Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
We’re back again with the Caturday felids, though I’m not sure how many people want this feature to remain. Weigh in below if you do.
First up is an article from BoredPanda with a compendium of funny cat photos. There are at least fifty, but I’ll show six; go see the rest as they’re all good.
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The Great Cat, an inexhaustible source of feline art, has an article about Bessie Bamber (1870-?), one of the most famous cat painters of our era (of course who knows cat painters?). Here’s what they say about her and some photos of her paintings:
Would you pay thousands of pounds for one of these?
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Speaking of cat paintings, we have a better one from a reader. Greg Geisler sent what he describes this way:
The cat was a friend’s beloved pet. She was very upset at his passing so I made this portrait for her. His name was Able. The portrait is woodburning and mixed media on reclaimed wood.
We have a batch of lovely insect photos from reader Mark Sturtevant. His captions and links are indented:
Here are more pictures of insects that were taken over the summer 2017.
A sign that summer is on the wane are the wandering fuzzy caterpillars looking for a place to make a cocoon. The first picture is of a caterpillar that was wandering, and so I placed it on a plant for pictures. It is the larva of the Virginian tiger moth (Spilosoma virginica).
Next are a mating cluster of Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica), with several males contesting access to a female. These are, of course, an invasive beetle that has become a serious crop and garden pest. When I was young I would not see these beetles since their invasion had not yet entered my area. Now they are everywhere, eating the leaves of a variety of plants. But it must be admitted they are also rather beautiful.
The odd looking black and yellow wasp in the next picture was completely new to me. It turns out to be Nysson plagiatus, and it has a rather interesting biology in that it is a kleptoparasite. Specifically, it lays its eggs in the provisioned burrows of related wasps like golden digger wasps plus a few other species. The larvae then eat the food provided by the first wasp, which will be paralyzed insects of one kind or another.
The next picture is of a generally black wasp on pure white flowers (difficult!). This is the one-spotted spider wasp, Episyron biguttatus, which provisions its burrow with paralyzed spiders.
Next are two pictures of European praying mantises (Mantis religiosa). The first is a male. He was extremely anxious to get away from me and would not hold still. I did not press it very hard and soon allowed him to move on.
The second is a very pregnant female that I rescued from a busy parking lot. She really needed to put down some oothecae to lighten up!
One of the fields that I visit has a very small, temporary-looking pond that is surprisingly popular with the local dragonflies. One day I had visited the location with a friend (who also does macrophotography), and there we saw a dragonfly that was new to both of us. We managed to take a couple of in-flight pictures, and from these they could be identified. They were wandering gliders (Pantala flavescens), which is an interesting species described in the Ohio DNR field guide—which btw publishes several different free, online field guides—as the only dragonfly that is found worldwide. It is a tremendous traveler and has even been seen far out to sea. Another thing noted was that multiple generations emerge in the summer and it likes to breed in temporary ponds. That explained this sighting.
In light of its having multiple generations, I made it a point to return every couple weeks. Sure enough, this paid off as I had hoped with a new generation of recently emerged “teneral” wandering gliders out in the field near the pond. With their new wings, they were unable to fly far and so were easy pickings for the camera. I like how the shiny new wings look like they are made of water.
Late in the summer appear numerous purple aster flowers growing in the wild, and these are favored by small bees. I have become a bit obsessed with photographing the metallic green Halictid bees, a.k.a. ‘striped sweat bees’ (Agapostemon) that are common visitors to these flowers, as the combination of bee and flower colors are simply amazing. The next picture shows a beautiful female A. virescens with an unknown bee admiring the scene. This is one of my favorite pictures from the summer of 2017, and I would encourage readers to embiggen it.
I have only recently come to realize that there are at least three different species of green Halictid bees in my area, and I have no doubt misidentified several in my picture collection. So next summer I will want to fill out this species inventory with more pictures that are properly identified. It does not take much to get me talking about the many things I have learned in this hobby! The internet meme shown in the last picture pretty much conveys what this hobby does to people.
It’s Saturday, January 26, 2019, and the weekend is here. It’s shaping up to be the coldest week in the 33 years I’ve been in Chicago, with two snowstorms between now and Monday and sub-freezing temperatures next week. Here are the high and low temperatures for both days in Fahrenheit and Celsius. At the moment it’s -5ºF (-21ºC). Look at Wednesday!
Fahrenheit:
Celsius:
It’s National Peanut Brittle Day, which is an okay treat if made with good peanuts and lots of butter, and also Australia Day in Australia, marking the anniversary of the arrival of Britain’s “First Fleet” in 1788, a fleet of 11 ships carrying about 700 convicts to found a penal colony. The group landed on January 26 at Port Jackson in what is now New South Wales.
On this day in 1564, the Council of Trent, reacting to the Protestant Reformation, declared all forms of Protestantism to be heresy. On January 26, 1838, Tennessee enacted the first U.S. Prohibition law in the U.S., banning the sale of spirits in stores and taverns. I can’t find out how long it lasted, but it surely lapsed before nationwide prohibition began in January, 1919. Exactly three years later, Commander James Bremer took possession of Hong Kong for the British.
On January 26, 1905, the world’s largest diamond, the Cullinan, weighing 3,106.75 carats (about 1.3 pounds!) was unearthed at the Premier Mine near Pretoria. South Africa. It was bought by the Transvaal Colony and given to King Edward VII on his birthday. Wikipedia describes the disposition of the big uncut stone:
Cullinan produced stones of various cuts and sizes, the largest of which is named Cullinan I or the Great Star of Africa, and at 530.4 carats (106.08 g) it is the largest clear cut diamond in the world. Cullinan I is mounted in the head of the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross. The second-largest is Cullinan II or the Second Star of Africa, weighing 317.4 carats (63.48 g), mounted in the Imperial State Crown. Both diamonds are part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.
Seven other major diamonds, weighing a total of 208.29 carats (41.66 g), are privately owned by Queen Elizabeth II, who inherited them from her grandmother, Queen Mary, in 1953. The Queen also owns minor brilliants and a set of unpolished fragments.
Here’s the rough stone, the Great Star of Africa in the Sceptre, and the Cullinan II in the Imperial State Crown:
On this day in 1926, Scottish engineer John Logie Baird made the first demonstration of television to the Royal Institution and the London Times. In 1945, Audie Murphy, born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, standing atop a flaming tank and wounded in the leg, held off a huge group of Germans single-handedly, killing or wounding 50 of them (he was a good shot). For this he won the Medal of Honor and went on to act in many films. He was perhaps America’s most decorated soldier in World War II. Here are his decorations, with the Medal of Honor around his neck:
On January 26, 1965, Hindi became the official language of India. And in 1998, Bill Clinton went on television to deceive the American public. He said, among other things, this:
Notables born on this day include Alexander Carlyle (1722), Douglas MacArthur (1880), Maria von Trapp (1905), Stéphane Grappelli (1908), Paul Newman (1925), Angela Davis and Jerry Sandusky (both 1944), Jacqueline du Pré (1945), Gene Siskel (1946), Anita Baker and Ellen DeGeneres (both 1958), and Wayne Gretzky (1961).
Those who died on this day include Edward Jenner (1823), Théodore Géricault (1824), Abner Doubleday (1893), Nikolai Vavilov (1943; geneticist who died in the gulag for promoting the truth about science), Lucky Luciano (1962), Hugh Trevor-Roper (2003), and Abe Vigoda (2016).
Here’s Vigoda playing Sal Tessio in The Godfather, being taken away to be killed for treachery towards the Family:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a Hili dialogue with a title! Backstory: the cream container is sitting on the table, but there’s not a drop in Hili’s bowl. Oy!
CONTEXTUALIZATION
Hili: This cream is taken out of context.
A: What is its context?
Hili: My bowl.
In Polish:
KONTEKSTUALIZACJA
Hili: Ta śmietanka jest wyrwana z kontekstu.
Ja: A jaki jest jej kontekst?
Hili: Miseczka.
Tweets from Matthew. The first one came from a “sort of cat”:
The man I live with said Do you ever wonder what is out ther Terry Barlow. I said It is just ducks. pic.twitter.com/h2I3mJ0Jyq
The latest on Matthew’s moggie Harry the Cat and his Cone of Shame (he had to wear it because he hurt his toe). Too bad there are no photos of this. . . .
Harry and the cone update. In the night he managed a) to get out through the cat flap (smart!), b) get very wet, c) get back in through the flap and d) get his poorly paw stuck inside the cone. So we have taken it off. He’s not gnawing at his paw so will be fine I reckon.
Tweets from Grania. The first begins a thread that’s well worth reading. Tweeted by a journalism professor, it explains why newspapers are dying.
For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. Though that is part of that. Here’s a cliffs notes version – not exhaustive but it hits the highlights:
[Presentation of research results] the movie was observed by a fluorescence microscope the state of intercellular signaling when the slime cells that expressed camp-sensitive fluorescent probes were set. It is understood that the signal is transmitted as a spiral wave in the group. Photographed by Mr. Hashimura.
Some great photos of cats looking at themselves in the mirror:
When John Kerry negotiated the nuclear arms deal with Iran four years ago, waiving sanctions on Iran in return for their dismantling refinement facilities and cutting back on production of refined nuclear material, I was dubious. I didn’t trust the government of Iran, for after all they would benefit greatly from the cachet of having the Bomb. They’d also scare the bejeesus out of Israel, which would be the first target of an Iranian bomb. But it wasn’t politically correct to criticize a no-nukes deal negotiated by a Democratic government, so I crossed my fingers, hoped, and remained silent.
Trump decided to scrap that deal, and Iran is considering restarting its old program. Well, that’s not exactly true: it had never kept to the bargain in the first place. In other words, I was right, but take no pride in it. This news comes from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and you can find the report and a video here, as well as a transcript here. This was in fact admitted by the head of Iran’s nuclear program, Ali Akbar Salehi. As the introduction to the video and transcript reports:
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was interviewed on Channel 4 TV (Iran) on January 22, 2019. He said that the negotiations surrounding the JCPOA had required Iran to destroy the Arak reactor’s calandria [the core of a nuclear reactor] by filling it with cement, but that Iran had secretly acquired replacement tubes ahead of time so that the reactor’s functionality would not be ultimately affected. He also said that pictures that had circulated that showed the Arak reactor’s pit filled with cement had been photoshopped. He explained that Iran has no intention to build a nuclear weapon, and that the Arak reactor is nonetheless incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. In addition, Salehi said that the yellowcake production facilities in Ardakan are operational and that Iran has been authorized to produce two additional IR-8 centrifuges. Salehi added that Iran has advanced rapidly in the field of nuclear propulsion.
Now if Iran lied about destroying the calandria, why should we believe them now when they say they have “no intention to build a nuclear weapon”? If you believe that, I’d call you credulous.
Interviewer: But you did say that you had poured cement into the tubes…
Ali Akbar Salehi: Not into the tubes over there. We poured it into the calandria we pulled out [of the reactor]. Inside the calandria, there are tubes where the fuel goes. We had bought similar tubes, but I could not declare this at the time. Only one person in Iran knew this. We told no one but the top man of the regime [Khamenei]. When our team was in the midst of the negotiations, we knew that [the Westerners] would ultimately renege on their promises. The leader warned us that they were violators of agreements. We had to act wisely. Not only did we avoid destroying the bridges that we had built, but we also built new bridges that would enable us to go back faster if needed. There were a series of tubes, 3 or 4 meters long and 2 or 3 centimeters in diameter. You can imagine there tubes. They have a beginning and an end. We had bought the same quantity of similar tubes. When they told us to pour cement into the tubes, we did…
Now Iran’s excuse that the U.S. would ultimately violate the agreement, and so Iran was justified in cheating, won’t wash. The U.S. wasn’t violating the agreement at the time, nor was there any indication that we’d get a President like Trump who would. Now that Trump has scrapped the deal, Iran can do what it wants. But it was doing what it wanted the whole time, and at the end of that road are nuclear missiles aimed at Israel.
All I can say is, “Oy vey.” Was Trump wrong to scrap the deal? I don’t see how given that the Iranians had scrapped it a long time ago. I haven’t seen anything in the New York Times about this, but it’s certainly news worth reporting. And if the Times didn’t, well, that’s more evidence of deficient and biased reporting. As the kids say, “Whatever.”
Reader Patrick called my attention to two articles in the Globe and Mail and VICE, reporting that Canada’s infrequently-used “hate speech” laws have not only been used to charge two people, but to convict them. Click on the screenshots below:
Globe and Mail:
VICE:
The two men convicted, James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine, were respectively the editor and publisher of Your Ward News, a vile Toronto-area newspaper that reached 300,000 people (probably not via subscription). The conviction was for promoting hatred against women and Jews. The content that led to their conviction is described by VICE (Richard Blouin is the judge who rejected the defendants’ claim that their paper was satirical, and his full decision is here):
Blouin goes on to list several examples of this occurring such as when after the Toronto van attack Sears told his readers to shut down women talking down to men with “extreme prejudice,” or how he commanded his readers to use jury trials to nullify statutory rape and domestic assault charges.
The decision says that Your Ward News contains “undeniable glorification of Adolf Hitler” and that Jews were portrayed as having Satanic horns, drinking the blood of children, blamed for atrocities, and celebrates past persecution of the religious group. The decision strongly goes after the duo for their views on women, with Blouin writing “any position communicated that essentially denies that an entire half of the world’s population are human beings is so outrageously reprehensible that the word “hate” is starkly inadequate. You can read the full decision below.
Your Ward News is a small publication—having around 20 pages per issue—and was put out in the Toronto area. Inside its fold, you would be able to find rape advocacy, Holocaust denial, all forms of anti-Semitism and racism, conspiracy theories, and all sorts of vileness.
One rather notorious passage which preaches against the statutory rape law, reads “age of consent should be the age at which a woman can safely have sex, and not a random number chosen by our ZioMarxist oppressors.”
From the Globe and Mail:
Prosecutor Robin Flumerfelt told the trial the publication – 22 issues from the start of 2015 to the summer of 2018 were scrutinized – demonized feminists as “dangerous people” and called women “tri-orficed chattels.” The paper branded most feminists as “satanists exhilarated by abortion,” claimed women are inferior, and that feminism encourages rape.
The paper also repeatedly claimed the existence of a worldwide, blood-thirsty Jewish conspiracy. The imagery depicted Jews as devils with serpent tongues and reptilian hands, argued Jews were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that the Holocaust was a Jewish myth to strengthen their control of the world.
Here are more examples of the paper’s hate taken from the judge’s decision:
Section 319 also specifies that there are defenses against violations of these sections, but they were not found applicable in this case:
Make no mistake about it: these are hateful, odious, antisemitic, and misogynistic men. Sears used to be a doctor but had his medical license revoked in 1992 for sexual misconduct with three women, and also has two convictions for sexual assault.
If ever there was a case to test the First Amendment in America, this would be it. And yet, despite the hatred they spewed and the vileness of their views, I still defend their right to say what they want. In other words, I don’t think Canada’s law is justified.
That’s because, as the American founders and the courts recognized, there’s a slippery slope between this kind of stuff and other views that might be discussed, and who is to say what’s acceptable speech and what is hateful. Yes, it’s hateful to demonize the Jews, but what about criticizing Judaism? Child rape is odious, but is it not debatable what the age of consent might be? (No, I am not encouraging child rape here, or saying that the views of these two guys are worthy of respect, just that they don’t deserve to be censored or tried.)
In other words, what is hate speech to some people is speech for others that is worthy of discussion—even if the only value is to sharpen your own opposition to repugnant views and hone your ideas against the best case for the other side. In general, I agree with the U.S. courts that speech should be deemed illegal only if it incites immediate violence, or if it’s libelous, contains threats, incites harassment against another individual, promotes child pornography, makes false and harmful statements about products like drugs, and so on. Hatred of groups does not fall within that ambit, nor should it. In view of the fact that what constitutes “hate” is so subjective, especially these days, I’d prefer to put that one to the side when advocating government censorship.
I realize that jailing these men (and they face a maximum of six months in the pokey and a $5,000 fine) may serve as a deterrent to others to from publishing similar views. But will it end the hatred? No, I think—it will just drive it underground, and make martyrs of these men. Why not air these views and allow them to face the opposition they deserve? The way to eliminate hatred is to bring it into the open, not repress its expression.
Finally, reader Patrick asked me this question:
I am curious if you have any thoughts on this case, and if you have any thoughts on the “defences” list for Canada’s hate speech law. More specifically, I wonder whether a free speech almost-absolutist can support a public postal service (such as Canada Post) refusing to distribute a hateful publication such as YWN. I am unsure about this (leaning towards no, since it is a government institution) but in actuality I am very happy they aren’t distributing it any longer.
I’ve answered the first bit, and as for the postal system, since it’s an arm of the government, in the U.S. it would be illegal, I think, to prevent publications that don’t violate the First Amendment from being distributed. After all, that would be government censorship of speech, as the postal system is an arm of the government. This censorship is legal in Canada, but I disagree with it.
A photo (and caption) from the Globe and Mail:
James Sears, right, editor in chief of Your Ward News, and publisher LeRoy St. Germaine, are seen outside Ontario court in Toronto on Nov. 28, 2018. COLIN N. PERKEL/THE CANADIAN PRESS
