KentPresents Report: Day 2

August 23, 2018 • 10:15 am

(The report for Day 1, last Thursday, is here.) I went to four discussions/talks on Friday, August 17, and then repaired back to my B&B, the Old Drovers Inn, to rest, work a bit, and have dinner there, as the food is highly reputed.

The full schedule for Day 2 is here; I neglected to take photos of the Social Media talk.

The morning kicked off with a Q&A session, “Universities and Free Expression” featuring Robert Zimmer, the President of the University of Chicago (and mathematician on the faculty), who was interviewed by John Donvan, newscaster and moderator for the Intelligence Squared Debates. Zimmer, pictured below, gave a good explanation of our free speech policy (see the University’s “Statement on Principles of Free Expression“), and his talk included this:

  • Any faculty member or student group who invites someone to speak will be accommodated by the University, which will also provide security
  • Students who disrupt or attempt to disrupt a talk will be removed and possibly disciplined
  • Students are free to protest outside the venue according to University regulations, and they’re welcome to organize a “counter-speech” session
  • The University discourages but does not prohibit the use of “trigger warnings”, as that is a slippery slope that prevents the free exchange of ideas so crucial to the university. However, reasonable accommodations can be made, such as indicating possibly triggering material on the syllabus
  • The University does not endorse “safe spaces” because they also inhibit the free discussion that Zimmer and his predecessors have considered essential to the functioning of a great university.

I agreed with everything Zimmer said save one minor point. When asked by Donvan if it was now mostly the Left that tries to shut down speech on campus, Zimmer said that censorship came from both Left and Right. Well, technically that’s correct, but if you look at FIRE’s “disinvitation database,” you’ll see that, over the last four years or so, the bulk of deplatformings, disinvitations, and disruptions of invited speakers in the last five years has come from the Left.

Beyond that, I was proud of what Zimmer said, which reflects the free speech principles of my own university.

Zimmer (left) and Donvan

A succeeding talk on “The Social Media Crisis” featured Rana Foroohar, editor and writer for the Financial Times and CNN’s global finance analyst, Roger McNamee, social media expert and investor, and Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University. As I didn’t take notes, I can remember just a bit, which included McNamee, who was a big investor in Facebook, indicting those big platforms for manipulation of advertising and adding, in effect, that one should stay off social media. Newport, who wrote a bestselling book, Deep Work, argued the thesis of the book, which was that you don’t need to be on social media to advance your profile or career (although it’s worked for some small businesses), and that you’re wasting your time and professional advancement by frantically perusing social media. I have to say that I’d like to go off the grid for a while and see what happens, but I must maintain this website. But even when I don’t, I spend too much time reading unenlightening stuff, and suspect that if I stopped doing so much Internet Inspection, I’d learn a lot more by reading books.

Sean Carroll spoke before lunch on “The Big Picture on Life, Meaning, and the Universe”, a broad topic to be sure. As you’ll know if you’ve heard him, Sean is an enthusiastic and clear speaker, and tried to compress the thesis of his latest book (he’s now writing another) into 35 minutes, which included questions. His talk was a distillation of the hourlong talk below given at LogiCal, which I heard live. One of his big points was that we fully understand the basic physics of everyday life, giving the equation presented in the talk below. He also said, and I hope the audience got it, that there’s no way that there can be a non-physical soul that can interact with a physical body. Sean, of course, is an atheist, but is less pushy and obnoxious about it than I am.

Judging by the applause, the audience really liked Sean’s talk. There does seem to be a dearth of real science at KentPresents compared to politics, technology, and sociology, and I think that in the future they might consider programming more scientists.

Sean in Kent:

Lunch: herbed chicken with three salads (garbanzo bean, watermelon and arugula, and spinach), raspberry iced tea, and a ripe peach (I’m eating healthier these days). I even eschewed dessert. There was a buffet every day, so you could eat as much as you wanted, but I exercised restraint.

