Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 10, 2019 • 6:32 am

It’s Sunday, March 10, 2019, and it’s National Ranch Dressing Day, a dressing that didn’t exist when I was younger. But it is good, especially when made with real buttermilk. It’s also calorific. Today is also Mario Day, though I’ve never played that game—or any other video game. I am culturally ignorant.

And it’s “election day” in North Korea. As you might expect, voting is mandatory and there is only one government-approved candidate per post.

Remember, if you’re an American, you should have set your clocks forward last night. If you didn’t, it’s an hour later than you think.

Today was a thin day in history. On March 10, 1804, ownership of the Louisiana Territory was formally transferred from France to the U.S.: only about $15 million for 828,000 square miles! If that hadn’t been done, they’d be eating croissants in Nebraska today.  On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham bell conducted the first successful test of a telephone; as Wikipedia notes, “The first successful bi-directional transmission of clear speech by Bell and Watson was made on March 10, 1876, when Bell spoke into the device, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” and Watson answered.

On this day in 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force firebombed Tokyo, an event not much remembered: over 100,000 people were killed, and they were mostly civilians.  This is comparable to the death toll in Hiroshima: between 90,000 and 150,000.  It is also the 60th anniversary of the Tibean uprising, when thousands of Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s palace, the Potala, to prevent his abduction by China. But the same year he fled to India, where he lives now, and a fake Dalai Lama reigns in Tibet.

On March 10, 1969, James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis, Tennessee to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. He later tried to recant, but of course was convicted, dying in prison of hepatatitis C in 1998.  You can make your own joke here: on this day in 1977, astronomers discovered the rings of Uranus. Finally, it was on this day in 2000 that the Nasdaq stock market index peaked at 5132.52, and then rapidly went downhill as the dot-com boom came to an end. Today, though, it stands at 7408.

Notables born on this day include Ferdinand II (1452, yes, that Ferdinand), Bix Beiderbecke (1903), James Earl Ray (1928), Chuck Norris (1940), Osama bin Laden (1957), Robin Thicke (1977), and Carrie Underwood (1983). Regarded as one of the founders of modern jazz, Bix died at 28 of alcoholism. Here’s one of the songs that ushered in modern jazz, “Singin’ the Blues”. And it’s still a good one. You can hear the Dixieland origins but also a novel trumpet solo by Bix (“Potato Head Blues” by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, recorded about the same time, has a similar construction—Dixieland plus stunning trumpet solo).

Those who died on March 10 include Harriet Tubman (1913),  Mikhail Bulgakov (1940), Zelda Fitzgerald (1948), Andy Gibb (1988), and Lloyd Bridges (1998).

Here’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie in a Christmas-card photo. Scottie died in 1986; if you can ever find the volume of Scott Fitzgerald’s letters to his daughter, buy it and read it. I see you can buy used hardcovers on Amazon starting at $25. It’s one of the best books of letters I’ve ever read. If you have a good public or university library, it might be on the shelves.

American author F Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) dances with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald (nee Sayre) (1900 – 1948) and daughter Frances (aka ‘Scottie’) in front of the Christmas tree in Paris. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, today’s Hili Dialogue has a title:

 GOOD ADVICE

Hili: Leave these computers and let’s go for a walk.
A: That’s not a bad idea.
In Polish:

DOBRA RADA

Hili: Zostawcie te kmputery i chodźcie na dwór.
Ja: To nie jest zły pomysł.

From reader Merilee: Snow ducks in Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories:

And more snow ducks sent by reader Michael, along with their creators, live runner ducks:

Here’s some useful cat-related wisdom courtesy of Stash Krod:

From reader Barry. He’s heard of these “chicken-swinging clowns” but I haven’t, and I was brought up Jewish. Somebody enlighten us: is this a religious ritual?

Tweets from Grania. The first one required that she explained to me who “Mr. Lumpy” was. Her response:

A badger. This is from a woman who has a family of badgers living in her garden so she puts out food for them, even medicine for the baby when he hurt his snout (antibiotics prescribed by the vet and delivered via peanut butter). She never interacts with them; they are basically still wild.

Cats shouldn’t steal Mr. Lumpy’s cheese!

Rays are beautiful, graceful, and often friendly:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1102303110515449856

I haven’t heard about the mutant Grumpy Cat for a while, but he’s still riding Roombas. And now there’s a contest:

Maru would do this, too, but he was too fat to make it through the box:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1102388695347482624

I could think of worse things:

https://twitter.com/castellanosce/status/1094481373887455232

Tweets from Matthew. I still plan on reporting about this paper giving evidence that predation was a selective pressure helping promote the evolution of multicellular from unicellular organisms. But a science post is the hardest kind of post to produce!

In lieu of a science post today, I request—nay, demand—that you watch this video. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it immensely pleases the scientist.

This snake is a far better actor than Ellen Page, but not nearly as good as Carey Mulligan:

An evening grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus) dining, but its table manners aren’t the best:

British parrot disappears, returns four years later speaking Spanish

March 9, 2019 • 1:00 pm

Nigel, a grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) went missing in California, and came back four years later speaking Spanish. The bird happened to be microchipped, and when a woman found it and had it checked, it was finally returned to its British owner. The Independent tells the tale (click on screenshot):

Nigel, a grey African parrot, flew away from his home in California in 2010 but was returned to his British owner, Darren Chick, after he was discovered in Torrance, California.

Although the Spanish-speaking bird bit Mr Chick when he first saw him, the happy owner said: “He’s doing perfect.”

Mr Chick says his bird’s British accent is gone, replaced by fluent Spanish – and someone called “Larry”.

Even though he has no idea where the bird has been for the last four years, he claimed: “It’s really weird, I knew it was him from the minute I saw him.”

. . .Nigel was discovered by Julia Sperling, who owns a dog-grooming parlour, after she took him in as he matched a missing pet advertisement she had seen.

“He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control. He was barking like the dogs,” she said.

“I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”

Below is a picture of Nigel from the Torrance [California] Daily Breeze, which actually found out where the bird had gone:

The multigenerational Hernandez-Smith family, who also lives in Torrance, was just happy that Morgan — their name for the bird that Smith’s grandparents bought for $400 in cash at a garage sale four years ago — had turned up safe after flying away from their house earlier this month.

Hernandez often let the bird fly free in their backyard, Smith said, but Morgan became spooked after coming face to face through a glass door with the neighbor’s cat. They thought he was gone for good.

When the family came forward in an email to a Daily Breeze reporter this week, it also cleared up one of the biggest mysteries — how the bird that once spoke with a cultured British accent was found suddenly speaking Spanish.

Hernandez was born in Guatemala and spoke mostly Spanish to the bird that had become his special friend, particularly in the two years since he lost his wife.

“My grandpa took especially good care of him and whistled classical tunes back and forth,” Smith wrote in her email to the Daily Breeze. Morgan, she said, also knows the first bars of the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and likes to imitate the early-morning beeping sounds of the trash truck as it makes its rounds.

“He often calls out several phrases in Spanish. He also calls out ‘Jerry,’ ‘Lorro’ and ‘Cosmo’ which are the names of (our dogs),” Smith wrote in the email. “He barks like the dogs.”

One of the other mysteries about the bird’s newly acquired vocabulary — his repeated mentioning of someone named “Larry” — was also solved.

Morgan often combined the dogs’ names together so that Lorro and Jerry became “Larry,” Smith said.

Jerry! If he can say “J” in English then he hasn’t completely lost his ability to speak English!

Nigel and Hernandez:

Grey parrots, well known for their mimetic abilities, are native to Central Africa:

Range: grey parrot

 

 

Twitter mobs ruin young-adult fiction again

March 9, 2019 • 11:45 am

Jennifer Senior used to be a book-review editor for the New York Times, but now she’s an op-ed editor. Her history at the paper has served her well in her new op-ed about the social media mobs who now police young-adult fiction (YAF) for ideological purity. (Click on screenshot).

What happened is that Kosoko Jackson, the author of a new book called A Place for Wolves, was forced by a Twitter mob to pull his accepted and already-printed book from the shelves.  The irony, as Senior points out, is that Jackson was not only black and gay, but had himself been one of those “sensitivity editors” who professionally vet this kind of fiction for purity.

You would have thought Jackson would learn to avoid putting himself into the shoes of characters of different ethnic or racial background, for that is the Number One Sin that gets YAF books damned by both sensitivity readers and the Outrage Police who descend en masse on works they don’t like. But when Jackson came to write his own book—a book that Senior thinks is flawed—he discovered the joys of imagination: he put himself in the shoes of people from Kosovo during the wars of the late 1990s. In particular, he made the two main characters Americans, though both are gay and one is black. The other characters are Albanians and Serbs, and one of them, an Albanian Muslim, is an evil character.

Despite the gayness and blackness, this just won’t do, because the Albanian Muslim was—horrors—not exemplary in every way. Muslims must be honored. And so the social media thugs descended. As Senior notes.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had — a reader who’d written an intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture — self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure. Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way: What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse, ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

How did Jackson get into this mess? Because he used his imagination, which is what fiction writers are supposed to do. And here Senior gets the dilemma of ideological purity tests exactly right:

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to create and dream — rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations — his natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience. Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities, guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing stuff for a living.

As I said, Senior, who read the book, didn’t like it: she found it clumsy and poorly paced. But its flaws could have been better vetted by the market than by a bunch of censorious, virtue-flaunting literary thugs. Senior ends her description and critique with these powerful words:

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways. Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it — or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first.

This kind of social-media demonization is only getting worse over time, and I don’t know how to combat it. I do know where it comes from: from the entitlement, fragility, and purity culture infecting American college campuses, which now, as college students enter the job market, is seeping into both politics and art. And its effects are not salubrious. It’s time for all of us to stand up against it, even if it means you get called a bigot or an “alt-righter”. Kudos to Senior for having the guts to call out the call-out culture.

h/t: Greg

Teaching Evolution: Sewall Wright: Evolution in space

March 9, 2019 • 10:30 am

by Greg Mayer

Our next installment of Teaching Evolution for this spring concerns Sewall Wright. His contributions were wide-ranging, but he is most noted for his integration of population structure (population size, migration) and selection into what he called the “shifting balance” theory. In this theory, genetic drift, migration, and selection interact to produce what he saw as the most favorable conditions for evolutionary advance. The reading is a brief precis of his much longer 1931 paper in Genetics, but in many ways was more influential, as it exposed a wider audience to his ideas. Modern appreciations of the shifting balance theory are given by Nick Barton (2016) and Norm Johnson (2008).

Sewall Wright, with guinea pig.

Sewall Wright (1889-1988) was, along with R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of theoretical population genetics, which synthesized Mendelian inheritance with Darwinian natural selection, thus laying the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. His classic paper “Evolution in Mendelian Populations” (Genetics, 1931) laid out his synthesis, and led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences while still a young man. Like Darwin, Wright studied carefully the work of animal breeders, and this strongly influenced his ideas on evolution, which he called the “shifting balance” theory. Although sometimes caricatured as a theory emphasizing random genetic drift, Wright stressed the importance of the interaction of drift, selection, and migration in adaptive evolution. Wright strongly influenced Dobzhansky, and he coauthored five papers in the latter’s “Genetics of Natural Populations” series. Beginning with his graduate studies at Harvard, Wright’s organism of choice for genetic studies throughout his career, which ended with a very productive 33 year retirement at the University of Wisconsin, was the guinea pig (note what is in his left hand in the photo). He is author of the monumental four volume Evolution and the Genetics of Populations (1968-1978). William Provine has edited a collection of Wright’s most important papers, Evolution: Selected Papers (1986), and written an insightful and analytic biography, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (1986).

Reading:

Wright, S. 1932. The role of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding, and selection in evolution. Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics 1:356-366.

Study Questions:

1. In this paper, Wright introduces the idea of a fitness surface or adaptive ‘landscape’ (see esp. Fig. 2). What do the x and y axes (the two dimensions of the ‘map’ on the paper) represent? What does the ‘altitude’ of a point on the landscape represent? What does a peak in the landscape represent? What does a valley in the landscape represent?

2. In one sentence in the first half of the paper, Wright succinctly states the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for allele frequencies, and its cause. Find and quote the sentence. Show that Wright understands the H-W principle.

3. Why is it difficult for a species to evolve across a valley from one peak to another if selection is the only evolutionary force? How does this lead Wright to argue for the importance of drift (inbreeding) and migration (crossbreeding), as well as selection, in allowing species to reach the highest adaptive peaks?

************

Jerry addendum:  While Wright’s theory was influential, and was incorporated by Theodosius Dobzhansky into his view of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (see his book Genetics and the Origin of Species), I find the theory deeply flawed. With two colleagues, Nick Barton and Michael Turelli, I wrote a long critique of that theory in 1997. Our paper was in turn criticized in two papers, one by Mike Wade and Charles Goodnight, and the other by Steven Peck et al.  We then rebutted these papers in another Evolution paper in 2000. All four references and links are below.

In my biased estimation, our critique did stem the tide of enthusiasm for Wright’s theory; in fact, Wright’s colleague James Crow at Madison said that our paper prompted him to stop accepting that theory. I’m not sure whether Greg mentions the critiques and attempted rebuttals in his lecture, but I’m putting them here for readers.

Coyne, J. A., N. H. Barton, and M. Turelli.  1997.  A critique of Sewall Wright’s shifting balance theory of evolution.  Evolution 51:643-671.

Wade, M. and C. J. Goodnight. 1998. The theories of Fisher and Wright in the context of metapopulations: when nature does many small experiments. Evolution 52:1537–1553.

Peck, S. L., S. P. Ellner, and F. Gould. 1998. A spatially explicit stochastic model demonstrates the feasibility of Wright’s shifting balance theory. Evolution 52:1834–1839.

Coyne, J. A., M. Turelli, and N. H. Barton.  2000.  Is Wright’s shifting balance process important in evolution? Evolution 54: 306-317.

 

Caturday felid trifecta: Realistic cat masks; cat burgler steals dosh from the milkman; computer-generated cats that don’t exist

March 9, 2019 • 9:00 am

Reader Steve sent me this first, but since then I’ve gotten this or similar links from many readers (thanks, all!). At this site you can see the products of a Japanese company that produces realistic cat masks. They take a picture of your cat that you’ve sent in, and, for a considerable fee (about $2700), will produce a realistic head mask of your cat that you can use to scare the bejeesus out of both people and felids.  They use the photo to make a mold of your cat, and then apply the fur and finishing touches:

 

 

This cat doesn’t look too pleased. . . . 

. . . and a video! This doesn’t show much about the cat mask, except that a dude wearing one narrates a cute video about a mother cat and her four new kittens:

********

From the BBC we have this story about another cat burglar, this time one that steals MONEY. (Click on the screenshot):

An excerpt:

A kleptomaniac cat notorious for stealing items from its neighbours has “finally brought home something of real value” – £25.70 in cash.

Pilfering puss Theo became known for thieving Christmas decorations and toys in Ipswich, which owner Rachael Drouet would then try to return.

She had joked it might be useful if he brought home cash instead of “tat”.

So he did. The eight-year-old Siamese cross stole the money a neighbour had left out for the milkman.

Ms Drouet and her family recently moved to a new house in the town and thought Theo might have left his thieving habits behind him.

Far from mending his ways, the filching feline upped his game and stole a plastic bag containing the cash.

Luckily there was a note inside with an address, and Ms Drouet’s partner Paul Edwards was able to return the money to their neighbour.

“He explained we have an Asbo cat,” Ms Drouet said.

“The young lad smiled, took the money and acted like that kind of thing happened all the time.”

Now I have no idea what “tat” is, nor what an “Asbo cat” might be, so British readers might help out. At any rate, all’s well that ends well. Here’s the dosh that Theo brought home:

***********

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me, “Jerry, try to think of a face you’ve never seen before.” This is very hard, as your imagination always calls up faces of people you’ve met. But, using computer technology, you can do this by morphing different faces. Now, the DevopStar site describes how you can produces not only the faces of humans that don’t exist, but also of cats.  Here are some cat faces generated this way. Most aren’t bad, but that monstrosity at the lower left is clearly a glitch, as is the asymetrically-eyed cat right above it:

h/t Kevin, Graham

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 9, 2019 • 7:30 am

Today we have a selection of insect photos from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose comments and IDs are indented:

Here is the final batch of photos taken over the summer of 2017. Enjoy!

We begin with a picture of some very tiny flies that were feeding from flowers. They’re clearly not mosquitoes, although they do somewhat resemble them right down to having a long proboscis. They were eventually identified as members of the bee fly family (Bombyliidae), so named because larger species resemble bees. Adult bee flies are important pollinators, while their larvae are parasitic on a range of insect hosts. This species is in the genus Geron.

The weird little fly shown in the next picture would have stumped me, but with the above bee fly identification I knew the family and that led to identifying it. This is a scaly bee fly (Lepidophora lepidocera). It was sipping the sweat off the arm of a friend of mine while we were out photographing insects. He could not get its picture because of its location, but I made him hold still so I could!

Moving on, I always find something to see in the Magic Field. Three species of tiger beetles are to be found in this field, and my favorite is this one: the festive tiger beetle (Cicindela scutellaris). Their colors can be pretty amazing (and variable), as shown in the link, but most of the ones around here are much darker. The first picture was of an individual that allowed me to get barely close enough for pictures. The much closer picture is of a beetle that allowed me get as close as I wanted. But that individual was pretty dusty.

Tiger beetles are clearly active predators, and long as I can remember they were placed in their own family while also being closely related to the ground beetle family. They are divided into two groups, and the most familiar group is known as the ‘flashy tiger beetles’. The festive t.b. is clearly a member of that crowd. Other tiger beetles are black or some other plain color, and they closely resemble ground beetles. I had recently learned that the entire tiger beetle family has been placed within the ground beetle family(!) I am probably out of the loop on many other revisions of this sort.

Next are pictures of a garden spider (Argiope aurantia) who was completing her egg sac near the end of the season. I had not seen this since I was a wee kiddo, and it was nice to observe. She was single-mindedly going ‘round and ‘round her enormous parental investment, carefully securing her “preciousss” for the long winter that was fast approaching.

On one of my last outings before winter, I found this nice big ‘n bristly Tachinid fly (looks like Juriniopsis adusta) on one of the last blooming goldenrods. These flies are of course parasitic on other insects, and this species is parasitic on caterpillars.

Finally, on the same plant was this nice surprise: an oötheca from a Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis). This will stand over the winter, and about a hundred little mantids will emerge all at once the following spring. This is a cheering thought.

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 9, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s the weekend at last, and I think the scent of Spring is in the air on this ninth of March, 2019. It’s National Crab Day, and I could use a batch of blue crabs, a mallet, and a pitcher of beer. That’s one of the best American meals you can get.

On this day in 1500, the fleet of the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral left Lisbon , heading for the Indies. The fleet discovered what is now Brazil in South American, and that’s why the country speaks Portuguese.  On March 9, 1566, the secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, David Rizzio, was murdered in her presence in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh.  On this day in 1776, Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations.  On March 9 of 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, along with 500 raiders, attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico (note that Wikipedia’s “Pancho Villa” page says only 100 raiders, so again we have a discrepancy). He was after arms and ammunition, but got General Pershing and the U.S. Army on his tail, though he eluded capture.

On March 9, 1946, the Bolton Wanderers Stadium Disaster took place in Bolton, when a barrier collapsed under a packed crowd (estimated at 85,000), resulting in the death of 33 fans and injuries to hundreds. Oddly, they continued the game after the bodies were covered. Here’s a  12-minute video about that event, with interviews of many who were at the game:

On March 9, 1954, CBS News with Edward R. Murrow (produced by Fred Friendly) produced the “See it Now” episode describing the malfeasance of Senator Joseph McCarthy, which helped bring him down. It was also influential in how future television investigations would be structured. In his famous summary, Murrow said this, which still resonates today:

No one familiar with the history of his country can deny that Congressional committees are useful; it is necessary to investigate before legislating. But the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty; we must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of the law.

Here is the entire show, well worth watching:

On this day 60 years ago, the Barbie doll was introduced at New York’s International Toy Fair.

Notables born on this day include Vita Sackville-West (1892), Samuel Barber (1910), Mickey Spillane (1918), Ornette Coleman (1930), Yuri Gagarin (1934, first human in space), Bobby Fischer (1943), Bobby Sands (1954), Ornella Muti (1955).

Sands, an IRA member died on May 5, 1981 during a prison hunger strike; 9 others died in the same episode. Sands was only 27.  Here were their demands:

Those who expired on this day include Cardinal Mazarin (1661), Mary Anning (1847), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1895), Robert Mapplethorpe (1989), Charles Bukowski (1994), George Burns (1996), Notorious B.I.G. (1997), and John Profumo (2006).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s comment is a bit opaque. Malgorzata explains:

“Wisła is the biggest river in Poland, it flows through the whole of Poland. Hili is a tiny cat and has absolutely nothing to do with the river and its flow. The idea that a tiny cat should be, on the one hand, proud, and, on the other, a bit patronizing towards this huge river seemed funny to us.”
The dialogue:
Hili: I’m proud of my river.
A: Why?
Hili: Because it continues to flow in spite of all obstacles.
She does look proud, doesn’t she?
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem dumna z mojej rzeki.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo dalej płynie, mimo wszystkich przeszkód.

A tweet from reader Nilou. Imagine trying to rock climb in a full-length skirt! Pinker was right!

Tweets from Grania, the first showing a beautiful and adventurous Bengal cat:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1103906100225564672

Nick Cohen speaks truth to the benighted and the Woke. Many Brits contest the accusation that Labour has adopted an anti-Semitic cast.

. . . and God gets wise:

Man, viruses are SMALL!

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1102226924364095490

Okay, which muscle is this?

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1102316844315303937

Tweets from Matthew. Can you really eat a pineapple this way? Please, somebody try this!

https://twitter.com/DenzBenzi/status/1103958443050889216

So much for Michael Behe’s contention that only broken genes can promote adaptation:

Matthew retweeted this and commented, “Cool! But you might get frog spunk on your fingers.”

This is the opposite of a cat in so many ways: