Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s Sunday, and we have a themed batch of bird photos from John Avise. John’s IDs and commentary is indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them:
Derisible Bird Names
Birders are often ridiculed as nincompoops who go to great lengths to spot Bristle-thighed Curlews, Great Tits, or Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. Such derision is not entirely without merit, as many birders are indeed quite fanatical and many avian species do have rather laughable names. Several such birds comprise this Sunday’s wildlife theme. So, chuckle along as I picture about a dozen birds with particularly odd English names. The Tits were photographed in Europe, the Kookaburra in Australia, the Boobies in Ecuador, the Curlews in Hawaii, the Bananaquit in Brazil, and the other species in North America. If you don’t find these official Common Names to be amusing, don’t blame me—I’m just the messenger. And, no doubt some of you can think of several other examples of odd or funny avian monikers.
Welcome to Sunday, January 30, 2022: National Croissant Day, a tasty form of cultural appropriation. Here’s the best croissant I ever had in Paris (and it won a prize). It’s from the bakery Maison d’Isabelle in the Sixth, only a five-minute walk from my hotel. No butter or jam needed, and you get them hot from the oven!
*Book-banning has been on this site fairly regularly, and I oppose all of it, though I do think that certain material should best be given to children when they are older. But under NO circumstances should books be removed from school libraries. In a stirring op-ed in the NYT, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author By Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how a violent and disturbing book, Larry Heinemann’s 1974 novel, “Close Quarters,” changed his life, for he discovered that the “damning material” that upset him was really a powerful indictment of the transformational effect of war on soldiers. And then he wrote a prize-winning book about the same theme. An excerpt (h/t Merilee):
. . . Those seeking to ban books argue that these stories and ideas can be dangerous to young minds — like mine, I suppose, when I picked up Mr. Heinemann’s novel.
But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.
Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics. Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been banned at various points because of Twain’s prolific use of a racial slur, among other things. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” has been banned before and is being threatened again — in one case after a mother complained that the book gave her son nightmares. To be sure, “Beloved” is an upsetting novel. It depicts infanticide, rape, bestiality, torture and lynching. But coming amid a movement to oppose critical race theory — or rather a caricature of critical race theory — it seems clear that the latest attempts to suppress this masterpiece of American literature are less about its graphic depictions of atrocity than about the book’s insistence that we confront the brutality of slavery.
Here’s the thing: If we oppose banning some books, we should oppose banning any book. If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging — and even hateful or problematic — ideas, then something must be fixed in our society. Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.
. . . Banning is an act of fear — the fear of dangerous and contagious ideas. The best, and perhaps most dangerous, books deliver these ideas in something just as troubling and infectious: a good story.
Singer Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in asking for her music to be removed from Spotify over Covid misinformation concerns.
“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” the Canadian singer said in a post on her official website.
On Monday, Young said the streaming platform must choose either him, or the podcaster Joe Rogan.
Rogan has been accused of spreading false information about Covid.
In her message on Friday, Mitchell, whose hits include Big Yellow Taxi, said she stands in solidarity with the Canadian-American singer, Neil Young, and with the “global scientific and medical communities”.
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have been friends for many years, and are both survivors of polio. They both contracted the disease in the early 1950s, not long before a vaccine became available.
Unlike Young, Mitchell did not specifically name Mr Rogan in her post.
Is this “censoring”? In some ways, yes, but in some ways no. One could see it as just refusal to participate on a platform that promotes medically dangerous advice, but then Young could have just quite like Joni did, and not give Spotify a choice.
*You can do this! A new report in the JAMA Internal Medicine, covered by the New York Times, shows that people in general can derive a substantial benefit from even ten minutes of extra activity a day, including brisk walking.
Suppose, the researchers asked, everyone who was capable of exercising began exercising moderately, such as by walking briskly, for an extra 10 minutes per day, on top of how much or little they currently worked out? How many deaths might not happen?
The researchers made adjustments to account statistically for those people who were too frail or otherwise unable to walk or easily move around. They also considered age, education, smoking status, diet, body mass index and other health factors in their calculations.
Then, the researchers ran the same statistical scenario with everyone working out for an extra 20 minutes a day and, finally, for an extra 30 minutes a day and checked the mortality outcomes.
Quite a few people would live longer in any of those scenarios, they found. According to the modeling, if every capable adult walked briskly or otherwise exercised for an additional 10 minutes a day, 111,174 deaths annually across the country — or about 7 percent of all deaths in a typical year — might be avoided.
When they doubled the imagined exercise time to an extra 20 minutes a day, the number of potentially averted deaths rose to 209,459. Tripling the exercise to 30 extra minutes a day averted 272,297 deaths, or almost 17 percent of typical annual totals. (The data was gathered before the pandemic, which has skewed mortality numbers.)
My own regimen includes 30 minutes of brisk walking per day, though I sometimes miss a day or two a week. If you break exercise down into these smallish segments, it doesn’t seem as daunting. But I long for the days when I could do a complete circuit around Hyde Park on the run (6.5 miles).
*From his latest show, here’s Bill Maher on how the Democratic Party has shifted a lot farther Left:
And good news from Darwin’s birthplace, Shrewsbury. He’s not canceled everywhere (h/t Malcolm):
They then all committed seppuku. Here’s a print on their journey home after the attack, with the caption: “The rōnin, on their way back to Sengaku-ji, are halted in the street, and invited in for rest and refreshment.” That invitations doesn’t look friendly!
1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself.
1847 – Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California.
1908 – Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is released from prison by Jan C. Smuts after being tried and sentenced to two months in jail earlier in the month.
1933 – Adolf Hitler’s rise to power: Hitler takes office as the Chancellor of Germany.
Here’s one minute of video from that performance from Peter Jackson’s new documentary, “Get Back”, which I haven’t yet seen.
1982 – Richard Skrenta writes the first PC virus code, which is 400 lines long and disguised as an Apple boot program called “Elk Cloner”.
Notables born on this day include:
1882 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, American lawyer and statesman, 32nd President of the United States (d. 1945)
Here are the braces Roosevelt had to wear in public to hide the fact that his legs were largely paralyzed from polio. Photographed in Warm Springs, Georgia, January, 2013:
1911 – Roy Eldridge, American jazz trumpet player (d. 1989)
One of my favorite jazz solos of all time. Eldridge’s nickname was “Little Jazz” (he was altitudinally challenged), and as you’ll hear he was a fantastic trumpeter. The song is “Rockin’ Chair” by Hoagy Carmichael, played by Eldridge with Gene Krupa’s band. Don’t pass this song over if you like jazz.
1912 – Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian and author (d. 1989)
Redgrave won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Can you name the film?
1937 – Boris Spassky, Russian chess player and theoretician
1941 – Dick Cheney, American businessman and politician, 46th Vice President of the United States, 17th US Secretary of Defense
1951 – Phil Collins, English drummer, singer-songwriter, producer, and actor
My favorite Phil Collins song. He was a drummer, and I always wondered how hard it would be to drum and sing at the same time. Well, he apparently didn’t drum on this single. But Levon Helm did it all the time for The Band!
Those who took their leave of Earth January 30 include:
1836 – Betsy Ross, American seamstress, said to have designed the American Flag (b. 1752)
From Ginger K., a guy who’s having a horrible day:
Candidate with 12 voters in family breaks down after getting only 1 vote in Gujarat gram panchayat elections https://t.co/ci7GNm0gZ2
— former fetus 4 choice is tired, so very tired. (@godfree_kd) January 21, 2022
Tweets from Matthew. I wonder how the guy finds these people. See more of his photos here.
Canadian photographer Francois Brunell searches and photographs similar people, but who are not related to each other. He has currently photographed about 200 doppelgangers! pic.twitter.com/OBcNnvnyIr
Weird sexual dimorphisms. But the weirdest one is the second photo, featuring scale insects (“true bugs” in the order Hemiptera), which have males that are completely different from females. You may have females on your house plants. Males have wings and often can fly, while females remain larval-like:
From Wikipedia:
Adult females typically have soft bodies and no limbs, and are concealed underneath domed scales, extruding quantities of wax for protection. Some species are hermaphroditic, with a combined ovotestis instead of separate ovaries and testes. Males, in the species where they occur, have legs and sometimes wings, and resemble small flies.
These incidents are becoming so common that they’re like the old “dog bites man” stories. In fact, when a school decides not to cancel a controversial book or remove it from a library or a reading list, that becomes a “man bites dog” story.
This book is in the former genre, as reported by Kirkus Reviews (click on screenshots). . .
. . and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
We learn from this that Toni Morrison’s first novel (1970), The Bluest Eye, hasn’t just been taken off school reading lists, but actually removed from a school library. Since the book (which I read and liked, but didn’t see as a classic) deals with childhood rape and abuse, clearly you shouldn’t ask elementary school kids to read it but removing it from a high school library is a different thing altogether. That is a form of censorship:
From the SLPD:
A national campaign to ban books with themes dealing with race and gender scored a victory Thursday when the Wentzville School Board voted 4-3 to pull “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison from the district’s high school libraries.
The board rejected the recommendation of a review committee of district staff and residents who said banning the book “would infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature.” The book is not part of the district curriculum.
Across the country, the push to restrict teaching about race and gender equity includes library books that conservative parents and lawmakers say are divisive and serve to indoctrinate students with a leftist ideology.
“The Bluest Eye” tells the story of a young Black girl growing up during the Great Depression who longs for blue eyes because she feels ugly and oppressed because of her skin color. Morrison, who died in 2019, said she wrote the book in the late 1960s to show the psychological damage caused by racism.
The novel, which includes passages about incest and child rape, frequently lands on the American Library Association’s annual list of most commonly banned books.
Wentzville School Board member Sandy Garber said she did not consider her vote against “The Bluest Eye” equivalent to banning but protecting children from obscenity.
That is a distinction without a difference. You can ban books as a way OF protecting people, and that’s what’s going on here. But it’s useless, especially for the intended targets. Obscenity, for instance, will be familiar to every kid with ears and an understanding of language. Note, too, that the book is being banned from high school libraries; that is, made inaccessible to kids between the ages of about 15-18. I suspect those students don’t need “protection” from their parents, no matter how laudable the motives.
But wait! There’s more:
“By all means, go buy the book for your child,” she said at the board meeting. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.”
Amber Crawford, a Wentzville parent who filed the challenge against “The Bluest Eye,” posted advice for challenges in other districts to the St. Charles County Parents Association’s Facebook group, including links to excerpts so they won’t have to read “the whole garbage book.”
At least two conservative groups with chapters in Missouri — Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education — have led the campaign against diversity and equity initiatives in schools.
No Left Turn in Education features more than 75 books on its website that it deems inappropriate because they “demean our nation and its heroes, revise our history, and divide us as a people for the purpose of indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology.” Nearly every book on the list features either Black or LGBTQ characters.
What are they protecting kids from here? Books about discrimination? Do they want to pretend it doesn’t exist? Not all books are getting banned, though: the article has one or two heartening tales of someone actually defending controversial work! But, by and large, censorship is not only rife, but increasing. And in this state, it’s largely by the Right:
While the book ban in Wentzville is unique in the St. Louis area, several other local school districts have encountered recent challenges to library books. Last month, the Lindbergh School Board voted to keep “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe in the high school library, and a review committee in the Rockwood School District rejected similar challenges to “Gender Queer” and five other books.
After a challenge to the memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” the Francis Howell School District’s review committee voted 11 to 1 in November to keep the book in school libraries because it “shared a positive message of hope for individuals in society.”
Local school districts have rules allowing parents to restrict their children’s library privileges based on individual books, authors or themes. The policies for book challenges are similar, involving a review committee and subsequent vote by the school board.
The challenges are related to proposed bills in Missouri and dozens of other states that would restrict the teaching of critical race theory and other “divisive” topics on race and gender, said Heather Fleming, founder of the Missouri Equity Education Partnership and a Francis Howell parent.
“The whole point and purpose of this is to have a chilling effect on equity and equity education in our schools,” Fleming said. “We know this is about a story about a Black woman instead of scenes that are too mature, because we’re not banning Shakespeare.”
I’m not in favor of bills restricting teaching CRT, and i’m certainly not in favor of telling your kids, if they’re of an appropriate age, what they can and cannot read. I can’t remember my parents ever telling me that I couldn’t read any book, and I was a voracious reader who chose my own books.
The kicker is this: the same school district that banned Toni Morrison’s book also banned, at the same time, three other books. From Kirkus (I’ve added links to the books):
The other three books removed by the board have also seen their share of bans as well. All Boys Aren’t Blue has been taken off library shelves in multiple states, and Heavy, a Kirkus Prize finalist in 2018, was recently banned by a Kansas school district.Fun Homehas been a frequent target of censors; it made the ALA’s top 10 banned books list in 2015.
Now of course I don’t favor indoctrinating kids by giving them an entire diet of Woke books about “identities”, for to me that’s propaganda rather than learning. But surely there’s room for children to hear that there are people in the world who are different from them, and who face their own brand of troubles. And of course they must discuss them.
And is there ANY valid reason to remove books from a high-school library if they are not simply deaccessioning books due to space limitation?
When I was thinking of a list of “identity” books that I would definitely assign to high school students, especially in Chicago (because it takes place here), it would definitely include Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which was both a bestseller and remains a classic not just of black literature, but of American literature. Surely, I thought, as it’s about the friction between blacks and whites, and neither a book about CRT nor even a valorization of blacks, but simply a graphic portrayal of the racism ubiquitous in America at the time, it couldn’t possibly be ban-able. I was wrong. I looked on Wikipedia and saw this about Wright’s book:
The novel has endured a series of challenges in public high schools and libraries all over the United States. Many of these challenges focus on the book’s being “sexually graphic,” “unnecessarily violent,”and “profane.” Despite complaints from parents, many schools have successfully fought to keep Wright’s work in the classroom. Some teachers believe the themes in Native Son and other challenged books “foster dialogue and discussion in the classroom” and “guide students into the reality of the complex adult and social world.” Native Son is number 27 on Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels List.
The book is number 71 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000. The Modern Library placed it number 20 on its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century. Time Magazine also included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
So it goes. You might find solace in these musings of Stephen King:
Not long ago, I reviewed for the Washington PostKathryn Paige Harden’s newish book on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of human traits and how we can use the results to bring about social change. Click on the screenshot to read my take, or request a pdf:
Harden wrote the book with a social purpose that. she thought, could be implemented through the new technique of GWAS. I explain the method in my review, and so won’t reiterate it here, but it aims to identify many regions of the human genome responsible for genetic variation in a chosen human trait in one population. The trait she concentrates on is “educational attainment” (years of schooling), which is highly correlated with nearly every measure of “success” that you can think of—particularly wealth and income. And indeed, Harden, summarizing previous work, points out that over 1200 regions of the DNA can affect the value of this trait.
What this means is that even in a newborn child, you can predict how well a child will succeed. The predictability isn’t anywhere close to 100%, but still you can “rank” children by their GWAS scores in their likelihood of “success.”
Now this sounds like a hereditarian nightmare, with the possibility of ranking people as Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World: alphas at the top and the useless epsilons at the bottom. But although Harden is a hereditarian, her aims are not stratification or ranking, but equity. Her view is that once we know the genes responsible for academic achievement, we can use that information to help achieve equity in academic achievement.
And that’s where the big problem lies in her book: she couldn’t propose a good a way to use this information to achieve “equity”. While her description of the genetic work in the book’s first half is excellent, the remedies she proposes in the second just aren’t there. In fact, I can’t see myself how to use this kind of genetic information to promote academic success. Suppose you know from genotyping an infant that that kid has an expected chance of graduating from high school that’s only 80% of the average value. What do you do with that information? Start tutoring the kid as soon as possible? Give more money to schools to boost everyone (this hasn’t worked)? There is no solution that doesn’t involve differential treatment, but Harden doesn’t want that, for it creates classes of “smarter” and “dumber” people, branding them from the outset. It turns out that I wasn’t the only reviewer to spot this problem. And I’d claim that it’s easier to manipulate the school environment than to genotype a gazillion kids. (All genetically-based interventionsmust be tested empirically, anyway.)
But I’m not writing this to reiterate my review, but to bring up some stuff that I had to leave out of my review. So I’ll put below an argument that I thought was important but omitted from that review, both because I was severely limited by space and because a few people who looked at my draft saw this as superfluous. Now I regret not having written what I say here. Bolding below is mine.
These are quotes from my rough draft about Harden’s argument that we need to pay special attention to inequalities based on genetics because they’re a matter of “luck”. I had to omit these bits (indented):
Harden’s motivation for using genetic differences to engineer equality comes from the fact that those differences are a matter of luck: the vagaries of how genes sort themselves out during egg and sperm formation. It’s unfair, she says, to base social justice on randomly distributed genes: “People are in fact more likely to support [wealth] redistribution when they see inequalities as stemming from lucky factors over which people have no control than when they see inequalities as stemming from choice.” [p. 206]
But is there really “choice”? Like many scientists and philosophers, I’m a determinist who rejects the idea of free will—at least the kind that maintains that there is something more to behavior than the inescapable consequences of your genetic and environmental history as well the possible indeterminate (quantum) laws of nature. In this pervasive view, at any one moment you could have chosen to do something other than what you did.
But there’s no evidence for this kind of free will, which would defy the laws of physics by enabling us to mystically control the workings of our neurons. No inequalities stem from “free choice” and so everyone’s life results from factors over which they have no control, be they genetic or environmental.
Harden actually admits this dilemma: “If you think the universe is deterministic, and the existence of free will is incompatible with a deterministic outcome, and free will is an illusion, then genetics doesn’t have anything to add to the conversation. Genetics is just a tiny corner of the universe where we have worked out a little bit of the larger deterministic chain.” [p. 200] And with that statement she pushes her whole program into that tiny corner.
But then Harden adds something like “I’m not going to get into the issue of free will.” By doing that, she punts on the most important issue of her book. Since our lives are completely the uncontrollable results of our genes and our environments, which even a compatibilist will admit, why should we see genes as a matter of “luck” but environment not? The family we’re born into, the people we meet, and all the influences of our lives are a matter of “luck”—and by “luck” I mean “naturalistic factors over which we have no willful control.” It’s not pure “luck” which way a coin falls when you toss it: it’s actually determined by the laws of physics at play when you flip it (velocity, wind currents, and so on). The outcome, like that of our lives, are determined. Or, in some cases, not absolutely determined by the laws of physics (i.e., theoretically predictable if you had perfect knowledge) but are still absolutely produced by the laws of physics, since quantum mechanics, which so far as we know is inherently indeterministic, can affect some circumstances. But, as we know, quantum mechanics cannot support the common notion of free will: “I could have chosen other than I did.”
People will argue about this, but I don’t really want to argue about free will here; I want to make a point about determinism. And that point is this. If you think that your genes, which partly determine your success in life, are the result of “luck” (I guess Harden means by “luck” those factors over which we have no conscious control), then so is everything else that determines your success in life. In other words, as Harden suggests (but then dismisses) the idea that genetic “luck” is somehow physically an morally different from “environmental luck” is a bogus distinction.
And if that be the case, then people’s feeling that you need to be more concerned with fixing geneticinequalities than with fixing environmentally-based inequalities is unfounded.
The point isn’t really how we define “free will”, for all rational people are naturalists, accepting that our wills cannot change the laws of physics that really control our lives. And even if you are one of those rare libertarian free willers—who are largely religious people—I can’t see any rationale for being more concerned with genetically based inequalities than with environmentally based ones. (I note her that “environmental inequalities” can also have a genetic basis, so the distinction isn’t completely clear-cut. For example, we have evidence that there are genetic propensities to choose certain people as your friends, and your friends are immensely important in determining how you turn out.)
I applaud Harden’s motivations; who wouldn’t want to improve everybody’s chance of educational achievement? But by punting on the issue of determinism, it seems to me that Harden undercuts the whole social value of her genetic program. And because she’s a true progressive leftist, she’s more or less forced to evade that issue. But it’s fourth down and 25 yards to a first—what else can you do?
From Cole and Marmalade we hear of Anna Wan, a UK woman who gave up a high pressure job for one of the world’s most pleasureable jobs—a visiting cat nanny. Click on the screenshot to read:
An excerpt:
Anna Wan from the UK decided to trade her work colleagues for cats. And who could blame her? After all, who among us wouldn’t like to give up the rat race to be a feline nanny?
After working in PR and events management for years, she decided her ideal job would be more flexible and allow her to be around cats more and people less.
At 38, she was recently married and settling into life in Wokingham, a town west of London. Now, she was ready to take a chance and start a cat-sitting service called The Feline Nanny.
Her website is at the link, and Wan offers three levels of service, all of which seem reasonable.
Services the Feline Nanny provides range from basic to more extensive, depending on the client’s needs.
A daily health check
Playtime with the cats
Emptying litter boxes
Cuddling with lonely kitties
Replenishing food and water
Taking out the trash and collecting mail
Keeping the home looking lived-in
Wong has her own ginger tabby, which, of course, is named “Garfield”:
Soon after starting her business, Wan found a steady list of clients. To make cats comfortable, she cares for them in their homes and gets to know each cat’s unique needs and personalities.
As cat lovers know, they can become easily stressed in unfamiliar places. Never fear; the Feline Nanny is here so they can relax when their pet parents are on vacation.
Now, many cat owners in the area are relieved to have first-class service from a cat lover with a lifetime of experience. Plus, she’s a member of the National Association for Pet Sitters, has a clean driving record, and is fully insured for pet sitting and associated services.
So if you’re in or near London, and want first-class cat care, you know who to call. This job seems pretty cool to me: you get to interact with a lot of cats and get a lot of exercise going from cat to cat. How many cats? She takes care of as many as twenty cats a day, and has a client list of 150 moggies.
Living the dream!
***************
This is great: a cat with moxie! There isn’t much information about this video, but it doesn’t matter. Turn the sound up to hear the cougar hiss while the housecat remains unfazed:
*****************
Reader Paul called my attention to this site, saying, “This organization is counting all the cats in the Washington, DC area via a number of techniques, including phone apps for the public to use. They use image recognition software to match up photos of the same cat.”
Click on the screenshot to read:
Why are they counting the cats of Washington? The rationale:
This research focused on the cat population network. The cat population in most communities consists of outdoor, owned, and shelter population segments. Many cats move among these segments over the course of their lifetime, often because of human actions (abandonment, adoption, trap-neuter-return, etc.). This dynamic system is the cat population network.
To identify effective strategies for managing this population network, it is necessary to understand the relationships and transitions between these population segments. The DC Cat Count accomplished this task by simultaneously quantifying the outdoor, owned, and shelter population segments in Washington, D.C. and combined these data sets into an integrated network analysis. In doing so, the DC Cat Count developed high-quality population size estimates for each population segment. This is the first project ever to comprehensively estimate population size for all cats in a large urban area using cat counting data and advanced statistical methods.
That link also gives the elaborate methods: camera surveys, shelter counts, and surveys of residents.
They analyzed nearly six million photos, and cats were the most common animal found, with squirrels a close second. Now of course “detections” do not equal “number of animals”, for the same animal could have been detected more than once, or they might have missed some cats.
The camera survey is described here, which has a detailed interactive map of where cameras were placed and cats were spotted (n.b. this is not to be mistaken for the locations where cats with spots were seen).
So how many cats are there in Washington, D.C.? I couldn’t find an answer!
Have an hour to spare to find some cryptic insects? Today we have a “spot the moths” series from Mark Sturtevant. It has two hidden species, one per photo. I’ve put Mark’s reveals below the fold. Click on the two photos below to enlarge them, and the narrative from Mark is indented.
I rate both pictures as “extraordinarily difficult,” so take your time finding them. I doubt that you’ll find both! This also shows how amazingly cryptic moths can be, and of course they tend to land in places that give them camouflage.
Can your readers find the moths in the two pictures? They are both pretty much in plain view and fairly large. Da Rool, however, must be to please not reveal the locations so that other readers can have a go. Have at it, people!
JAC: BE SURE TO ENLARGE THE PHOTOS TO THEIR MAXIMUM SIZE (click twice in succession), or you’ll fail miserably.
Photo (and speciesI 2:
Click “continue reading” below for the Big Reveals, but first try to see the moths!
National Carnation Day—also known as Red Carnation Day, or simply as Carnation Day—is set aside to remember President William McKinley, who was born on today’s date, and who was known to be fond of carnations, often wearing one on his lapel.
*Afghanistan under the Taliban is collapsing in nearly every way possible: people are starving, food prices are skyrocketing, women are giving birth to underweight babies who die soon after birth, the economy is shrinking 20% per year, and, of course, the theocracy is still oppressing dissidents and women. People on the street are trying to sell their kidneys and even their children The U.S. has frozen $7 billion in assets, but is still trying to provide aid to the the people and not the government. That’s hard to do, as the Wall Street Journal points out.
“The world should understand that it is not only the Taliban living in Afghanistan. There are hundreds of thousands of innocent people,” said Sahib Khan.
Days earlier, Mr. Khan said he took his daughter, Laila, 3, to a square in central Kabul to sell her to a passerby. He hoped to get $200 to $300 for her, saying that anyone with that sort of money would be able to look after her better than he could. He didn’t find anyone able to pay.
“Who would want to sell their child? Poverty forces me. I need money to get through winter,” said Mr. Khan, who has four other children. “We can’t see any future. Everything is dark.”
There’s only one reason to sell a child in Afghanistan. . .
There are still American citizens stuck in the country, as well as many Afghanis who were promised passage to the U.S. because they helped U.S. troops. I don’t know any solutions, but any should involve the Taliban’s respects for human right. But of course “human rights” and “Islamism” aren’t compatible.
*Has Putin’s gamble to invade Ukraine failed? Yes, says Yulia Latynina (an expert in Russian politics), in a NYT op-ed. That’s because, Latynina claims, the bare-chested Russian has got himself into an untenable situation:
Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship. What happens next is unknown. But one thing is clear: Mr. Putin’s gamble has failed.
I don’t necessarily agree. What “armed conflict” will Putin face beyond fighting the Ukrainian military? For sure NATO members are not going to go to war with Russia. They can supply arms, but that’s about it. Also for sure, the Russian Army can ride roughshod over the Ukrainian military, regardless of the latter’s resolve. bravery, and weapons from NATO. I still think Russia will invade very soon, and I still hope I’m wrong.
The “seminar” was a talk, and the canceled speaker is steamed:
Michael Butler said Monday that he had been scheduled to give a presentation over the weekend before Osceola County teachers on the history of the U.S. civil rights movement since 1896 when he was notified that the seminar was canceled.
No one from school district asked to see the materials he was going to present, and the presentation had no reference to critical race theory, said Butler, a history professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.
“I was shocked. There is a lot that bothers me about this,” Butler said in a phone interview. “I think that critical race theory is so nebulous that, for people who aren’t experts in the field, CRT is becoming a euphemism for Black history, and that is a shame. They aren’t the same.”
See also this report at NBC News. This is why laws banning the teaching of CRT are ludicrous, for they can be manipulated to political ends. Here they canceled what seems to be a worthwhile talk for teachers. In fact, the Left and Right both engage in conflating CRT with “black history”: the former to allow questionable aspects of “real” CRT to be snuck into the classroom, and the latter to ratchet back on teaching black history altogether (see yesterday morning’s post).
*Here’s a prime example of why every university needs to abide by the University of Chicago’s own “Kalven Principle,” barring our school and its constituent units (e.g., departments) from making official statements on politics, ideology or morality. Such statements create a climate that chills speech, making people fearful of opposing “official” views. Now a look at this “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” issued last May by the Asian-American Studies Department at UCLA (a public university). It’s about as rabidly anti-Israel as it comes, and is guaranteed to make those department members who disagree fearful of opposing it. Here’s the most appalling bit:
We condemn the exchange of military tactics and financial support between the United States and Israel, noting how U.S. counterinsurgency techniques and military equipment used during the Vietnam War were then extrapolated to the Occupied Territories; how the Israeli military’s policing of the apartheid wall dividing Jerusalem and isolating the West Bank has influenced the U.S.’s own brutal border security policies along the U.S.-Mexico border; and how Israel has too often upheld its support of Asian and Asian American individuals as proof of multicultural democracy, over and against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine via a process of “yellow-washing.”
Yellow-washing! That’s nearly identical to the accusation by anti-“Zionists” that when Israel mentions its liberal LGBTQ+ policies as evidence of nondiscrimination, anti-Semites say that this is just “pinkwashing.” No matter that in Palestine and other Arab states, you can be killed for being a homosexual. Such is the hypocrisy of the “progressive” Left.
The statement is hateful, untrue (“apartheid wall,” really? It’s there to keep terrorists from coming into Israel and killing Israelis). But the news is that two members of the University of California’s Board of Regents, Jonathan Sures and Sherry Lansing (the studio executive), have called this statement “inappropriate”, with Sures even broachin a Kalven-like possibility:
Sures said during the January 18 meeting regarding the AAS statement: “I don’t think it’s appropriate that people are allowed to use university websites to make political statements. So I’m wondering, are we going to address it? I think it’s wrong. I think it is a violation of policy.” He asked if the regents should look into forming a working group “to define the policy so we know where we stand on this particular issue.” Lansing echoed Sures’ concerns. “We do have a policy on antisemitism… and I think this violates that.”
Regardless, no department of any should be making such statements, whether they’re in favor of Palestine, Israel, Joe Biden, or Black Lives Matter—indeed, anything not relevant to the mission of the University. If you’re an academic, have a look at the Kalven Report and see if it doesn’t make sense.
*I’m constantly re-examining my views on affirmative action (I still favor a restricted form of it, though as the years go by it’s getting harder to justify), and so I read with interest John McWhorter’s views on the issue in his latest NYT column, “No, don’t end it. But for goodness’ sake, yes, time to mend it.” An excerpt, which explains why my view are getting harder to justify:
It’s not that I’m opposed utterly to affirmative action in the university context, admitting some students under different grade and test score standards than other students. I just think affirmative action should address economic disadvantage, not race or gender.
When affirmative action was put into practice around a half-century ago, with legalized segregation so recent, it was reasonable to think of being Black as a shorthand for being disadvantaged, whatever a Black person’s socioeconomic status was. In 1960, around half of Black people were poor. It was unheard-of for big corporations to have Black C.E.O.s; major universities, by and large, didn’t think of Black Americans as professor material; and even though we were only seven years from Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the idea of a Black president seemed like folly.
But things changed: The Black middle class grew considerably, and affirmative action is among the reasons. I think a mature America is now in a position to extend the moral sophistication of affirmative action to disadvantaged people of all races or ethnicities, especially since, as a whole, Black America would still benefit substantially.
The class-based system will still increase the desired racial diversity of universities, but without the invidious accusations of “reverse racism.” And it seems less likely that students will suffer when told “you just got in because you’re poor or faced adversity,” than when told “you just got in because you’re black.”
McWhorter also takes up the argument that we’ll need to maintain affirmative action until there are no more racial inequities. He rejects that for two reasons, but you can read it for yourself.
And they were: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, and Morgan Bulkeley. Bulkeley? He got in because he was President of the National League.
Here’s Lear with the caption: “Lear in 1887, a year before his death. His arm was bent as he was holding his cat, Foss, who leapt away. “(Remember “The Owl and the Pussycat”? That was Lear’s poem.
And a drawing by Lear of the aged man and the aged cat: “Edward Lear Aged 73 and a Half and His Cat Foss, Aged 16 (1885)”. And a note from Wikipedia, where Foss has his own page:
Foss was a tabby cat described as “unattractive.” His tail was cut short by Lear’s servants to try to prevent him from wandering. No photographs survive of the cat, as he jumped out of Lear’s arms on the only occasion when one was to be taken.
Lear grew fond of Foss and he was said to be his favourite animal. Foss was mentioned often in Lear’s correspondence, to the extent that he was said to have been almost as famous as Lear at the time. He was said to roll on Lear’s manuscripts to help dry the ink. Many accounts say that when Lear was planning his relocation to Sanremo, he had his architect design his new villa on the same floor plan as his previous home to avoid confusing Foss.
A famous can-can dancer and model (her real name was Louise Weber, with “La Goulue meaning “the gourmand”), here’s she is in a photo and then in her most famous depiction, in a poster by Toulouse-Lautrec:
1934 – Fritz Haber, Polish-German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1868)
I always show this photo of my dad (right) with Alan Ladd on the Acropolis, taken during the filming of the movie “Boy on a Dolphin” (1957). He was stationed in Athens with our family at the time, and the Army helped the film procure jeeps and gasoline. Dad also got to hang around with Sophia Loren, another star of the movie.
1980 – Jimmy Durante, American entertainer (b. 1893)
His famous farewell. But who was “Mrs. Calabash”? It turns out it was his pet name for his first wife, who died young.
2008 – Margaret Truman, American singer and author (b. 1924)
2015 – Rod McKuen, American singer-songwriter and poet (b. 1933)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili evinces a disdain (which I share) for podcasts:
From Barry, about the saddest photo I know about ocean pollution. The caption:
A seahorse clutches a discarded cotton swab to ride the oceans currents near Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. “It’s a photo that I wish didn’t exist but now that it does I want everyone to see it,” wrote photographer Justin Hofman. “What started as an opportunity to photograph a cute little sea horse turned into one of frustration and sadness as the incoming tide brought with it countless pieces of trash and sewage.” PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN HOFMAN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Go see the other photos at the site, which gives a number of favorite Nat. Geo. pictures that appeared on Instagram. The photo of the human face transplant will stun you.
I didn’t know that starlings could mimic this well! Sound up, of course.
Vocal mimicry is reasonably common in birds, but European starlings are particularly gifted mimics. As this clip shows. Just incredible. pic.twitter.com/8TxlrIZAK9
Approx 80 ostriches escaped from a farm and ran loose in the streets of Chongzhou, China. Cell phone footage from residents capture the bizarre scene. pic.twitter.com/zY6RnInTfi