Outside the lunchroom door was a bowl of beautiful ripe peaches. There are few fruits both more beautiful and more tasty than a tree-ripened peach:

One of my gustatory discoveries at the meeting was this wonderful carbonated Italian drink, which is made from the juice of blood oranges. I guzzled as much as I could, but others had also discovered it, so I had to be quick at the bowls of iced drinks.

After lunch was the Big Talk of the Day, with CBS news correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewing former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, now 95 years old and running a consulting firm. Many of you will know of Kissinger from having lived during the Nixon and Gerald Ford era or having read Christopher Hitchens’s book about him. Kissinger lives in Connecticut not far from Kent; at dinner the night before I was introduced to his wife Nancy.

Lesley was staying at my Inn, and when we rode back in the limo with her husband the night before, we discussed what she was going to ask Kissinger and how he might respond. It went pretty much according to her predictions. I did have a lot of trouble hearing Kissinger because he has a heavy German accent, his voice has gotten even deeper with age, and my own hearing has always been subpar. Lesley tried to get him to pronounce on current affairs like the Middle East and Russia, but Kissinger talked a lot about other eras, including his growing up in Nazi Germany and his relationship with Richard Nixon. (He did say that Nixon deeply wanted to change the world, but was hampered because his personality was such that he simply could not abide criticism.) As Stahl had predicted, Kissinger was loath to criticize Donald Trump, and in fact said exactly what she said he would: he would never criticize a President himself (though he did diss Nixon a bit), but only a President’s policies.

But about Trump’s policies he had little to say (I might have missed something, and at any rate the videos will be online at KentPresents after a while). When Lesley asked Kissinger if it was a mistake for Trump to have talked to Putin one on one without notes, in effect negotiating with Russia, Kissinger responded (after some pushing) that yes, it was a mistake. One-on-one meetings between leaders, he said, should be largely a venue for the exchange of pleasantries, and the spadework of negotiating should be done in advance not by the President, but by diplomats and professional negotiators. Finally, Kissinger said that he considered the Middle East the biggest international problem facing America, but he had no advice on what we should do about it, simply offering the bromide that we should try to be amiable with each other. But of course he was holding back his real opinions on the issue, which he probably gets paid to tender via his consulting firm.

Photos of the conversation:

At times I got the impression of Yoda

I skipped the other talks that day to repair to my B&B for rest, work, and dinner, missing the fancy dinner at the meeting that night. But I didn’t miss much, because dinner at The Old Drovers Inn was superb.

It started with a plate of crudités and a basket of warm homemade bread. (I had a stout instead of wine):

Then a fantastic “shrimp cocktail” which was more like a ceviche, with lightly cooked shrimp, avocados, tortilla strips, and a delectable sauce:

Then a salad with feta cheese.

And a wonderful plate of softshell crabs with greens and two huge French fries. I was too full for dessert.


At dinner I noticed a ghoulish figure in the wood of the wall next to me:

And a bit of solipsism: a selfie in a mirror at the Inn, blurry because it was so dark and the shutter speed was about 1/5 of a second:

Reader’s wildlife photos

August 23, 2018 • 7:45 am

Today have a grab-bag of singletons (and one doubleton) sent by readers. (If you’re reading this, nobody is looking at the science posts; see here.)

From Diana MacPherson.

Just took the picture of an Eastern garter snake (Eastern Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) that was hiding along the base of a tomato plant pot. Poor snake. I put my camera right in its face for the picture because I was using a 24mm prime lens not a zoom lens.
A turtle and a dragonfly via reader Lorraine:
This photo was taken by Doug Hayes on August 18, 2018 at Forest Hill Park in Richmond, Virginia.   Doug has included the info about the turtle below.

“This morning in the park.  It is a common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina).  Pretty good size – about two feet across.”

Another two photos by Doug Hayes via Lorraine (her words):

 Two photographs of a dragonfly that my friend Doug Hayes photographed this past weekend. The dragonfly is a Beaverpond Baskettail (Epitheca canis). The photo was taken in Aylett, Virginia. 

I may have posted this already, but it’s a box turtle by reader Bob Felton, and I don’t have the ID or other information:

And an aposematic insect from reader Frank Williams:

Eastern Lubber grasshopper [Romalea microptera], Vienna, Lousiana: about 3″!

Selfie with Honey

August 23, 2018 • 7:00 am

Every day I think, “This may be the last day I’ll ever see her. She may leave at any moment, life is hard for hen mallards in the wild, and I have no idea how old she is.” And so I took a selfie yesterday.

Some of her molted feathers that I can remember her by, including a prized half-blue feather from the speculum:

UPDATE: She’s still here, and had a big breakfast.

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 23, 2018 • 6:45 am

Time is marching on, drawing us ever closer to extinction. It’s Thursday, August 23, 2018, and National Spongecake Day. It also seems to be National Cuban Sandwich Day (is that cultural appropriation?), a comestible much better than spongecake.

News of the day from Paris: a man killed two (his mother and sister) and wounded one with a knife before being shot dead by police. ISIS is claiming credit but there’s no evidence for the connection.

And more insanity from Trump (h/t Grania):

On this day in AD 79, Mount Vesuvius began rumbling—on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. It erupted the next day, releasing, so says Wikipedia, over a hundred thousand times the energy of the combined atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  On August 23, 1305, William “Freeeeeedom!” Wallace was executed for treason, brutally drawn and quartered in London.  Something I didn’t know: on this day in 1784, the western part of North Carolina (now eastern Tennessee) declared itself an independent U.S. state called “Franklin.” It lasted four years after being rejected as a state by the Union. On August 23, 1927, the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts for murder and robbery; 200,000 came out for their funeral procession, and it’s still not clear which, if either, was guilty. On this day in 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad began; as Wikipedia notes, “it was the largest (nearly 2.2 million personnel) and bloodiest (1.8–2 million killed, wounded or captured) battle in the history of warfare.” The battle ended with a Russian victory and German withdrawal/surrender five months later.

On August 23, 1973, the Norrmalmstorg robbery, a botched bank heist, took place in Stockholm. The four hostages bonded with and became protective of the two robbers during a six-day siege, giving rise to the term “Stockholm syndrome“. After a tear gas attack, the robbers surrendered and were tried and convicted, though one conviction was later quashed. Both robbers are still alive. Here’s the arrest of Jan Erik Olsson, the robber who spent ten years in jail.

On this day in 1990, East and West Germany announced the reunification of Germany on October 3 of that year. Finally, on this day eleven years ago, the remains of Russia’s last royal family members (Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia and his sister Grand Duchess Anastasia) were discovered near Yekaterinburg, Russia, where the Tsar and his family were executed by Bolsheviks in 1918. The family’s remains now rest in the cathedral in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

Notables born on August 23 include biologist Georges Cuvier (1769), Arnold Toynbee (1852), Edgar Lee Masters (1868), Gene Kelly (1912), photographer Galen Rowell (1940, died in a plane crash in 2002), Keith Moon (1946, died 1978), and Kobe Bryant (1978). Those who died on this day include caliph Abu Bakr (634 AD), Rudolph Valentino (1926), Sacco and Vanzetti (1927; see above), and Oscar Hammerstein II (1960).

Here’s what is probably Rowell’s most famous photograph, a rainbow seeming to strike the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace in Lhasa, Tibet:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seeks enjoyment in her wanderings:

Hili: Survival is not everything.
A: What do you mean?
Hili: Entertainment is important as well.

Trumpiana:

Wildfires are plaguing the American northwest; Seattle is so polluted that residents are advised to not go outside:

Things are dire in the UK, and I’m not even mentioning the Brexit debacle:

I wonder what my reputation will be?

Even though this is a d*g, it’s an amazing video, for it’s watching itself on television and applauding! (See video.)

And a bear accidentally hitting itself in the balls:

Trump gets even more insane

August 22, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Have a look at these two tweets. I don’t need to comment.

and

Bari Weiss returns with a column on Asia Argento, Avital Ronell, #MeToo, and the Shoe on the Other Foot

August 22, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I don’t know how anyone can find this new New York Times column by Bari Weiss objectionable, but I know they’ll try. (Click on screenshot to read it.)

The column is about two women who have been accused of sexual abuse. The first, Asia Argento, is an actor who was revealed to have paid $380,000 to buy the silence of a 17 year old boy (below the age of consent) with whom she apparently had sex. The ironic thing is that Argento was one of the main accusers of Harvey Weinstein in the #MeToo scandal.  Argento was important in helping bring down Weinstein, and in calling attention to men’s use of power to leverage sexual mistreatment of women, but it turned out she herself had apparently committed sexual malfeasance.

Weiss’s column is balanced, pointing out that women, too, can be abusive, manipulative, and cruel. Yet at the same time she’s fully on the side of the movement that is going after men for sexual abuse, and noting that sometimes women who abuse get treated more lightly than men.

Sadly, Argento, like Rose McGowen, seems a bit unbalanced to me. I can’t get over the rumors that Argento’s infidelities contributed to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, but, more important, for her and McGowan, I feel they’ve used the #MeToo movement to draw attention to themselves. That doesn’t for a minute denigrate (for either me or Weiss) the salubrious outing of sexually harassing and mistreating males. All it does is put the shoe on the other foot, promoting the principle that no matter who abuses their power to get sex, they should be treated the same regardless of gender.

So, for example, Weiss notes this vis-à-vis McGowan:

But others in Hollywood offered sober calls for caution and context. These are particularly striking when they come from those who typically deliver public statements with muzzle velocity, like the #MeToo leader Rose McGowan:

Ms. McGowan, herself a victim of Mr. Weinstein, has a point. We ought to reserve judgment. We ought to take seriously the ruining of a person’s reputation and career until we have all the facts. We ought to consider the context of the accusation.

But the advice is a bit rich coming from a person who has insisted that anything less than immediately believing accusers is moral cowardice:

It is a bit confusing coming from someone who has advocated mercilessness toward alleged sexual harassers:

Given that Mr. Bennett [the boy paid off by Argento] seems to have been financially strapped when he made the accusation against Ms. Argento, there are reasons to wonder whether he had an ulterior motive. But this willingness to weigh the complicated context of such an allegation is one the movement has seldom applied when the accuser has been a woman. Perhaps that will change.

The larger question is whether the Argento story might undermine the #MeToo movement. Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer certainly hopes it will. So do various anti-feminists, right-wing bloggers and conspiracy theorists, who are already fashioning the Argento plot twist into Pizzagate 2.0.

Most people aren’t going to fall for this nonsense. They’re not going to stop taking sexual abuse seriously because of one high-profile hypocrite.

But I do think the stakes at this moment are high for the #MeToo movement. Outspoken feminists will lose credibility if they ignore this story or try to explain it away with clichés, however true, about how hurt people hurt people.

Indeed. But I’m heartened that feminists are not ignoring the Argento story. Nor are they ignoring the other subject of Weiss’s column, the suspension of Avital Ronell, a “feminist star professor” at NYU who was found guilty of sexually harassing her graduate student Nimrod Reitman. Ronell was let go for a year, but I suspect won’t be coming back to NYU. The irony here is the number of feminists (including the odious Judith Butler) who wrote a letter defending Ronell by touting her intellectual superstardom and asking for either lenient treatment or for complete exculpation. That would never fly with a male accused of the same things, and is a big fat case of hypocrisy. As Weiss says,

Believe survivors, right? Not so fast. In a letter signed by some of academia’s biggest feminist luminaries, including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Mr. Reitman is accused of waging a “malicious campaign” against the professor. The signatories “testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.” Apparently, dignity is a privilege reserved for the tenured.

“We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare,” they wrote.

The tone-deafness here is almost comical. A young up-and-comer blows the whistle on a powerful mentor who wielded control over his career. Entrenched interests rush to the defense of the accused, venerating the powerful and actively smearing the character and motivations of the accuser. It’s a repeat of the sexual harassment stories we’ve spent the past year reading about, only with the genders flipped.

This isn’t a good look. And it will become increasingly untenable as young men come forward with similar stories of harassment and abuse, as they surely will in this new stage of #MeToo. “Believe women” only works as a rule of thumb when all women are good. That myth falls flat outside Victorian England.

But Weiss isn’t evincing Schadenfreude here, merely calling for equal treatment for equal malfeasance. There’s no doubt that Weiss stands on the side of the victimized women, and I can’t imagine, as I said, anyone taking umbrage at her column. But Weiss is now among the Control-Left Untouchables, and I expect pushback. After all, she’s not entitled to criticize those still on the side of Moral Purity.

h/t; cesar

Male pipefish who get pregnant reduce investment in their offspring if they see a sexy female

August 22, 2018 • 11:45 am

This new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B caught my eye because of its title (abstract here but paper behind a paywall; judicious inquiry might yield you a pdf).  Check out the title and the abstract, and I’ll explain a bit of the results below (I read the paper quickly):

First, a bit of biology. Many species of pipefish and seahorses have a reproductive system in which males become pregnant. What happens is that females produce their eggs and stick them into the brood pouches of males, who fertilize them and then protect them, control the salinity, and even nourish the eggs using materials from the male’s body.  Since there is a shortage of available male brood pouches compared to the number of females who want their eggs fertilized, there’s competition between females for male pouches—the reverse of the usual competition by males for access to female eggs when females get pregnant or lay eggs. (Don’t believe Richard Prum’s new book about this, in which he implies that there really isn’t male competition by males for females, even in humans where the data on male profligacy vs. female choosiness are clear.)

Since sexual selection is reversed in these species, you find reverse ornamentation as well: it is the females who are ornate compared to the drabber males. And males in tests prefer both larger and more ornate females above smaller or less showy females. Here is the difference in seahorse anatomy and a male giving birth:

Look at all those babies!

In the new paper, authors M. Cunha et al did three sets of studies:

  1. They gave pregnant males of black-striped pipefish the sight (in a divided aquarium) of new females, some larger, some smaller, and some about the same size as females who had already “impregnanted” the males. In the first study, those males who got to see larger females produced smaller offspring. This may be because they’re reducing their investment in past pregnancies in hopes of remating to a “fitter” or more attractive female and producing more and better offspring.
  2. The authors measured the incidence of aborted embryos in pregnant male pipefish, and showed that the presence of very large females on the other side of the divider increased the percentage of aborted embryos in the male (they didn’t test females of different size, but used large females vs no females). This suggests that males can somehow reduce their investment when seeing another attractive female, though they didn’t use females of different size (attractiveness), which would have been a marked improvement of the design.
  3. They looked at wild pipefish males whose embryos were at different stages of development, and found that the heterogeneity of embryo size within a male decreased as pregnancy proceeded, and this was correlated with marked reduction in brood size. This was not due to random culling of embryos, but to culling of either the smallest or largest embryos (they couldn’t determine which were culled), which the authors see as a a form of selective abortion.

Overall, although the data aren’t terribly strong, this suggests a form of post-fertilization sexual selection, in which males decide to abort or reduce investment in embryos if they see a better mating opportunity. To quote from the paper:

Male pipefish, triggered to invest less in ongoing pregnancies by the sight of a very large, sexy female, hence produced smaller and more heterogeneous offspring, while also reducing brood size. As in pipefish resources derived from aborted embryos are captured by the father, instead of being directly distributed among developing embryos [14], males stricken by a sexier female not only save energy reserves for a presumably more auspicious future reproductive event, but they also potentially seize resources from a less rewarding brood.

As I lacked the time to read this paper as closely as usual, readers may find problems with the paper or errors in my summary.

_______

Cunha, M., A. Berglund, S. Mendes, and N. Monteiro. 2018. The ‘Woman in Red’ effect: pipefish males curb pregnancies at the sight of an attractive female. Proc. Roy. Soc. B. 285:20181335. Published online.