Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

March 7, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning; it’s Thursday, March 7, 2019, and National Cereal Day. I can’t remember when I last had cold cereal, though I enjoy a hot bowl of oatmeal now and then.

Today’s Google Doodle marks what would have been the 97th birthday of Olga Ladyzhenskaya (born 1922, died 2004). Although her father was arrested and shot by Stalin’s NKVD, she worked her way up to a distinguished career in mathematics.

Although comprehending her accomplishments is above my pay grade, here’s what iNews says about her.

Authoring over 250 papers, Ladyzhenskaya developed a stellar reputation for her work in partial differential equations and the field of fluid dynamics, with her work still highly influential today.

She is most celebrated for her work exploring 19th century ideas for explaining behaviour of fluids known as the Navier-Stokes equations, whose practical applications include predicting the movement of storm clouds in meteorology.

Parallels were drawn between her work in partial differential equations and John Nash, the American mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.

It’s a thin day in world history. On this day in 321, according to Wikipedia, “Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire.” On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was given a patent for what he called the “telephone.” On this day in 1936, in a harbinger of WWII, and in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland.

It was on this day in 1965 (“Bloody Sunday“) that civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama, after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, were attacked by police with tear gas and billy clubs. They were brutally turned back but were allowed to pass two days later.

It was footage like this, from the March 7 incident, that helped turn the tide of American sentiment in favor of civil rights:

 

On this day in 1986, divers from a Navy ship located the crew cabin of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger, which went down on January 28, killing all seven crew members. I didn’t know until yesterday that their bodies were recovered. The details are below but be warned, they are gruesome and may be upsetting. 

Inside the twisted debris of the crew cabin were the bodies of the astronauts, which after weeks of immersion in salt water and exposure to scavenging marine life were in a “semi-liquefied state that bore little resemblance to anything living”, although according to John Devlin, the skipper of the USS Preserver, they “were not as badly mangled as you’d see in some aircraft accidents”. Lt. Cmdr James Simpson of the Coast Guard reported finding a helmet with ears and a scalp in it. Judith Resnik was the first to be removed followed by Christa McAuliffe, with more remains retrieved over several hours. Due to the hazardous nature of the recovery operation (the cabin was filled with large pieces of protruding jagged metal), the Navy divers protested that they would not go on with the work unless the cabin was hauled onto the ship’s deck.

During the recovery of the remains of the crew, Gregory Jarvis’s body floated out of the shattered crew compartment and was lost to the diving team. A day later, it was seen floating on the ocean’s surface. It sank as a team prepared to pull it from the water. Determined not to end the recovery operations without retrieving Jarvis, astronaut Robert Crippen rented a fishing boat at his own expense and went searching for the body. On April 15, near the end of the salvage operations, the Navy divers found Jarvis. His body had settled to the sea floor, 101.2 feet (30.8 m) below the surface, some 0.7 nautical miles (1.3 km; 0.81 mi) from the final resting place of the crew compartment. The body was recovered and brought to the surface before being processed with the other crew members and then prepared for release to Jarvis’s family.

Finally, it was on this day in 2007 that the British House of Commons voted to make the House of Lords a fully elected body.

Notables born on this day include Luther Burbank (1849), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857, Nobel Laureate), Piet Mondrian (1872), Maurice Ravel (1875), Anna Magnani (1908), Willard Scott (1934), and Bret Easton Ellis (1964).

It was not a good (or bad) day for the deaths of notables. Those who bought the farm on March 7 include Thomas “Yes, the Bible is literally true” Aquinas (1274), Wyndham Lewis (1957), Alice B. Toklas (1967), Stanley Kubrick (1999), and Gordon Parks (2006).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is thoroughly sick of winter and decides that it’s over:

Hili: I’m announcing the spring.
A: According to the calendar it’s still winter.
Hili: I’m not a stickler for rules.
In Polish:
Hili: Ogłaszam wiosnę.
Ja: Kalendarzowo to nadal jest zima.
Hili: NIe jestem formalistką.

It’s getting warmer in Poland, and Leon and Elzbieta are out for a hike:

Leon: Do you think we are going in the right direction?
Leon: Myślisz, że zmierzamy we właściwym kierunku?
Grania reported this church notice celebrating yesterday’s Catholic holiday with a misspelling, though this is almost too good to be true. I suspect it’s a fake, but I may be wrong.

Dictionary.com responds to a worshipful article in Forbes about Kylie Jenner who, thanks to the credulity of the American people, is now a billionaire:

From reader Paul, who says this is his favorite animal video of all time. Is that Snowball on the right?

https://twitter.com/stevosideways/status/847742734542659584

Tweets from Grania. This is Ireland for you: a waterfall that falls UP:

Clearly somebody can’t do simple arithmetic:

https://twitter.com/stonecold2050/status/1103123600251346944

I love this pensive philosopher cat (watch the video):

A sad case of canine logophobia:

https://twitter.com/wawinaApr/status/1103272190525337600

Tweets from Matthew, who’s off doing Resistance broadcasting in Paris with the BBC. First, cat cosmology (lower tweet has a video):

First exorcism in the Vatican and now cannibalism?

Binna Burra is in Queensland, Australia, and a land mullet is a skink (reptile):

Finally, the scariest road I know. I’ve ridden over many roads in Nepal but, thank Ceiling Cat, not this one:

 

 

Hipster inadvertently proves that all hipsters look alike

March 6, 2019 • 3:00 pm

Reader Julian called my attention to this post on The Register, a post that could have come from The Onion, but it’s TRUE.

The headline tells it all:

What happened is that a paper appeared on the AMS Journals website with a mathematical theory explaining why hipsters (or anything that behaves like hipsters) tend to eventually resemble one another.  The Register tells more:

At the end of February, MIT Technology Review emitted a pithy rundown of a 34-page research paper from maths-modelling boffins at Brandeis University in the US; the paper essentially posited that in a bid to make that all-important “countercultural statement”, hipsters can end up looking alike. For groovy models of how random acts by hipsters “undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state” – along with some knotty network equations – see here [PDF].

Accompanying the article was an edited stock image of a generic millennial chap in plaid shirt and standard-issue beanie, or “trendy winter attire”, as Getty put it.

. . .The MIT journal’s editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, took to Twitter to tell a “cautionary tale” about what followed the article going live:

“We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo that ran with the story. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn’t too complimentary about the story, either.)”

That hipster picture is below.  The thing is that the photo was a stock picture from Getty and it wasn’t the complaining guy at all. By complaining, he’d proved the article’s point!

As I said, this story could have been in The Onion, and people would have laughed and assumed it was satirical. But it wasn’t, for life was imitating art (or, in this case, science).

Retraction Watch highlights the paper I got retracted

March 6, 2019 • 1:30 pm

Yesterday we were headliners at the watchdog site Retraction Watch (RW). This time it was about the creationist paper by Sarah Umer that was published in The International Journal of Ethnology and Anthropology, a Springer journal.  I complained bitterly about it on a post on this site, and then kvetched to the journal itself. They blew me off. I persisted. Eventually, I got to the higher-ups, who took a while but eventually retracted the paper, though leaving it on the website (I was sore about that, too, but apparently that’s policy). You can read about the journal’s excuses and Umer’s defense of her creationist nonsense at the link below (click on screenshot):

First, RW pokes fun at the journal and its lame excuse for “mistakenly” publishing Umer’s paper:

It’s become a sort of Retraction Watch Mad Libs: Author writes a paper that is so far, far, out of the mainstream. Maybe it argues that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or that vaccines cause autism. Truth squads swarm over the paper, taking to blogs and Twitter to wonder, in the exasperated tone of those who have been here before, how on earth it was published in a peer reviewed journal.

Then, in something that approaches — but does not quite qualify as — contrition, the journal in question retracts the paper, mumbling something in a retraction notice about a compromised peer review process, or that ghosts in the machine allowed the paper to be published instead of being rejected.

This week’s parade float entry is a paper in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology.

The journal’s excuse and RW’s reaction:

. . . .The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1], because it was published in error before the peer review process was completed. Further post publication peer review determined that the article is not suitable for publication in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology. The author does not agree to this retraction.

Now, mistakes happen, and editors press the wrong button, and all that, but…really? We’ve seen this sort of thing before, almost always with controversial papers. That suggests at least two possibilities: This happens a lot, but no one notices when the papers are mundane, or it’s a convenient excuse that publishers trot out when they realize they’ve published something that was “bull shit.”

The “bull shit” bit comes from Umer’s response when she was contacted by RW. Here’s what the benighted author said to the site:

We asked [Umer] to share the peer reviews her paper had received, so that we could understand how, in the journal’s words, it was “published in error before the peer review process was completed.” She declined to share the reviews, saying that doing so would be unethical, but said that

nevertheless the only reason it was accepted was because my paper raised questions against the standing theories and tried to counter it with logical reasoning.I believe that I received undue criticism from people who did not believe in a divine force. Divine Force is a belief in a super natural power that is controlling the world and the universe. It is a force that almost all religions of the world believe in, whether it is Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism etc. However, I have quoted a couple of physical anthropologists and pure scientist, who also doubt this theory. Therefore, I still stand with my claim and findings and strongly believe that the only way I can be proved wrong is if the anthropologists find intermediate species, which they haven’t  since 1859, the date of Charles Darwin’s theory.

Now in support of my article, I would say that maybe it is against many physical anthropologists and it openly refutes Charles Darwin theory of evolution. But none of the critics refuted me by informing me that they have found intermediate species that counter my argument and endorses Charles Darwin’s theory. Although, they claim that the article is bull shit and I immediately need to remove it.

Finally, I would say that we had this theory of evolution since 1859 and I openly refuted it in 2018. I think only future fossil findings can either prove Darwin right and me wrong or vice versa.

Somebody should inform Umer that “bullshit” is one word.

But look at that garbage! Divine Force? Seriously?

If you think Umer’s article has any merit, I urge you to read it for yourself, for it doesn’t lay a hand on evolution or Darwinism. And of course there are gazillions of “intermediate species” that counter Umer’s argument: intermediates between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, and early primates to the H. sapiens ape. If Umer doesn’t know this, she’s ignorant or blinded by her faith (surely Islam), but either way she had no business publishing that article, and Springer had no business accepting it.

As for taking the paper offline, Retraction Watch has corrected me by noting that leaving a retracted paper up is accepted policy. As RW notes:

Coyne would like to see the article removed from the journal’s site entirely, which would not be in keeping with guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics.

I stand corrected, and am satisfied—except I think that this effort should earn me my second Censor of the Year Award from The Discovery Institute. Come on, folks: I deserve it!

h/t: Nilou

Ripped from the pages of Der Stürmer: UN Heritage parade in Beligum features nasty anti-Semitic tropes

March 6, 2019 • 12:30 pm

UPDATE: For more defense of the float, and a wave of antisemitic comments defending it, see here.

____________

Nobody can argue that the float shown below (and past actions of participants in this parade) are simply disagreeing with the policies of Israel. No, this is undiluted and classic anti-Semitism—though the perpetrators, in the fashion of Ilhan Omar, deny it. And it took place recently in Belgium, for crying out loud, a country where I’m supposed to be lecturing in a month—a country that’s supposed to be sensible, liberal and (so I thought) not infected with anti-Semitism.

Worse, the Carnival at Aalst parade, as always, is sponsored and promoted by the United Nations. And as far as I can determine, it’s funded by the UN through UNESCO, though I’d be glad to hear otherwise. Its UNESCO sponsorship, though, is not in doubt.

What happened is that this year the parade harbored about as anti-Semitic a float as you can construct, a float depicting hook-nosed Orthodox Jews with rats on their shoulders, gloating over bags of money and gold coins. And this kind of trope, which could have appeared in Der Stürmer 80 years ago, isn’t the first one to appear in this parade (see below).

There are three articles about the incident lest you’re the kind of person who questions the credibility of the first one because it’s from a Jewish source. 

Here’s the same report from the Brussels Times:

What about the BBC? Here:

The float:

(from the Brussels Times): The antisemitic float was paraded through the annual carnival parade in Aalst. The orthodox Jews stand amongst money bags, coins and gold bars. On the shoulder a rat can be seen.

Here’s a video (another one is here):

But no, it’s not anti-Semitic, not at all! Here’s the perfectly innocuous explanation:

Belgian media report that the group behind the controversial float, De Vismooil’n, went to the police after it received death threats over the float.

The group were economising on a so-called “sabbatical year” – saving money on their float in this year’s parade to invest more heavily in the following year, members told Belgian news outlet HLN.

“We came up with the idea to put Jews on our float. Not to make the faith ridiculous – carnival is simply a festival of caricature,” they said.

“We found it comical to have pink Jews in the procession with a safe to keep the money we saved. You can have a laugh with other religions too,” they told HLN.

The newspaper also quoted the town’s mayor, Christoph D’Haese, as saying the group “had no offensive intentions”.

Really comical, those pink Jews with their rats and money! How comical would it be in the U.S. to have a float with blacks with big lips, eating watermelon and fried chicken? Answer: NOT COMICAL! And to have the town’s mayor defending this travesty is beyond belief.

More excuses reported by WIN:

“In [our city], it should be allowed,” declared Christoph D’Haese, the mayor of Aalst, a Belgian city thrust into the spotlight after a recent parade included bulbous-nosed Jewish puppets standing on money bags, marchers dressed in Klu Klux Klan costumes, and young Europeans donning blackface makeup.

JTA reported that a carnival spokesperson claimed the float represented commentary on how “everything has become so expensive.”

What a clever way to comment on inflation!

Now the Carnival at  AAlst has been declared by UNESCO, a branch of the UN, as an “Intangible cultural heritage”. One Israeli news source says it’s even “funded by UNESCO”, but I’ll seek further confirmation. The UN has historically treated Israel much worse than any other country, passing resolution after resolution against it while ignoring countries, like North Korea, who are far worse in repressing their people and committing war crimes. I wouldn’t want to think that the UN is turning a blind eye to this kind of bigoted nonsense.

The sad thing is that this isn’t first time that the parade has featured horrific anti-Semitic floats. As the Wikipedia article notes, there was a previous incident, and although UNESCO protested, it didn’t stop a recurrence.

In recent years, the parade has been marked by several floats and puppets with stereotypically antisemitic and racist imagery. In 2013, a group had members who dressed up in SS-uniforms and paraded around with cans marked Zyklon B, which led to a furious protest by UNESCO. In 2019, one float featured two huge puppets resembling orthodox Jews, one with a rat on his shoulder, sitting on bags of money and gold coins.

From another source:

Past entrants in the parade have included a float modeled after a Nazi train car used to deliver Jews to death camps, which was surrounded by members of the float’s sponsor dressed as both Nazi SS officers and ultra-Orthodox Jews, according to JTA. Other imagery on the float included canisters labeled “Zyklon B,” the gas Nazis used to murder Jews during the Holocaust.

Really cute!

When will this stop? When politicians, supported by the Western Left, take a serious stand against anti-Semitism—as serious a stand as they take against “Islamophobic” bigotry against Muslims. In the meantime, European countries like England and France become more and more anti-Semitic, to the extent that Jews are starting to flee from them. Are Belgian Jews about to join this exodus? My friends in Belgium, old and soon to be made, please protest this bigotry.

 

Selection for temperature regulation may drive the evolution of egg color in birds

March 6, 2019 • 9:30 am

A new paper in BioRχiv, submitted but not yet accepted, suggests that in some parts of the world the color of bird eggs may reflect selection for temperature regulation. In short: in colder northern climes, eggs may be darker because it helps them absorb sunlight and stay warm, a crucial factor in keeping embryos warm enough to develop. The paper is below (click on screenshot, and the free pdf is here):

I will try to be brief. The authors measured reflectance and color of eggs from 634 species of birds representing 32 of the 36 living orders. They also collected biogeographic data on where the birds nest and what kind of nest they made in terms of exposure: open nests, “cup” nests in dense foliage, or cavity nests.

As I noted above, the results show that egg color is correlated with latitude (e.g., temperature), but only in the north where nesting birds experience cold temperatures. Northern-nesting birds tend to have brownish eggs rather than bluer or whitish eggs, while birds that live in more southerly climes tend to have a variety of colors, implying that in those areas temperature is not as important as other factors (camouflage, etc.). In other words, the worldwide correlation between latitude and egg color comes entirely from northern birds having darker eggs. Outside the colder areas, there’s no correlation between latitude and egg color, implying that there are other factors influencing color. (I’m sure you can think of some.)

Overall the correlation between latitude and color was highly significant, but you can see from the plot below that this was  entirely dependent on darker colors at higher (e.g., more northern) latitudes. Here’s the plot showing egg coloration with latitude (three colors are represented in the mix: brown, blue-green, and whitish):

(From paper): Figure 2. An equal Earth projection of the global distribution of avian eggshell colour depicted in a (a) bivariate plot illustrating continuous variation in blue-green to brown eggshell and darkto light eggshell colours, in units of standard deviation from their means. We depict colour variation using the colours of the gray catbird Dumetella carolinesis and the peregrine falcon Falco peregrinus to represent blue-green and brown colour, respectively.

Here are the correlations of color and luminosity with latitude (you can see how they collected the data by reading the original paper). As you see from the “bends” at the right side of the plots, the correlations come from higher (more northerly latitudes) alone: 40 degrees and higher):

(From paper): Both avian perceived (b) colour (R 2 = 0.83, λ = 0.94, AICc = −40,475; latitude: z = −0.06, p = 0.95; latitude2 : z = 4.67, p < 0.0001) and (c) luminance (R2 = 0.88, λ = 0.94, AICc = −30,736; latitude: z = 2.08, p = 0.04; latitude2  : z =−9.26, p < 0.0001) vary non-linearly across latitude, such that dark brown eggs are more likely at northerly latitudes.

You can see the same correlation with color and luminosity in the blue-colored plot here for “cold Köppen regions” (not sure what these are) versus the absence of a correlation in warmer regions (reddish areas):

(From paper): Figure 3. Variation in avian perceived (a,c) colour and (b-d) luminance in (a,b) cold Köppen climate regions (blue dots) compared to (c,d) other ecoregions (pink dots). The central inset depicts those climate regions on the Earth. See figure 1 and methods for further details.

Now if this is really due to temperature, you can make two further predictions:

a). If egg color really does reflect selection to warm up and retain heat for incubation, you should be able to demonstrate that in the lab by using eggs of different colors from a single species and exposing them to light.

b). In areas where there is a correlation between egg color and temperature, more exposed nests that receive more sunshine should be on average darker than those from nests in dense vegetation, which experience less sunlight and thus less selection for capturing sunlight, and that eggs in cavities, which experience very little sunlight, should be even lighter.

The authors demonstrated that a) is the case by using dark brown, light brown, blue-green, and white eggs obtained from commercial chicken breeds. They exposed them to direct sunlight after a control period of acclimation at lower temperature, and measured both internal temperatures and external temperatures through reflectance. Color made a highly significant difference in both rate of heating up and retention of temperature after light-based heating (p < 0.0001).

Here’s a graph showing the retention of temperature in dark brown (“db”), light brown (“lb”), blue-green (“bg”) and white (“w”) eggs after heated up (top lines, left scale) and the difference in temperature from the white egg (bottom eggs, right scale).  You can see that dark brown eggs, more prevalent further north, retain heat substantially longer than do lighter eggs. This, of course, will help with the incubation of chicks, especially when the mother or father aren’t on the nest incubating them:

As for b), the correlations of egg color with nest site was highest for exposed eggs (ground nesters), weaker (but still significant) for cup-nesting birds who incubate in foliage, and even weaker (but still significant) in cavity-nesting birds. Presumably all these nests might be exposed to some light, and so might still select for darker colors in more northern areas:

There may often be conflicting selection on egg color, as dark eggs in warmer climes may be more cryptic, but they also may heat up too much, injuring or killing the incubated chick. In the north there is not as much danger of overheating, so eggshell color is free to darker (and more cryptic). In more southern areas, color may be freer to vary for other reasons. As the authors note:

In cold climates, the ability to maintain temperature for longer periods of time afforded by darker coloration is particularly important. This is not to say that species laying exposed eggs will leave their eggs unattended for longer, but instead, when unattended, dark eggs would have greater heat retention over comparable time periods. Eggshell pigmentation thus can confer an additional advantage over the chill tolerance found in some species. By contrast, in warmer climates dark eggs might be more costly because they heat relatively quickly (e.g., nearly twice as fast as white eggs). In these environments, species are subjected to competing selection pressures and while eggs may have greater luminance (less pigmentation) in these warmer climes the colour  is unlikely to be selected for thermoregulation. Instead, in these environments eggs are likely impacted by a range of other selective pressures: solar filtration, anti-microbial defence , signalling of mate quality, and egg recognition. Additionally, crypsis and eggshell strength are known to influence egg coloration, and are likely important selective pressures globally. This interpretation is supported by our data. Egg colour was increasingly variable nearer the equator, indicating other selective pressures (e.g., ecological or behavioural) are acting on eggshell coloration.

Other information, such as how the authors phylogenetically corrected the color and nest-site data, can be found in the paper.

So, the upshot is that we have a tentative explanation for why birds that incubate in more northerly areas have darker eggs, and some experimental data that supports the explanation. As always, this idea makes other predictions that can be tested (for example, tropical eggs might be lighter colored if there are fewer egg predators around).

Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos)

March 6, 2019 • 7:30 am

We’re running a bit low on photos, at least sufficiently low that I’m getting nervous. I may have to suspend this feature in a week or so unless we get some good readers’ photos.  If you have ’em, please send ’em. And remember to give the Latin binomial and to try to limit each submission to ten picture. Thanks!

Today we have some nice underwater photos (and videos given in links) from reader Peter Klaver, whose words are indented:

Here are some pictures and links to video from scuba diving trips we had in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba (at times when the Sinai peninsula was less dangerous to go to than it has been for much of the time since then).
Here is a third batch from diving trips in Egypt. We saw bluespotted ribbontail rays, Taeniura lymma, on several occasions.

Sometimes they cover themselves with sand a bit.

But we saw them swimming too, like in the video here.
In addition to hard corals, giant clams, Tridacna gigas, grow there too. If you come near them they can sense that and they will sometimes close up, as you can see in the video here. I estimate the one in the picture below was ~30 cm long.

Crocodile fish, Papilloculiceps longiceps, blend in well with the bottom.

Box fish (no idea which one this is, or its Latin name) on the other hand stand out clearly.

I think this pufferfish is Arothron stellatus.

Moray eels are a common site but mostly just their heads sticking out of rock openings. But we did see one out and about, see video clip here.

And finally, we did our diving from liveaboard boats. At one point we had dolphins (Delphinus capensis or Delphinus delphis?) playing around our vessel.