names like Harris and Walz...

It all felt a bit, as some social media users described, like apostrophe hell: Would it be Ms. Harris’s and Mr. Walz’s or Ms. Harris’ and Mr. Walz’s? The Harrises and the Walzes? The Harrises’ family home and the Walzes’ family dog? It was enough to see double, made worse by the fact that stylebooks, large news organizations and grammar geeks were all split or contradicted one another.

Discussion continues at the source, but to me the only interesting part was this:

People can easily pronounce the plural or possessive of Harris or Walz, both of which contain epenthetic schwas, Ms. Holliday said. When a word ends in an S or Z sound, we insert a schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet — to break up a block of consonants.

So, like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who discovered that he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, I now realize that I've been using epenthetic schwas all my life! 

[epenthetic = inserted into a word].

See also Any vowel can become a schwa (2020)

Why Trump wants Joe Biden back

I've set it to start after the first minute of silliness.  For the TLDV crowd, if 18 minutes is too long, just use the slider to hear the 11:28 - 13:00 segment.  I'll close comments for this; I don't have time today to be curating arguments.

Stories to make your day a little happier

Selections from a group of 49 "Uplifting Posts That Will Put A Smile On Your Face" at Izismile.

Swifties4Kamala

“I feel like us US Swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous Project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down to the polls in November,” the 22-year-old posted to his 70,000 followers. He added a sobbing emoji. “Like if we don’t want democracy to end we really need to move and push blue votes.”

Fourteen thousand likes later, the coalition Swifties4Kamala was born. Dozens of people signed up to help and run accounts on X, Instagram and TikTok, as well as strategize activities and communications. Within three weeks, Swifties4Kamala amassed more than 180,000 followers across its social media platforms...

Long dismissed as unserious, in part because it has long been thought of as the domain of women and young people, fandom is now a potent political force in the 2024 elections – an election in which young women and LGBTQ+ people are expected to vote, rally and otherwise participate in politics at historic levels...

Memorably, the first fandom to seize on Harris’s candidacy was not the Swifties, but the Angels, fans of the singer Charli xcx. Hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, Charli xcx tweeted: “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her album Brat and its brash party-girl aesthetic. The internet was immediately awash with green-tinted supercuts of Harris – the Brat album’s signature color – while CNN reporters tried to decode the meaning of “brat” for less online audiences at home...

In 2022, after Swift urged her millions of Instagram followers to vote, Vote.org recorded more than 35,000 voter registrations. Ticketmaster’s botched rollout of the Eras tour led to a 2023 Senate hearing. Swift’s endorsement is one of the coveted prizes in the 2024 election; although she has not said anything about this year, the odds are not looking good for Donald Trump and JD Vance. Not only did Swift endorse Democrats in 2018 and 2020, but she is also probably the world’s most famous “childless cat lady”...

Image cropped for size from the original at The Guardian (credit Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

Iconic photo from the 2024 Olympics

Podium worship by Elsa Garrison (400mm, 1/250th sec, f/3.5, iso 2500)

“To me what makes this picture special is that it embodies the Olympic spirit: athletes supporting and celebrating each other. Throughout the week I had been following Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, the American gymnasts, on social media and in their interviews. They had been singing the praises of the Brazilian gymnast, Rebeca Andrade, so I had a feeling that if Andrade were on the podium they would do something special. My colleagues were photographing the ceremony down on the ‘field of play’, so I went up to the lower bowl and found a spot that was as close to head-on as possible. I chose the lower bowl so that I could still see their faces, but I was also high enough to get a clean background.”

From a gallery of interesting Olympic photos at The Guardian.

That's not a mule

"Hannah Huckabay regularly combs livestock auctions online for horses she can rehabilitate and train at her Colorado ranch. But when she saw a video in February of a mule for sale in Kansas, she could hardly believe what she was seeing.

The stocky animal’s short black mane shot straight up like a mohawk, and its white belly stood out against its tan coat. As it nervously paced in its corral, Huckabay said it bore a striking resemblance to Przewalski’s horse, a critically endangered species she’d learned about while studying equine science.

“I was like, ‘There is no way. That is not a mule,’” Huckabay recalled thinking. “That’s a purebred Przewalski.”

Such a find would be incredibly rare. Once extinct in the wild, around 2,500 Przewalski’s horses remained worldwide as of 2022. They’re native to Mongolia and in June, seven were reintroduced to nearby Kazakhstan as part of an effort to return them to their natural habitats. They are the only truly wild horse remaining (mustangs are feral horses).

But scientists say Huckabay’s hunch appears to be correct. Hair samples from the animal Huckabay purchased — along with a second horse recently surrendered at a Utah sanctuary — were sent to Texas A&M University’s animal genetics lab. Both appear to be Przewalski’s horses, said Rytis Juras, the genetics lab’s director who tested both samples..."

The story continues at The Washington Post.  Image cropped for emphasis from the original (credit Kinsey Huckabay)

Homo Naledi

This video is concise (12 minutes), informative, and presented in a professional manner.  New information for me and perhaps some readers - definitely worth a view if the history of modern humans is of interest to you.  A tip of the blogging cap to my cousin Otrastan for sending it to me.

The poems of Shel Silverstein

This week I reread a book I first encountered about 40 years ago - Don't Bump the Glump, by Shel Silverstein. Above are some sample pages.

I was disappointed to discover that I had totally misremembered my favorite creature. It really ought to be a Quick-Digesting Geeth. That's what I'm going to continue to use if/when I recite the poem for anyone.

Reposted from 2009 because it has been buried too deeply in the archives.

How do you slice a pie... chart?

I have never seen a pie chart sliced like this one (describing the sexual and racial composition of the American population).  I don't see any advantage over radial wedges, unless its to enable placement of the segment labels within the diagram, and I find it hard to compare the size of irregular polyhedrons.

A quick search led me to "11 pie chart alternatives and when to use them," which didn't include this pattern exactly, unless its a type of Voronai diagram.

Posting this because the readership here has a huge range of knowledge and skills, so perhaps someone can offer an informed comment.

If nothing else, the search at least led me to this old Dilbert cartoon:

Interesting rock from Lake Michigan

Image cropped for size from the original found at the whatsthisrock subreddit, where the top comment on the thread describes it as "crinoid stem hash, with some bivalve cross sections thrown in."

Hans Rosling explained world economic trends back in 2006

I'm sure I originally posted this many many years ago, but I can't find that post now, and it's worth calling it to readers' attentions again.  Sadly, Rosling has died, and his lectures on this subject are unappreciated.

Here is a later version focused on the subject of world population:

These are two of the finest lectures I've ever heard.  And during 30 years in universities, I've heard thousands of lectures.

World population growth rate is declining

"...world history can be divided into three periods marked by distinct trends in population growth. The first period (pre-modernity) was a very long age of very slow population growth. The second period, beginning with the onset of modernity (with rising standards of living and improving health) and lasting until 1962, had an increasing rate of growth. Now that period is over, and the third part of the story has begun; the population growth rate is falling and will likely continue to fall, leading to an end of growth towards the end of this century."

Most people don't understand this.   I have presented this concept several times using the outstanding lectures of Hans Rosling.

LOTS more relevant charts at the OurWorldInData website.

Reposted from 2016.