Tuesday Duck Tails

April 9, 2019 • 2:30 pm

There’s never a dull moment at Botany Pond. This morning at 7 a.m. no ducks were visible, but when I whistled for a while, Honey came flying in over the fence at the pond’s south edge, skidded to a stop in the water, and then swam rapidly to me, subsequently downing a big three-course breakfast.

This afternoon, when I met Anna at the pond for our first annual Joint Duck Feeding, only the drake was there (by the way, he needs a name), and we fed him for a bit. He’s a lovely male, with no obvious signs of domestic genes. He’s small, too, so he’s neither Frank nor James. Honey is certainly not monogamous!

Name this duck, please:

And then, when Anna and I were sitting on the edge of the pond, we heard a whir of wings and some quacks, and Honey came flying in.  She landed on the ground near us, and Unnamed Drake got out of the pond to join her. Here’s Anna feeding them corn:

And then they jumped into the pond, ignoring the food, and COPULATED! The drake mounted Honey, forcing her whole body underwater, including her head (which he had in his bill), and she was under for about 20 seconds. I wanted to break it up but Anna told me not to. She was right. Sure enough, the bout ended after a short time and both ducks surfaced, flapping their wings in postcoital glow. Then they preened and swam off together. I think that it was a real mating, though Honey may already have laid eggs.

Here’s the mating; you can barely make out Honey’s head underneath Unnamed Drake. Yes, there are two ducks in this photo. And remember that the male has to unfurl his big coiled penis.

COPULATION!

If they really mated, this is part of what was happening:

Afterward I took a few shots of the hen to see if it was Honey. And indeed, she had the same stippling pattern on her bill as one of the two hens from the other day (only one hen remains), with the distinctive black corner spots where the bill meets the head:

Finally, she got out of the water and blithely walked across the grass to the other, larger pond:

Sorry if I post too many duck pictures, but you don’t have to look at them!

 

In which I visit Woke Left websites

April 9, 2019 • 1:00 pm

It’s really time I stopped looking at HuffPost, as my friends tell me repeatedly. But I still like to look at Woke Left websites, just like I look at conservative and centrist or center-Left websites: just to see what’s going on.

I’ve managed to break the habit of looking at Salon, though, spending a bit of time there today, I was appalled to see how mindlessly authoritarian it has become: it’s almost a caricature of Authoritarian rhetoric. One example: I saw the movie Green Book on the plane to Europe, and thought it was pretty damn good, though I was of course aware that the family of the black protagonist Don Shirley objected to its factual inaccuracies. But it was a movieand not a biography. Liberties were and are taken in movies like this.

Salon‘s objection, though, was the familiar one that Green Book was a “white savior movie.” That I don’t quite get, as it’s a movie in which a black man weans a white man from his racism, and a white man helps a black man come out of his shell. If there was any saving, it was mutual. But I prefer to think of it as the story of two very different men finding their common humanity. The story was absorbing, new to me, pretty much if not wholly true, and the acting was superb. Andit by no means whitewashed the racism of the South in the early Sixties.

But if you read Salon‘s house critic’s review of the movie, you’re thrust into a world where the quality of a work of art depends entirely on whether it corresponds to the critic’s intersectionalist ideology. Here, for instance, is the end of (t.v.) critic Melanie McFarland’s splenetic review of Green Book:

It’s much simpler, however, to spit-shine escapist Social Progress tales drawn from a mythologized version of history. These reassure mainstream white audiences of how far we’ve come as a nation despite the headlines about a spike in hate crimes, the rising white nationalist presence within law enforcement and in politics, racially motivated mass shootings and widening wealth gaps between whites and non-white minority groups.

None of this is to say that Farrelly has no right to direct “Green Book” or that Vallelonga should not have told his father’s story. But it would have helped, perhaps, if someone from within Shirley’s family circle had been consulted, if only to prevent “Green Book” from being a story about a white man’s flirtation with racism by way of witnessing a black man’s strained effort to survive and succeed in spite of it.

So in this way “Green Book” transforms racism into something that, you know, really makes you think, something terrible happening to other people, something that’s really too bad, instead of an ever-present structure in America from which people either specifically or unwittingly benefit. Racism is awful, but it doesn’t force Tony to risk anything aside from punching out a few people threatening the guy who’s paying him.

And that’s soothing. It sells the idea that as long as a person doesn’t behave like a violent criminal from Sundown Town, Alabama, when confronted with a person whose skin is darker than theirs, that’s enough. The passage of time will take care of the rest, assisted by a few take-out meals and road trips along the way.

