Welcome to Friday, September 18, 2026, and National Ice Cream Cone Day. There are two types of people: cone people and cup people. I like to eat the cone, though sometimes it gets drippy, but I’ll take the cup if a place gives you more ice cream in a cup. The history of the cone as a container for ice cream is murky. Wikipedia says this:
The earliest certain evidence of ice cream cones come from Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Book of Cookery (1888), written by the English cook Agnes B. Marshall.]Her recipe for “Cornet with Cream” said that “the cornets were made with almonds and baked in the oven, not pressed between irons”. Marshall is consequently often regarded to have been the inventor of the modern ice cream cone.
Here’s one that looks good: a green tea ice cream cone made with matcha.
It’s also International Grenache Day, National Cheeseburger Day, National Red Velvet Cake Day, and National Rice Krispies Treats Day.
Speaking of cheeseburgers:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 18 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The WSJ reports that Iran is in trouble vis-à-vis exporting oil; the article is “Iran’s attempts to get around the Hormuz blockade are hitting a wall.”
Iran vowed to respond to a U.S. blockade by pushing more trade overland. On the ground, it isn’t going according to plan.
Hundreds of Iranian truck drivers are currently stuck at Iran’s border with Pakistan, unable to send their goods into Tehran’s neighbor. They say they are facing worsening bureaucratic hurdles and costs, many caused by their own government. The same thing is happening at Iran’s land borders with Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dealing Tehran a self-inflicted blow and throttling trade through its few remaining economic release valves.
Tons of stranded apricots have been spoiled because of the delays. Lucrative cargoes of iron ore, cement and bottled gas are stuck at entry points to the Pakistani and Afghan borders, truckers say.
“Neither Iran is taking responsibility for the situation, nor is Pakistan allowing us to unload our cargo,” one driver says in a video posted by the Union of Truckers and Drivers Organizations Across Iran over the weekend.
The economic war in the Persian Gulf is dictated as much by how much the countries in the region can move their exports over land rather than through the Strait of Hormuz. Some have found workarounds. Saudi Arabia is moving more of its oil west across the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. Navy is helping some of the Gulf nations shift their oil through the strait.
Iran’s attempts are faltering. The U.S. is isolating its economy with new sanctions and launching strikes on Iranian tankers in reprisal for Tehran’s attacks on its Navy, collapsing seaborne exports.
In another setback for Iran’s plans to bypass Hormuz, the country’s Mahan Air, which is sanctioned by the U.S., said Wednesday that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey, state-affiliated media in Tehran said. Last week, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies it said were supporting Mahan, which operates cargo and passenger services.
The U.S. blockade has also hurt Iran’s imports of basic goods, 70% of which normally go through the blockaded ports. Though humanitarian goods and food are ostensibly exempt, the reality is that shippers are reluctant to service Iran.
Videos posted on social media last week show cranes at the Port of Shahid Rajaee, Iran’s largest commercial container port, at a standstill. Thousands of containers are stranded in ports in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, transportation professionals in Tehran last month told the Mehr News Agency, which is affiliated with Iranian security services.
Even Iraq is blockading Iranian goods:
But in a sign of how vulnerable the alternative routes are, Iraq over the weekend temporarily closed cargo terminals at the Iran border after alleging Iran had used its territory to attack Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, trucks carrying Iranian onions bound for Iraq were forced to turn back as a result, according to Tehran’s Central Fruit and Vegetable Market.
The rising costs are now adding to Iran’s worsening inflation problem.
. . . Much of these costs are being passed on to consumers, with unpredictable results for the Iranian leadership. Food inflation rose to 128% in August, according to Iran’s official statistics office.
*I said I’d report back on reactions to the new anti-Israel movie “NAZA,” which accuses of Israel of deliberately killing civilians in a way not according to their strategy (“the military gains must outweight the civilian losses”, or something like that). There’s one in the Free Press by their Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, “Hold your applause for the new Gaza documentary“, with the subtitle “There may yet be hard truths in ‘NAZA,’ including evidence of Israel’s systemic failures. But the reporting around it treats flimsy claims as proof of criminality.” (Note: like nearly everyone weighing in, Gur hasn’t seen the movie).
The title is an Israeli military acronym derived from nezek agavi, Hebrew for collateral damage. It refers to the filmmakers’ conviction that the systems Israel used to select targets and authorize strikes in Gaza enabled immoral and unlawfully high rates of civilian casualties. Their allegation goes beyond excessive tolerance of civilian casualties: They reportedly contend that the killing was intentional.
I haven’t seen the film. This means I cannot confidently assess its editing, corroboration, or the full testimony it presents. I would love to live in a world in which I could wait, watch the movie, and have a sober debate about its claims. Unfortunately, the discourse online is not so patient. That’s why it’s necessary to examine the argument its makers have published, the reporting on which it builds, and the standards by which its allegations should be judged. The film falls short on every dimension.
Start with the question of civilian casualties. The online conversation about the film—as distinct from the film’s own claims—is replete with shock and horror at the finding that the IDF calculated the estimated number of civilian deaths before each strike. According to the usual Israel critics, this shows that the resulting deaths amounted to deliberate murder.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how clownishly (and intentionally) wrong this claim is. International humanitarian law requires those planning an attack to assess foreseeable civilian harm and take feasible precautions to avoid or minimize it. You can’t assess proportionality in relation to the expected military advantage of a strike—as required by law—without that calculation. Indeed, an attack that isn’t preceded by an assessment of potential civilian deaths is an immoral attack. This point isn’t against the film itself, but it says something important about how skewed and shallow and preordained the debate around it was always going to be.
So what does the film itself claim? In their published accounts, the filmmakers describe interviews with 24 former IDF soldiers, most of them intelligence officers. They claim that civilian losses were authorized for targets of little military value, and that in some cases, the intended target was not present. According to the soldiers, these were features of the system, not departures from its protocols.
Those are substantive claims. But I have seen nothing to suggest that they are proven in the film itself. What I do know is that neither the filmmakers nor their production or research teams presented any of the findings to the IDF for a response. In fact, the IDF has publicly asked the filmmakers to screen the documentary for military officials so it can produce a detailed response; so far it’s not clear they have responded.
So, when we Israelis do finally see the film, we will ask the most basic journalistic questions: How are its claims established? What did each witness—all of them anonymous—actually observe, and what was their role and level of access? Does an officer describing one phase of the targeting process know what happened during the rest? Are any of these claims corroborated in any independent way? When someone says a target had little military value, what information is that judgment based on?
Nobody has to prove a system-wide policy for the unjustified killing of a particular individual or family to be wrong, and deserving of an investigation. But the film’s claim isn’t about a single strike, or even a number of them. It is that the IDF’s collateral-damage mitigation system is used to systematically and purposefully target civilians. That this was the purpose of the military campaign.
One of the few Israelis who’s had the chance to watch the film—and who is sympathetic to director Yuval Avraham—came away deeply disappointed. In a Monday op-ed in Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli outlet most likely to resonate with the film’s claims, Raviv Drucker wrote that he couldn’t help but feel the film was trying to create an “impression” of the “context in which these terrible things were done”—juxtaposing military claims about suffering in Gaza with images of people dining in Tel Aviv. He simultaneously vouches for Avraham’s integrity while complaining that the film fails to prove or contextualize its claims. According to Avraham, NAZA doesn’t say anything meaningful about the broader military context (which is necessary to prove that strikes had no military need), compare how other armies fight terrorist organizations embedded in civilian populations, or even acknowledge the problem of Hamas’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure. Drucker’s conclusion is written in a tone of sadness and disappointment, not anger. He wishes, he writes, that the film had been “truer to reality.”
Gur also shows that director Yuval Abraham deliberately distorted the number of Palestinian civilian dead in a previous publication, and that the targeting restrictions changed over the course of the war for military reasons. In the end, Gur doesn’t say Israel is exculpated, but does say this:
All this said, legitimate findings of the film should be taken seriously. Dramatically changed military circumstances do not suspend rules of proportionality or offer blanket justification for whatever followed. And even if the film turns out to be as dishonest, the civilian toll in Gaza requires examination.
But these questions do at least set a standard that a film must meet to show the immorality it claims. Will it? Did the filmmakers even try?
We’re going to have to wait, though it’s hard for me to believe that the IDF deliberately wanted to kill civilians without adequate military justification. I’m not quite sure why this film is not being shown to everybody who wants to see it, including the IDF. That alone makes me suspicious.
*At the German site Cicero, emeritus professor Werner Kunz at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, described how one of his big lectures was canceled, and he was relieved of his teaching duties, all for comparing the objective existence of two biological sexes with the objective existence of biological species. (h/t Luana)
In the fall of 2025, I received an invitation to give a lecture on nature conservation in June 2026 at the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” association at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). I have a long-standing connection to this association and have given several lectures there in previous years. I know the chairman personally and have met with him on numerous occasions for private discussions. My lecture, scheduled for June 2026, required extensive preparation and was to be recorded on video for YouTube. People from other universities were planning to attend. Just two days before the lecture, I had preparatory discussions with the chairman.
And then it happened. Less than 24 hours before the lecture was due to begin, late in the evening, I received an email from the chairman informing me that the lecture had to be canceled. The letter stated, among other things: “We are aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university… After thorough examination and discussions with the relevant departments of HHU, we have come to the conclusion that these statements are incompatible with the principles that HHU and the Friends Association, as organizers, stand for…”
The source of the controversy remains unnamed.
What had I done wrong? The “responsible departments of HHU” never identified themselves to me, and nothing was ever “discussed in the past.” I don’t know who was discussing this. The rejection letter from the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” only mentions an “equal opportunities organization.”
My assumption stems from the module “Fundamentals of Biodiversity and Evolution” that I taught in 2024. A key part of this module’s content involved explaining the biological concept of a species. The species concept can only be explained by comparing the characteristics that distinguish two species with those that differentiate the two sexes. This was therefore also part of the curriculum.
Several students complained vehemently about my statements regarding gender differences during the subsequent evaluation of the course and even filed a complaint against me. My statements were reinterpreted as an alleged verbatim statement that “women cannot think.” I never made such a statement and never would, because it would be utterly absurd. The lawyers of the “Network for Academic Freedom” describe the whole affair as an “outrageous incident” and have already stated in an “Open Letter to the Executive Board of HHU” that this is based on a statement that was never made, the assertion of which constitutes the criminal offense of defamation under Section 187 of the German Criminal Code.
Removal from office without debateThe equal opportunities officer of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, who also chairs the Biology Research Unit, accepted this statement as true and immediately relieved me of all my teaching duties (including supervising bachelor’s theses) without verifying the students’ alleged statements and without granting me the right to a discussion and defense. The examination board and the second supervisors of my bachelor’s students’ theses were not consulted. Yet, my ethical conduct could easily have been verified on my website. The majority of my bachelor’s, diploma, and doctoral students, as well as most of the co-authors of my publications, were women. I was powerless to challenge my immediate dismissal from all my teaching positions, which I had continued to hold without pay after my retirement, because I no longer had any legal right to teach.
It was apparently these events, which took place almost two years ago, that forced the chairman of the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” to cancel my aforementioned lecture at short notice, with the words: “We have become aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university…”
Again we see a professor penalized after ridiculous student accusations. Species, like sexes, are not “defined” but “recognized”. Yes of course there are cases where species are not absolutely distinguished, though those (particularly when allopatric) are much more frequent than individuals who are neither male nor female (about 1/5600 or less). But in both cases we are dealing are biological realities that exist independent of definition (e.g., H. sapiens doesn’t blur into any other species, nor do Pallas cats or platypuses). Just as nature is lumpy with respect to types of animals and plants, so is nature lumpy with respect to the kinds of animals that produce gametes (in that case there are two lumps). They really should apologize to professor Kunz.
*Since I was in graduate school there has been discussion of whether dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, a view promoted most vigorously by Robert Bakker. The NYT now reports that,using new methods, scientists believe that Tyrannosaurus rex was warm-blooded, with a body temperature close to ours (article archived here).
The last vestiges of warmth drained out of a Tyrannosaurus rex’s body around 66 million years ago, but scientists just used chemistry to take the long-extinct dinosaur’s temperature: 97 degrees, give or take a few.
The new finding securely situates the king of the dinosaurs among the warm-blooded animals, confirming previous years of research.
T. rex ran hot, but not too hot, according to the study, published Wednesday in Science Advances. Instead, the reading places it somewhere on the body-temperature spectrum near large mammals like Indian elephants (97 degrees) or humans (98 degrees) or flightless birds like ostriches (101 to 103 degrees) — but nowhere near the heat of a chicken, say (105 to 107 degrees).
“That is absolutely spectacular,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study.
So how did they do it?
To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The team first used a dental drill to sample the tough outer enamel from the teeth, and then took advantage of a remarkable fact: The chemical bonds within minerals can tell their own stories.
“Basically, at the point a mineral forms there are elements of its chemistry that are kind of frozen in time,” said Robert Eagle, a geobiologist and one of the leaders of the study.
. . . Dr. Eagle and his colleagues analyzed the bonds between two isotopes; heavier versions of both carbon and oxygen. Those bonds acted like a thermometer: The more bonds present, the lower the body temperature.For a gut check, they also compared the T. rex teeth to those of ancient crocodilians excavated from the same site Hell Creek Formation in Montana. T. rex measured 97 degrees; the crocodilians ran much cooler at, on average, 88 degrees.
Being warm-blooded is associated with a more active lifestyle and means the “tyrant lizard” could live in a broad range of environments. The researchers calculated that, at least from a temperature tolerance point of view, T. rex could have roamed over most of the North American continent, from Alaska to Mexico.
. . .Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out in an email that the body temperature reading opens up a whole new set of questions about how this celebrity dinosaur operated.
One possibility is that T. rex was warm-blooded the way humans are, with a constant and hot body temperature regulated by an internal furnace, Dr. Brusatte said. Another possibility is that T. rex was more like a giant, terrifying insulated coffee cup that takes forever to cool down.
The way to answer that question, at least tentatively, is to look at the chemical bonds in relatives of T. rex that were not so big, and so would cool down quickly. If they also showed evidence of warm-bloodedness, particularly in very small dinos, that would suggest that homeothermy was an ancestral trait.
Here’s a figure from the paper comparing the isotopically-calculated body temperatures from various groups, along with the environmentally calcualted temperature (see the paper for free here to read more):
*According to the AP’s Odd News, corn mazes featuring Dolly Parton are cropping up all over the UK and Canada, most of them started before Dolly even died.
Dolly Parton ’s megawatt smile and big wavy locks are gracing fields across the U.S. and Canada this fall.
Twenty farms have carved out large corn mazes to honor the late country music icon, actor and philanthropist and raise money for her Imagination Library, which provides free books to children.
The “Jolene” crooner’s death due to cancer on Aug. 25 in Nashville at age 80 brought an outpouring of tributes. They ranged from a drive to rename the country music capital’s airport in Parton’s honor to a surge in online streams of “9 to 5,” “Islands in the Stream” and her many other hit songs.
Now she is being immortalized in corn, with the mazes located in about a dozen states and two provinces, from Alabama to California and Ohio to Texas. Most also feature a Parton-themed trivia game, photo ops and other offerings.
Brett Herbst, founder of The Maize Inc., the Utah-based consulting company that designed the mazes, called Parton a “true American treasure.”
The company said the mazes were in the works months before Parton died and are part of its annual campaign honoring country music’s brightest stars. Previous honorees included Reba McEntire in 2023, Luke Bryan in 2024 and Lainey Wilson in 2025.
Parton, who famously grew up poor in rural Tennessee, thanked organizers for supporting her charity before to her death. In a statement provided by The Maize Inc., she encouraged people to “get lost in this year’s country music corn maze for a little fun, laughter and a real good reason to get lost.”
Here’s a video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming quite philosophical:
Hili: I look and wonder?
Andrzej: What about?
Hili: Where does time disappear to?
In Polish:
Hili: patrzę i zastanawiam się?
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Gdzie ucieka czas?
*************
From Stacy:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Things with Faces:
From Masih. who got a prestigious honorary degree from The New School, and used the occasion to reiterate the woes of the Iranian people:
I received an honorary doctorate from a university in America. It should have been one of the happiest and proudest days of my life.
But that very morning, the Islamic Republic executed three young protesters for taking part in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
I cried all… pic.twitter.com/wWYeQ3Vu1m
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 17, 2026
From Luana, and not a surprise: “inclusive excellence”:
I thought the tweet below must be omitting some critical context or paraphrasing the text ungenerously.
But no, the NYT actually published an op-ed that claims the University of California hasn’t sacrificed excellence even though it admits students who struggle with basic math. https://t.co/fTZjZnIG3I pic.twitter.com/hAitGCNqb1
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) September 16, 2026
Also from Luana (click to go to page as I can’t embed this by itself):
Two from my feed. First, a new species of cat discovered, and not just a subspecies, either. See the article here. It’s called the tilcayo tiger cat.
New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a “weird cat” has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: https://t.co/crffXvPqH4 pic.twitter.com/USo7rI3Y5q
— National Geographic (@NatGeo) September 17, 2026
And a rare cat, the jagarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi). Sound up to hear its weird call!
Rare footage of a jaguarundi, a wild cat that’s naturally very shy. pic.twitter.com/9eFqgCFWvk
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) September 16, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was two years old and would be 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/sFswTlMyB9
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 18, 2026
Two from Doc Cobb. Ducklings!
Our three little ducklings plus two enjoying splash time
— Chris and his farmily of forever farm friends (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2026-09-17T15:24:30.558Z
Well, we have about a month to go:
Better make the most of October folks…(Published in Science in 1960: http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…)
— Adam Kucharski (@adamjkucharski.bsky.social) 2026-09-16T19:39:40.379Z