Sunday: Duck report (Honey leaves and returns)

September 23, 2018 • 2:45 pm

It’s been a regular duck roller-coaster around here. Two days ago Honey and James were disporting themselves in the pond, the loving couple shown below (lots of big koi also go for the noms):

James attentively guarding his mate:

A video of the loving couple trying to eat in the wind. Note James paddling backwards at 0:19—one of his skills. Honey finds some corn on the island.

Then when I came to the pond yesterday morning, Honey had disappeared! James looked stunned and then depressed, and didn’t eat very much. She was gone for a day and a half, and most of the time James sat disconsolately on the island, hunched up and sad. He didn’t eat very much, either. Sometimes he’d swim around the pond aimlessly. Photos from yesterday and this morning:

Where is she?

Then, some time between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. today, Honey returned! I was overjoyed, and, judging by the amount that James ate, so was he. Honey had a good feed, too. But where did she go? I’ll never know.

James stretches out his neck in joy:

Is being “woke” a way to gain status?

September 23, 2018 • 1:40 pm

This new piece at the increasingly important site Quillette by two academics with the same name (brother? father and son?), is well worth reading. It’s amusing even if not 100% accurate, but it’s accurate enough to strike home, and to make you rethink what Authoritarian Leftism is all about:

The Winegards’ thesis is not entirely new. The Regressive Left, they say, is in effect a religion with a sacred narrative (victimized groups), a moral doctrine (i.e., the power hierarchy in America needs to be reversed) and a priestly caste, which, they say, comprises white intellectuals who promulgate Purity Doctrine as a way of separating themselves from the “hoi polloi” and gaining status. Since status is a zero-sum game—the more others get, the less you have—the “woke” priests spend their time signaling their purity, denigrating others who make missteps, and never engaging in actually effecting change.

We all know people who do this, but it’s interesting to see “Wokeness” characterized this way. And I think it’s largely, though not entirely, true. Here are a few quotes:

It is trivially easy (not costly) to assert that one is educated or sophisticated or committed to a doctrine; therefore, very few people pay attention to such pronouncements (except as they might indicate narcissism). On the other hand, it is not easy (is costly) to speak a jargon that is taught only in universities and that requires many hours of dedication to master. Therefore, people pay attention and often defer to those who command a rich, complicated jargon.

. . . Using arcane language and adhering to constantly changing norms about acceptable epithets are not particularly effective for attracting people from the broader population to one’s cause. In fact, they almost certainly alienate many average, and otherwise sympathetic, Americans, who understandably disdain indecipherable prose and elite superciliousness. Therefore, this signaling function of the Woke faith is actually antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness (i.e., creating a more just social world—which requires a broad coalition of different classes of people).

Well, yes, this is Wokeness as evinced by the slaves of postmodernism. But not all of the Woke adhere to postmodernism, and we all know of cases of postmodern haters who still flaunt their virtue without using complicated jargon—though there is always some jargon, like “intersectionality” and “hate speech”.

Here are some words on the demonization of others. This rings really true, especially the second paragraph, which highlights the Serena Williams affair that I could never see as a sign of sexism on the part of the umpire:

The Woke faithful almost certainly do believe that the world is unjust, even wicked, and they almost certainly do sincerely want to ameliorate the suffering of its victims. However, they also want to signal their membership to an elite and morally righteous club, and therefore they need an out-group, a foil, a morally wicked other for contrast. And, they can’t let just any kind-hearted person into their club, because then it would lose its exclusivity. So they must develop a strenuous vetting system, one that is vigilant and suspicious and quick to detect sin.

Furthermore, accusing others of violating the faith of the Woke can serve as a signal of one’s commitment to righteousness; and, perhaps perversely, the more ridiculous the accusation, the better the signal. How, after all, can somebody who accuses the entire tennis world of racism and sexism, be racist or sexist? This can lead to a kind of concept creep, in which those vying for status among the Woke compete to call out vanishingly trivial offenses and imagined slights as intolerable manifestations of racism, sexism, and patriarchal oppression. Meanwhile, many otherwise sane people, with no interest in the excesses of The Great Awokening, nevertheless feel compelled to agree with such fantastical claims for fear that otherwise they too will be accused of bigotry.

On the laziness of the Woke:

Of course, the signaling perspective also explains why so many disciples of Wokeness expend effort writing inscrutable articles about the patriarchy or denouncing sinners on Twitter rather than going out into the world to help the victims’ groups they claim to admire: their primary motivation, whatever their conscious beliefs, is to procure status. There are, of course, many courageous and devoted people who do work quietly to make the world better for minority groups; and those people deserve our admiration. But, many of the most conspicuous activists spend more time promising punishment to heretics on Twitter than they do helping their local communities. These Twitter displays are often called virtue signals, but they are probably better understood as commitment signals, because they don’t really signal a person’s underlying moral character, but they do signal his or her allegiance to the faith of Wokeness.

The other disagreement I have with this piece is the claim that the religion of “Wokeness” functions “predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses.”  Well, no. In fact many of the Woke are members of minorities higher in the oppression hierarchy. You don’t have to be white to be Woke, or to shame other people for not being sufficiently Woke. Remember the Asians, for instance, who chided the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for having Kimono Wednesdays, or the black people who argue that white writers shouldn’t write about the black experience (see a particularly bizarre accusation of inappropriate blackness here).  But beyond that, the Winegards have it pretty much right.

RadioLab distorts some science

September 23, 2018 • 12:00 pm

There’s been a lot of publicity about David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, which tells the story of the discovery of a new domain of life, the Archaea, the discovery that chloroplasts and mitochondria are the remnants of anciently absorbed microbes, and, most novel, the recent discovery of horizontal gene transfer (HGT): the transfer of DNA and genes between relatively unrelated organisms. Most of the publicity about the book—to be sure, publicity pushed by Quammen himself—centers on HGT. It is, we’re told, something that radically overturns Darwin’s view of the “tree of life” and of evolution, and even revises our own view of “what it means to be human” (after all, we’re also told, a substantial part of our genome is dead, nonactive DNA from ancient retroviral infections).

A month ago today I reviewed the book in the Washington Post (see my postmortem post here), and was pretty critical of the way Quammen handled HGT. While the phenomenon is fairly common in bacteria, it’s less common in eukaryotes, and hasn’t dramatically altered our view of evolution in either case, much less having changed our view of ourselves. Even horizontally transferred genes must be subject to natural selection if they’re to spread as adaptations, and they certainly haven’t messed up evolutionary trees in eukaryotes, for people are still busy reconstructing the history of life using such trees. (Indeed, the delineation of Archaea as a separate domain of life depends on their being a discernible evolutionary tree.)

Nevertheless, Quammen still promulgates his spiel widely, most recently in a National Geographic interview and, more invidiously, in the RadioLab interview below (click on screenshot). After all, the man has books to sell. But I wish he’d tone down his rhetoric.

Both Quammen and the show’s hosts (Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad) seem to promulgate the misconceptions about HGT, and I hope RadioLab isn’t becoming more uncritical. I can’t enact the emotional labor to dissect every error in this 30-minute show, but here are a few bizarre things to which I took exception:

1.) Krulwich says that Quammen’s book shows that HGT and perhaps endosymbiosis (origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts) are “a smack in the face to Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Well, not really. They are revisions of how genetic variation comes to enter a species’ genome, but, as I said in my review, HGT doesn’t really efface Darwin’s “tree of life.” And it hasn’t affected our view of adaptation via the disposition of random genetic variation by natural selection.

2.) In the classic story of the peppered moth Biston betularia, the show tends to cast the spread of the “melanistic” mutation in the moth during industrialization as a refutation of “incremental mutation”. But it’s wrong to say that the old idea was that the color difference was due to several mutations, or happened gradually,. We have long known that the change in color from peppered white to dark was the result of mutation in a single gene, and that the English population became transformed quickly: within a few decades. Further, when pollution controls were passed, the moth quickly reverted to its ancestral peppered form.

The change was not, as Krulwich says, instantaneous. And just because the gene change was due to a “transposable element”” that moved within the moth genome (i.e., not HGT) rather than a change in one nucleotide does not affect the Darwinian nature of the change one bit. It just shows that the “mutation” was a big one involving translocation of a big chunk of DNA into the moth’s cortex gene. No revision of Darwinism needed, especially because Darwin didn’t even know about genetics, so you could equally well shout that genetics itself was a “smack in the face to Darwin’ s theory of evolution”. The whole characterization of the “original” Biston story as “incremental mutation and very slow evolutionary change” is a straw man”—not even wrong.

I wrote to my old undergraduate advisor, Bruce Grant, who worked extensively on Biston. He listened to the RadioLab show and had this to say:

The “review” of the classic peppered moth story is garbled and grossly misrepresents it. No one has ever argued for incremental mutations. There are multiple alleles that produce a range of intermediates collectively called insularia, with the darkest, fully melanic phenotype called carbonaria. It acts as a qualitative autosomal dominant, fully melanic from the get-go wherever it occurs (besides the UK, in North America and Japan). Its frequency increased via directional selection, and its frequency has also decreased by directional selection. Further, these changes have been parallel in both directions on separate continents (US and UK), in concert with documented changes in air quality assessed by suspended particulates ( soot).

The DECLINE in melanism has been much better documented than its increase. There are mountains of data. Those taken by Cyril Clarke include nearly 20,000 specimens collected at one location near Liverpool from 1959 to 2001+. Insularia (intermediates) have always been rare there. Effectively only two phenotypes have been involved: fully melanic carbonaria and the “typical” peppered form. The reduction in the frequency has been gradual, did NOT involve intermediates and fell from well over 90 % to under 5 % in 40 generations. Now carbonaria has all but disappeared there. I witnessed this decline personally from 60 % onwards. It’s real and intermediates (insularia) were always rare there.
Parallel changes have occurred independently in Michigan. All this has been published and is supported by hard data. The RadioLab people do NOT know what they’re talking about.

What Quammen is probably confused by is Ilik Saccheri’s evidence that transposons may be responsible for the original mutation. But there are still some reservations about that I spelled out during my talk at CoyneFest. I do think that Ilik oversells his work, and shortchanges others in the process, but surely he’d still object to Quammen and the hosts’ interpretation of Industrial Melanism.

3.) The suggested idea that the first billion years of life involved pervasive HGT, and that individuals and species weren’t easily delineated, is just that—speculation. Species and well delineated individuals could have arisen quite early, for all we know.

4.) Krulwich’s claim that HGT shows that evolution “can happen a lot faster than we thought” isn’t really true. A horizontally transferred gene is just a big mutation, and in many cases will sweep through the population just as rapidly or as slowly as a mutational change in the organism’s own DNA. What’s important is how strong natural selection is. And we already knew that evolution by conventional mutational changes in genes can happen quite quickly, even without HGT. (Biston is an example of that, as is the 10% change in beak size in one year in the medium ground finch revealed by the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant and their group.)

5.) Once again we hear the claim that the human microbiome and the presence of viral DNA in our genome means that we have to revise the notion of who we are, and “what it means to be human”. But that’s bogus, too—just a sensationalistic way to sell books. The fact is that I don’t wake up every morning and think, “Geez, my gut is full of E. coli and my DNA full of retroviruses. I have to rethink what it means to be Jerry Coyne!”

6.) There is a clear implication that Carl Woese contributed to work on HGT. This is not the case: his work highlighted in Quammen’s book was in discovering the domain of life comprising the species within the new group Archaea.

7.) Finally, it is overblown to think that HGT and endosymbiosis means that the categories of ‘individual organism’ and ‘species’ become blurry. Is Homo sapiens a real group or an arbitrary construct? The former, for sure. And I am Jerry Coyne, not a mixture of Jerry Coyne and Donald Trump (thank god!).

So listener beware when you hear this discussion on NPR. I wish Krulwich & Co. would have been a bit more critical rather than credulous consumers of Quammen’s sensationalism.

Errors in forensic DNA testing are still pervasive: false matches and wonky statistics

September 23, 2018 • 9:30 am

About twenty years ago I spent a good deal of my time testifying for the defense in criminal cases involving DNA evidence. These were trials in which the prosecution claimed that the defendant’s DNA profile had been found to match crime-scene samples (these involve blood or sperm analysis), and in which the prosecution presented “match probabilities: the supposed chance that a randomly-selected and innocent person would have had DNA that also matched the evidence. (If these probabilities are very low, say one in several million, juries tend to conclude that the suspect is guilty.)

While I favored the responsible use of DNA testing, the prosecution at that time was not being responsible, ergo my involvement. What I testified about, as an unpaid expert witness (I decided that saying I was paid for a case—and the prosecution always asks when you’re on the stand—might make the jury think that I was making money as a “professional witness”) were two issues: match probabilities and lab error rates. Here’s a brief synopsis:

Match probabilities. If the suspect’s own DNA matches that from the crime scene, you can then calculate the chance that a randomly-selected person would match the sample as well. This corresponds to the chance that an innocent person would have been implicated by the DNA evidence. Absent lab errors (see below), these calculations involve population genetics, which was my area of expertise. If, for example, the suspect matches the crime-scene sample at three tested genes, how do you calculate the probability of a random match?

That depends on who you consider to be a “random and innocent” person. Is it the population of Hispanics in America if the suspect is a Hispanic? Probably not, because we don’t know the ethnicity of the perpetrator. It’s thus best to use a series of databases and take the most conservative (highest) probability. Moreover, you can’t just multiply the probabilities for each gene together if gene forms are associated with each other in different groups, as they tend to be.  One of my beefs was that the prosecution would use a database corresponding to the ethnicity of the defendant, and then just multiply the probabilities for each tested gene together; or they would use a variety of databases and select the lowest probability. Neither of these is kosher given the way human populations are genetically structured.

Nowadays, when we can do almost full DNA sequences rather than just matches at a few sites in three genes or so, this problem has been ameliorated. If a match is not perfect, then the suspect is exculpated. But one big problem remains, and it is one about which I testified at length:

Lab error rates.  Labs aren’t perfect, and sometimes two samples whose DNA doesn’t match can be found to match if tubes get mixed up or if there is contamination. (Since genes are amplified thousands of times before sequencing, a small bit of contamination can be magnified.)

This happens more often than you think. When I was testifying (I stopped doing that after the Simpson trial), blind testing of labs gave an error rate of around 2%. That is, about one time in fifty, two non-matching samples sent to a lab to test its prowess would be seen to match based on lab error.

With error rates like this, match probabilities from popuation genetics become virtually useless. That’s because the chance of a random match becomes about equal to the lab error rate. If the rate of an innocent subject matching a crime sample includes both the random match probability based on the frequency of DNA profiles PLUS the chance that a match would occur from lab error, then the largest probability—lab error—dominates. If the former probability is, for example, one in a million (0.000001) and the latter one in fifty (0.02), then the total “random match” probability is the sum of these, or 0.020001. That’s about 2%.  The default match probability is thus not one in a billion or one in a million, even if many genes are used, but simply the probability that a random person will match the crime sample because of lab error. The probability of lab error is invariably higher than the population-genetic probability.

This is all common sense, but prosecutors hated my testimony, because it made their evidence look a lot less incriminating than it was. So they tried to get around it, saying that the population-genetics calculation and the error rate calculations were “apples and oranges” and couldn’t be combined. (As I discovered from my courtroom experience, the prosecution is often less interested in presenting an honest case than in securing a conviction.) They also used irrelevant arguments that might appeal to non-scientists, often saying that my testimony was unreliable because it involved humans but my research was on fruit flies. (Both species, of course, have genes!)

One way I suggested to ameliorate the lab error rate was to label the samples blindly and to have the DNA tested in at least two or three labs independently. If all of them matched, the chances of error causing this would be reduced. (For three labs it would have been 0.02 X 0.02 X 0.02, or 8 in a million—comparable to some population-genetic calculations). But at that time the prosecution didn’t do this, and I don’t know if they do it now.

These considerations may seem simple to you, but juries are composed of a sample of voters, most of whom don’t even know what DNA is. To try to educate them about error rates, population genetics, and probabilities was a daunting task, and I often spent several days on the stand. Even then the jury was often baffled, as I suspect it was in the Simpson case.

While the population-genetic calculations have been improved by more extensive DNA analysis, the problem of lab errors remains, as shown in this new article from the New York Times (click on screenshot to read it). It’s by Greg Hampikan, a professor of biology at Boise State University, one of whose concerns is forensic DNA (he has a joint appointment in Criminal Justice).

Outside testing of forensic DNA labs have shown that there’s still a very large probability of lab error, and that error comes from two sources. (The article cites “an alarming new study of crime laboratories published this summer”, but I can’t find it and it isn’t cited.) I quote:

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology gave the same DNA mixture to about 105 American crime laboratories and three Canadian labs and asked them to compare it with DNA from three suspects from a mock bank robbery.

The first two suspects’ DNA was part of the mixture, and most labs correctly matched their DNA to the evidence. However, 74 labs wrongly said the sample included DNA evidence from the third suspect, an “innocent person” who should have been cleared of the hypothetical felony.

The test results are troubling, especially since errors also occur in actual casework.

In other words, an innocent person was deemed a match over 70% of the time due to lab error. This involves two types of mistakes: switching of tubes and the new possibility that the sensitivity of DNA tests allows the DNA of completely innocent people to be present in low concentration in crime-scene samples, but concentrations high enough to be detectable and thus judged “culpable”.

Tube swaps are easy to understand. But some laboratory errors are far more difficult to detect. For example, it’s hard to interpret DNA mixtures from three or more people. As DNA testing has become more sensitive, most laboratories are now able to produce profiles from anyone who may have lightly touched an object. The result is that DNA mixtures have become more common, making up about 15 percent of all evidence samples.

Moreover, there’s still the problem of different labs calculating different match probabilities, probably because they use different population-genetic calculations (my emphasis):

One shocking result from the new N.I.S.T. study is that labs analyzing the same evidence calculated vastly different statistics. Among the 108 crime labs in the study, the match statistics varied over 100 trillion-fold. That’s like the difference between soda change and the United States’ gross domestic product. These statistics are important because they are used by juries to consider whether a DNA match is just coincidence.

One would think that the data in the new paper (and again, I can’t find it) would make the prosecution think twice about how it presents data. But even the authors of that paper larded it with disclaimers, and the journal took four years to get the paper out, meaning that its results didn’t affect criminal cases over that period. Here’s Hampikan’s angry but justifiable complaint:

While this lapse in publication is troubling, more disturbing is that the authors try to mute the impact of their own excellent work. Neither the paper’s title nor the abstract mention the shocking findings. And the paper contains an amazing number of disclaimers.

In fact, the conclusion begins with a stark disclaimer apparently intended to block courtroom use:

The results described in this article provide only a brief snapshot of DNA mixture interpretation as practiced by participating laboratories in 2005 and 2013. Any overall performance assessment is limited to participating laboratories addressing specific questions with provided data based on their knowledge at the time. Given the adversarial nature of the legal system, and the possibility that some might attempt to misuse this article in legal arguments, we wish to emphasize that variation observed in DNA mixture interpretation cannot support any broad claims about “poor performance” across all laboratories involving all DNA mixtures examined in the past.

People serving time behind bars based on shoddy DNA methods may disagree. It is uncomfortable to read the study’s authors praising labs for their careful work when they get things right, but offering sophomoric excuses for them when they get things wrong. Scientists in crime labs need clear feedback to change entrenched, error-prone methods, and they should be strongly encouraged to re-examine old cases where such methods were used.

That disclaimer is absolutely unconscionable. ANY participating lab must be blind tested, and the results of that testing presented in the courtroom. There is no other way to ensure a fair presentation of evidence.

I’ve been out of this game for some time, so I wasn’t aware of this and had assumed that the lab error issue had been corrected. It hasn’t.

And those errors are important. When DNA testing exculpates a subject, it’s likely not due to lab error (though it could be). But when the testing implicates a suspect, one must be very scrupulous to ensure that the match isn’t an error and, if it isn’t, that the match statistics be presented fairly. I agree with the old dictum that it’s better (and, for DNA evidence, also less likely!) to let a hundred guilty people walk free than to jail one innocent person.

Hampikan suggests some fixes for correcting errors, but they aren’t perfect. Blind testing of samples and use of multiple labs remains two essential ways to ensure that the innocent don’t get jailed.

Readers’ wildlife photographs (and videos)

September 23, 2018 • 7:30 am

There’s a small road just north of Moss Landing, California that runs beside a small estuary that’s terrifically rich in wildlife: birds, otters, sea lions, and so on. It’s been called “The Serengeti of the Pacific”, and we spent quite a bit of time there. Here are some photographs of what you can see.

A long-billed curlew (Numenius americanus), which makes its living by probing sand and mud for crabs and other invertebrates.

Fluffing its feathers:

A long-billed curlew foraging on the beach:

Three sanderlings (Calidris alba). As ecologist Bruce Lyon wrote me, “These are arctic (tundra) breeders and they have an interesting mating system if I recall correctly. The breed as pairs but the female lays two clutches, one that she incubates and one that her mate incubates.”

Here’s a sanderling foraging on the beach. It’s hard to take photos and videos of these birds because they skitter around so rapidly:

Curlews, brown pelicans and willets (Tringa semipalmata), the ones with straight beaks):

A common murre (Uria aalge):

 

A brown pelican (Pelicanus occidentalis)flying through the fog, its wings barely grazing the ocean:

Kelp and seaweed:

One of the most appealing of sea mammals is the sea otter(Enhydra lutris). These gorgeous furballs were nearly driven to extinction by the fur trade, as their lovely coats can have up to a million hairs per square inch. At the beginning of the last century, it’s estimated that only 1,000-2,000 animals remained, but hunting became forbiddien and recovery efforts have brought the species back, though it’s still listed as endangered.

They’re voracious eaters, consuming between 25% and 38% of their body weight in food each day. (A large male can weigh 45 kg, or nearly 100 pounds.) They eat clams, abalones, crustaceans, urchins, and other seafood, procuring them on short dives to the bottom in shallow water (they usually stay underwater for less than a minute). Seeing them pounding open a clam using a stone on their chests (yes, a tool!), or watching a mother cradle her adorable baby on her stomach, rank as some of the great sights in nature.

Sea otters often congregate in “rafts” of up to several thousand individuals. Here’s one raft we saw near Moss Landing:

And a video of the raft:

Finally, a “watch for otters” sign in Moss Landing; they do occasionally get hit by cars, though they don’t often come on land:

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 23, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Sunday, September 23, the first full day of fall in the Northern Hemisphere (the season began in Chicago at 7 p.m. last night). Google celebrates the advent of autumn with an alluring animation:

It’s also National Pancake Day, and it’s a good Sunday to make some.

The duck story continues. Yesterday Honey was gone all day, leaving a disconsolate James to sit on his island and swim around aimlessly, looking for his mate. As of yesterday afternoon she hadn’t returned, and James wasn’t eating as well as usual. This is very sad, and I hope my hen returns today. I will be quite upset if James has been jilted. We’ll know in a few hours when it gets light and it’s feeding time.

On this day in 1641, the ship Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure of over 100,000 pounds of gold (worth over £1 billion today), as well as 400 bars of Mexican silver and nearly 500,000 pieces of eight and other coins, was lost at sea off Land’s End. It has never been recovered, though people have tried. On September 23, 1642, Harvard College held its first commencement exercises in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1806, Lewis and Clark finally returned to St. Louis after having traveled to the Pacific Northwest for 28 months.  On this day in 1846, the astronomers Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, John Couch Adams and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborated on the discovery of Neptune. And on September 23, 1909, the novel The Phantom of the Opera (original title: Le Fantôme de l’Opéra), by French writer Gaston Leroux, is was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois. Four years later, Roland Garros, a French pilot, flew from St. Raphael in France to Bizerte in Tunisia, making him the first person to fly an airplane across the Mediterranean Sea. Here he is after his successful flight. (Garros was shot down and killed in 1918.)

On September 23, 1980, Bob Marley played his last concert in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suffering from melanoma (he had collapsed two days earlier). He died on May 11 of the next year. On this day in 1986, pitcher JIm Deshaies of the Houston Astros set what is still a major league record, striking out the first eight batters he faced in a game against the L. A. Dodgers. The feat was equaled by Jacob deGrom of the New York Mets in 1914. Finally, it was on this day in 2002 that the first version of the browser Mozilla Firefox was released.

Notables born on this day include Walter Lippmann (1889), Louise Nevelson (1899), Mickey Rooney (1920; do you know how many times he was married?), Ray Charles (1930), George Jackson (1941), Bruce Springsteen (1949, about my age) and Sean Spicer (1971). Those who passed away on this day include Snorri Sturluson (1241), Sigmund “I made it all up” Freud (1939), Pablo Neruda (1973), Bob Fosse (1987), and Irven DeVore (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is taking up space in the hall:

A: Hili: Move aside, it’s impossible to go through.
Hili: You don’t have to go here when I’m lying here.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, zejdź z drogi, bo nie można przejść.
Hili: Nie musisz tędy przechodzić, kiedy ja tu leżę.

The other day I rode back on the train from downtown and sat in a car with a group of young, well-dressed adults, obviously going to a convention at McCormick Place. Virtually all of them were staring at their phones, even when they were sitting with a friend. From my seat I could see seven people, and all seven were gazing fixedly at the screens of their smartphones. That’s when I thought about this:

One can dream. . .

Here are some tweets from Grania. Look at this baby melanistic leopard (or is it a jaguar?):

https://twitter.com/animalsofworlds/status/1042598247381041152

Whack-a-kat:

Tom Nichols suggests how to further investigate Brett Kavanaugh:

Word from Pinker! (Grania says, “Bless this man,” and I agree!)

Grania says that First Amendment lawyer Randazza rarely criticizes Trump. He’s made an exception!

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is true and I used to call the library it from time to time when I was a kid. The NYPL has saved all the inquiries, and here are some. Have a look at the third question:

Cat does not seem pleased with mini-me:

What is the merlin doing? Trying to catch the skylark, or harrying the harrier?

Here’s a possible meme for a “just do it” Nike ad:

This is an amazing video: a meteor makes a smoke ring, presumably passing through clouds:

A flipped blue iceberg

September 22, 2018 • 2:30 pm

After years of following leads and contacting travel/expedition companies, it looks as if I’ll be lecturing next year on some cruises to Antarctica and the Falkland Islands, which has always been a great dream of mine. It will be great fun lecturing on cruises again (I’ve done it four times), as the audiences are always much more receptive and interested than are the students in a regular college course. And I can’t wait to see the scenery and, especially, the wildlife. And maybe a blue iceberg!

Until I read this article from MyModernMet, and followed the links, I had no idea that icebergs could actually be blue. (They can also be green.) After all, they’re made of water, and water is clear and ice cubes are clear. But this doesn’t appear to be the case with ‘bergs. As the “Met” link reports:

While on an expedition in Antarctica, interface designer and filmmaker Alex Cornell was treated to the rare sight of a massive iceberg that had recently flipped over, revealing an extraordinarily vivid blue underside. With the strikingly polished ice ranging in hue from light aqua to dark teal to near-black, this breathtaking specimen looks “more like a galactic artifact than anything terrestrial,” according to Cornell in a discussion with Fstoppers.

Icebergs are normally white because of the air bubbles trapped inside, Jan Lieser, a marine glaciologist at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Co-operative Research Center in Tasmania, tells the Sydney Morning Herald. The deep blue color of this iceberg indicates virtually no air inclusion, most likely as a result of pressure from accumulating snow squeezing out all the air.

What we see of an iceberg is only about 10 percent of its entirety, with the majority of the mass hidden beneath the surface of the water. Dr. Lieser explains, “While the iceberg is in the water it actually melts, so that balance becomes imbalanced and, at some stage, which nobody can really predict, these icebergs flip and turn.” Those flips, which are extraordinary to witness, are even powerful enough to sometimes create tsunami-like conditions.

Some photos from Alex Cornell’s website:

 

Cornell’s video of the flipped iceberg, explaining how he made the photos. Yes, he manipulated them, but he didn’t make them appear blue, as you can see in the video itself. Rather, he tried to reproduce what he actually saw with his eyes.

And a rare video of a different iceberg flipping over:

Finally, a bit more from the Sydney Morning Herald (link above):

“I’ve seen beautiful examples of green [flipped] icebergs, which we refer to as jade icebergs, but they have a completely different evolution.”

The underside of icebergs can vary in colour from blue to green and jade.

“This iceberg will remain this colour for the rest of its life. How long that will be, I don’t know, but this ice will be as blue as it is until it’s melted in the ocean – unless it turns again,” Dr Lieser said.

I want to see a green one, too!