Friday: Hili dialogue

February 8, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday at last: February 8, 2019, and National “Potato Lovers” Day. Why the scare quotes, though? Are there people who only pretend to love potatoes? I know of no such people. Meanwhile, in India and Nepal it’s “Propose Day,” a day when people propose to their significant others and give them flowers.


Today I must hie myself to O’Hare Airport in my second attempt to have a Global Entry interview. If I succeed in the eyes of Customs and Border Protection, I’ll get the ability to bypass those long customs lines when I return to the U.S. Because of my mission, posting will probably be light today. As always, I do my best.

I’ve timed my O’Hare appointment so I can stop for lunch at Gayle V’s Grilled Cheese emporium near the subway stop to O’Hare. If I’m feeling flush, I may get the lobster and grilled cheese sandwich, available only on Fridays, as well as their homemade tomato soup. (Is there anything more comforting for lunch on a cold day than a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup?) Here’s a video:

On this day in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed, ostensibly for plotting to murder Queen Elizabeth I. Wikipedia describes the execution:

Mary was not beheaded with a single strike. The first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head. The second blow severed the neck, except for a small bit of sinew, which the executioner cut through using the axe. Afterwards, he held her head aloft and declared, “God save the Queen.” At that moment, the auburn tresses in his hand turned out to be a wig and the head fell to the ground, revealing that Mary had very short, grey hair.

On February 8, 1693, The College of William & Mary, my undergraduate alma mater, was granted a charter by King William III and Queen Mary II. That makes it the second oldest college in the U.S., after Harvard, and I’ve been to them both Go W&M! On February 8, 1910, the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated. Now that girls are allowed to join, will they still keep calling them the Boy Scouts? Or will it be the Person Scouts?

On this day in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s controversial (and racist) film The Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles.  Nine years later, the murderer Gee Jon became the first person killed by “state execution”. It was by lethal gas, and the story is a bit gruesome: “The officials first attempted to pump poison gas directly into Gee’s cell while he was sleeping, but without success because the gas leaked from the cell.” He was then executed in a makeshift gas chamber. 

On February 8, 1960, according to Wikipedia, “Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom issues an Order-in-Council, stating that she and her family would be known as the House of Windsor, and that her descendants will take the name Mountbatten-Windsor.” As Johnny Carson used to say, “I did not know that.” I do know that she is the Queen of New Zealand, though.  Finally, it was on this day in 1963 that Americans were prohibited by law from traveling to Cuba or having any commercial transactions with the country.

Notables born on this day include Robert Burton (1577), Daniel Bernoulli (1700), John Ruskin (1819), Jules Verne (1828), Dmitri Mendeleev (1834), Martin Buber (1878), Neal Cassady (1926), Ted Koppel (1940), Brooke Adams (1949), and Mary Steenburgen (1953).

Also born on this day, in 1794, was Friedland Ferdinand Runge, a German analytical chemist most famous for identifying and isolating caffeine in 1819.. He’s honored in today’s Google Doodle along with the formula of his discovery, the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug:


And for biologists, today is the birthday of Henry W. Bates, best known for developing theories of mimicry, particularly the form that bears his name: “Batesian mimicry.” In that form, an edible or harmless species (the “mimic”) evolves to resemble one with a pattern that has been learned by a predator (the “model”). Thanks to Matthew for sending the tweet below:

https://twitter.com/royalsociety/status/1093796591159382021

Those who expired on this day include Mary, Queen of Scots (1587; see above), Peter the Great (1725), Connie Mack (1956), John von Neumann (1957), Del Shannon (1990), Iris Murdoch (1999), and Anna Nicole Smith (2007).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is manipulating Cyrus to get food. What a devious cat she is!

Hili: You have a mission.
Cyrus: What mission?
Hili: Go to the kitchen and bark.
In Polish:
Hili: Masz misję.
Cyrus: Jaką?
Hili: Idź do kuchni i szczeknij.

A tweet from reader Nilou. The big news is that the Laysan Albatross named Wisdom, the world’s oldest known wild living bird, has had another baby at the age of (at least) 68! What a bird! She’s only about a year younger than I am. Here she is with her chick at her habitual breeding site, Midway Atoll:

From reader Barry we have a canny rat (but they’re all canny!):

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1092805877378281473

Tweets from Heather Hastie. First, an island with a cloud yarmulke:

From Grania, we see that some mallards are overwintering in Chicago. Sadly, they’re forced to do stuff like this:

Take a guess at what order this beautiful amber-preserved insect is in:

Grania says, “Best cough syrup ever!” Yep, and besides stopping your cough, it’ll get you drunk and stoned before putting you to sleep.

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1091912558695469057

Tweets from Matthew:  I hope this tale is true, but there’s no doubt that the guy and the Andean condor are BFFs. Sound up, please.

A farting tree? (You definitely need the sound on.) It seems as if these larvae are not feeding on a dead animal, but on a tree. Or so Torres says later in the thread:

Local guide said that tree is known to be soft so more easily attacked at its roots by what he called screw worms. Honestly not really sure, never seen anything like this. I at first assumed a dead animal had been laying there but clearly it was tree-related.

This is a worthy project (I didn’t know there were over 100,000 Holocaust survivors in the U.S. alone), but Steven Spielberg’s project of interviewing them seems more useful than just photographing them. Have a look at the linked article:

A good palindrome:

Yet another music expert and critic says that today’s popular songs suck

February 7, 2019 • 2:00 pm

I’ve long argued that today’s music sucks, well aware that for saying this I’ll be accused of being a curmudgeon who simply likes his generation’s music and can’t make way for the innovations of the new kids.

My response to that accusation is threefold: that there are no groups today that even begin to rival the great groups of the Sixties, including the Beatles, the Doors, Santana, and so on; that oldies stations twenty years from now will still be playing the Beatles and not Maroon 5 or Ariana Grande; and that somebody had to live through the era of the most innovative rock and pop music that existed, and those people just happen to be me and my peers.

I’ve also defended my views in a very popular post comparing the top-selling songs of my day and these days (see also here). There was no comparison: look at the lists of the top 20 Billboard songs.

You know I’m right, don’t you? And if you don’t, well, you can take a number, get in line, and . . .

But now we have more objective measures of rock quality. Below is a new article from the New York Times claiming that today’s songs are louder and having a more compressed dynamic range compared to rock songs of yore and also (a more arguable claim) that people easily tire of loud, compressed music. There are other articles (I won’t list them all) showing that using various indices, pop music has become worse on a number of fronts. One website lists 5 studies that were themselves summarized by the BBC. The SCIENTIFIC RESULTS:

1. Pop music has become slower — in tempo — in recent years and also “sadder” and less “fun” to listen to.
2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes, and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word “I” in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all — all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst. This may explain a rising trend of young millennials, for example, digging around for now 15-30 year-old music on YouTube frequently. It’s not just the older people who listen to the 1980s and 1990s on YouTube and other streaming services it seems — much younger people do it too.
5. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

Conclusion: There is some scientific evidence backing the widely voiced complaint — on the internet in particular — that pop music is getting worse and worse in the 2000s and the 2010s. The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more “I” (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments. The 2010s got by far the most music quality down votes with 42% from people polled on which decade has produced the worst music since the 1970s.

Now read the Times article:

The icing on the cake: here’s the Billboard Top 10 from exactly 50 years ago (Feb. 8, 1969; sadly, #1, not shown, is “Crimson and Clover”, a pseudopsychedelic snoozer by Tommy James and the Shondells):

Today’s top 10 (#1, even more unfortunately, is “7 Rings” by Ariana Grande Latte):

There are at least three classics in the 1969 list: “I heard it through the grapevine,” “Touch me” (my favorite Doors song), and “I’m gonna make you love me.” But “Worst that could happen,” “I started a joke,” and “Everyday people” are no slouches in the song department, either.

Is there any song on today’s list that will last like the ones from 1969? I doubt it.

So get off my lawn!

 

Ducks of San Diego

February 7, 2019 • 1:15 pm

by Greg Mayer

On my recent visit to San Diego, I got to see one of my favorite ducks, a merganser. Mergansers are fish-eating diving ducks. Here’s a Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator), diving in San Diego Bay, viewed from the Coronado Aquatics Center, on the Coronado Strand.

Mergansers have bills adapted to catch their prey, which are quite different from those of other ducks or, indeed, birds in general. Instead of the broad, flattened bill typical of ducks (the origin of the term ‘duckbilled’), their bills are long and narrow. And, though all modern birds lack teeth, there are a series of tooth-like serrations on the bills of mergansers which help them grab fish, frogs, and the like.

Skulls of a mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), top, and a merganser, bottom. 

There are some geese that have similar structures on their bills, but they are more like transverse grooves rather than serrations. Geese are typical Anseriformes (the order to which ducks, geese, and swans belong) in their feeding habits, and do not catch fish; it is interesting that the only birds I know of with these approximations to teeth are in that order.

Close up of the bill of a merganser, showing tooth-like serrations.

(The merganser skull shown above is probably one of the two species found in Wisconsin, either the Hooded Merganser [Lophodytes cucullatus; resident breeder in SE Wisconsin] or the Common Merganser [Mergus merganser; breeds from northern Wisconsin up through the taiga belt of Canada and Alaska, but winters in SE Wisconsin].)

I also saw a Surf Scoter (Melanitta perspicillata), another diving duck, also at the Aquatics Center. The body of water here is Glorietta Bay, a part of San Diego Bay enclosed by Coronado “Island”, the Strand which connects Coronado “Island” to the mainland (the reason Coronado “Island” is not an island), and a landfill extending from the Strand on which a Navy base is located. The scoters have broad bills, but they’re higher in the back (unlike mallards), and they feed on mollusks.

The bird in the video above is a male, as you can tell from the white markings on its head and neck. I saw several more Surf Scoters while sailing in San Diego Bay off National City, flying just above the water in small groups, but unfortunately did not get any photos. Both of these species of duck breed mostly on fresh water in the taiga and high arctic, and winter along the sea coasts, so it was a rare opportunity for me to see them.

On two visits to Balboa Park, at the Lily Pond in front of Botanical Building, there were Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), Jerry’s favorite species of duck.

Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, January 16 2019; note the female sleeping on shore amongst the flowers.

I have often noted an excess of males when observing Mallards (often two males with a single female), as in the photo above, but I don’t know why that’s the case; a pair walked about near the pond.

Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, January 16 2019.

As Cornell’s All About Birds reminds us, not everything that floats is a duck, and on a later visit to Balboa Park, I photographed this American Coot (Fulica americana). There were also more Mallards about that day—I counted 22 at the Pond.

American Coot (Fulica americana), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, January 18, 2019.

The coot later went ashore and fell asleep. In looking at photos of the Mallards from my first visit, I noticed a coot in the background on the pond (first photo above)– probably the same individual. (You can find out more about the birds of Balboa Park at the Birds of Balboa Park page.)

American Coot (Fulica americana), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, January 18, 2019.

The Lilly Pond did have a few lily pads.

Lily pads, Balboa Park, San Diego, California , January 18, 2019.

More kerfuffles at Williams College

February 7, 2019 • 12:00 pm

Gather ye around, and hear my prediction: Williams College, in Williamstown Massachusetts, widely regarded as the best small liberal-arts school in America, is on its way to becoming the Evergreen State College of the East.  It is becoming hyper-woke in the same way that Evergreen State did before it imploded, with Evergreen’s enrollment and budget dropping precipitously.  I may be wrong about Williams, but remember this prediction in two years.

I’ve already posted several times about Williams’s ongoing debate about free speech, and about how many students and faculty (including the student newspaper), are urging “nuance”—the balancing of free speech against “hate speech”. (I doubt that Williams has much hate speech; see below.) This is the same kind of invidious “balance” that sounds oh so reasonable but is a good way to censor speech you don’t like; and it’s the same kind of balance that, as I wrote this morning, British “hate speech” law tries to strike.

What’s happening at Williams is that several professors have asked for the College to adopt policy embodying the Chicago Principles of nearly untrammeled free speech (over 50 colleges have already adopted them). There followed pushback by students and faculty who don’t like the notion of free speech. Now the college President, Maud Mandel, has constituted a committee to examine the question and suggest policy. The way the committee was constituted concerns me, and I predict that it will not arrive at any consensus about freedom of speech, or, if it does, the consensus will involve restricting speech.

Here are two excerpts about the committee from the student newspaper, the Williams Record. First, who was appointed to be on it?

The 13-member committee will consist of students, alums, faculty and staff, and it will be led by Jana Sawicki, chair of philosophy. Student members, who were selected by the College Council Appointments Committee, will be Michael Crisci ’21, Eli Miller ’21, Rachel Porter ’21 and Conrad Wahl ’20. The committee also includes alum Mark Robinson ’02, staff therapist Alysha Warren, Rabbi Seth Wax, librarian Hale Polebaum Freeman and four other professors in addition to Sawicki: Senior Lecturer in Dance Sandra Burton, Assistant Professor of American Studies Eli Nelson, Professor of Political Science Cheryl Shanks and Chair and Associate Professor of Physics Fred Strauch.

There are 5 faculty members, 4 students, 3 staff, and 1 alum. Faculty, then, constitute 38% of the committee—as opposed to 100% of the Chicago committee (7 out of 7). There are almost as many students as there are faculty.

I find this deeply unbalanced, for faculty are not only older and more experienced than are students (call me elitist if you must), but faculty are at the College for the long term, while students are transitory. Further, students have shown more opposition to free speech than have faculty, though this is just my impression. I don’t have strong feelings about staff, except that one of them is a therapist (is she going to favor free speech as opposed to the “psychological damage” of hate speech?) and another is a rabbi (what expertise to rabbis have in free speech, and don’t they have an interest in protecting their faith?).

It should be clear that I want the committee to endorse the Chicago Principles, but this committee is front-loaded to avoid that. In a misguided attempt to get every faction of the college to participate in decision-making, President Mandel has shot herself in the foot. There will be no agreement that will come close to the Chicago Principles. But perhaps Williams wants to be on the side of censorship, in which case it’s abrogating its educational mission.

And then there’s this:

In a Jan. 9 email, while the committee’s roster was being formed, Mandel elaborated on the intent of the committee. “Williams, like other schools around the country, is debating how to uphold principles of open inquiry and free expression,” she wrote. “The debate has focused on how to do so while not providing a platform for hate speech, racism, or other forces that are corrosive to a learning community.”

She further framed the committee’s mission as seeking input from across the campus community to find a proper balance.

The proper balance is the balance struck by the First Amendment: free speech except for speech the courts have deemed illegal, including harassment, libel, and speech that incites imminent violence. So, I predict either no outcome and no unanimity from the committee, or a weaselly statement of “balance” that doesn’t specify what speech is allowable.

In other news, two Williams professors, Kai Green and Kim Love, have left off teaching for the semester. Both are black professors and their non-teaching is a result of or in protest of what they claim are the violence, microaggressions, and hatred that they encounter regularly at Williams. Green is a (male) assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies, while Love is an assistant professor of English. They’re created quite a stir with their failure to meet their classes this quarter. Green is on an “unexpected medical leave”, apparently involving recovery from racism, while Love, without warning, simply didn’t show up in her class, leaving students stranded and other professors in the department to pick up their loads.  Both claim, and have claimed in the past, that they encounter “violent practices” from the College itself, as well as anti-blackness and transphobia. Click on the screenshot to read the Williams Record piece:

The article above highlights an essay jointly written by Green and Love in the Feminist Wire, an essay that details the racism they experienced. It’s below (click on screenshot). “Dr G.” self-identifies as “Kai” at the end.
But the article describes only a single possible incident of racism, and it didn’t take place on campus and didn’t even come from someone associated with Williams. The incident involved a local car mechanic who treated the pair badly when their car broke down. It likely does involve bigotry, but hardly instantiates the claim of Green and Love that a). Williams itself is committing “violent practices” against blacks or LGBTQ people, and b). that the pair experience daily racism and microaggressions. If you’re going to make that claim, and in fact stop teaching because of it (Love appears to have simply walked out of her class, as if on strike), you must document these claims. 

In an attempt to see how pervasive “hate incidents” are at Williams, I looked at the College’s record of incidents reported either to the campus police or the local police, a record you can find here.

Here are the data from 2015-2017, showing four incidents of “intimidation and harassment” in 2015, but none in the succeeding two years, and no other “hate crimes” reported. The chart below is full of goose eggs. Both Green and Love started at Williams in 2017.

This supports the impression I had that Williams is not only a very diverse college, but one that is supportive of diversity and largely free of bigotry:

Why do I bother with this? First of all because the newspaper report about Green and Love’s absence seems to have thrown Williams into a bit of a turmoil. And yet their accusations of racism are similar to those that occurred at Evergreen State before it melted down: in other words, unsubstantiated accusations.

Until Green and Love can actually document how Williams is a racist institution that isn’t doing anything about ethnic and gender bias, and describe the incidents that have made them quit teaching, I’d be wary of denigrating the institution itself. Evergreen, too, was not a racist, sexist, or transphobic university, and yet many students insisted it was, leading to the demonization of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, the occurrence of thugs students roaming the campus with baseball bats, looking for racists, and then the big meltdown that made Evergreen State look ridiculous in the eyes of the country. It will be a long time, if ever, before Evergreen State becomes the kind of place where you’d want to send your kid.

Were I an administrator at Williams College, I’d be quite concerned that my university was being accused of structural and institutional racism. I would want to see if the complaints have merit before convening committees to fix a problem that may not exist. And I’d be concerned about the national reputation of the College, which heretofore has been high. Williams is not only a good college but a wealthy one, and incidents like these, and the College’s reluctance to embrace free speech, threaten to damage its reputation. Sadly, I don’t think that its President has the moxie to stand up for truth and free speech, or to stand against accusations of structural racism if they’re false.

British police threatened atheist for posting a nonbeliever sign in his yard

February 7, 2019 • 8:45 am

This story is from 2012, but the law still applies in the UK. The Public Order Act of 1986 remains in force, and it specifies this:

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he:

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.
(2) An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the person who is harassed, alarmed or distressed is also inside that or another dwelling.\
(3) It is a defence for the accused to prove:

(a) that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or
(b) that his conduct was reasonable.

A fair number of readers have defended the “hate speech” laws of places like Canada and Germany, saying that these laws don’t make those countries any more dysfunctional than the U.S., where “hate speech” is legal. But for those who do defend “hate speech” laws, put this in your pipe and smoke it.

According to The Friendly Atheist, who got the story from the UK paper The Boston Standard, in 2012, a Brit named John Richards put up a small, letter-sized sheet of paper in his window that read as follows:

Photo from the Boston Standard

 

Yep, that horrible message, which happens to be true, that “Religions are fairy stories for adults.”

And for that Mr. Richards has been threatened by the police. The Boston Standard notes, in an updated report, that if anybody complains because they were offended by Richards’s poster, the coppers will ask him to take the sheet down. If Richards doesn’t comply, he faces arrest. As the paper notes, (my emphasis):

Officers say that they have not told John Richards he is committing an offence for displaying the poster but said he could only face arrest if he causes offence and refuses to take the poster down when they ask.

In a statement Lincolnshire Police said the 1986 Public Order Act states that a person is guilty of an offence if they display a sign which is threatening or abusive or insulting with the intent to provoke violence or which may cause another person harassment, alarm or distress.

The statement adds: “This is balanced with a right to free speech and the key point is that the offence is committed if it is deemed that a reasonable person would find the content insulting.

“If a complaint is received by the police in relation to a sign displayed in a person’s window, an officer would attend and make a reasoned judgement about whether an offence had been committed under the Act.

“In the majority of cases where it was considered that an offence had been committed, the action taken by the officer would be to issue words of advice and request that the sign be removed. “Only if this request were refused might an arrest be necessary.

Well isn’t that peachy? They give the guy a chance to do the right thing before taking him in.

Note that, according to the constabulary, the “right to free speech” is balanced here by a legal right not to be harassed, or even “alarmed or distressed.” I’m sorry, but that ludicrous balance is the basis of “hate speech” laws, and it’s not only dumb, but it’s inimical to free discourse. As Stephen Fry said, you don’t have the right not to be offended.

Here’s another example of alarming and distressing speech in Britain:

Source: Akira Suemori / AP

Now in this case somebody could complain to the bus company, which would be threatened with legal action if it didn’t take down the posters.  And of course the famous bus posters were offensive to many believers, but who among us would argue that people have a right not to see these words?

And would you say that Richards’s sign is okay, but one that said, “There was probably no Holocaust” is illegal and should be banned? For such signs are illegal—in Germany and, I think, in Canada. This shows the slippery line between hate speech and free speech—and the reason why the line doesn’t exist in America. One person’s free speech, as I always say, is another person’s hate speech. Do not underrate the propensity of people to be alarmed or distressed by things that most of us would consider innocuous.

I won’t go on except to give free-speech advocate and attorney Ken White’s take on this ridiculous “Public Order Act” on the Popehat site:

. . . I’d like to say a word about character.

What is the character of a person who sees a sign like that in a pensioner’s window, and runs to the police to complain?

Could a person with such character stand up, against great odds, in the face of the the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt? Could such a person do his duty, as England expected, at Trafalgar? Could such a person keep calm and carry on? Would such a person fight on beaches, on landing grounds, in fields and streets, in the hills, and never surrender? Is such a person capable of having a finest hour?

I ask because of this: societies that make rules like this one, encouraging its citizens to scamper mewling behind the skirts of the government when faced with the least offense, produce people with the character necessary to take them up on the offer. It is hard to imagine how a nation run by people of that character can endure — or at least, how it can endure as anyplace you’d want to live.

I would add “It’s hard to imagine how a college inhabited by people of that character could endure.” But many American colleges are just like that, and we’ll hear about one later today.

I’d be glad to hear from readers who think that there is a defensible line between free speech and hate speech, and, if you comment on this, please tell me exactly where that line is.

_____________

UPDATE: If you want a more recent example of thought policing by the UK cops, this is new (click on screenshot). Remember, he didn’t even write the damn tweet, he just liked it.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 7, 2019 • 7:45 am

Today we have a new contributor, John Avise, whom I’ve known as a renowned phylogeographer (one who studies evolutionary biogeography from gene patterns); but I didn’t know he was also an excellent photographer. His passion is birds, and here are some of his photos. His IDs and captions are indented.

American Avocet, Recurvirostra americana:

American Kestrel, Falco sparverius:

Great Egret, Ardea alba:

Snowy Egret, Egretta thula:

Reddish Egret, Egretta rufescens:

A duck! A duck!

Bufflehead, Bucephala albeola:

Barn Swallow, Hirundo rustica:

Cliff Swallow, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota:

 

Black Phoebe, Sayornis nigricans:

Allen’s Hummingbird, Selasphorus sasin:

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 7, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s Thursday, February 7, 2019, and National Fettuccine Alfredo Day, honoring my favorite pasta. It’s also National Send a Card to a Friend Day. Will an email do? I will be emailing several friends.

On this day in 1497, the real “Bonfire of the vanities” took place as the followers of Girolamo Savonarola burned cosmetics, books, and works of art. The odious friar himself was executed the next year. On February 7, 1898, Èmile Zola began his trial for libel for publishing the famous defense of Dreyfus, “J’Accuse!” (Zola accused higher-ups in the French Army of perverting justice and anti-semitism. Zola was convicted but fled to England; when he returned, he accepted a pardon under the new government. Here’s the famous accusation:

I didn’t know we had a plague epidemic in the U.S., but, as Wikipedia recounts, it was on this day in 1900 when “a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco falls ill to bubonic plague in the first plague epidemic in the continental United States. 121 people caught the disease, and all but two died. 

On this day in 1940, Walt Disney released his second full-length animated film, Pinocchio. (Do you know the first one?) Here’s a scene in which Pinocchio goes off to school, and there’s a CAT!

On February 7, 1962, the U.S. ban of all Cuban imports began, including Cuban cigars. But before he signed the bill, cigar lover JFK asked Pierre Salinger (or so I recall) to go out and buy a huge supply of H. Upmann Cuban cigars that would be legal. The ban is still in effect, making it tough to get the world’s best stogies.

On this day in 1986, the Duvalier dynasty ended in Haiti after 28 years as Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country. “Baby Doc” died in 2014. On this day in 1997, NeXT merged with Apple Computer, paving the way for the Mac OS X.  And an embarrassing statistic: it was on this day just six years ago when the state of Mississippi became the last state to officially certify the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery. (The amendment was passed by Congress in 1865!).  Finally, and this again from Wikipedia, in 2014 “scientists announce[d] that the Happisburgh footprints in Norfolk, England, date back to more than 800,000 years ago [JAC: the paper says 750,000- 1 million years], making them the oldest known hominid footprints outside Africa.”

Here are two photographs of the footprint hollows taken from the PLoS ONE paper in which they were published; the paper’s caption is below the photo. The prints, attributed to Homo antecessor, were destroyed by the tides two weeks after they were uncovered. 

Figure 5. Photographs of Area A at Happisburgh. a. Footprint surface looking north-east. b. Detail of footprint surface. Photos: Martin Bates.

Notables born on this day include Henri Fuseli (1741), John Deere (1804), Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867), Alfred Adler (1870), G. H. Hardy (1877), Sinclair Lewis (1885), Eubie Blake (1887), Dock Boggs (1898), Buster Crabbe (1908), Matt Ridley (1958), Chris Rock (1965), and Ashton Kutcher (1978). Here’s what is probably Fuseli’s most famous painting, “The Nightmare” (1781):

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on February 7 include Henry Steinway (1871), Josef Mengele (1979), Doug Henning (2000), and Blossom Dearie (2009).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a pronouncement:

Hili: Traditional books and magazines are friendlier to cats than electronic media.
Malgorzata: You have been saying that for years.
JAC: I’m jealous!
In Polish:
Hili: Tradycyjne książki i czasopisma są bardziej przyjazne dla kotów niż media elektroniczne.
Małgorzata: Od lat to powtarzasz.

A tweet from reader Barry: the world’s largest rodent is also the world’s chillest rodent.

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1092851544775569408

From Heather Hastie, who owns a cat that bangs on the door when it’s hungry (the cat below is not her cat):

https://twitter.com/SlenderSherbet/status/1092530508670603266

An adorable (goat) kid; Heather says they’re like “human babies with hooves.”

That IS a unit!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1092553804497805312

I’m curious why the cat spaces the socks so evenly:

A cat destined to be spoiled its whole life:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1092883309028433920

Ultima Thule, the planetesimal that’s about 32 X 17 km:

Tweets from Matthew. Stay tuned on this one. Could it be the thylacine (Tasmanian “tiger”)???

Let the damn cat in, for crying out loud!

You could make this a further recursion by going to this spot and reading this tweet: