Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 10, 2019 • 6:30 am

I had to look at the calendar to be sure it was really Friday, but indeed it is: May 10, 2019, and it’s National Liver and Onions Day. Jebus, what a horrible food! But my old man loved it, and when my mom made it for him it stunk up the whole house. Mr. Floyd Coyne ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

It’s also Golden Spike Day, honoring the meeting of the tracks of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad, built from both east and west and meeting on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. Leland Stanford (who founded the University) drove in a golden spike (17.6-carat) linking the tracks, which was, of course, later removed. Being gold and all, it couldn’t be pounded, so was dropped into a pre-drilled hole linking the tracks. Here it is:

(From Wikipedia): The original “golden spike”, on display at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University

Today the Google Doodle honors Lucy Wills, whose achievement is described by C|Net:

Pregnant women around the world have Lucy Wills to thank for crucial research that led to the creation of a prenatal vitamin that helps prevent birth defects.

That vitamin is folic acid — a man-made form of folate, a B-vitamin found naturally in dark green vegetables and citrus fruits. It plays an important role in the creation of red blood cells, and when taken by women before and during pregnancy, it can help prevent birth defects in the baby’s brain and spinal cord.

But this connection was unknown until 1931, when Wills published a paper about research of anemia in pregnant women in India. For her pioneering work, Google dedicated its Doodle on Friday to Wills on her 131st birthday.

On May 10, 1497, Amerigo Vespucci is said to have left Cádiz for his first voyage to the New World; he was the first to discover that Brazil and the West Indies were not the eastern edge of Asia. On this day in 1534, Jacques Cartier arrived in Newfoundland, which he claimed for France. On this day in 1774, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette became the King and Queen of France.

On this day in 1869, as noted above, the linking of the American coasts by railroad was completed at Promontory Point, Utah. And in 1908, we had the first observance of Mother’s Day—in Grafton, West Virginia. On May 10, 1916, according to Wikipedia, “Sailing in the lifeboat James Caird, Ernest Shackleton arrives at South Georgia after a journey of 800 nautical miles from Elephant Island.” This was an amazing journey.  Eight years later, J. Edgar Hoover was appointed first director of the FBI, a post he held until he died in 1972 (48 years at the helm, sometimes in lingerie).

On this day in 1954, the first rock and roll record to reach #1 on the Billboard charts was released by Bill Haley & His Comets. Do you remember (or know) the name? I was 5 when I first heard it, and I still remember. It was being played on Sally Quinn’s 45 rpm record player upstairs in her house, and I can well remember being amazed at the music. Quinn, the daughter of my father’s commanding general, went on to become a Washington Post reporter and the wife of Ben Bradlee.

On May 10, 1974, Bobby Orr scored “THE GOAL” to win the 1970 Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins. Here’s that goal:

Finally, it was on this day in 1994 that Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first black president of South Africa.

Notables born on this day include John Wilkes Booth (1938), Karl Barth (1886), Alfred Jodl (1890), Fred Astaire (1899), Maybelle Carter (1809), Donovan (1906), Sid Vicious (1957), Rick Santorum (1958), and Bono (1960).

Those who expired on May 10 include Paul Revere (1818), Stonewall Jackson (1863), Carl Nägeli (1891), Joan Crawford (1977), Walker Percy (1990), John Wayne Gacy (1994), and Shel Silverstein (1999).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is nervous, as she always is when crossing the soccer field:

Hili: Something is there.
A: What?
Hili: Exactly, also I wonder what.
In Polish:
Hili: Tam coś jest.
Ja: Ale co?
Hili: No właśnie. Też się zastanawiam, co?

In nearby Wroclawek, Leon rejects some reading. When I asked Malgorzata what the book was, she replied, “I have no idea. I tried to read the few words that are visible and I suspect it’s some kind of recipe book on how to pickle or make preserves of vegetables and fruits. But it’s a guess.”

Leon: I’m not convinced that this is a suitable reading for today’s evening.
Leon: Nie jestem przekonany, że to odpowiednia lektura na dzisiejszy wieczór.

This is from Facebook, sent by Diana MacPherson. Can you find the hidden cat? It took me a while:

And another from Facebook:

A tweet from reader Barry, who says, “I can’t stand these cultists.” Neither can I.

From Nilou: Biologist Bob Trivers promotes exercise (and weed). The Dude abides!

Tweets from Grania. I may have posted this one before, but it’s a heartwarmer and will make you tear up.

From the inimitable Stephen Fry, who coins a new profanity:

AI still isn’t perfect . . .

Translation by Twitter: “It is a wild mama who eats the food to the kitten first.”

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is kind of sad, but predators gotta eat:

A boy imitating birds:

Check that against the original. Pretty good!

Matthew loves illusions, and this is a great one. ALL the lines are curved but half of them in the gray area appear to be zig-zagged. They’re not: check for yourself.

 

What is the sound of a million wings flapping?

May 9, 2019 • 3:00 pm

Here, from Twisted Sifter, via reader Paul, is one of the rarest sounds you can hear in nature. It’s the sound of millions of migrating monarch butterflies flapping their wings, narrated by naturalist/biologist Phil Torres. Some day I will make it to this site and see the fantastic clusters of butterflies, like huge clumps of Spanish moss hanging from the trees.

Paul says it sounds like a waterfall, but you be the judge.

Straight talk about “fat acceptance”

May 9, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Quillette has two good articles up about the need to deal with biological facts. I won’t discuss the first one here, but it’s well worth reading: “A victory for female athletes everywhere“, which lauds the new testosterone standards for competing in women’s athletics. The writer, Doriane Coleman, has plenty of cred: she’s a professor of law at Duke Law School and, in college, was a champion runner in the 800-meter event.

The other piece is the one below, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot. It’s by Canadian writer Anna Slatz, who takes issue with some aspects of the modern “fat acceptance” movement (FAM). Slatz has not only written on this topic before, but was in fact once very fat: as she says, she once weighed 300 pounds at a height of only 4’10”, a sure prescription for premature death. So she knows whereof she speaks.

Slatz’s objection to the FAM is the same as mine: by telling people that it’s okay to be obese in the sense of “not unhealthy”, it encourages people to ignore conditions that cause disease and greatly increased mortality. And it’s medically inaccurate as well, because there are tons of data showing association of obesity with diabetes, cardiovascular problems, joint issues, and so on. Slatz notes that 18% of all deaths in the U.S. are associated with obesity. To pretend that you can be “healthy at any size” is to ignore science completely.

That said, Slatz and I are both cognizant of the stigma associated with being fat. It is not okay to treat people unequally because they’re overweight. It’s not okay to call their attention to their weight and say that they need to lose weight for their own good. Nearly all of them already know that! (Except, that is, for those deluded by FAM’s claims that there’s no association of morbidity and mortality with obesity.) We should all realize how difficult it is for overweight people to lose pounds. I’ve struggled, fasting two days a week, just to lose 15 pounds or so, and that’s not anywhere near the task facing people who are obese.

It’s also undeniable that the media presents images of women who are way too skinny: many models starve themselves and even smoke to quench their appetite. Finally, doctors must be sensitive to patients and aware of the difficulties of losing weight, as well as not overlooking other conditions because of obesity. (Slatz mentions an overweight woman whose cancer wasn’t discovered until it was too late.)

But the FAM goes way beyond this. Slatz gives one example: Sonalee Rashatwar, a sort of fatness social justice warrior, who goes so far as to blame her medical problems not on her obesity, but on those who stigmatize her. To wit:

Last week, self-described queer non-binary “fat sex therapist” Sonalee Rashatwar delivered a two-hour lecture entitled Race as a Body Image Issue at the St. Olaf College Health and Wellness Center in Minnesota. The event was a master class in social justice, at times putting shame to the parodies of the genre that now traffic on social media. In the video, the visibly obese woman asks: “Is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure—or is it my experience of weight stigma?” In the presentation, which has gone viral, Rashatwar also compared “fatphobia” not only to eugenics (which is itself absurd) but also to “Nazi science,” and declared that “a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex.” Indeed, the very titles of her recurring presentations—including Health is a Social Construct, Decolonizing Sex Positivity, Gender Isn’t Real and Neither Is Health and How Fat Queers the Body—seem like something you’d find on the Twitter feed of satirists such as Titania McGrath or Madeline Seers. Yet Rashatwar can’t be dismissed as just another social-media kook—for she is regularly invited to speak to actual health experts at numerous universities across North America, including, recently, medical students at the University of Texas. The listed speaking fee on her web site is US$5,000. (She also specifies that “travel arrangements should not be made on Sonalee’s behalf by the host organization due to her disability needs.”)

The talk at Saint Olaf is no longer online, but it’s telling that it was at the “Health and Wellness Center.”  To give a talk like the one Slatz describes at a “health and wellness center” is equivalent to telling people at such a place that it’s okay to be a heavy smoker.

Why do we have this movement? In one sense it’s laudable, for fat people have been demonized for too long. I’ve even heard that it’s a “moral weakness to be fat,” something that could be said only by someone who doesn’t know the difficulty of losing large amounts of weight. And it’s part of a new anti-bigotry movement that, fostered by the Left, is generally salubrious despite its excesses in the Regressive Left. But, unlike ethnicity or race, you can actually do something about being overweight, hard as it may be. It’s really not okay to be fat—not in the sense that you’re likely to have medical problems and a shorter life than other folks, and most people don’t want to die prematurely.

Let us not stigmatize or discriminate against those who are fat. But let’s not pretend that they’re not endangering themselves, either. We don’t have to tell them that—they already know it—but fat people shouldn’t tell other fat people that they’re perfectly fine, healthwise. It’s not up to those of us who aren’t fat to police others: such a message needs to be conveyed by those overweight people who instead give false reassurances, and to doctors, who have a responsibility to tell people the consequences of being overweight.

The Williams College Council and anti-Semitism

May 9, 2019 • 10:45 am

Those of you who say you skip the posts about coddled and entitled students, go ahead and skip this one. It’s just a short update on the anti-Semitism of students at Williams College, whose College Council denied a pro-Israel organization (WIFI) status as a recognized student organization while giving that status to a pro-Palestinian one (SJP). There’s little doubt about the reason for this double standard, which, though in violation of many College rules, has been tacitly accepted by the college’s administration (who didn’t do anything except mouth disappointment and say that the unrecognized Jewish group could still use University facilities). The minutes of the meeting are kept secret except from Williams students, and the vote by the College Council against giving formal status to the pro-Israel organization (13-8) was by secret ballot so the cowardly miscreants could hide their names.

What purports to be a record of the Williams College Council, and a report by its secretary, one “Lance”, has appeared here and can be downloaded here. I have no doubt that it’s authentic, as it originated on a Williams-alumni website (EphBlog), but one must always be a bit wary. Here’s the header:

And on page 2 you find the relevant part from the person who took the minutes (my emphasis):

Lance: Hi there, I’m the minutekeeper. My name is Lance. Anyways, thank you so much for your thoughtful email. If you’d like to tell me… so, just a procedure from CC, because I want to be done with it too, I understand. If you say that a certain thing was misattributed to the wrong person, I was handling 12 different guests that were sitting in geographically different locations, I had to look down while typing, right? So it is a bit challenging, but for instance, I don’t remember which guest number you were and I don’t remember which guest number you were. I also don’t know which guest number I attributed your guest number to, right? But if you want to send me a quick correction, because clearly you know which ones are misattributed, I can easily change those numbers real quick. That is always how we do it, that is why we approve them in the next week’s minutes. As for ‘in shambles’, I only didn’t type down two things: 1) personally identifying information – if someone who said something that was deeply personal, I tried to limit that to preserve anonymity; 2) clearly anti-Semitic things I didn’t type down. I want [sic, must be “won’t”] repeat them, but I didn’t type those things down. So those are the only two things I didn’t type. If that is a mischaracterization that you are uncomfortable with, I don’t know what to tell you. Those are the only two things I didn’t type. Again, there is an audio recording. I can’t actually, accurately 100% transcribe things, though I do try my best. But that is really all I can say. If there are specific edits, I’d love to hear them. I can just edit them real quick, we can vote on it, and we can move on to this training.

So not only the names of those who voted on each side were kept secret, but so were “clearly anti-Semitic things” that were said. This shows that there was some anti-Semitism espoused at the meeting, but for some reason (you can guess why), it wasn’t recorded.

It’s telling that with all its efforts to expunge hate from the Williams campus, the administration doesn’t seem to care much about the anti-Semitism that, I suspect, is rife among its students. That’s because, of course, Jews don’t count as PoCs (the new acronym for “people of color.”)

If you read this, Williams administrators, will you investigate? I don’t think so.

 

Overreaction: College library director suspended over historical exhibit that included blackface photos from the 1920s

May 9, 2019 • 9:00 am

Inside Higher Ed reports an incident demonstrating the extreme sensitivity of American colleges over racial issues.  In this case, a library exhibit at Doane University in Crete, Nebraska included two photos from 1920s college yearbooks showing students in blackface. The librarian, alerted to the fact that these photos offended students, then removed them, but it was too late: she was suspended indefinitely. (It’s not clear whether she’ll be fired.) The overreaction, to my mind, was giving her the boot when she was already rectifying the situation.

Read the article by clicking on the screenshot below.

What happened is that the director of the campus library, Melissa Gomis, was responsible for a historical exhibit that included the photos. This ensued:

Doane’s library staff in March curated an exhibit of historical photographs and other memorabilia from student scrapbooks housed in university archives. In late April, a student complained about two photographs in a display called “Parties of the Past.” The photos showed students attending a 1926 Halloween party, apparently in blackface. A blurb from a local newspaper at the time indicated it was a campus masquerade party. But there was no accompanying note from the curators explaining why the photos were included.

Many historians have argued that there is value in showing the presence of racism at universities and in other parts of society, even if such visibility makes people uncomfortable today. Many also argue for contextualizing this kind of content.

What makes this problematic is that after two students complained about the photos, Gomis removed the offending material. But it was already too late for her:

After speaking with the concerned student, Gomis decided to remove the blackface photos due — according to the AAUP — “to genuine concern for the student while also recognizing the current atmosphere of elevated sensitivity on many college campuses.” Indeed, a number of campuses have this year been forced to acknowledge blackface incidents in their own not-so-distant pasts.

Then last week, under orders from the provost, the entire exhibit was removed. That same day, Gomis was told to collect her things from her office and suspended indefinitely.

The article is long and I won’t give more details except to add that both the American Association of University Professors, using guidelines from the American Library Association, objected to this as “external censorship” that was unwarranted given that Gomis had already exercised “self censorship.” They also cited it as a violation of academic freedom.

The University President issued a strong statement without mentioning Gomis’s own decision to remove the photos:

President Jacque Carter sent an all-campus memo saying that blackface “has a history of dehumanization and stereotyping, which perpetuates systemic racism in society.” He apologized for the photos and the hurt they’d caused.

“Such an insensitive action is unacceptable and will not be tolerated now or in the future,” Carter wrote.

Gomis was suspended under the University’s anti-harassment policy.

On the University administration’s side is the fact that the display didn’t give any context about the photos, explaining them and perhaps pointing out that blackface is racist and offensive. And there’s no denying that those photos are offensive and upsetting. Further, the display was in public and had no “trigger warning”, so that students encountered the photos without warning.

Yes, that might have been a misstep, although one could argue that the photos showed racism in the University’s past that was itself educational. But Gomis’s willingness to meet with an offended student, and then her removal of the photos, constitutes a recognition and rectification of the offense. That, and an explanatory note from the President to the campus community, should have ended the matter.

One could argue whether there was any value in including the photos in the exhibit. I think the answer is “yes”, perhaps with some context. Blackface is surely offensive, but so are Confederate flags, pictures of Nazi oppression of the Jews, photos of Alabama police unleashing dogs on peaceful civil-rights demonstrators, as well as many other things of pressing historical interest—all demonstrating how we now decry bigotry that was normalized not so long ago. Would a photo of Jews being offloaded from railroad cars at Auschwitz also be cause to suspend a curator? I don’t think so.

We can’t eliminate bigotry by pretending it never existed. Indeed, it’s salutary to point out the oppression of the past as a sign of how far we’ve come. That the photos weren’t explicitly singled out was an omission, probably an inadvertent one, but doesn’t warrant someone losing their job.

While I share some of the actions taken to rectify immorality in history, like removing Confederate statues erected after the war as tacit approbations of slavery, neither can we pretend that our forebears were moral by today’s lights. Such are the lessons of history, and support Steve Pinker’s data showing that morality is improving. How will we know how much bigotry has waned unless we show it at its height?

Yes, by all means give context. But do not fire people who tried to do the right thing!

Melissa Gomis (photo from IHE).

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 9, 2019 • 7:45 am

Today’s contribution is from Mark Sturtevant, whose notes are indented:

Here are pictures that were mostly taken from various local parks in the late spring / early summer of last year. In what I call the Magic Field, the early season ground cover is teeming with various species of baby grasshoppers. I really like these little ‘hoppers since they are cute, but I do need to use a trick to increase magnification to photograph them since they are otherwise much too small for my macro lens. The one shown in the first picture is likely a very young red-legged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, and it was taken by mounting the macro lens on a full set of extension tubes.

Although one might expect all the grasshoppers to be immature so early in the season, a notable exception is my favorite grasshopper that I see only in the Magic Field. The next two pictures show a young adult coral-winged grasshopper, so-named because of the colorful hind wings as shown in the linked picture.  This robust grasshopper overwinters as mature nymphs, so in the spring there are many adults flying around while all other grasshoppers are only recently hatched. One can see how well they are well camouflaged against the lichens and mosses that cover much of the ground in the Magic field. This large female was also very cooperative. What a beauty!

Next up are some damselflies. There are so many species of these around that it will be some time before I photograph most of them in my area. Adding to this challenge are the many species of ‘bluet’ damselflies,  distinguished in the field by the smallest differences in their markings so that I have no idea whether I am photographing a new species or one that I have taken many times before. The first one is likely to be the Hagen’s bluet (Enallagma hageni), and this was later discovered to be a new species for me.

The second one was definitely something new. This is the lovely sedge sprite damselfly, Nehalennia irene.

The boldly marked caterpillar shown in the next picture was a mystery at first, but from the pictures I determined that this was the larva of the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas phaeton). That was pretty exciting since this is a butterfly that I had never seen before. So I returned the next day to the same spot, but the caterpillar was missing. A careful search of the area revealed it several feet away, lying motionless and limp on the ground. What happened? A possibility is that a hunting wasp that supplies its larvae with paralyzed caterpillars had found it. On occasion a wasp can drop their prey during transport and not find it again.

The story does cheer up a bit since some weeks later I came across an adult Baltimore checkerspot butterfly at a different park. This little beauty was well concealed in tall grass, but I was able to get this picture after trimming back the grass with scissors. Scissors are often very handy for this hobby.

Next are pictures that show more of the hardships of insect life. First is a caterpillar with cocoons of the wasps that had parasitized it. The wasps were likely Braconids, but I don’t know their species or the species of their caterpillar host. The doomed caterpillar was still alive when I found it, but quite unable to crawl away because it had been firmly fastened down with the silk from the cocoons.

I am lucky to have house centipedes (Scutigera coleoptrata) in my area. Besides running up and down the walls in our house, they can also be generally found sitting on the outside of the house during warmer weather. So we are pretty much surrounded. The last pictures show a large one that had captured a Noctuid moth drawn in by our porch light. Perhaps readers would enjoy watching this short documentary to learn more about house centipedes. For any person who is perhaps creeped out about these multi-legged beasties, this beautifully filmed but also humorous video will not make you feel any better about them 😉

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 9, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, May 9, 2019, and National Shrimp Day. It’s also Victory Day, celebrating the end of the war in Europe, including the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany (see below). This holiday is celebrated in Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Nobody is reading the science posts and I am sad.

On this day in 1671, Thomas Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. He failed and was caught, but, oddly, was not only pardoned but rewarded with land and money.

On May 9, 1926, according to Wikipedia, ” Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett claim to have flown over the North Pole (later discovery of Byrd’s diary appears to cast some doubt on the claim.)” It looks as if Byrd may have falsified his sextant data. If so, then the first to really succeed in this flight were Roald Amundsen, Umberto.Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and Lincoln Ellsworth, who flew over the Pole just a few days later: May 12, 1926.

 

On May 9, 1945, the final German Instrument of Surrender was signed at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst, ending World War II in Europe. On this day in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film Vertigo opened in San Francisco. Here’s the official trailer:

On May 9, 1960, the FDA announced that it was giving the first approval of an oral contraceptive: Searle’s Enovid birth-control pill. 14 years later, the House Committee on the Judiciary opened impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. Nixon resigned on August 9 before the proceedings finished (they became moot at that point), and was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Finally, on this day in 1979, according to Wikipedia, “Iranian Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian [was] executed by firing squad in Tehran, prompting the mass exodus of the once 100,000-strong Jewish community of Iran.” There are very few Jews left in Iran now.

Notables born on this day include John Brown (1800), Howard Carter (1874), Mike Wallace (1918), Richard Adams (1920), Sophie Scholl (1921), Manfred Eigen (1927, Nobel Laureate), Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson (both 1936), Richie Furay (1944), and Billy Joel (1949).

And Matthew notes the birthday of one of his scientific heroes, Heinrich Matthaei, who is 90 today. Matthaei, as the tweet notes, was the first to see that a nucleotide triplet coded for a particular amino acid (UUU = phenylalanine). Matthaei should have gotten the Nobel Prize for this work along with those who did win for deciphering the code, but was shut out. A travesty! You can read more about him in the article cited by Matthew, which is in fact Matthew’s piece in the Torygraph:

Those who died on May 9 include Friedrich Schiller (1805), Albert Abraham Michelson (1931, Nobel Laureate), Ulrike Meinhof (1976), James Jones (1977), Tenzing Norgay (1986), Russell Long (2003), Lena Horne (2010), and Vidal Sassoon (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili gets fusses from a visitor:

Agata: Do you like to be petted?
Hili: Yes, but you may do it with greater intensity.
In Polish:
Agata: Lubisz jak cię głaszczą?
Hili: Tak, ale możesz to robić bardziej intensywnie.

And at his future home near Dobrzyn, the Dark Tabby makes a sage pronouncement:

Leon: The basis of every action is observation.

Leon: Podstawą każdego działania jest obserwacja.

From a cat’s diary, sent by reader Karl:

Another from Facebook:

A tweet contributed by reader Blue, and a pretty amazing display of strength and athleticism:

Reader Barry found this one, adding “Well, at least 57% of 22,531 people are idiots.”

A tweet from Matthew about Sir David’s birthday, which was yesterday:

More tweets from Matthew. Bad typo in this one!

But isn’t this what saints are for? To intercede for you?

This shows the profound gaps in the fossil record:

Tweets from Grania. I’m not sure whether this cat is normal:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1125746034318172161

This is quite a sneeze!

Seriously, is this a question even worth asking?

Paranoia ad infinitum: As far as I know, there have been exactly zero hyena attacks by the Zionist carnivore: