Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 20, 2017 • 7:30 am

Faithful contributor Joe Dickinson sent some lovely photos of cliff swallows from California. His notes are indented:

I’ve been watching cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) building nests on a bridge in Capitola.  Most of the nests are up under an overhang where they are always in deep shadow and, although I can get to deck where they are pretty much at eye level, they are 15 – 20 feet away.  So, I have to use a rather a long zoom to get close shots.  That combination of factors (plus birds almost constantly in motion) results in photos that are not always as sharp as I would like.  Still, I think they are interesting.  I will continue to monitor once or twice a week to see if I can catch feeding activity and/or nestlings.

First, a shot showing location and general layout of the portion of the colony to which I have the best access.

The next four shots show the same nest on three consecutive days and then four days later.  In the second image of this set, you can see the bird on the right adding a fresh daub of mud.

Here I was focusing on the head poking out when another swallow flew into the frame.

This is a better view of a beakful of fresh mud being added.  Generally, at least in later stages, they enter the nest, turn around and work from the inside.

This nest, near the other end of the bridge, is out in the sun.  It will be interesting to see how successful it is.  I would think it would get rather warm inside.

This is the same nest three days later.  Notice that an entrance tunnel has been extended down almost to the metal strap that supports the nest (just above the bird’s head).  Compare to where the head is poking out in the previous photo.

Finally, I found a patch of mud from which building material is being collected.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s the weekend now: Saturday, May 20, in the year of Ceiling Cat 2017. It’s National Quiche Lorraine Day, but I don’t know what nation they’re talking about, as this isn’t France! It’s also World Metrology Day, and no, I didn’t misspell “meteorology”: this is a day to celebrate and promulgate the metric system. Note: as of this morning, the hoax paper on the Conceptual Penis is still online at the journal site.

On this day in 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama finally found a sea route to India, landing at Kozhikode (formerly Calicut) on India’s west coast. On May 20, 1609, Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published—in London by Thomas Thorpe.  And it’s a blue-ribbon day for most of us, for 144 years ago today, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patented blue jeans with copper rivets, something that millions of people still wear (I wear Wranglers: the boot jean). On this date in 1883, the volcano Krakatoa—in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra—began erupting, with the serious and famous explosion occurring on August 27, causing tsunamis that killed at least 35,400 people. The explosion was heard 4800 km away, the volcano’s pressure wave circled the globe 3½ times, and scientists estimate that anyone within 18 km of the volcano would have been deafened.  Also on this day in 1940, the first prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Finally, on May 20, 1964, Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Penzias discovered “cosmic background radiation”. Correctly interpreting this as a leftover from the Big Bang, both men won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Notables born on this day include Honoré de Balzac (1799), John Stuart Mill (1806), Joe Cocker (1944, died 2014), and Cher (1946). Let’s have songs from the last two. Here’s Cocker, in his inimitable singing style (well. imitable by John Belushi), singing “With a little help from my friends” in a famous performance at Woodstock:

And here’s a long-forgotten (lipsynched) hit from Sonny and Cher: “Baby Don’t Go“, first released in 1964 to little acclaim, and then rereleased a year later, when it became a huge hit. I happen to like it a lot. Wikipedia describes Cher, by the way, as “the only artist to date to have a number-one single on a Billboard chart in each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s”.

A bit more about the song lipsynched above (you hear the recorded version):

The song was originally intended for only Cher to sing, but she got nervous and froze in the studio and asked Sonny to join her. She said later that the situation was like a classic Disney film: “[Sonny joined] me on the choruses, which was enough to take the pressure off me. Sonny was like Dumbo’s good luck feather for me. If he was by my side, I had the confidence to do anything.” Indeed, it was on this recording that Cher began to develop the assurance in her voice that would manifest itself in future hits. Moreover, the harmony scheme they adopted for the song – Cher singing low and Sonny doing the high part – was the opposite of the conventional male-female duo; it gave them a distinctive sound and they retained the practice on subsequent records.

Those who died on this day include Clara Schumann (1896) , Gilda Radner (1989, she was 43), Stephen Jay Gould (2001), and Robin Gibb (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus appears to have made a new d*g friend:

Hili: I hope…
A: What do you hope?
Hili: That the little dog that’s friends with Cyrus stay out of our garden.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam nadzieję…
Ja: Że co?
Hili: Że ten mały piesek, który się zaprzyjaźnił z Cyrusem nie będzie przychodził do naszego sadu.

And here is Cyrus’s new pal; Malgorzata says, “It’s a neighbour’s puppy. He adores Cyrus and runs to him from afar.”

Today’s lagnaippe is an optical illusion found by the estimable Dr. Cobb. Yes, there are 12 black dots in the picture. Can you spot all of them?

https://twitter.com/pionic_org/status/865166073443762177

A new academic hoax: a bogus paper on “the conceptual penis” gets published in a “high quality peer-reviewed” social science journal

May 19, 2017 • 4:06 pm

It’s been 21 years since physicist Alan Sokal submitted a bogus paper to a special “Science Wars” issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text. His paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“, maintained that quantum gravity was a social construct, using many bizarre quotes from postmodern scholars to make its case. Almost immediately after the paper was published, Sokal revealed it was a hoax in an article in Lingua Franca.

The “Sokal Affair” inspired a lot of debate, as well as accusations that Sokal himself was unethical in submitting the paper, but I thought it made its point superbly: much of the social sciences and “culture studies” in academia is intellectually vacuous—a repository for dumb ideas couched in bad prose.

Now we have another hoax: a piece on the “conceptual penis” published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, self described as “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences: from law to sociology, politics to geography, and sport to communication studies. Connect your research with a global audience for maximum readership and impact.”

Here’s the article; click on the screenshot below to see it in the journal (though it will probably be removed very quickly!). The paper has, however, been archived, and you can find it here.

Have a gander!:

Like the Sokal paper before it, this one also deals with social constructs, but this time the construct is  “the conceptual penis”: a transformation of the male genital apparatus into a social meme that is harmful to nearly everyone.  You can read the paper for yourselves, and I recommend it so you can see how low the standards of some humanities journals are (this paper, unlike Sokal’s, was peer reviewed by two scholars). Here are a few choice bits:

Still, even as a social construct, the conceptual penis is hopelessly dominated by recalcitrant social constructions that favor hypermasculine interpretations of the penis as a notion unjustly associated with high male value (Schwalbe & Wolkomir, 2001). Many cisgendered hypermasculine males, for instance, seem to identify those aspects of their masculinity upon which they most obviously depend with the notion that they carry their penis as a symbol of male power, domination, control, capability, desirability, and aggression (The National Coalition for Men “compile[d] a list of synonyms for the word penis [sic],” these include the terms “beaver basher,” “cranny axe,” “custard launcher,” “dagger,” “heat-seeking moisture missile,” “mayo shooting hotdog gun,” “pork sword,” and “yogurt shotgun” [2011]). Based upon an appreciable corpus of feminist literature on the penis, this troubling identification results in an effective isomorphism linking the conceptual penis with toxic hypermasculinity.

But wait! There’s more!

Nowhere more does this problematic construction compare than with the “hegemonic masculinity and cultural construction” presented in the “essence of the hard-on” (Potts, 2000). Potts (2000) illustrates that the functioning (or lack thereof) of the [conceptual] penis “demonstrates the inscription on individual male bodies of a coital imperative: the surface of the male body interfuses with culture to produce the ‘fiction’ of a dysfunctional nonpenetrative male (hetero)sexuality.” This is clear power-dynamical repositioning to alleviate the internal psychological struggle of weakness via hypermasculinity and an essential fear of weakness that characterizes hypermasculinity itself. We therefore further agree with Potts that “by relinquishing the penis’s executive position in sex, male bodies might become differently inscribed, and coded for diverse pleasures beyond the phallus/penis,” and we insist that understanding the objective isomorphic mapping between phallus and (conceptual) penis is a necessary discursive element to changing the prevailing penile social paradigm. The constructed intersection of the anatomical penis and the performative conceptual penis defines the problematic relationship masculinity presents for male bodies and their impacts upon women in our pre-post-patriarchal societies.

And this is my favorite part:

2.2. Climate change and the conceptual penis

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear. At best, climate change is genuinely an example of hyper-patriarchal society metaphorically manspreading into the global ecosystem.

The reveal. Who are these scalawags who perpetrated this hoax? Well, “Peter Boyle” is none other than philosopher Peter Boghossian, and “Jamie Lindsay” is Peter’s frequent collaborator James Lindsay. And, like Sokal, they’ve revealed and explained their hoax in a paper at the Skeptic Magazine site called “‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’: A Sokal-style Hoax on Gender Studies“. Here’s how Peter and James start their reveal:

“The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.”

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

That last sentence is a doozy, and is so true for the field at issue. What does it say that two reviewers were taken in by this? If the authors didn’t understand what they were saying, how could the reviewers? The reviewers didn’t even check the references, as fully a quarter of them were complete fakes: references to nonexistent journals and papers. One referee even said the references were “sound”! Finally, a bit of their rationale; why did Boghossian and Lindsay do this?

Sokal exposed an infatuation with academic puffery that characterizes the entire project of academic postmodernism. Our aim was smaller yet more pointed. We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

Well, you can read the rest of Peter and James’s explanation. Was it ethical to fool a journal this way? I think so—especially if the journal takes the article down. Further, it makes a point far more important than any paper in that journal: it shows that over the past 21 years since Sokal’s hoax, the social sciences remain rife with obscurantist nonsense—an academic miasma. Of course, not all people or areas in social science or the humanities are full of such nonsense, but cultural studies, including women’s studies, are particularly prone to the toxic combination of jargon and ideology that makes for such horrible “scholarship.”

Yes, 21 years on and cultural studies are just as bad as ever—or worse. I’m so glad I spent my career in science, where you can’t fob off craziness so easily—and hoaxes or made-up stuff inevitably gets found out.

If God really existed, this is what the Bible would have said

May 19, 2017 • 1:15 pm

While we’re waiting for the Big News, here’s a nice pair of tw**ts (is that obscene?):

https://twitter.com/1stClown/status/865615525208109056

h/t: Barry

Big news at 4 p.m.!

May 19, 2017 • 11:25 am

At about 2 p.m. Pacific Standard time, or 4 p.m. Chicago time, I’ll be putting up a pretty amazing post: I haven’t done anything amazing, but others have, and you’ll want to read about it. You will find it hilarious, infuriating, a mortal wound on some of those we oppose, or even an unethical act. Or all of the above.

Just watch this space in a few hours. You won’t be disappointed.

What’s the goal of “women’s studies”?

May 19, 2017 • 8:30 am

Let two feminist scholars of them tell you, via this tweet from The New Real Peer Review:

A quote:

When envisioning the future priorities for women’s studies—ones that take advantage of women’s studies as a dangerous, infectious, potentially radical force of change—we posit two new directions for the field to embrace. First, training both female and male students as viruses could prove especially useful in articulating the mission and goals of the field. There are clearly different stakes in the feminist pedagogical work directed toward female students versus male students. While female students must work to understand their own experiences as women and to deconstruct, critically analyze, and understand the ways that their identities as women map onto other privileges and oppressions, they often at least sense the impact of oppression and privilege in their lives.

Male students, on the other hand, may have had little or no exposure to thinking about their own male privileges at all, particularly for white men who may perceive themselves to be victimized by feminist critiques and classroom discussions (George, 1992). While men of color and gay men may differently understand concepts of privilege and oppression, white heterosexual men may arrive at the examination of privilege with little to no experience examining such personal aspects of their lives and identities. The danger of challenging white men, for example, to recognize and critique their own (and other men’s) privileges may be different than teaching women to recognize and critique their privileges and oppressions. Precisely because whiteness, heterosexuality, and maleness are not oppressed classes (George, 1992), and thus are not subjected to the consciousness of oppressed classes, the methods used to discover their own 947 Fahs & Karger – Women’s Studies as Virus privilege may prove critical to the virulent capacity of women’s studies programs seeking to infect male-dominated institutions.

This is one area of academia, it seems, where a scholarly discipline not only has explicit political goals, and a point of view that it must inculcate into students, but makes these things public. I can’t think of any other disciples with such a nakedly obvious agenda, except other areas of “cultural studies.”

Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, retweeted it like this:

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/865509442170667008

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 19, 2017 • 7:30 am

We have photos from three contributors today. The first photo was conveyed by Gayle Ferguson:

I’ve attached a ‘wildlife’ photo for your website. The photo was taken by a colleague of mine (Phil Battley) out of an office window.  His caption is this: “Young female New Zealand falcon [Falco novaseelandiae], Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ. Taken out of an office window!”

Reader Andrée Reno Sanborn sent beetle photos and some notes:

This is a Round-necked Longhorn (Clytus ruricola). June 21, 2016; Northeast Kingdom of Vermont:

As we made our daily bug walk, we found this long-horned beetle (which we first thought was a wasp, injured, cold or drunk) hanging out of a rolled black cherry (Prunus serotina) leaf. My husband carefully detached the leaf for photos. Inside, we found the beetle with aphids and a ladybug grub (Coccinellidae sp.).

The larvae eat rotting hardwood and prefer maple (Acer) (which doesn’t seem to be a problem in our sugar bush, since this was the first one we have found; but on the other hand, we don’t let maple sit and rot).  Adults eat flower nectar and pollen.

 

After chats with real entomologists, we figure this beetle was sipping honeydew, which, of course, is sweet like nectar.

After posing politely, the beetle flew away quite quickly. It seems to have grasshopper-like legs. This is another bug that we need to actively seek out. There is not enough life history information on the Internet. I can find no photos of larvae. I am assuming the bug is not invasive.

From Stephen Barnard, who calls this “One of my ‘Maxfield Parrish’ landscapes”:

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 19, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on May 19, 2017. The storms in Chicago never materialized yesterday, and it was warm and sunny with a high of 25° C.  It’s National Devil’s Food Cake Day, a lovely dessert, but I’m curious why such a toothsome comestible is named after Satan. In Vietnam, it’s Ho Chi Minh’s Birthday (see below), and in the U.S. it’s both Malcolm X Day (he was born on this day in 1925) and National Hepatitis Testing Day. I can assure you that I’m free of all three forms; I’ve been tested.

On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn, accused and “convicted” of adultery, treason and incest (!), was beheaded on the orders of King Henry VIII. In 1919 Kemal Atatürk landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast, beginning the Turkish War of Independence that deposed the Ottomans and began the modernization of Turkey, reforms being quickly reversed by Thug Erdogan. Finally (not much happened on this day), in 1962 Marilyn Monroe sang her famous version of “Happy Birthday (Mr. President)” at a birthday celebration for President John F. Kennedy (10 days early)  at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The incident has its own Wikipedia entry. Here Monroe is introduced by Peter Lawford (JFK’s brother in law) before crooning her ultra-sexy rendition:

By the way, there’s no conclusive evidence that Monroe had an affair with Kennedy, though many think this sultry song is evidence for that. It isn’t. They may have had a fling, but we don’t know for sure.

Notables born on this day include Johns Hopkins (1795), Ho Chi Minh (1890), Max Perutz (1914), Pol Pot and Malcolm X (both 1925), Nora Ephron (1941), and Pete Townshend (1945). Those who died on this day include José Martí (1895), my hero T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”; 1935; motorcycle crash), Charles Ives (1954) and Ogden Nash (1971).

Lawrence is one of my heroes because he was a man of thought and action as well as an excellent writer, though—or perhaps because—he was a tortured soul. When I took a week’s vacation in Dorset in 2006, I visited his cottage Clouds Hill, which he bought in 1923 and kept until his death in 1935 at the age of 46. It’s a spartan place, without electricity or windows in the front, but was near the RAF base where he had been stationed. Here’s the cottage; on the lintel Lawrence had inscribed the Greek phrase οὐ φροντὶς (“Why Worry”). No photos were allowed inside, but I snuck one.

Here’s his bathtub, with a plank to read on, also holding his shaving bowl:

After much searching along the road a few miles from Clouds Hill, I found the spot where Lawrence had his fatal motorcycle accident:

In Arabia:

On one of his beloved Brough Superior SS100 motorcycles. It was on one of these that he was killed:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the beasts are scrutinizing the property, and there’s even a title. It’s a cute picture

INSPECTION TOUR
Hili: We have to check everything thoroughly.
Cyrus: Yes, it’s very important.
In Polish:
OBCHÓD
Hili: Musimy dokładnie wszystko sprawdzić.
Cyrus: Tak, to bardzo ważne.

Here’s a Gus photo with a backstory, sent by Taskin, who’s half of his staff:

I made this sign for the door at the bottom of the stairs into our basement. The other half of Gus’s staff is a massage therapist who has his office in the basement. Gus sometimes scratches and meows at the massage room door, so we started shutting this other door to the waiting area to keep him from being a nuisance during massages. However, people coming in for their massage were then unsure whether they should go down the stairs when the door was shut. Hence, the sign. I love listening to people chuckle as they head down the stairs.

And here’s Ozzy the Weasel, a rescue weasel (DO NOT ADOPT WEASELS!):

Finally, Matthew Cobb sent a tw**t he found depicting a swell mirage, a “Fata Morgana”. Wikipedia has a detailed explanation of this phenomenon.