Month: March 2017

Today’s Google Doodle

March 31, 2017 • 3:30 pm

I’m told by reader Kevin that this is today’s Google Doodle in the US, though it’s already a day later in New Zealand (expect lots of April Fool’s jokes tomorrow in the US). It highlights diversity, and is the winner of a contest:

Google describes it this way:

Nine years in, the U.S. Doodle 4 Google Contest draws thousands of creative submissions from talented young artists across the country. Roughly 140,000 participants answered this year’s prompt, “What I see for the future.” Some imagined a future with modernized homes, others dreamed of a planet without endangered animals, while some saw a compassionate world built around communal harmony.

Five incredibly talented national finalists spent the day at Google HQ in Mountain View, California. Of those five masterpieces, Connecticut 10th grader Sarah Harrison’s Doodle, “A Peaceful Future” was chosen as the national winner! Today, millions in the U.S. can enjoy her masterpeice on the Google homepage.

Sarah says, “My future is a world where we can all learn to love each other despite our religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality. I dream of a future where everyone is safe and accepted wherever they go, whoever they are.”

Of course the diversity is only of ethnicity, religion, and whether or not you’re handicapped; what’s ignored is diversity of class and of ideas.

It’s a nice thought that we can all live in harmony, but I have mixed feelings about it, and shared Kevin’s reaction when I saw the different religions highlighted:

I think it misses the mark: religious diversity is unlikely to maintain peace, especially in the long run.  (Maybe it’s an early April Fool’s joke 🙂

And must the Muslim woman also wear the hijab of oppression when she already has a Muslim symbol on her tee shirt?

And where’s the tee shirt with a donkey for a Democrat and one with an elephant for a Republican? Now there’s a harmony greatly to be desired (and also one impossible to achieve).

I guess I’m just becoming a curmudgeon of the “get off my lawn” stripe.

p.s What does the “e =” symbol mean?

p.p.s. I just noticed that the “disabled” and “old” people are, literally, marginalized. And really, that person is supposed to be old? Shoved behind the others, he’s clearly showing ageism on the part of the artist, especially since everyone else looks to be about 18.

Other readers who sent me this had other reactions, most of them somewhat critical. Please add your take below.

An artist made a bust of Cristiano Ronaldo, and you won’t believe what happened next!

March 31, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Yes, that’s a clickbait headline, but a bust that Portuguese artist Emanuel Santos made of his famous soccer-star countryman, Cristiano Ronaldo, didn’t turn out so well. As the Guardian reports:

The sculptor who made the bronze bust of Cristiano Ronaldo has admitted that his creation may not be to everybody’s taste but insisted the Real Madrid striker had given his seal of approval before it was unveiled.

Emanuel Santos, a Madeiran artist, was chosen to recreate the image of the four-time Fifa player of the year which will adorn the newly named Aeroporto Cristiano Ronaldo in Funchal after offering his services to the owner of the airport, where he was previously employed. Santos spent three weeks creating the bust before it was sent to the Portuguese mainland to be cast in bronze.

It was then unveiled on Wednesday by Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and will be on permanently on show outside the terminal entrance. But while social media users delighted in pointing out that rather than looking like the 32-year-old Real Madrid forward the bust was a closer resemblance to the former Republic of Ireland striker Niall Quinn, Santos insisted he was happy with his creation.

“It is impossible to please the Greeks and Trojans. Neither did Jesus please everyone,” he said. “This is a matter of taste, so it is not as simple as it seems. What matters is the impact that this work generated. There is always the possibility of making a difference, I was prepared for all this. I used as a base some photos of Cristiano Ronaldo that I found on the internet, nothing specific. I put the photos next to me and started working on the bust.”

No, some things are not just a “matter of taste.” Some things are simply horrible art!

OY! Photo: AFP
Photo: Reuters

Here’s former Republic of Ireland captain Niall Quinn, who looks a lot more like the bust:

A couple of tweets:

And do you remember this one?

https://twitter.com/jonkudelka/status/847237558513803264

Denver Zoo hatches kea chick

March 31, 2017 • 1:17 pm

A Colorado news station announced the successful hatching of a single kea chick (Nestor notabilis), although four eggs were produced. (I wrote about my own sighting of a kea in the “wild” here. )

You can see the report by clicking on the screenshot below, which takes you to a video and to this information (I like the headline):

This [the station doesn’t don’t say what; perhaps artificial insemination] resulted in four eggs, and while zookeepers tried to let the proud parents rear the eggs themselves, they ended up breaking two of them – forcing the zoo to step in and incubate them artificially.

Of those two, only one chick hatched – and that chick is Scarlet. She’ll get to meet her parents when she gets a little bit older, but right now, she’s being hand-raised by zookeepers.

Kea are found mostly in the mountains of the south island of New Zealand. Adults can grow 19 inches long and weigh about two pounds.

Here’s Scarlett. She needs a mate!

Here’s Scarlet being fed (all photos Courtesy Denver Zoo). She’s one of only 38 kea chicks reared in captivity:

And here’s the sister species of the kea: the New Zealand kākā (Nestor meridionalis), which I saw yesterday, and very close up (on our lunch table, and everybody else’s). More pictures tomorrow!

A public university is preparing to throw a massive natural history collection away to make more room for the track team

March 31, 2017 • 12:25 pm

by Greg Mayer

In a Washington Post piece by Sarah Kaplan, I learned of the following disaster– read this tweet, by John Overholt of Harvard University, and weep.

https://twitter.com/john_overholt/status/846888723241488385/photo/1

And this gem of administrative reasoning is from the Post article:

ULM Vice President for Academic Affairs Eric Pani told a local paper, the News Star, that the university can no longer afford to keep the collection…  now that running facilities are being updated to meet national track and field standards, there’s nowhere else for the specimens to go, he said.

“Unfortunately, the fiscal situation facing the university over the years requires us to make choices like this,” Pani said.

As Jerry and I have argued before, in our defense of science at the Field Museum in Chicago, natural history museums are key parts of the scientific enterprise, and their collections are irreplaceable documents of, among other things, biodiversity across space and time, and an essential resource for the conservation of biodiversity. In the present case, it’s not that the role of science in the museum is to be diminished, as was the case at the Field Museum; rather, it is to destroy the collection altogether! The public exhibit part of the Museum of Natural Museum, is to be maintained, and I’m not sure if they will be firing the curators, but the collections are to go, and that’s the only part of a museum that is literally irreplaceable– not that scientific curatorship and education aren’t vital, but both can be reconstituted as long as the collection is ‘mothballed’.

It might be argued that since it’s ‘just’ a regionally focused collection, it’s not that important, but state and local museums are often repositories for the most comprehensive and useful collections, especially for conservation efforts (which in the U.S. often have a state focus). And there are millions of specimens in the collection!

The action of the ULM administration is a striking illustration of the deep currents of anti-intellectual philistinism coursing through American higher education, especially among university administrators, who increasingly are divorced from teaching and scholarship– a managerial class obtaining their degrees in ‘leadership’, and forced upon universities by boards and legislators who think higher education should be run more like a ‘business’. (I am wont to point out, when confronted by such arguments for business-like governance by people who usually have a high regard for the military, that the captain of an aircraft carrier is always a pilot who has come up through an air wing, and not someone trained only in management.)

A hashtag, #ULMcollections, has been created to further discussion and dissemination of knowledge about this unconscionable plan. I urge readers, especially those in Louisiana, to contact officials, their representatives, and the university, although you might want to be a bit more temperate than I’ve been here.

h/t N. Taft

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 31, 2017 • 6:30 am

by Grania

TGIF.

Today is the birthday of Ewan McGregor (1971), the man who squicked the world when he took a headlong dive into the worst toilet in Scotland in Trainspotting.

 

A man who managed to surprise the world in an entirely different way is another birthday boy Christopher Walken (1943) when he chose to accent a career playing flint-eyed, menacing antagonists by dad-dancing his way through Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice and coming out the other side even cooler. The secret to the best dancing is not caring that people are going to see you.

Today is the day Netscape’s open source Mozilla debuted in 1998, the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 and Luna 10 was launched in 1966.

It’s also World Backup Day. You know what to do. Don’t forget your phone!

From Poland Hili is a little bit annoyed as it appears that the birds are not cooperative.

Hili: Sparrows have no sense of humor.
A: Why do you think so?
Hili: I was just joking but it got away.

In Polish:

Hili: Wróble nie mają poczucia humoru.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Ja tylko żartowałam, a on od razu uciekł.

As a lagniappe, here is a cautionary tale of what happens if you dare to get between a tiny kitten and its food.

Click the white arrow, and don’t forget to turn up the sound on the movie.

Philomena on “Moments of Wonder”

March 30, 2017 • 3:00 pm

Philomena Cunk presents a new “Moments of Wonder,” the subject being “Charity”. Reader Michael sent this, alone with a note:

This video was made for Comic Relief day last week in the UK [AKA Red Nose Day]
Unfortunately Cunk’s writers have fallen for the Mother Teresa myth, but other than that a reasonable stab. I’m not sure how well this sketch travels due to the Brit references throughout – the best one being @ 2:11 – red noses in the Groucho Club toilets [the club is a hangout for cocaine-sniffing rock stars, media ‘luvvies’ & C list celebs]
The best part is her interview with “Charity Man”:

The saga of NASA’s grant to theologians continues, with NASA violating the Constitution and its employees apparently behaving illegally

March 30, 2017 • 1:44 pm

If this doesn’t get me another Discovery Institute “Censor of the Year” award, I don’t know what will, for, as far as I remember, I discovered this bit of information. But the Freedom from Religion Foundation should be the real recipient, as it’s done every bit of the legwork and heavy lifting. The issue involves an illegal and unethical entanglement of the US government with Christian theology.

I discovered (and can’t remember where) that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, along with the John Templeton Foundation, awarded a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) to study the social (read: theological) implications of extraterrestrial life. Of course we haven’t yet found any such life, but theologians need work to justify their existence, and what better way to keep them off the streets than to let them ponder the issue of what aliens would do if they encountered Jesus?

I reported what I found to the FFRF, adding on this site that I considered it unconstitutional for the US government to spend taxpayers’ money to fund an essentially Christian endeavor (the grant’s theologian recipients were nearly all Christians).

The FFRF then went to town, filing many requests under the Freedom of Information Act, with NASA stonewalling them all the way—refusing to give out information about how the grant was awarded or to divulge internal emails.  This raised suspicions that NASA had something to hide. It turns out (see below) that that seems to be the case.

More and more information eventually emerged. I reported on the continuing efforts on this site: you can get the background  here, here, here, and here

In June of last year, the FFRF asked NASA to withdraw its grant from the CTI, and renewed that request in August. No dice, of course.

Today the FFRF issued a press release about what it found, “FFRF protests large NASA grant used for religious purposes.” Looking through hundreds of pages of documents, FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel found two things. First, NASA Technical Officer Mary Voytek, the official managing the grant application, appear to have had a questionable and likely unethical relationship with CTI director William Storrer, with Voytek accepting trips and gifts from CTI while the grant was being considered—before it was even given!   Second, the grant, as all of us suspected, violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against government promoting a particular religion, in this case Christianity.

Here’s the summary emailed to me by Andrew Seidel, much of which is in the FFRF announcment. I quote his email with permission:

After combing through the NASA records we discovered two things that are laid out in the two attached letters.
First, the grant was definitely unconstitutional. They hired eleven theologians with the money and one actual scientist. That wouldn’t be problematic if they were doing secular work, but they weren’t. The work proposed for the grant included:

·      formulating a “Christian response” to scientific studies on morality,
·      developing a new model of biblical interpretation,
·      relating themes from First Corinthians, a book in the Christian bible, to astrobiology,
·      the author of Christian Ethics applying those ethics to astrobiology,
·      reconciling a potential astrobiology discovery with Christian theology,
·      looking at how astrobiology would affect the Christian doctrine of redemption,
·      examining Christian ethics and Christian doctrines of human obligation,
·      looking at societal implications of astrobiology with “theological ethics,”
·      and writing a monograph on Christian forgiveness.

In short, NASA was paying for Christian apologetics.
Second, Mary Voytek [the NASA official in charge of awarding the grant] has a questionable and likely unethical relationship with William Storrar, the head of CTI. It looks like she was accepting gifts from Storrar and CTI when she was considering and managing their grant request and grant. If so, that violates federal law.
Also, we are doing another FOIA request going back to 2014 to determine the extent of the Voytek-Storrar relationship.

. . . We’re sending two letters. One that renews the state-church issues, which Voytek “investigated” and responded to previously. We’re asking for another investigation done by a competent, uninterested party. The second is to a few people in various offices that oversee ethics issues. They’ll have to investigate the issue once they get the letter.

You can read both of  those letters as links in the FFRF press release, which adds these details:

“We are informing NASA that it cannot constitutionally fund theology,” Seidel writes to NASA Astrobiology Institute Director Penelope Boston 
in his recent letter. “The Supreme Court has explicitly held that refusing to fund scholarships for theology is not religious discrimination under the First Amendment.”

Then there is the questionable relationship between Voytek and Storrar. While administering the first grant but prior to approving the supplemental grant to the Center, Voytek participated in a panel at a 2015 Center of Theological Inquiry conference in the United Kingdom. Emails reveal that the Center arranged for Voytek’s travel to and from this event. In another email sent during the same period, Voytek talks about a 2014 invitation for a trip to Florida to meet the Center’s board members and thanks Storrar for his “thoughtful gifts.” The records do not reveal the nature of these “thoughtful gifts.”

Employees of the executive branch of the United States of America “may not . . . accept a gift from a prohibited source,” according to federal law. A prohibited source includes any person who:

  • “does business or seeks to business with the employee’s agency.”

  • “is seeking official action by the employee’s agency,” or

  • “has interests that may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance 
of the employee’s official duties.”

The Center of Theological Inquiry is or was a prohibited source under each of these definitions. None of these gifts or the travel was disclosed, as required by law.

FFRF requests an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between Mary Voytek and William Storrar and a complete review of the grants awarded to the Center, including a determination as to whether the awards violated the Constitution by providing funds to a religious institution for research with a religious purpose and effect.

Remember, this is the pre-Trump NASA; and what it did, according to the FFRF and my own review of the documents, was to simply funnel taxpayer money into a dumb religious project, violating the Constitution. Voytek’s behavior, apparently schmoozing with the grant requestor and taking gifts from them before the grant was awarded, and then failing to report these gifts and trips to the government, seems to be blatantly illegal. She should resign.

Well, it’s a new administration now, and we’ll see what happens, but NASA should be ashamed of itself. Their money should be used for space exploration and the like, not theology! What an embarrassment!