“Green Book” is a manual for an outdated mode of thinking, in other words, and a mode of moviemaking that needed to end yesterday. But we’ll take 2019. That would be a fine time for fresh start.

The underlying theme of this vitriol is that racism in America hasn’t gotten any better since 1962—a palpably ridiculous claim, but one that makes me realize why people objected to Steven Pinker’s last two books on progress—and that making racism personal elides the fact that it’s a structural, endemic, and omnipresent feature of America. Unfortunately for McFarland, we’ve made a lot of strides in the last 57 years, and although racism still pollutes America, the purpose of the movie was to tell the story of two men embedded in a time when bigotry was an unquestioned feature of the American South. It is the story of two men, not a polemic about the racism of modern day America, which is what McFarland wanted. She reviewed the movie not as it was, but in comparison to the movie she would have made, which would be the equivalent of art under Stalin.

But I fulminate. I liked the movie. I will not be going back to Salon any time soon.

If you want to see a calm refutation of all these criticisms of Green Book, including the erroneous claims of Shirley’s family, watch this video.

On a happier note, HuffPost continues to go down the tubes, at least judging from its analytics seen here. Viewership seems to have dropped about 50% just since October:

 


x

 

In comparison, The New York Times, flawed as it is but still not fully Woke, is holding pretty steady over that period:

It will be a happy day for me when HuffPost closes up shop.

 

First black hole photo should be released tomorrow; explanatory video below

April 9, 2019 • 11:30 am

Reader Bryan called my attention to the fact that in exactly 24 hours, a photo of a black hole (if there is indeed such a photo), will be released for the first time. The project is described in this New York Times article, which gives this context:

At 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday April 10, a group of astronomers who run a globe-girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil their long awaited pictures of a pair of putative black holes. One of the objects sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, and equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe.

The other target is in the heart of Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo, where a black hole 7 billion times the mass of the sun is spewing a jet of energy thousands of light-years across space.

According to calculations, and if all has gone well, either or both of the black holes should appear as a tiny shadow backlit by the glow of radio energy at the galactic center.

They might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether they are rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing them are slightly wrong, or if they are spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe.

. . .astronomers are thrilled at the prospect of finally, actually seeing the previously unseeable.

“Yes, I’m definitely excited to see the image!” Daniel Holz, of the University of Chicago, wrote in an email. “It’s not really rational, since I know the math works and the theory has been thoroughly tested. But still, this would be a picture of the real thing, up close and personal. That is super cool.”

Read more below. The article says that although we don’t know for sure if the image of a black hole will be captured, the scientists are acting as if they have something to show: there will be a simultaneous announcement in six places and a big party at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. So this should be cool, and we’re luck to see it in our lifetime.

Bryan also sent a link to this 9-minute video, adding that “Derek Mueller has a very lucid theoretical primer – using tangible props and minimal computer graphics ( I particularly liked this )- which will help understand the anticipated image of the black hole tomorrow.” Do watch it today, though, as it is Mueller’s guess about what the photo will look like based on the principles of physics. It also explains the connection between the image and the Einstein’s theory of relativity.

A Qatari sociologist gives Islamic instructions (and a demonstration) on how to beat your wife

April 9, 2019 • 10:00 am

To all those who seem to think that being Muslim is in itself a badge of honor, to those who ignore the misogyny inherent in the religion and its dictates, to those feminists who turn a blind eye to the oppression of women in the Middle East, calling Israel an apartheid state but ignoring the “apartheid” against women in Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—to all these people, have a look at this video from Qatar, featuring a sociologist demonstrating the Islamically permissible way to beat your wife.

MEMRI describes a new video featuring Qatari sociologist Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari, who uploaded his “demonstration” on the Al-Mojtama YouTube channel. The video is below, and I’ve put some screenshots below it, which I posted before I found the subtitled video on YouTube (MEMRI doesn’t often put its videos there).

Remember that Qatar is considered one of the more liberal Islamic countries, though it’s actually quite despotic in its employment of sharia law, its use of corporal punishment, its deeming of homosexual acts as capital crimes, and its abysmal treatment of guest workers.

I suppose it’s a mercy that Al-Ansari (demonstrating on a boy) shows that Islam mandates just a mild slapping around of the disobedient wife rather than full-on beating and punching, but saying that it’s okay to lay hands on a wife, and even arguing that the women want that because they love domineering men, is flat-out misogynistic. And, of course, there’s the unquestioned assumption that the man is the boss and the woman must do his bidding (see data below). Apartheid, indeed!

Some screenshots:

From the 2013 Pew Survey of the World’s Muslims, a survey taken in many (but not all) Muslim-majority countries. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Yemen, for instance, are not represented:

Had enough? At least have a listen to this short video of the enlightened sociologist discussing International Women’s Day. As the YouTube notes say,

On March 8, 2019, Qatari sociologist Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari uploaded a video to the Al-Mojtama YouTube channel, which he runs, in which he mocked International Women’s Day for being a celebration of women’s freedom to “act like whores, to play around… and to do whatever they want.” He mocked Western criticism of the hijab and of the Muslim male chaperone system, alleging that the West tells women to act like sluts instead. He also mocked the West for turning women into “cheap merchandise” and encouraging them to dance, use Snapchat, work as TV hosts and actresses, and attend co-ed universities, where male students fondle them behind the professors’ backs during class. He mockingly said: “Bear him a bastard child!… Yes, freedom!” He also said that the West allows women to serve in the military and police in order to “provide comfort” to male service members, and added that dogs are more honorable than the “filthy” secular people who fool women into driving cars, working as electricians, completing their education, and turning into prostitutes like in Europe, where he claimed 90 percent of children are bastards. Al-Ansari’s Facebook page says that he is the manager of the Center for the Organization of Marriage Projects. The Al-Mojtama YouTube channel’s “About” section says that the channel calls for a return to the instructions of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad.

I doubt there are many women who, thinking from behind John Rawls’s “position of ignorance”, would be happier if they were born in Qatar than in almost any Western country.

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (and a video)

April 9, 2019 • 7:30 am

Please send in your good wildlife photos if you have some.

Reader Tony Eales from Australia continues his series of arthropods from his trip to Borneo. His notes are indented.

There aren’t too many insect orders left from my Borneo trip. Here we have Blattodea, Diptera and Hemiptera.

A lot of people think termites are ants, and a lot of stuff on the web still puts termites in their own order of Isoptera; but phylogenetic analysis shows them to be deeply nested within the Cockroach order Blattodea. They’re basically eusocial cockroaches. In Australia I am used to seeing them only if I lift a log or peel back some dead bark, but in the rainforest of Brunei they were out marching along a balcony rail like ants.

We saw more traditional cockroaches as well. A very large nymph or wingless female roach out on a ginger leaf on a night walk.

A medium sized roach with love hearts on its prothorax. Ignoring completely taxonomic accuracy, I’ve dubbed it the Love Bug.

And the smallest winged adult roach I’ve ever seen at about 3-4mm.

With my camera woes, flighty insects like flies were difficult to photograph and I missed, what may be, my only opportunity to photograph a stalk-eyed fly but I did get some other interesting dipterans. The first I have no idea of the family but the other two I am certain where Rhiniid Flies as we have similar species in Australia.

Rhiniids:

We also had many Hemipterans. The Flatid planthopper was almost identical to others I’ve seen in Australia. As was the Rice Bug Leptocorisa sp. (second photo). But both seemed like their colour was more “saturated” than the ones at home.

I also found an unidentified tiny nymph in a lovely shade of pink.

I also recorded the sounds of Cicadas calling at dusk. It’s an extraordinary call that sounds like a trumpet. They would call at the same time every day for about 15mins. Every time I listen it takes me back to the rainforest. The video is all hazy because my phone was in a ziplock bag to protect it from rain and humidity:

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 9, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Tuesday, April 9, 2019, and National Chinese Almond Cookie Day. Those aren’t fortune cookies, but the ones shown below. (I have no idea what lobby managed to get this comestible its own holiday):

It’s also the Christian Feast Day for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis on April 9, 1945. Here I am making an exception of my rule “No religious feast days”, as I admire Bonhoeffer for his courage and because his theology was relatively sane (though still, of course, theology).

On this day in 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to America left on its way to Roanoke Island, where it landed and established the Roanoke Colony (Raleigh wasn’t on the expedition). By 1590, the Colony mysteriously vanished, and we still don’t know what happened to its settlers. On April 9, 1860, according to Wikipedia, “On his phonautograph machine, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.” The machine worked  by “transcrib[ing’ sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackened paper or glass.” Here’s what the device looked like:

On this day in 1865, the fighting of the American Civil War ended as Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. In 1939, black singer Marian Anderson, after being denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) the right to sing to an integrated audience at the DAR’s Constitution Hall, gave a replacement concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands of people came in support of Anderson and many, like Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the DAR in protest. Here’s the big concert:

As noted above, it was on this day in 1945 that pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis for his “subversive” activities and for spying.

On April 9, 1959, NASA introduced the “Mercury Seven” astronauts to the public, a scene depicted very well in the Tom-Wolfe inspired movie “The Right Stuff”.  You can see the three videos of the real press conference here, here, and here.  On this day in 1965, the first indoor professional baseball game was played as the Houston Astrodome opened. Finally, it was on this day 14 years ago that Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in a civil ceremony in Windsor.

Notables born on this day include Charles Baudelaire (1821), Eadweard Muybridge (1830), Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865), Paul Robeson (1898), Hugh Hefner (1926), Tom Lehrer (1928), Carl Perkins (1932), Valerie Solanas (1936), Sam Harris (1967), Kristen Stewart (1990), and Jackie Evancho (2000).

Here’s a Muybridge photo of a leaping cat (he also, as you may know, proved through his stop-motion photography that a running horse has at one point all four hooves off the ground):

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on April 9 include  François Rabelais (1553), Francis Bacon (1626), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882), William Henry Johnson (“Zip the Pinhead”, 1926),  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1945), Frank Lloyd Wright (1959), and Phil Ochs (1976).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus shows some tenderness towards Hili. Hili isn’t impressed.

Hili: Why are you standing over me?
Cyrus: Out of concern for your safety.
Hili: But nothing is threatening me.
Cyrus: That’s beside the point.
In Polish:
Hili: Czemu tak nade mną stoisz?
Cyrus: W trosce o twoje bezpieczeństwo.
Hili: Przecież nic mi nie grozi.
Cyrusa: Nie szkodzi.

From Heather Hastie: Interspecific love between a cat and a ferret:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1110930769034260480

Two tweets from reader Nilou. This first one restores my faith in humanity:

https://twitter.com/MsMollyRachael/status/1109879593689862147

From the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London:

Tweets from Matthew. First, a lovely stag beetle (he says “click on the picture if you see a blur”):

A hornet attacking what looks to be an orthopteran. Translation of the Japanese: “The hornets were strong!”

I’m not sure how I feel about this breed of domestic duck.

This letter from William Faulkner (second tweet below) is pretty well known:

Oh man, just when you think you’ve seen the last possible case of one species mimicking another, you find something like this—a spider mimicking a caterpillar!

Tweets from Grania, with a gecko licking its eye:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1114789603280543744

Well, live and learn: I had no idea horseshoe crabs swam upside down!

https://twitter.com/PhysicsVideo_/status/1114769957718355968

A lovely view of the Chicago skyline taken from near one of the water-pumping stations out in Lake Michigan (the white-and-red structure in the foreground):

This ant, apparently viewed with a scanning electron microscope, seems to have a friendly face:

Should the college-admissions scam participants get jail time?

April 8, 2019 • 6:23 pm

On the news tonight, and now via CNN, I learned that thirteen parents and college staff who participated in the college-admissions scam, falsifying college applications to improve kids’ chances, have pleaded guilty. These include the best-known participant, actor Felicity Huffman. I suspect that others like Lori Laughlin will follow shortly with similar pleas, for there’s a penalty cost for fighting charges that were so well substantiated with evidence.

When this all broke, I thought that some jail time, though not much, would be an effective deterrent to others who might cheat in this way, and would also show that rich white people are not above justice. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the cheaters will get anything more than a slap on the wrist. As CNN writes:

Thirteen wealthy parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, and one coach will plead guilty to using bribery and other forms of fraud as part of the college admissions scandal, federal prosecutors in Boston said on Monday.

Huffman, the “Desperate Housewives” star, pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to a fake charity associated with Rick Singer to facilitate cheating for her daughter on the SATs, the complaint says.

She faces up to 20 years in prison. In exchange for Huffman’s plea, federal prosecutors will recommend incarceration at the “low end” of the sentencing range, a $20,000 fine and 12 months of supervised release. They will not bring further charges. [JAC: her lawyers have asked for NO jail time.]

A federal judge will have the final say on the outcome for Huffman and the other defendants.

I’m usually not this vindictive, but it seems to me that without jail time, a $20K fine (easily affordable by these rich parents) and a year of “supervised release” is an undeservedly light punishment. Give parents like Huffman 4-6 months in jail! That, I think, will be a strong deterrent. Of course other participants may have committed more serious crimes, but here I’m talking just about those rich parents who paid money to produce college applications full of lies.

Perhaps I’m being too vindictive here, but there’s no deterrent like incarceration, however light, for thenceforth you’ll always be a person who “went to jail”.

What do you think? Vote below, but leave comments with your take.