Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 29, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s almost December now: we’re at the penultimate day of November, i.e., the 29th of the month in the year of our Ceiling Cat (fleas be upon him), 2018. It’s National Chocolates Day, but I can’t have any as I’m fasting. It’s also the feast day of Our Lady of Beauraing, celebrating five Belgian children who saw visions of Mary in 1932-1933. Why, by the way, is it always Mary who appears in these visions? Why not Jesus, or even God? That alone shows that this is an infectious meme. After all, God did appear to Moses, to Job, and to Abraham.

This is another skimpy day in history. On November 29, 1781, a horrible event took place: the crew of the British slave ship Zong simply threw 133 Africans overboard, killing them because the ship’s water was running low and the owners could claim insurance money (they lost). Here’s J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting “The Slave Ship”, inspired by the Zong’s perfidy (click to enlarge):

On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison first demonstrated the phonograph that he’d recently patented. 22 years later, F.C. Barcelona was founded by Catalan, Spanish, and English men. It remains a great team. On November 29, 1929, Admiral Richard Byrd made the first successful flight over the South Pole. On this day in 1967, three months into my first year at college, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, beleaguered and unsure of his mission to prosecute the Vietnam war, resigned. Finally, on this day in 1972, or so Wikipedia claims, “Atari release[d] Pong, the first commercially successful video game.” I don’t know from Pong.

Notables born on this day include Amos Bronson Alcott (1799), Christian Doppler (1803), Louisa May Alcott (1832, Bronson’s famous daughter), C. S. Lewis (1898), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908), Jacques Chirac (1932), Felix Cavaliere (1942), and Rahm Emanuel (1959).

Cavaliere was of course the titular head of the rock group The Young Rascals (also known as The Rascals), and here’s their most famous song: “Groovin“, from 1967. It became a #1 hit for the group. First some background from Wikipedia:

Written by group members Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati and with a lead vocal from Cavaliere, it is a slow, relaxed groove, based on Cavaliere’s newfound interest in Afro-Cuban music. Instrumentation included a conga, a Cuban-influenced bass guitar line from session musician Chuck Rainey, and a harmonica part, performed first for the single version by New York session musician Michael Weinstein, and later for the album version by Gene Cornish.

The result was fairly different from the Rascals’ white soul origins, enough so that Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler did not want to release “Groovin'”. Cavaliere credits disc jockey Murray the K with intervening to encourage Atlantic to release the song. “To tell you the truth, they didn’t originally like the record because it had no drum on it,” admits Cavaliere. “We had just cut it, and he [Murray the K] came in the studio to say hello. After he heard the song, he said, ‘Man, this is a smash.’ So, when he later heard that Atlantic didn’t want to put it out, he went to see Jerry Wexler and said, ‘Are you crazy? This is a friggin’ No. 1 record.’ He was right, because it eventually became No. 1 for four straight weeks.”

And the song, which you’ll remember if you’re close to my age:

Those who died on this day include Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1530), Hans Holbein the Younger (1543), Giacomo Puccini (1924), Natalie Wood (1981), Cary Grant (1986), and Jim Nabors (2017).

Holbein, official portraitist of Henry VIII, did a famous painting from life of the king (1537) that was destroyed in a fire in 1698. Copies remain, though; here’s one from around the same time, and below that an original Holbein showing Henry:

An original portrait by Holbein (1534-1536):

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus are bantering:

Cyrus: Do you think that your shadow is afraid of my shadow?
Hili: No, they know each other.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Czy myślisz, że twój cień boi się mojego cienia?
Hili: Nie, one się znają.

A tweet from Heather; both of us would dearly love to be this guy!

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/1067719119406014464

Reader Nilou sent a tweet from the Tower of London’s Beefeater “Ravenmaster,” who is shamelessly flogging his new book:

See?

Tweets from Matthew. In the first series he expresses his disapprobation about the Chinese scientist who claims to have genetically engineered two babies using the CRISPR system, removing a gene that makes people susceptible to HIV infection (why would one even want to do that?):

Eric Topol is a well known geneticist and researching physician.

That experiment is really, really wonky, and would be illegal in the U.S. We simply don’t know enough about how to use CRISPR responsibly to justify this kind of manipulation.

More tweets from Matthew. The first one makes a strange claim. How can that bee? The thread after this tweet gives the bizarre solution:

I wonder if someone lost his job over this. . .

https://twitter.com/stiffleaf/status/1065942619228962818

Tweets from Grania. The first is the “on” button of a cat:

https://twitter.com/SoVeryAwkward/status/812478977357049856

As Grania says, “This is an outrage.” Truly!

https://twitter.com/DanRiffle/status/1066340719189786626

Nothing that Trump says surprises me any more.

 

Knickers the Giant Steer saved by his size from the abattoir

November 28, 2018 • 2:00 pm

The New York Times—and, indeed, the entire Internet—is buzzing with the story of Knickers the Giant Steer, who lives in Australia. He’s not just big; he’s HUGE!

From the Times:

It’s a very big steer.

The very big steer is, according to the nearly unanimous acclaim on social media, a hero. At 6 feet 4 inches tall and more than 1.4 tons (2,800 pounds), it is roughly the height of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson but weighs about 11 times as much.

Its enormous size — just three inches short of the Guinness World Record for tallest living steer — saved it from certain death, its owner said. No one bought it for slaughter at an auction last month because potential buyers said it wouldn’t fit in their farm equipment.

“He was always a standout steer,” said Geoff Pearson, who owns thousands of cattle in Myalup, a small town south of Perth in Western Australia.

. . . Knickers drew worldwide adoration after local news reports ignited coverage of him internationally, and his image saturated social media on Tuesday.

Get a load of this guy.

There was something familiar about him. Knickers is that guy who stands in front of you at every concert.

There was something relatable about him. Knickers looks the way you feel when you don’t know anyone at a party.

And there was something inspiring about him. Cattle don’t typically have much control over their fate. Knickers beat the system.

. . . His reward for escaping the literal chopping block will be a life of coaching other animals on how to live their lives at the farm, Mr. Pearson said. The other animals have taken to him.

Mature steer of his breed typically stand 4 feet 10 inches tall and weigh about 1,500 pounds, according to the Cattle Site.

Here’s Knickers, whose size is exaggerated a bit as he’s surrounded by small wagyu cows. But even so. . . . .

Here’s a video:

Now some people are (excuse the pun) beefing because there aren’t any photos in which Knickers is standing right next to a person, so you can get a good idea of his height. Let’s just say that if 6 foot 4 is his shoulder height, he’d be six eight inches taller than I if I were standing beside him. And that’s big!

If you want to see the record holder, here it is, certified by Guinness:

“The tallest ox is Bellino, a chianina ox who measured 2.027 m (6 ft 7 in) to the withers. He is owned by Giuseppe Sola (Italy) and was measured on the set of Lo Show dei Record in Rome, Italy, on 27 March 2010. An ox is an adult, castrated male bovine.”

College cancels “The Vagina Monologues” because it doesn’t include trans women

November 28, 2018 • 10:45 am

This is just another example of the Authoritarian Left cutting off its nose to spite its face. The Ann Arbor News (from Michigan) reports the following (click on screenshot):

Most of you have heard about Eve Ensler‘s play “The Vagina Monologues,” first produced in 1996. It’s become an iconic feminist work and has raised a lot of money for women’s causes. As Wikipedia reports:

The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler which developed and premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York and was followed by an Off-Broadway run in 1996 at Westside Theatre. The play explores consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences, body image, genital mutilation, direct and indirect encounters with reproduction, sex work, and several other topics through the eyes of women with various ages, races, sexualities, and other differences. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the play “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” Ensler originally starred in both the HERE premiere and in the first off-Broadway production, which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit and the West Side Theater. When she left the play, it was recast with three celebrity monologists. The play has been staged internationally, and a television version featuring Ensler was produced by cable TV channel HBO. In 1998, Ensler and others, including Willa Shalit, a producer of the Westside Theatre production, launched V-Day, a global non-profit movement that has raised over US$100million for groups working to end violence against women and girls anti-violence through benefits of The Vagina Monologues.

According to the Ann Arbor paper’s report, the play was deep-sixed for reasons you’ve probably guessed: it’s not “inclusive” of transgender women who don’t have vaginas (some of them, of course, do have surgically constructed vaginas). From the paper:

YPSILANTI, MI – Eastern Michigan University’s Women’s Resource Center will no longer host productions of “The Vagina Monologues,” noting that the play’s version of feminism excludes some women.

The WRC announced its decision in an email, which came after the center evaluated responses from a survey. Survey respondents opposing the production consistently indicated they were concerned that the play centers on cisgender women, that the play’s version of feminism excludes some women, including trans women, and that overall, “The Vagina Monologue” lacks diversity and inclusion.

Modifying the script to the play written by Eve Ensler is not an option, due to copyright laws, the WRC stated.

“We feel that making this decision is in line with the WRC mission of recognizing and celebrating the diverse representations of women on campus along with the overall mission of the Department of Diversity and Community Involvement, in which the WRC is housed, of supporting and empowering minoritized students and challenging systems and structures that perpetuate inequities,” the email from the WRC said. “We truly believe that it is important to center our minoritized students and this decision is in line with this mission driven value.”

The play, as far as I know and as I hear from women, was pretty good, and, to use a word I don’t often use, was “empowering.” That is, it buttressed women’s self-esteem at a time when they were more oppressed than they are now. And I expect the play would still have a salubrious effect.  But the empowerment that women will receive from this is, apparently, more than counterbalanced by the proposed damaged done to transgender women who don’t have vaginas and thus don’t feel included.

What is the proportion of all American women who fit in this class? A paper last year in the American Journal of Public Health came up with a meta-regression estimate that 390 adults per 100 000 are transgender individuals. Assuming that’s roughly equal in men and women (there’s some evidence of a slight disparity in a Dutch study), then 0.39% of people who feel they’re women were born biological men. It is the feelings of this small moiety of women that has caused the Women’s Resource Center to cancel the play, and the implicit assumption is that the good done to the 99.61% of women with vaginas who watch the play is outweighed by the harm done to that 0.39% because they’re not included in the class “people with vaginas” (PWVs).

But that’s assuming those people are harmed. While some transgender people have previously objected to Ensler’s equation of women and PWVs (the play was canceled at American University and Mount Holyoke College as well), it’s not clear that they’d be palpably harmed beyond the usual “offense”, and certainly not harmed to the degree that women with vaginas would be empowered or helped.

I suspect this is more about virtue signaling than improving society. Is canceling the play a net good? Could the University mitigate any harm by using part of the ticket revenues to help all women, including transgender ones? How many plays could be canceled because they portray clearly cis-gendered people in a way that might “exclude” transgender people?

In the end, the drive for “inclusion” often divides people more than it unites them, and in this case also withholds a valuable piece of theater from a population that would, by and large, benefit from it.

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ extremists

November 28, 2018 • 10:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo, called “trick-2,” is an eleven-year-old resurrection, but is still relevant today, since the tropes of Stalin and Pol Pot—not to mention Hitler—are still used to defend religion and attack atheism. The artist’s point is a good one, made even more trenchant by realizing that while ISIS and Fred Phelps damn others (and the former kills them) on the explicit grounds of religion, while Pol Pot and Stalin went after people not because they were atheists (there were a few exceptions), but mostly because those people opposed—or were said to oppose—a totalitarian regime.

Why are cat tongues spiny?

November 28, 2018 • 8:45 am

If you have a cat, you’ve probably been licked by it, and thereby experienced the raspy, sandy feel of a cat tongue. That’s due to the tongue’s being covered by many “papillae”—recurved, backwards-pointing spines made of keratin, the protein that’s in hair, hooves, and the outer layer of our skin. The papillae are in fact as hard as human fingernails, and much harder than the tongue tissue itself.

The housecat has about 300 of these papillae, but all species of felid studied so far have the spines, and they’re all about the same height: ca. 2.3 mm regardless of the size of the cat. (The authors studied, beside house cats, bobcats, cougars, snow leopards, tigers, and lions.)

All cats have papillae, but their function hasn’t been systematically studied, and thus has been speculative. One impediment is that the spines weren’t even studied morphologically, so it was thought that they were solid.

Now two scientists from Georgia have published a paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA (click on screenshot below; pdf here, reference at bottom, all free with the legal Chrome Unpaywall extension) that gives us more insight into cat tongues, something of great interest to us all.  For one thing, they found that the spines aren’t solid, giving a clue to how they work. Be sure to see the figures and tongue movies shown here.

First, the tongues. The second series of photos show how the spines behave when the cat is licking itself.

(from paper): Kinematics of cat grooming. (A) A domestic cat grooms its fur. (B) Close-up view of its tongue showing the anisotropic papillae, which point to the left toward the throat

There are four phases of grooming, shown in the figure below. As the authors describe them, they consist of “extension of the tongue, lateral expansion and stiffening of the tongue tissue, a sweep of the tongue through the fur, and retraction of the tongue in a U-shaped curl. During expansion, the spines rotate until they are perpendicular to the tongue, as shown in the high-speed film in Movie S1. This allows the papillae to stand erect to increase their contact area with fur.” As you see, a swipe takes about a quarter of a second. Go watch the movie if you can.

Cats spend a lot of time grooming themselves: the authors note that the average house cat sleeps 14 hours per day and spends about 24% of its waking time grooming itself. Therefore your moggie is licking itself for about 2.4 hours per day. Why is it doing this?  Well, clearly it has some cleaning function, but whether that be to remove parasites, dirt, dead skin, or all of the above isn’t known. Thermoregulation is another possibility: since cats sweat only through their paws, spreading saliva on their fur can cause evaporative cooling of a hot cat. And maybe the papillae help the cat cut up meat or grip food better.

One clue comes from fine-resolution X-ray imaging, microcomputed tomography. This reveals that the papillae aren’t solid, but in fact hollow. There are in fact two hollow regions: at the base of the papillae, and one at the tip, where a U-shaped cross-section acts to wick up saliva by capillary action.

Here’s the hollow papillae, and then a figure showing it wicking up mock saliva (red-dyed liquid). Once in the papillae, the fluid is stable, and stays inside even when the tongue is upside down. It can them be deposited on any surface by pressing the tongue against it.

(From the paper) Fig. S4. A transparent model of a domestic cat’s papilla, illustrating cavities present.

 

And here are photos of the papillae from six cat species:

(From the paper): The cat tongue and its wicking papillae. (A and B) From left to right, (A) excised tongues and (B) micro-CT scans of cavo papillae from a domestic cat, bobcat, cougar, snow leopard, tiger, and lion.

And some figures showing how well these papillae wick up saliva:

(From the paper): (F) Time course of red food dye wicking into a cat papilla (black square) and two tiger papillae (solid and open triangles).

The authors did a number of calculations, models, and measurements, and I needn’t go into the details here (they also did studies with tongues removed from dead cats—and I don’t want to know the details of how they did that). The salient results are these:

1.) The tongue of a housecat deposits about 56.6 microliters of saliva in a single lick: about 50% of the saliva on the tongue. The papillae themselves hold only about 10% of the deposited saliva, but even that allows the deposition of 48 grams (1.7 oz) of saliva per day onto the coat from the papillae.

2.) Even though most of the saliva on the tongue that gets onto the fur comes from the tongue and not the papillae, the papillae are vital. Measurements show that it’s only the papillae that can get to the cat’s skin through its two layers of fur: the thick guard hairs of the top coa, and the softer undercoat, which helps insulate the cat. Experiments with all six felids showed that, when licking, the cat compresses its fur sufficiently to allow the papillae to reach the skin. Thus, it seems, at least one function of these spines is to clean the skin and undercoat.

3.) But the deposition of saliva on to the skin (rather than the fur) also helps the cat cool itself. The estimates of evaporative cooling via saliva deposited close to the skin show that about 25% of the total cat cooling comes from skin-deposited saliva, with the remaining 75% of heat loss coming from radiation from the hairs, paws, and ears. The saliva deposited on the skin can cause a temperature difference of 17°C between the skin and the topcoat.

4.) If you have a short-haired cat, this is all good. But some breeds studied by the authors have fur too long to be penetrated by the papillae. As they say,

. . .if the papillae cannot reach the skin (h[papillae] < h[fur]), much of its fur cannot be accessed, making the cat “ungroomable.” Long-haired domestic breeds, such as Persian domestic cats, are notorious for their matted fur if not cared for properly. According to Veterinary Centers of America (VCA) animal hospitals, Persian cat owners should comb their cat daily and give it baths monthly to redistribute the fur’s natural oils . Consistent with these care instructions, two Persian breeds are the only animals to fall into the ungroomable region, as shown in the upper one-half of Fig. 3C.

Here’s that figure, showing the papilla length and fur length of various species and breeds, all of which (save the control chinchilla and the Persian cat) are able to reach and groom their skin:

(From the paper): (C) Relationship between the compressed fur height h[fur] and papillae height h[papillae]. The dashed line, h[papillae] = h[fur], indicates the separation between groomable and ungroomable cats.
So be sure to comb and wash your Persians regularly!

Finally, I think there’s a new cat-grooming brush in the offing. The authors constructed what they call the TIGR brush (tongue-inspired grooming brush) with recurved spines like the papillae. It’s shown in the video below, and TIGR is much easier to clean than is a regular human hairbrush (perhaps those recurved spines help the cat, in its mouth, remove the fur more easily, of course leading to HAIRBALLS). I sense a patent and a new product!

So the next time you see your cat groom yourself, or feel the “scratchy” sensation when your cat licks you, perhaps you’ll have a new respect for what it’s doing, and for the marvels of evolution that helped produce those hollow and recurved spines.

h/t: Gravelinspector

______

Noel, A. C. and D. L. Hu. 2018. Cats use hollow papillae to wick saliva into fur. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nov 2018, 201809544; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1809544115

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 28, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Dick Kleinknecht sent some bird photos, which are better than he makes out in the apologetic notes below. I’ll leave you to identify them.

I have sent photos before of interesting activities by wildlife, but these aren’t very exciting,  Their chief claim to fame is they were all taken from inside my house or on the back deck.  We live near the boundary between forest and civilization so there is quite a sampling of birds and furry critters to watch during the year.

They were taken from my home in King county, about 25 miles southeast of Seattle.  Near the forest/civilization boundary, which is in the foothills of the western slope of the Cascade Mountains.

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 28, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, November 28, 2018, with only three more days to go until we’re into December. And I have a new driver’s license!

It’s National French Toast Day, a treat I much love for breakfast but never get.  I have no idea why they call it “French toast”, since I’ve never seen it in France and I doubt it was invented there. And it’s Albanian Flag Day, celebrating that country’s independence from Turkey in 1912 as well as the raising of that flag in 1443, both of which occurred on November 28. I bet you don’t know what the Albanian flag looks like; if you don’t, go here.

On this day in 1443, quoting Wikipedia, “Skanderbeg and his forces liberate Kruja in central Albania and raise the Albanian flag.” On November 28, 1582, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway paid a £40 fee for their marriage license. That was EXPENSIVE in those days! Here’s the bishop’s register and an enlargement of the bond record (click to enlarge), but I’ll be damned if I can read anything or make out “Shakespeare” or “Hathaway”:

On this day in 1660, twelve men, including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, decided to found what has become England’s Royal Society.  And in 1893, women’s suffrage took effect in New Zealand in that country’s general election. I believe that the Kiwis were the first to give women their right to vote.  On this day in 1895, according to Wikipedia, “The first American automobile race takes place over the 54 miles from Chicago’s Jackson Park to Evanston, Illinois. Frank Duryea wins in approximately 10 hours.”  Ten hours to go 54 miles? An ultramarathon runner could beat that, I bet!  On this day in 1925, the Grand Ole Opry had its first broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee, billed as the “WSM Barn Dance.”

On November 28, 1967, the first pulsar, PSR B1919+21, was discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish; it had a period of 1.33 seconds.  Hewish and Martin Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize for radioastronomy (and this discovery) in 1974, but Bell was left out. It was Fred Hoyle who later found that pulsars were neutron stars (Bell and Hewish briefly entertained the idea that the regularity might mean the presence of extraterrestrial life), and he thought, as do many, that Bell should have also gotten the Prize.

On this day in 1972, Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems were guillotined at La Santé Prison, making them the last people executed in Paris. But not in France—the country’s last execution was that of Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977. That, too, used a guillotine. Finally, it was on this day in 1990 that Margaret Thatcher resigned as head of the Conservative Party and thus lost her job as Prime Minister. She was succeeded by John Major (who remembers him?)

Notables born on this day include William Blake (1757), Stefan Zweig (1881), Ernst Röhm (1887), Berry Gordy, Jr. (1929, he’s still with us at 89), Gary Hart (1936), and Randy Newman (1943).  Here’s Blake’s illustration (he did several) on the poem “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes“:

Those who died on November 28 include Washington Irving (1859), Richard Wright (1960), Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1962), Rosalind Russell (1976), and Jeffrey Dahmer and Jerry Rubin (both 1994; Dahmer was murdered in prison).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is anxious (she’s a Jewish cat):

Hili: I’m anxious about what can come.
A: And what can come?
Hili: How do I know?
In Polish:
Hili: Niepokoję się tym, co może przyjść.
Ja: A co może przyjść?
Hili: A skąd ja mam wiedzieć?

A tweet from Heather Hastie, who said this story made her tear up. And it is indeed a wonderful tale of a man, his stork, the stork’s inamorato, and their 59 grandchildren. Be sure to watch the whole thing, as it will give your day a good start.

Another tweet from Heather via Ann German. Seriously, though—somebody expected cats to work?

A tweet from reader Graham; I may have posted “Pavlov’s Cats” before:

https://twitter.com/bebekittenheels/status/1036294825853808641

Tweets from Grania. I’m not sure whether these are purebreds, and, if they are, what sort.

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1067338524406378497

And this one baffles me, since I don’t know the music video, much less the music, and can’t figure out what the relevance of this cat is:

This whole thread is funny. It starts with this tweet by J. K. Rowling (do you know the bird?), and continues on, with none other than Nick Cohen joining the conversation:

A wonderful visit, but mallards aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer (why couldn’t Mom fly over the fence?)

Tweets from Matthew. I’m not sure these goats are following the rules:

I don’t have to read this article (though I will) to know that the answer is “Hell, no!”

Another cat watching television: