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.
Because it’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’ll finally put up some pictures I took when I visited Auschwitz/Birkenau in September of 2013. Most of these will speak for themselves; I’ll add some short captions. I’ve posted a few of these before.
Arrival:
These railroad cars held over 100 people each (this is one actually used for transporting prisoners):
A wheel of the train:
One man’s registration:
Prisoners photographed on the day they entered the camps. Note that they didn’t live long after they entered. Their faces haunt me.
A uniform. Jewish star and orange triangle means Jewish political prisoner:
A day’s rations, guaranteed to produce famine and diarrhea:
Items left behind by inmates thinking they’d retrieve them. The inmates were gassed and these things confiscated. The only thing I didn’t photograph, because it’s prohibited, was a huge room full of hair shaved from women’s heads:
The saddest relics:
Where kangaroo courts tried some of the prisoners (hearings were a few minutes).
The “death wall” where those convicted were shot.
The women’s barracks at Birkenau. Each section of the bunk held six people. Some slept on the cement. These are the real barracks, not a reconstruction.
The women’s toilets:
Communal sinks:
Zyklon-B, hydrogen cyanide plus an adsorbent. “Giftgas” means “poison gas”. This was used to exterminate prisoners.
Reconstruction of a gas chamber:
The ovens:
The real gas chambers (destroyed by the Nazis):
A mass grave, eerily prowled by a black cat:
About 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz. 960,000 of these were Jews. The breakdown:
Jews (1,095,000 deported to Auschwitz, 960,000 died)
Non-Jewish Poles (140,000- 150,000 deported, 74,000 died)
Roma (Gypsies) (23,000 deported, 21,000 died)
Soviet prisoners of war (15,000 deported and died)
Other nationalities (25,000 deported, 10,000- 15,000 died)
If you want to read more, you can find an informative digest here.
Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on this day 74 years ago. Here’s some footage of the liberation.
I was going to write a critique of the article below from Aeon; its authors are Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of natural philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, and Evan Thompson, a professor of philosophy and a scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (Click on the screenshot.)
But as I read it for the second time, and the familiar science-dissing arguments arose before my eyes, I became dispirited. Science can’t give us an objective view of reality, the authors claim, because “reality” is always filtered through our consciousness (and, by the way, good luck, Science, with explaining consciousness!). The view that we perceive an objective reality is, Frank et al. argue, “more theological than scientific.” (But theology can’t make verifiable predictions, and science can!). Science changes, too, as our experience of “how things are” changes (viz., quantum mechanics). Thus we don’t have a handle on Reality.
And as I mentally prepared my arguments, I became almost physically ill. Of course we don’t know for sure if there’s an external reality independent of our experience, but if there isn’t then our predictions are remarkably successful. And animals perceive physical things that comport with what we perceive (i.e., a mallard hen gets alarmed when she sees a Great Blue Heron near her chicks; when water freezes for us, it freezes for ducks; and so on). Doesn’t that mean that there’s something out there that we see and that other species see, all with very different consciousnesses?
If you’re going to diss science because it’s filtered through our consciousness, then every notion of the word “truth” goes out the window. How do I know you ate a cheeseburger today, even though I saw you scarf it down? After all, although what I saw looked like a cheeseburger, it was filtered through my consciousness, so the idea of a Cheeseburger Independently Existing in the Cosmos is garbage.
And then there’s this paragraph, which begins the piece:
The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and velocities of its constituent parts, such as particles, atoms, fields and so forth. This problem hits a hard wall when we deal with the origin of the Universe itself, because we have no view from the outside. We can’t step outside the box in order to look within, because the box is all there is. A First Cause is not only unknowable, but also scientifically unintelligible.
First of all, we don’t know if there is a first cause; you can plausibly argue that the Universe in one form or another has proceeded from other universes and that it’s simply universes all the way down. Physicists tell us that the notion of a time before the present Universe began makes no sense since the beginning of time is coincident with the beginning of space-time. And if a First Cause is scientifically unintelligible, which it appears to be, then why is it a criticism of science to say that we can’t pin down a “First Cause” (which, by the way, is NOT equivalent to an “initial condition”)?
And then I realized that I have remunerative and enjoyable work to do, and why should I waste my time rehashing the same old arguments?
If you want to see how scientists and philosophers combine forces to show that Science Isn’t Everything (something with which we mostly agree), have at it yourself. But it’s one thing to say that science is different from music, and that we’ll never know why some people like Stockhausen while others despise him (actually, some day science might be able to answer that!); but it’s another thing to say that science is fundamentally theological in nature. Yes, science can be wrong, and all we can do is to make models that conform better and better to how we perceive the universe, and that predict things we can observe. Yet one thing is for sure: it would be remarkable if Einstein’s perception of the Universe corresponded with the bending of light by the sun, but that actually there may not be light or a Sun, and it’s all some kind of Matrix.
Oh, and another thing is for sure: theology isn’t even CLOSE to science in understanding “reality”, whatever that might be, because different theologians—unlike different scientists—have huge differences in what they say reality consists of, and there’s no way to judge who is right. On the other hand, we know there isn’t an ether and that we can test whether matter bends light. When theologians find a way to tell us whether there’s a god, and whether that god is one or many (as Hindus maintain), and what the nature of that god is, and that we can test their claims, then I’ll start saying that theology is scientific in nature.
The only purpose of pieces like this, it seems to me, is to do down science. You tell me why, as I don’t know. Perhaps people are upset that science continues to advance and push woo further into the corners, and that other areas of human endeavor have had no such successes.
At any rate, I’m done for the day. I’m tired of these kinds of arguments. I’ve attacked them before and need not do so again, and I’ll move on to more interesting pursuits. I wonder why Messrs. Frank, Thompson and Gleiser are going after science rather than theology.
Here’s the second batch of photos taken by Rachel Wilmoth on a trip to Kruger National Park last October (first batch of photos here). Her notes and IDs are indented; some creatures are unidentified and readers are invited to give their take.
Here are bird pictures. I am not a birder and don’t know what most of the birds are. But I’m guessing other readers can identify what I cannot. Here are the birds I can identify:
It’s Sunday, January 27, 2019 and that means it’s National Chocolate Cake Day. It’s also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the day in 1945 when the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. If you’re ever in Kraków, Poland, do go visit it, as I did a few years ago. I can’t say it’s a pleasant excursion (see my short post on it here), but the visit will remain in your mind the rest of your life.
A tweet to help us remember:
These violins belonged to European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Now they're being played in concert halls around the world, thanks to this man. pic.twitter.com/9URXfadfB2
You can read about the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau here, and here’s a video with interviews of historians and some survivors of the camps:
And a reader sent me a story just a few minutes ago:
Decades ago, when I worked in the anesthesia department of a hospital for special surgery (ophthalmology), one of my patients noted that, as I examined his arms looking for a suitable I.V. site & found his tattoo, a tear well up in my eye; he looked into my eyes, took my hand in his & comforted me! Such was this survivor who was finally getting his cataracts out. He did not want pity, but understanding.
On this day in 1302, Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence for belonging to the wrong faction of a fight between supporters of the Pope and of the Holy Roman Emperor. On January 27, the trial of Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators of the “Gunpowder Plot” began; they were all executed four days later. On this day in 1820, according to Wikipedia, ” a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovers the Antarctic continent, approaching the Antarctic coast.” On January 27, 1944, the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans, which had lasted 900 days, was lifted.
Exactly one year later, the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated the inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau who had not been marched away. On this day in 1967, three Apollo astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire while their spacecraft was being tested at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Finally, it was on this day in 1996 that Germany first observed theInternational Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Notables born on this day include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756), Lewis Carroll (1832), Samuel Gompers (1850), Jerome Kern (1885), Elmore James (1918), Donna Reed (1921), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948), Mimi Rogers (1956), and Rosamund Pike (1979). Here’s Elmore James, king of the slide guitar, playing “Dust My Broom”:
Those who died on January 27 include Francis Drake (1596), John James Audubon (1851), Giuseppe Verdi (1901), Nellie Bly (1922), Crew of Apollo 1 (1967; see above), Mahalia Jackson (1972), André the Giant (1993), Jack Paar (2004), John Updike (2009), J. D. Salinger (2010), and Pete Seeger (2014). And here’s Audubon’s raven (Corvus corvax) from the Birds of America folio (1840):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a new toy that dispenses cat treats when it’s batted about, but I suspects it annoys her, as she can’t figure out how it works! As Malgorzata wrote me, “This is not a new toy. We had it for about a year and Hili never understood that there are goodies inside and that she could get at them. This cat is not as intelligent as we thought. After a biscuit fell out and she ate it, she looked to Andrzej to produce another one. Last Friday we had a visit from Elzbieta and we gave her the ball to take home. Leon got the trick at once and is now happily pushing the ball and eating biscuits.”
When I wrote back that Leon was smarter than Hili, Malgorzata replied, “Yes, it is definitely so. But we love her anyhow.”
A: Inside this ball are scrumptious cat biscuits. You just have to bat it.
Hili: You do it!
In Polish:
Ja: W tej piłeczce są pyszne chrupki, wystarczy ją popchnać.
Hili: Zrób to.
Leon is still hiking in the mountains of southern Poland. Here he plans a trip:
Leon: I would love to travel where chamois are.
In Polish: Tu chciałbym pojechać,gdzie są kozice.
A tweet from reader Barry, who wonders why the pigeon doesn’t fly away:
Tweets from Grania. The first is a response by Maajid Nawaz to the “progressive” new Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who isn’t that progressive. The incident he refers to is described here. An excerpt:
Omar, who has been under fire for not backing down from anti-Israel rhetoric, and who accused the Covington Catholic H.S. teens on Twitter of “taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants” (she has since deleted the false accusation), and then accused President Trump of backing a “coup in Venezuela” and installing “a far right opposition” opposed to Socialist Dictator Maduro is now getting heat for a letter that she wrote to a judge in 2016 defending a Minnesota man caught trying to join the terrorist organization ISIS.
Go look at the thread below to see what Germans think Americans eat. It’s funny! Hint to die Deutschen: Wir essen keine Lebensmittel “mini”!
I am an American living in Germany. My grocery store currently has a temporary “American food” section. Join me for a tour of what Germans think Americans eat. pic.twitter.com/uvnF0Q8Uwo
Like most of us, Shappi Khorsandi is a fan of the unsinkable Titania McGrath. (In the UK, “BAME” refers to black, Asian, and minority ethnic people.) Unlike many, Shappi knows that Titania is a spoof of wokeness.
Tweets from Heather Hastie (via Ann German). This dog is being taught to be nice to birds:
A wonderful landing, but not much room for error! This reminds me of flying into the Lukla, Nepal airport in a Twin Otter. Turn the sound on for this one:
Almost all carabid #beetles have an antennal cleaner. This little Sloanella (Trechina) from Weldborough Pass in Tasmania is showing us how they use it. pic.twitter.com/HHPiuZAKOQ
Finally, one of the many pictures I took at Auschwitz in 2013. I always intended to do a full post on my visit there, but somehow couldn’t bear to do it. This shows the suitcases of Jews who, told that they would retrieve their belongings after their shower, were then gassed. The Germans kept the suitcases, as they did all the other “saved” possessions. This photo breaks my heart, as the suitcases bear the names and addresses of real people. On display at Auschwitz are also rooms full of toothbrushes, shaving apparatus, prosthetic limbs, and, saddest of all, the dolls of children who were killed.
I’ve previously written posts about things that I consider way overpriced: these includes coffee at Starbuck’s (a large black coffee can be over $3, not to mention the varieties of Confectionary Coffee like caramel macchiatos), as well as commercial toothpaste (Pepsodent costs about $1 a tube, and is just as good as much higher-priced toothpastes, which shows you how much the prices are inflated.)
On my fasting day on Thursday, having run out of diet soda (i.e., lunch), I visited the student union here to get a Diet Coke. I noticed that they had replaced the large paper cups with smaller plastic ones, which held, I estimate, about 12 ounces of soda. This cost $2.39. I don’t buy soda in cans, but I suspect that’s about six times what a can of the stuff would cost at the grocery store.
Yesterday I went to a local eatery for lunch, treating to lunch the departmental staff who watered my plants when I was gone. We all had sodas, and it cost $2.49 for an ice-laden soda. (Places also inflate prices by filling soda cups with ice, which of course is a ripoff: you don’t need that much ice to keep the drink cold.)
This is unconscionable, as the actual cost of the liquid to these places must be something downwards of 25¢. Like wine in nearly all restaurants, soda prices are inflated because, I guess, people are willing to pay too-high prices for drinks, so it covers the lower profit margin on food.
I protest! But my recourse is simply to buy diet sodas in 2-liter bottles at the grocery store, as I buy Pepsodent when I see it. I’m sure other readers have beefs about items they consider overpriced, and I encourage you to describe these beefs below.
It’s supposedly my day off, though with the weather being Arctic, there’s not much to do outside—or even a reason to go outside. But I’ve read a few things that I’ll recommend if you too are housebound today.
First, a good column—especially the first part—from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine (h/t Simon). It’s worth keeping up with him, as he’s becoming a voice of reason in this increasingly demented era of hatred and tribalism. Click on the screenshot:
This is about the Covington Mess and how both social and mainstream media, by going with their confirmation bias, is ruining America. And I agree. I’ll give a couple of good quotes:
Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.
. . . To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.
. . . Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.
There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.
The other night I was having a drink with a friend who said he believed that the Trump threat was essentially over, as the shutdown took its toll. He noted what might become an inflection point in the polling. He was heartened by the midterms. He might be right. But I think that misses the core point about this presidency. From my perspective, the Trump threat to liberal democracy is deepening, largely because its racial animus and rank tribalism are evoking a response that is increasingly imbued with racial animus and rank tribalism, in an ever-tightening spiral of mutual hostility.
I especially like this bit:
What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general. Here is Kara Swisher, a sane and kind person, reacting to the first video: “To all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.” Judging — indeed demonizing — an individual on the basis of the racial or gender group he belongs to is the core element of racism, and yet it is now routine on the left as well as the right. To her great credit, Kara apologized profusely for the outburst. The point here is that tribal hatred can consume even the best of us.
And this is what will inevitably happen once you’ve redefined racism or sexism to mean prejudice plus power. It’s reasonable to note the social context of bigotry and see shades of gray, in which the powerful should indeed be more aware of how their racial or gender prejudice can hurt others, and the powerless given some slack. But if that leads you to ignore or downplay the nastiest adult bigotry imaginable and to focus on a teen boy’s silent face as the real manifestation of evil, you are well on your way to creating a new racism that mirrors aspects of the old.
This is the abyss of hate versus hate, tribe versus tribe. This is a moment when we can look at ourselves in the mirror of social media and see what we have become. Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us. This process is greater than one president. It is bottom-up as well as top-down. Tyranny, as Damon Linker reminded us this week, is not just political but psychological, and the tyrannical impulse, ratcheted up by social media, is in all of us. It infects the soul of the entire body politic. It destroys good people. It slowly strangles liberal democracy. This is the ongoing extinction level event.
Andrew writes further about the legalization of marijuana, which has led to “dabbing”, or vaporizing concentrated weed resin. He decries this practice mainly because it leads to somnolence rather than facilitating good conversation, which is what he wants out of the drug. I am on his side, as I tend to become more gregarious when I partake. A few years ago tried dabbing in a state where it was legal to buy and smoke recreationally, and it blitzed me out for about 8 hours, in a way that just made me withdraw and want to sack out rather than chat. Our new governor has vowed to make marijuana legal in Illinois, and we’ll see if that happens. His third segment is about Brexit.
Speaking of Covington, one of the venues that’s tried its hardest to maintain its narrative in the face of changing facts is the Guardian, a site I rarely visit any more. Have a gander at this headline, from a story posted last Wednesday:
The article, and the Guardian as a whole, makes me ill; they’re presenting a caricature of the Left. When Wilson writes something like this, did he ever care about the truth? I don’t think so; he just wanted to maintain that the Covington students were still pariahs while dissing the conservative media that painted them as heroes. Nobody was a hero in that narrative, but neither were the boys nor the Native Americans pariahs. Wilson:
On Tuesday night, Fox News hosts continued to feast on the controversy, which was sparked by a standoff between Covington Catholic high school students and a Native American veteran called Nathan Phillips. Footage show students wearing pro-Trump Maga hats taunting the Omaha tribe elder. The relentlessly repeated talking point – that there was a collective “rush to judgment” on the boys because they were Trump supporters – was used by conservative anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attack mainstream media and left leaning social media users.
. . . As of Wednesday, as a result of these well-worn tactics, liberal media has almost completely backed away from their initial, justified take on the story.
When will we ever learn?
Yep, use the kids to go after your favorite targets. And “initial justified take on the story”? I don’t think so!
Speaking of social-media outrage, here’s a good article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf:
A quote:
For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.
Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent half an hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.
On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.
One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. . .
From Inside Higher Ed, Alan Sokal, author of the Great Hoax, criticizes the persecution of philosopher Peter Boghossian by his employer Portland State University (PSU) after Peter, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted fake articles to humanities journals, exposing the egregiously low standards of those journals—and the disciplines as a whole. PSU found Peter guilty of violating rules about experimentation on human subjects—in this case, the subjects were journal editors and reviewers—without following “human subject research” policy. Found guilty, Peter may be fired. Yet the federal regulations apply only to federally-funded research, which wasn’t behind Boghossian et al.’s work. Portland State just decided as its policy to follow the federal rules. Read on:
Sokal thinks this punishment is dumb, and I agree, but those who think the excesses of the humanities are just fine, thank you, are going for Peter’s throat. Vindictiveness reigns.
And Portland State University, like many other universities, has decided, as a matter of its own internal policy, to apply federal IRB rules to all research carried out by PSU employees or students — though such treatment is legally mandatory only for projects sponsored by the federal government, which Boghossian’s was not.
But common sense suggests that something has gone seriously awry here, when rules initially written to protect subjects in biomedical research from physical harm — and later extended to social-science research, where the harm could be psychological — are applied blindly and literally to an “audit study” aimed at testing the intellectual standards of scholarly journals. As Singal observed, “the potential for harm came in the form of reputational damage and humiliation to journal editors and reviewers.” But so what? The journal editors are professionals undertaking a public responsibility, not people in the street. If they screw up, why shouldn’t this be publicly known? Moreover, the journal editors are not voiceless: if their actions were defensible (as they may well have been), they and their supporters can set forth their reasons, and the rest of us can evaluate the competing arguments with our own brains.
Please note that the issue here is different from the one addressed in two recent articles, where it was proposed that research projects deemed to pose “low risk” might be exempted from IRB review (an issue that is quite delicate, as the comments on these articles show). Here I am not contending that the reputational risk to journal editors caught publishing grossly deficient articles is low. Quite the contrary: this risk can, depending on the circumstances, be severe. What I am contending, rather, is that journal editors do not deserve to be protected from this type of risk.
What we see here is a guy being punished not for violating sensible rules, but for violating senseless ideology.
Finally, The Washington Post calls out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling whoppers, which she does habitually. And it’s a shame, as I like many of her policy recommendations. But she keeps shooting herself in the foot with misstatements and a fulminating love of the limelight (h/t Heather Hastie for the link):
The Post:
Ocasio-Cortez deserves credit for using her high profile to bring attention to income inequality. However, she undermines her message when she plays fast and loose with statistics. A lot of Americans do not earn enough for a living wage, but we cannot find evidence that it is the majority. Amazon and Walmart pay well above the minimum wage, contrary to her statement, and it is tendentious to claim those companies specifically get some sort of a wealth transfer from the public when such benefits flow to all low-wage workers in many companies. Overall, she earns Three Pinocchios.
The new Representative is awarded three Pinocchios for her misstatements, which, on the Post’s ratings, represent “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of “mostly false.”
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.
**********
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?
***********
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.
