Sabine Hossenfelder says we don’t have free will, but its nonexistence shouldn’t bother us

October 11, 2020 • 1:00 pm

Here we have the German theoretical physicist, author, and science popularizer Sabine Hossenfelder giving an 11-minute talk called “You don’t have free will, but don’t worry”. (My own talk on the subject is the first five words she uses, and I think we should be concerned—though not in the sense she means.)  The video and a written transcript are on her website Backreaction.

If you’ve read this site, you’ll know that my own views are pretty much the same as hers, at least about free will. We don’t have it, and the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum mechanics doesn’t give it to us either. Hossenfelder doesn’t pull any punches:

This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because you are made of particles, and what happens with you is a consequence of what happens with those particles. A lot of people seem to think this is a philosophical position. They call it “materialism” or “reductionism” and think that giving it a name that ends on –ism is an excuse to not believe it. Well, of course you can insist to just not believe reductionism is correct. But this is denying scientific evidence. We do not guess, we know that brains are made of particles. And we do not guess, we know, that we can derive from the laws for the constituents what the whole object does. If you make a claim to the contrary, you are contradicting well-established science. I can’t prevent you from denying scientific evidence, but I can tell you that this way you will never understand how the universe really works.

QED!

She adds this about quantum mechanics, which used to be a life preserver used to rescue the notion of “freedom”, but has largely been abandoned because with two seconds of thought you see that it doesn’t give us any freedom of the will:

What about quantum mechanics? In quantum mechanics some events are truly random and cannot be predicted. Does this mean that quantum mechanics is where you can find free will? Sorry, but no, this makes no sense. These random events in quantum mechanics are not influenced by you, regardless of exactly what you mean by “you”, because they are not influenced by anything. That’s the whole point of saying they are fundamentally random. Nothing determines their outcome. There is no “will” in this. Not yours and not anybody else’s.

Taken together we therefore have determinism with the occasional, random quantum jump, and no combination of these two types of laws allows for anything resembling this intuitive idea that we can somehow choose which possible future becomes real. The reason this idea of free will turns out to be incompatible with the laws of nature is that it never made sense in the first place. You see, that thing you call “free will” should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then it’s either determined by what you

Now note that she hasn’t actually defined free will so far, but later on she dismisses the concept that most people, including me, adhere to (my emphasis):

Taken together we therefore have determinism with the occasional, random quantum jump, and no combination of these two types of laws allows for anything resembling this intuitive idea that we can somehow choose which possible future becomes real. The reason this idea of free will turns out to be incompatible with the laws of nature is that it never made sense in the first place. You see, that thing you call “free will” should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then it’s either determined by what you want, in which case it’s not free, or it’s not determined, in which case it’s not a will.

Now, some have tried to define free will by the “ability to have done otherwise”. But that’s just empty words. If you did one thing, there is no evidence you could have done something else because, well, you didn’t. Really there is always only your fantasy of having done otherwise.

I don’t agree here, for the “could have done otherwise” definition of free will is the one that most people adhere to, and the “otherwise” comes not from physical randomness but from will. In fact, Hossenfelder doesn’t even agree with herself, for shortly thereafter she implicitly defines free will this way—after having disposed of a few varieties of compatibilism (again, my emphasis):

I also find it unenlightening to have an argument about the use of words. If you want to define free will in such a way that it is still consistent with the laws of nature, that is fine by me, though I will continue to complain that’s just verbal acrobatics. In any case, regardless of how you want to define the word, we still cannot select among several possible futures. This idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics.

Here she implicitly defines free will as whatever facility enables us to “[select] among several possible futures,” and that’s the notion she refutes. I’m not sure why this idea is any more “empty words” than  is “the ability to have done otherwise”.

At any rate, she goes on to conclude that the absence of free will doesn’t mean that our moral behavior will erode. I agree, of course. I think it means our “moral responsibility” disappears, for to me “moral responsibility” comes with the notion of “having an ability to make the ‘right’ choice”, an ability that doesn’t exist. I think we are responsible for our acts in the sense that it is our brains that have produced them, and thus for many reasons we should either be punished or rewarded. If you want to say “we are responsible because we have either transgressed or supported the acts society considers ‘moral'”, I’m not going to beef.

Hossenfelder concludes by reiterating that free will is “nonsense” and that “the idea deserves going into the rubbish bin.”  True, that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be happy, for we have the illusion of free will, and we can use that as a crutch to go through life. She even suggest a psychological trick for being happy:

If it causes you cognitive dissonance to acknowledge you believe in something that doesn’t exist, I suggest that you think of your life as a story which has not yet been told. You are equipped with a thinking apparatus that you use to collect information and act on what you have learned from this. The result of that thinking is determined, but you still have to do the thinking. That’s your task. That’s why you are here. I am curious to see what will come out of your thinking, and you should be curious about it too.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think that people who do not understand that free will is an illusion underestimate how much their decisions are influenced by the information they are exposed to. After watching this video, I hope, some of you will realize that to make the best of your thinking apparatus, you need to understand how it works, and pay more attention to cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

I’m not sure how it helps to realize that “you have to still do the thinking”, when in reality the thinking is doing itself! Just because we don’t know what will happen—that our predictability is not so hot—doesn’t make us any less a bunch of meat robots who are slaves to the laws of physics. I know this, and yet I’m tolerably happy (for a lugubrious Jew). We know our “choices” are illusions, and my realization that these illusory choices come from a brain embedded in the skull of one Jerry A. Coyne does not give me the consolation Hossenfelder promises. But I still beat on, a boat against the current.

One more point: I’m not sure why compatibilists don’t just admit what Hossenfelder does instead of trying to find a definition of free will that people do have. The physicist Sean Carroll and philosopher Dan Dennett have taken that route, which I call the Definitional Escape rather than Hossenfelder’s There’s No Escape but Isn’t it Cool to Not Know what Comes Next.

The one thing I think Hossenfelder neglects comes from her last paragraph. If we do understand that free will in the Hossenfeldian sense is illusory, that has enormous consequences for the judicial system and for how we think about people who are either more or less fortunate than we are. I won’t dilate on this as I’ve discussed it to death. But yes, realizing that our brains are particles and obey the laws of physics should cause us worry—worry about how we treat prisoners and those who are mentally ill, and worry about how some people hold others responsible for making the “wrong choices.”

That aside, I applaud Dr. Hossenfelder for realizing the truth, which, as she says, is the ineluctable outcome of science, and for saying it so straightforwardly. I’m a big fan of hers. And I applaud myself for agreeing with her.

 

h/t: Andrew

Tool-using ants build siphons to wick sugar water out of containers, keeping them from drowning

October 11, 2020 • 11:00 am

It’s now recognized that the use of tools is widespread in animals, and the article below from Functional Ecology (pdf here, reference at bottom) notes that there are fifty examples known in insects alone.  Some of these, in ants, involve using various substances like leaves or stuck-together bits of dirt to sop up sweet liquids and carry them back to the nest. The article below describes not just the use of tools, but the ability to adjust their usage to environmental conditions like the size of sand grains and the surface tension of water (an index of risk), to nosh on sweet liquids without drowning. It’s the adjustment to environmental conditions of how they use a novel “tool” (a siphon made of sand grains) that constitute the new results in the article.

Click to read; it’s free.

The insects used were lab colonies of the imported black fire ant, Solenopsis richteri, collected in Mississippi.  The colonies were put in an arena that contained grains of sand that varied in size, as well as a 1 ml of a 15% solution of sugar water in a small plastic container.

Under normal conditions, the nature of the ants’ cuticles makes them able to float atop this sugar water. But to reduce the surface tension, which produced the possibility of the ants on the solution drowning, the authors added 5 concentrations of a surfactant, up to 2%). One could then measure the foraging risk to the ants by counting the number of drowned ants. There were also four kinds of sand presented to the ants: coarse, medium, fine, and mixed. Altogether, the authors made 12 replicates of each condition (4 sand grains and 6 surfactant concentrations), giving 24 x 12 or 288 replicates.

Each replicate was left for five hours after the sugar water was placed by the sand, so you can see this is a lot of work. At the end, they weighed the sand grains used by the ants as tools, the number of ants drowned in the solution, and the weight of the ants after the experiment compared with before the ingestion, giving an idea of how much sugar water was consumed.

Here are the results in brief:

First, with no surfactants, and just sugar water, few ants drowned. As the surfactant concentration rose to 2%, more ants drowned, as their bodies could no longer keep them atop the liquid that had reduced surface tension. The more surfactant added, the more ants drowned.

Second, as surfactant was added, and ants began drowning, the ants began using their tools. At the lowest concentration of 0.05%, they pasted sand grains inside the plastic sugar-water container, which wicked the solution up to the edge where the ants could consume it without having to get close to the water.

As the surfactant concentration rose higher, to 0.1%, the ants began making what the authors call “sand structures” a sand siphon that started on the inside of the container and continued to the outside and down to the “ground” where the sand piles were available. These siphons, which wicked the sugar water out of the container to where it could be safely ingested without drowning, increasing the amount of food eaten by the ants by 8%—an appreciable increase—and also reduced the proportion of drowned ants. (The siphons could wick about half of the solution out of the containers.):

Here is a photo of the siphon structure; the caption is from the paper; the red dye, added to the sugar water, shows how the sand structure wicked the solution out of the container and onto the “ground”.

The sand syphon structures. (A, B) Syphon structures dried completely at room temperature. (C) Five minute after 1 ml of sugar water with 1% surfactant was added into in syphon structure A. (D) Five minutes after 1 ml sugar water with 1% surfactant and red food dye were added into the syphon structure B. (E) Top view of sand syphon structures.

The ants, then, were able to adjust their construction of the siphon to the conditions of the solution (the authors note that reduced surface tension may be characteristic of some nectars and other sweet liquids in nature), and perhaps to the perception of the number of drowned ants. They were also able to choose sand grains that were most effective at wicking the food: the medium and coarse ones. (They showed that the wicking capacity of fine sand is lower.)

The take-home lesson: the ants can somehow assess “foraging risk” and, when it’s higher, use tools, building a big siphon out of sand grains.

Now this is not the first instance of tool use in ants, though previous descriptions seem spotty. From the paper:

Several Myrmicinae ant species have been reported to be able to use debris to collect and transport liquid food into their nests (Banschbach, Brunelle, Bartlett, Grivetti, & Yeamans, 2006; Barber et al., 1989; Maák et al., 2017). There has been only one reported case of tool manufacture in ants prior to our study, but the validity of this report has not been confirmed yet. The Florida harvester ant P. badius, can construct small pellets of sand grains to soak up honey for transport (Morrill, 1972). However, this observation was only reported briefly in a short communication without any additional follow‐up study, and the data are insufficient to validate that this is a true case of tool manufacture by ants.

This, then, is a well documented case of tool use in ants—and it does count as tool use. It also shows for the first time that insects can adjust their foraging strategies to minimize risk.

Finally, the authors think it shows the ants show “high cognition”, and this is where I differ. The paper says this:

Our findings suggest that social insects may be able to create novel approaches to foraging by using available tools in situ to overcome the environmental constraints. The results also indicate that considerable capacities for high cognition and unique foraging strategy may be developed in social insects such as ants, which has previously only been characterized in vertebrates when facing risks and problems. Such sophisticated flexibility of tool use provides a powerful platform for further studying the cognitive mechanism and tool use strategy of social insects, and at the same time, promotes the research on the universality of tool use strategy in invertebrates.

Yes, it is sophisticated flexibility, though the authors don’t know whether the proportion of drowned ants, rather than the perception of surface tension (they’re correlated) leads to the construction of sand siphons.

But is it “high cognition”? Is it “cognition” at all? This isn’t a trivial question, but it’s an important one. The online Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of cognition related to this act (there are others):

  1. The action or faculty of knowing; knowledge, consciousness; acquaintance with a subject.
  2. Apprehension, perception

The question, then, is whether the ants are responding to an inbuilt behavioral program that robotically takes in information about the environment and responds with an adaptive act, which would accord with the second definition, or whether the ants “knowingly” do this; that is, are they conscious in some way—similar to us—of what’s going on. That would accord with the first definition of consciousness. One thing I don’t accept is that the ants learned to do this in the lab; this is surely a form of behavior that they perform in the wild. Ants aren’t that smart!

Since I’m a determinist, the ants really can’t make a conscious decision about what they do when the surface tension is low and they’re faced with drowning ants and sand grains of various size. None of us can make a free choice about what we do: we’re all constrained by our neurons and the environment we perceive. So the question here is not whether the ants make a free “choice,” but whether they are conscious of what they are doing. That is the question, and it’s one we can’t answer. All we can say is that the ants are able to perceive environmental stimuli and adjust their behavior in an adaptive way, and in this case use tools to do so. The rest involves the unanswerable question of “what is it like to be an ant?”. So it goes.

___________________

Zhou, A, Du, Y, Chen, J. Ants adjust their tool use strategy in response to foraging risk. Funct Ecol. 2020; 00: 1– 12. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13671

The New York Times describes Hitler’s Nazis as “anti-Zionists”

October 11, 2020 • 9:00 am

I’m sure some readers will feel that the New York Times‘s description of Nazis—and of the rabid anti-Semite Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini—as mere “anti-Zionists”, is an innocuous description.  But I don’t think so. I think it’s an attempt to rewrite history and, at the same time, defuse some criticisms of Palestine made by a Saudi Prince.

First, some background. The October 6 article in the NYT (click on screenshot below) was about Saudi Prince Bandar making statements that appear to erode his country’s support for Palestine. (This is on the heels of some Arab states starting to normalize relations with Israel.) Prince Bandar’s statements including describing the cozy relationship between the Muslim Grand Mufti (of Jerusalem) and Hitler in the 1940s, as well as the failure of the Palestinians to move forward. Bandar also criticized Yasser Arafat for supporting Saddam Hussein.

The NYT article is below, and the highlighting of its words and tenor in the excerpt are analyzed in an article on the CAMERA website (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis).

The excerpt from the NYT’s article that I (and CAMERA) highlight is in bold below (my emphasis):

In a surprising televised monologue, a senior member of the Saudi royal family and former ambassador to Washington accused Palestinian leaders of betraying their people, signaling an erosion of Saudi support for an issue long considered sacrosanct.

“The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful,” the royal, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, said in the first episode of a three-part program, which aired Monday on the Saudi-controlled Al Arabiya satellite channel.

. . .Prince Bandar offered a rambling and selective history of the Palestinian struggle, saying that the Palestinians “always bet on the losing side.”

His survey, interspersed with archival images and footage, cited the contacts between Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and an early Palestinian nationalist leader, and the Nazis in the 1930s, adding, “we all know what happened to Hitler and Germany.”

The prince also blasted Yasir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, for embracing the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, despite Kuwait’s record of welcoming the Palestinians. And he accused Mr. Arafat’s P.L.O. of working harder to take over Jordan and Lebanon than to liberate Palestine.

While there is broad agreement that Mr. al-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis against Zionism, historians differ on the significance of his relationship with Nazi leaders.

Now there are two issues in this last bolded statement, and in both cases the Times grossly distorts the situation.  First is the ridiculous assertion that “Mr. al-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis against Zionism”. No, he did not collaborate against Zionism alone (i.e., the movement to create a state that was a homeland for Jews); al-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. (Further, the idea that the Nazis were merely “anti-Zionist” in their dealings with al-Husseini is ludicrous.) You can read an article about the Nazi’s dealings with the Middle East here, and it shows that, first of all, the Nazis wanted useful idiots and advisers in the Middle East to help with the Final Solution, and, second, that al-Husseini, while being an anti-Zionist, was more aptly seen as a rabid anti-Semite who repeatedly called for the death of Jews and their elimination from the Middle East.

Here is what some of what al-Husseini did to further “anti-Zionism” (a list from Malgorzata; you can check the claims or argue with her in the comments, if you wish):

  1. Stopping a transport of a few thousand Jewish children to Palestine – they were instead murdered in death camps.
  2. Organizing an SS Division consisting of Bosnian Muslims.
  3. Broadcasting during the whole war incendiary programs into the Arab world in which the main message was: “The Jews are enemies of God and enemies of mankind. Kill the Jews wherever you find them”.
  4. Drafting plans for death camps for Jews in the Middle East based on Auschwitz and other death camps which he visited and admired.

The CAMERA article adds a few more:

  • The United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum characterizes al-Husseini as “a vicious antisemite and actively supportive of Nazi Germany’s efforts to annihilate world Jewry.”
  • Yad Vashem states that the Palestinian mufti was motivated, inter alia, to “lend his support to the ‘Final Solution.’”

JAC: I suppose if there’s any “area of controversy”, it’s whether al-Husseini’s efforts promoted the Holocaust in Europe, and there’s not strong evidence for that. The Endlösung would have taken place with or without his help. But al-Husseini did, as you see above, contribute to the death of Jews and repeatedly called for their deaths. At best, Hitler, who met al-Husseini, got moral support from the Mufti for exterminating Jews, and there’s no doubt that al-Husseini favored exterminating rather than just deporting Jews.

But the weasel statement that “historians differ on the significance of his relationship with Nazi leaders” is misleading, as we have a lot of evidence about that relationship. What we don’t know is how much al-Husseini’s influence on Hitler buttressed the Führer’s determination to exterminate the Jews. I’m happy to believe that the influence was miniscule, and that Hitler was determined to do it with or without al-Husseini. So what? The anti-Semitic Mufti himself contributed to the death of Jews.

More actions from CAMERA about the “relationship”:

  • Nazi official Wilhelm Melchers is quoted as stating after the war, during testimony about al-Husseini, that “the mufti was an accomplished foe of the Jews and did not conceal that he would love to see all of them liquidated.” (Jennie Lebel, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Haj-Amin el-Husseini and National Socialism, pg. 255.)
  • Jeffrey Herf, a professor of German history, wrote of al-Husseini that “In Hitler and the Nazis he recognized ideological soulmates who shared his profound hatred of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism.”
  • In his book on Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, Herf  describes al-Husseini’s “intense hatred of Jews,” quoting the Palestinian leader as referring to the “overwhelming egoism” of Jews, who “lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals,” and so on. Jews had “tormented the world for ages” and were “the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence,” al-Husseini argued.
  • In al-Husseini’s 1937 text “Islam and the Jews,” he charges Jews with perfidy going back to the time of Muhammed:
    “The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina… In those days the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was a swindler… They tried to undermine his honor… They began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mohammed… and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today… the verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.”
  • Al-Husseini also called on his followers to “Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you.”

Some “anti-Zionism”! Seriously, New York Times?

Although you can argue that the sentence in bold above is just a throwaway remark, I see a whole world of bias in it—bias that the NYT has shown repeatedly.  As a woke paper, the NYT must perforce be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli as well as anti-Zionist, and, I would argue, anti-Semitic, though it has to be careful because many of its readers are Jewish. The owners of the paper are Jewish, and have been, but that means nothing, for some of the most rabid Jew-haters have a Jewish background.  I know I’ll be excoriated for calling the Times anti-Semitic, but if it makes you feel better, let’s just call it anti-Zionist and leave it there.

It’s telling that after Bari Weiss (a Jewish columnist who was pro-Israel) left the paper—probably hounded out of her job for her views—they took on Peter Beinart as a contributing op-ed writer. His views on Israel are very different from Weiss’s, and probably align more with those of the editors. Beinart has been a persistent and notable critic of Israel and favors a “one-state” solution in which Israel is not a Jewish state but a Jewish “home”, and in which Jews and Palestinians live together. That’s anti-Zionism for sure, but it’s also a recipe for a bloodbath. It’s like creating a cage in the zoo containing a lion and a lamb. It would lead to the end of the Jews in the Middle East, and all advocates of the one-state solution know this.

Here’s Beinart’s op-ed:

We can only speculate about why the editors and writers of the NYT have an anti-Israel stand so strong that it distorts their reporting, to the point that they consistently neglect Palestinian perfidy in favor of criticizing Israel. But that they do this is unquestionable, and it’s a view held by many on the “progressive” Left, like the Congressional “squad”. I’ll finish by quoting the CAMERA article:

Al-Husseini’s anti-Zionism likely condemned countless Jewish children to death at the hands of the Nazis. But make no mistake: Thanks to the New York Times‘ campaign to normalize and boost anti-Zionism, its recasting of the Nazis and al-Husseini as collaborating merely “against Zionism” will be seen by some of its readers as exculpatory. This is the same newspaper, after all, that not only hosted a debate on its pages about whether Israel should continue to exist, but that stacked the deck so that the defenders of Israel’s existence were outnumbered. It is the same paper that has repeatedly turned its Opinion pages over to activists, from Ian Lustick to Muammar Qaddafi to Ali Abunimah to Peter Beinart, calling for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map. Beinart’s anti-Zionist Op-Ed seemingly earned him a job offer from the New York Times Opinion department within days of its publication.

. . . What could make the newspaper whitewash all of this, and recast the partnership between the Nazis and al-Husseini as strictly anti-Zionist? The New York Times has an Israel problem; it has an antisemitism problem; and it has a problem reporting forthrightly on Palestinian antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence — extending, apparently, even to leaders who supported and eagerly collaborated with the Nazis.

That is apparently why the paper made a point of signaling to readers that the Saudi Prince’s criticism of past Palestinian decision-making is invalid, and that al-Husseini wasn’t antisemitic.

It’s telling, for example, that the newspaper characterized Bandar bin Sultan’s criticism as “a rambling and selective history,” when that same newspaper had previously described a conspiratorial, error-filled, and anti-Jewish rant by current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as nothing worse than a “lengthy history lecture.” What makes a history “rambling and selective,” then, is neither bloviation nor inaccuracy. It is the focus of that history. You can fabricate Jewish history all you want. Just don’t shine too hard a light on Palestinian leaders.

Again and again, in fact, New York Times journalists have engaged in advocacy journalism to protect Palestinian decision-makers from criticism. In 2014, after a Palestinian terrorist slaughtered Jews who were praying in a Jerusalem synagogue, editors inexplicably cut from their story on the incident any reference to US Secretary of State John Kerry blaming the massacre on Palestinian incitement. (Kerry’s damning condemnation, in fact, was replaced by a Palestinian accusation that Israel is guilty of incitement.) Last year, a passage explaining that Islamic Jihad is “listed as a terrorist organization by many countries” — an accurate and relevant piece of context — likewise mysteriously disappeared from a Times article.

There’s more, but I’ve seen enough evidence to now believe that the Times’s coverage of the Israeli/Palestine conflict is a Middle Eastern version of The 1619 Project: a distortion of history meant to buttress the paper’s ideology.

al-Husseini meeting with Hitler, 1941

 

(From Wikipedia): Haj Amin al-Husseini, alongside SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen SS Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, greeting Bosnian SS volunteers during their training in November 1943.

Sunday: Duck o’ the Week

October 11, 2020 • 7:45 am

With this installment we bring the North American Duck segment to a close, as John Avise has now presented every species of duck in North America. I hope that by now you know all the species, especially the mallard and the wood duck. But we have one final contribution: not a native duck, but a beautiful one that has established residence in the U.S., helping make America great again.  Next week we start a new Sunday series, but I’ll keep that under wraps. The ID and Duck Facts are below the fold.  John’s notes (and, below the fold, Duck Facts) are indented.

Here are photos and comments for this week’s Duck o’ the Week.  [(The Cornell site has no map for this species because it is not native to North America).  This is the 29th and final of our “Duck o’ the Week” series, which I’ve very greatly enjoyed.  Next week I’ll introduce and begin our follow-up series, which should continue for several more months.

Hen:

Young hen:

Eclipse drake:

Breeding drake:

Drake, rear view:

Drake standing:

Drake swimming:

Drake, frontal view:

Pair standing

Pair swimming:

JAC: Now this is sexual selection!

Click “read more” to get the ID and Duck Facts. I’ve put in a video for fun. Continue reading “Sunday: Duck o’ the Week” →

Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

October 11, 2020 • 6:30 am

Happy Cat Sabbath: It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day, October 11, 2020: National Sausage Pizza Day, a comestible that clearly isn’t kosher. It’s also Southern Food Heritage Day, World Obesity Day, and Kraken Day, described this way:

Kraken Day, also known as Myths and Legends Day, is part of International Cephalopod Awareness Days, or Cephalopod Awareness Week, which takes place from October 8-12 each year.

Finally, in the U.S. it’s International Day of the Girl Child, International Newspaper Carrier Day (how many readers delivered papers?), and National Coming Out Day. 

News of the Day:

This happened yesterday (the CNN headline was “Trump delivers dark and divisive speech in first major appearance since Covid diagnosis“):

People wore masks, though the first thing Il Duce did when he appeared was to publicly peel off his mask, a clear signal; but there was no social distancing. Trump’s doctor (I don’t trust him) says he’s cleared to interact with people and is “no longer a transmission risk”, but still won’t say if he’s tested negative for the virus. And that surely means that he hasn’t tested negative.

The Washington Post reports that an after-midnight military parade in Pyongyang, North Korea, featured the largest liquid-fueled, road-mobile nuclear missile anyone’s ever seen. Apparently it can carry several nuclear warheads that can be delivered inter-continentally, but the Great Leader says that it’s only for deterrence.  Here’s a photo, but I always wonder how experts can tell these are real missiles rather than dummies:

(from WaPo): This image made from video broadcast by North Korea’s KRT shows a military parade with what appears to be a possible new intercontinental ballistic missile at the Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. (KRT via AP)

A strident atheist proclaims, “I’m ready for an atheist president”—in Cosmopolitan, of all places! (h/t Barry) An excerpt:

We may think of ourselves as “one nation, under God” (that lil phrase was only added to our pledge of allegiance in 1954, btw), but right now, nothing about our nation is feeling whole, one. Our insistence on religion as a unifying American principle feels just as outdated and illusory as the notion of civility in the White House. And when politicians wield their faith as a means to convince voters that they’re “good,” it strikes me as downright condescending.

Good news! LiveScience reports that, after Tasmanian devils disappeared from the Australian continent about 3,500 years ago, probably outcompeted by dingos, they’re back on the mainland again (see also National Geographic).

Aussie Ark, a wildlife nonprofit in Australia, has been breeding and studying Tasmanian devils for more than a decade, with the goal of eventually reintroducing devils into the wild once conditions were sustainable for their survival, according to the statement. For the recent release, Aussie Ark partnered with GWC and WildArk, another wildlife conservation nonprofit; they released 11 Tasmanian devils on Sept. 10. (h/t Sue)

The wild devils in Tasmania have been hit hard by a contagious face cancer, transmitted by bites from other devils, but the released population on the mainland is cancer-free, so there’s no chance that an expanded population will be afflicted by the disease. You go, o lovely fierce marsupials!

Tasmanian Devil (from Aussie Ark via Nat. Geog.)

The New York Times has a figure and a list of coronavirus cases in American colleges and universities. Right now the total is more than 178,000 cases at 1400+ colleges. Ohio State seems to hold the record, with 3,051 reported cases, but it has a huge enrollment—66,400 or so. The University of Wisconsin at Madison is only ten cases behind Ohio State (enrollment: 43,820), but clearly has a higher infection rate. The University of Chicago is on the low side, with 79 reported cases (enrollment: 14,467 counting grad students), and I hope it stays that way.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 214,184, an increase of about 600 deaths over yesterday’s report. The world death toll remains at “1.0 million +”, with 4,646 deaths reported yesterday.

Stuff that happened on October 11 includes:

  • 1531 – Huldrych Zwingli is killed in battle with the Roman Catholic cantons of Switzerland.
  • 1767 – Surveying for the Mason–Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania is completed.

Here’s the Mason-Dixon line [dark red] from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Surveyed to resolve a border dispute, it later became the informal line of demarcation between slave states in the South and free states in the North.

  • 1852 – The University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university, is inaugurated in Sydney.
  • 1906 – San Francisco sparks a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan by ordering segregated schools for Japanese students.
  • 1954 – In accord with the 1954 Geneva Conference, French troops complete their withdrawal from North Vietnam.
  • 1962 – The Second Vatican Council becomes the first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church in 92 years.
  • 1968 – NASA launches Apollo 7, the first successful manned Apollo mission.
  • 1976 – George Washington is posthumously promoted to the grade of General of the Armies.

That took long enough, and what was accomplished by it?

  • 1984 – Aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to perform a space walk.

Here’s an short interview with Sullivan that shows scenes from her space walk (trigger warning: d*g!)

  • 1991 – Prof. Anita Hill delivers her televised testimony concerning sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.

Hill, now 64, teaches at Brandeis University and a works as a lawyer with the Civil Rights and Employment Practice group of the plaintiffs’ law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. And of course we all remember the tense standoff between her, Clarence Thomas, and the Senate.  Here’s Joe Biden, who gave Hill a hard time during the hearings, asking her to say “Long Dong Silver”. It didn’t matter, but I did and do believe that Hill was telling the truth.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1844 – Henry J. Heinz, American businessman, founded the H. J. Heinz Company (d. 1919)
  • 1918 – Jerome Robbins, American director, producer, and choreographer (d. 1998)
  • 1925 – Elmore Leonard, American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter (d. 2013)
  • 1937 – Bobby Charlton, English footballer and manager

There’s a good FIFA  video about Charlton, who played for Manchester United most of his career. You can see it on Youtube by clicking on the screenshot below (I can’t embed the video; it’s FIFA!):

  • 1946 – Daryl Hall, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
  • 1968 – Jane Krakowski, American actress and singer

Those who met their Just Reward on October 11 include:

  • 1779 – Casimir Pulaski, Polish-American general (b. 1745)
  • 1809 – Meriwether Lewis, American captain, explorer, and politician, 2nd Governor of Louisiana Territory (b. 1774)
  • 1940 – Vito Volterra, Italian mathematician and physicist (b. 1860)
  • 1961 – Chico Marx, American comedian (b. 1887)
  • 1963 – Jean Cocteau, French author, poet, and playwright (b. 1889)
  • 1965 – Dorothea Lange, American photographer and journalist (b. 1895)

Lange became well known for her photographs of people affected by the Great Depression, taken for the Farm Security Administration . Here’s one of them:

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili likes to be admired, but not out in the open, where there may be d*gs. Here she is down by the Vistula:

Hili: Open spaces make me anxious.
A: Why?
Hili: Everybody can see me
In Polish:
Hili: Otwarte przestrzenie budzą niepokój.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Wszyscy mnie widzą.

In nerby Wloclawek, Mietek the kitten is no longer a kitten. He’s an adult cat, and showing all the signs of it.

Mietek: What do you mean that I had dinner already?!!!

In Polish: Jak to, jadłem już kolację?!!!

A Halloween meme from Nicole:

From Jesus of the Day; time to rectify the deficit of penguins in STEM:

And speaking once again about flies (I have to hand it to Pence—he’s made flies great again!), here’s a cat/fly meme from The Cat House on the Kings:

From Titania. This statement might sound ridiculous, but in fact it is the sentiment of some of the Woke:

I’m highlighting the second tweet below (I can’t figure out how to embed a single tweet in a thread). It shows Trump making another ridiculous statement (at the end). I guess he hasn’t heard of The Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the first video also shows one of his unhinged moments.

A tweet from Barry. Notice how the beasts become bipedal before the hit. As Barry says, “That’s gotta hurt!”, but I’m not so sure:

From Simon, the first animation I’ve seen from The Lincoln Project. Sound up. A “Walk of Shame” usually refers to a college woman sneaking back to her dorm or sorority house after spending a night with a guy, wearing the same clothes she wore the previous evening.

A lovely carving by a talented carver:

This is the most enlightened society ever:

LOL, a climbing frame:

More than one scholar has written me in the past week saying I was right about denying that Arab scholars anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution hundreds of years before The Origin. And here’s another one.

 

Bret Stephens is wrong about most things, but he is very brave

October 10, 2020 • 11:15 am

The title of this piece came from Greg Mayer, who was about to write a post on this same subject when he saw my draft. So, with permission, I’ve stolen his title, which was better than mine. And I agree with it.

Bret Stephens knew what he was doing when he called out the 1619 Project in his latest column (click on screenshot below). For he not only criticized the project, but the paper’s—his paper’s—journalistic integrity, verging at times on mendacity.  In fact, it’s a good piece, even if you don’t like Stephens’s conservatism, for what I know about his indictment is true. But how much of a career will he have at the NYT now? For what he did was far more serious than the “crimes” that made Bari Weiss’s life at the paper so untenable that she left. She was just anti-woke, which went against the paper’s editorial grain.

When Greg saw this draft (he’s followed the Project since its inception, he added this:

You mention Bari Weiss, but don’t forget the opinion page editor, James Bennet, who was defenestrated from the Times for insufficient wokeness. One thing about Stephens that might protect him is the fact that he is very visible, as the Times‘s premier conservative columnist. Both Weiss (who only occasionally was published by the Times) and Bennet were mostly behind the scenes players; Stephens is out in front, published twice weekly (including his duets with Gail Collins), and a “Columnist”, not a mere contributor.

In his column, Stephens says the 1619 Project, however good its motivations, was handled so duplicitously that it gave the paper’s critics “a gift.”

Let me say first that since the 1619 Project was not just journalism, but also an attempt to infiltrate American secondary education with its ideology from Critical Race Theory, it represents a victory for the Woke. Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the Woke haven’t won, I disagree. They control not only the two most respected liberal papers in America, and most higher education, but are now putting their tentacles into secondary-school education. Even the Chicago school system has adopted the 1619 Project as part of its curriculum.

But I digress. I described some of the paper’s questionable practices in earlier posts, and Stephens reprises how Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s director, simply lied about the project’s overriding aims, saying that she never tried to change the foundation date of America from 1776 to 1619. But she did make that claim several times, and it quietly disappeared from the paper’s website without an explicit correction. And despite trenchant criticism by historians about many of the project’s empirical claims, the paper and editor refused to accept, or even consider, the criticisms.  The Woke don’t do stuff like that.

Stephens finds other problems, like the new claim that 1776 represented the year of “defining contradiction” of America, that the founding principles were “false,” and that Jake Silverstein, the NYT Magazine editor, grossly exaggerated when he said this:

“Out of slavery—and the anti-Black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”

Well, you can argue about the meaning of words like “contradiction,” “falsity”, and “nearly everything,” but the fact remains that noted historians on all sides of the political spectrum have argued that the Times‘s journalism simply distorted history. Stephens gives several examples of pushback by historians (e.g., here, here and here) and concludes, correctly, I think, that the 1619 Project is “a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.”

The historical distortions and track-covering by the Times are not in doubt, at least not among those who’ve followed the controversy, but of course all criticism of the 1619 Project by liberals comes with the obligatory praise for its anti-racist intent.  And indeed, the intent was admirable. Who of good will can oppose anti-racism? But the execution has been deeply flawed, and will the paper really reduce racism by inculcating a generation of American children with Critical Race Theory? Further, Trump has already suggested that he’ll cut off government funding to any schools who adopt the 1619 Project in their curriculum. I oppose that autocratic decision as well, as the President should not be dictating what’s taught to children. School boards set curricula.

In the end, Stephens knows he’s even more of an apostate with his NYT colleagues now, but you have to admire him for the courage of his convictions. He didn’t have to write this column, which includes criticisms of the paper’s journalistic practices like this:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

Nor did he have to end his piece this way, but I’m glad he did:

For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.

In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal has reported on a futile effort: a letter to the Pulitzer Committee signed by historians (including Glenn Loury), asking them to take back the 1619 Project’s Pulitzer Prize (that Prize was ridiculous from the get-go, awarded not for quality but wokeness). You won’t be able to read the WSJ article, which is paywalled, but you can see the beginning by clicking on the screenshot below. (Judicious inquiry may yield you a copy of the piece.)

The WSJ repeats some of the earlier criticism, but also links to the Pulitzer letter, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot below:

Of course the Pulitzer folks won’t retract the prize; I don’t know if it’s ever done that, but it surely wouldn’t retract an award for an antiracist piece in these times.  Here’s a short extract from the longish letter which includes lots of material we’re familiar with by now:

The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.

The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions. To err is human. But now that it has come to light that these materials have been “corrected” without public disclosure and Hannah-Jones has falsely put forward claims that she never said or wrote what she plainly did, the offense is far more serious. It is time for the Pulitzer Prize Board to acknowledge its error rather than compound it. Given the glaring historical fallacy at the heart of its account, and the subsequent breaches of core journalistic ethics by both Hannah-Jones and the Times, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written” does not deserve the honor conferred upon it. Nor does The 1619 Project of which it is a central part, and which the Board seeks to honor by honoring Hannah-Jones’s essay. The Board should acknowledge that its award was an error. It can and should correct that error by withdrawing the prize.

The letter is signed by 21 original signatories and 7 additional ones from “the Independent Institute.” I can’t be arsed to look most of the scholars up and, as most Woke people do, try to discredit them. I’d never heard of any of them save Glenn Loury, who, as I recall, identifies as a liberal. It doesn’t matter, though, as Pulitzer won’t revoke the Prize. But the original award to the 1619 Project is, I think, a travesty, motivated much more by ideology than by quality.

h/t: Cate, Enrico

Caturday felid trifecta: Twitter’s “unflattering cat photo” contest; cats in paintings; cats and their human doubles (and lagniappe)

October 10, 2020 • 9:15 am

Yes, it’s Caturday again, and we have the usual three items plus lagniappe (if you’ve been good).

First up is Twitter’s new “unflattering cat photo” contest, and there are some doozies here. I’ll put up just a few. (The contest was sponsored by Popsugar.)

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From Facebook, loads of cats in paintings. Just keep clicking on the arrow. Again, I’ll show a few:

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And this piece from the Guardian is a corker. Photographer Gerrard Gethings found cats that looked like humans, and the match is remarkable.

Excerpts:

The humans are not the animals’ real owners, but models selected through a casting process. The cat portraits came first, then Gethings sought out lookalikes, either based on the cat’s markings, a pose they unexpectedly made (one cat with its paws in the air recalled a raver; another in a pugilistic pose reminded him of a friend who’s a boxer), or, in the case of some cats, with a celebrity they brought to mind. For the cat with the white walrus moustache, Gethings’ ideal match was The Thing actor Wilford Brimley. He posted a callout on Instagram, and “someone in Edinburgh got in touch to say that her dad was his double. He was such a great lookalike that I hopped on a train and shot him at his home. They’re one of my favourite pairs.”

For the cat who looks like a Hells Angel , “I posted a picture of Hagrid on Instagram, and said, ‘Does anyone know anyone who looks like this?’ And this guy came back and said, ‘I look exactly like that.’ And he did. In fact, I think he’s a Hagrid impersonator – that’s his job.”

The imperious-looking cat paired with the sophisticated woman in a grey fur stole was one of the trickiest to photograph. “The cat looks really calm, but it spent the first hour hiding under the furniture, and this was probably the only perfect shot we achieved. It was motionless for a fraction of a second. It required every trick in the book: laser pointers, clockwork mice, spiders, doorbells, duck calls, birds on strings – even my son’s whoopee cushion.”

Marielle and Jacques (silver Maine coon)

There are others at the site, so go look.

There’s a game, too:

Do You Look Like Your Cat? A Matching Game by Gerrard Gethings/@gezgethings and Debora Robertson is released on 12 October, laurenceking.com

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Lagniappe!  This cat must be starving, as all cats are; but this one shows his hunger in a unique way. How could you not feed a cat after it did this?

h/t: GInger K., Matthew, Jez