Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 7, 2018 • 7:00 am

It’s Thursday, June 7, 2018, and the campus is getting ready for graduation (“convocation“) on Saturday. By Sunday the campus will be empty, and I’ll have more quality and uninterrupted Duck Time. It’s National Chocolate Ice Cream Day, and the birthday of Prince Joachim of Denmark.

As for Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), he’s still a bit under the weather with this cold/allergy or whatever it is. Posting may be lighter till I recover. But the ducks must be fed (there are still eight), even though I myself am fasting today.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Dr. Virginia Apgar, born on this day in 1909 (died 1974). If you go to the Google site (click on the screenshot), you get an animation showing the five criteria described by C|Net below—criteria that apparently saved the lives of millions of infants:

While the infant mortality rate in the US had declined, the rate of infant deaths within the first 24 hours after birth remained constant. As an obstetric anesthesiologist, Apgar was able to identify physical characteristics that could distinguish healthy newborns from those in trouble.

Apgar’s observations led to the development in 1952 of the Apgar score, a quick and convenient method for immediately evaluating how well the newborn weathered the birthing process, especially the effects of obstetric anesthesia.

To honor Apgar’s contribution to neonatology — the medical care of newborn infants — Google dedicated its Doodle Thursday to the doctor on her 109th birthday.

Generally conducted one and five minutes after birth, the test assigns a score of zero to two for each of five criteria: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration (APGAR). Scores of seven and higher are generally normal, four to six fairly low, and three and lower are generally regarded as critically low. The test helps medical personnel determine whether a newborn needs immediate medical care.

The test spread through US hospitals in the 1960s, proving a useful measurement for quickly assessing a newborn’s physical condition. The technique is still used in hospitals throughout the US.

On June 7, 1099 the First Crusade reached its goal, beginning the Siege of Jerusalem, which ended successfully on July 15, with the slaughter of thousands of Muslims and Jews (they were fighting side by side). On this day in 1654, Louis XIV was crowned the King of France. On June 7, 1892, a setback for integration in the U.S.: Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to leave the “whites only” section of a train, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Plessy lost the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregated facilities under the mandate “separate but equal.” Of course, they were never equal. It took seventy years to make the right decision.  On this day in 1899, the Temperance fanatic Carrie Nation started her movement of wrecking establishments that served alcohol; in this case she ruined the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.  In France in 1944, the invasion of the Allies continued, and, at Ardenne Abbey, members of a Hitlerjugend SS division, crazed with hatred, shot 23 Canadian prisoners of war.  On June 7, 1946, BBC One returned to the air after a 7-year hiatus due to World War II. I was surprised to read this, for wouldn’t that station have been important in keeping up regular routines and morale during the war? On this day in 1965, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme court forbade states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples. Finally, on June 7, 1982, Priscilla Presley opened Graceland to the public, excepting the bathroom where Elvis Presley died in 1977. I’ve never been; have any readers?

Notables born on June 7 include Beau Brummell (1778), Alois Hitler (1837, Adolf’s dad), Paul Gauguin (1848), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868), Gwendolyn Brooks and Dean Martin (both 1917), Tom Jones (1940), Liam Neeson (1952), Prince (1958), Mike Pence (1959), and Iggy Azalea (1990). And another birthday from yesterday found by Grania:

Those who died on this day include Jean Harlow (1937; she was only 26), Judy Holliday (1965), Dorothy Parker (1967), E. M. Forster (1970), and Henry Miller (1980).

Meanwhille in Dobrzyn, Hili wants IN.  Note the beautiful roses around the staff’s house.

Hili: There is nobody in this room.
A: So why are you looking around so carefully?
Hili: Because I might be mistaken.
In Polish:
Hili: Nikogo nie ma w tym pokoju.
Ja: To czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Bo mogę być w błędzie.

Matthew’s cat Pepper is upset as he cannot have breakfast. He’s probably ok; he’s getting blood tests since he lost a slight amount of weight since last year.

From Grania, a surprise boat inspection. Don’t miss this video! (And can you identify the penguin?)

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1003605881475432448

A Millennial starling makes cool noises:

No comment needed:

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1003941381247815681

A tweet from Maajid Nawaz showing the dire actions of the British Labour Party, which is riven with anti-Semitism (click to enlarge the article):

No comment needed here, either:

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1003967197738348544

A cat among ducklings; what a blessed moggie!

Word!

https://twitter.com/eazyonme/status/1001709047337439232

From Matthew, a beautiful blue bee collected by Henry Bates, who gave his name to the term “Batesian mimicry“:

Matthew and I both agree that cheese on apple pie is WRONG. Vanilla ice cream is far, far better.

The marvels of sexual selection. Look at those males fight to spread their genes!

Wednesday: Duck report

June 6, 2018 • 1:30 pm

These photos were actually taken yesterday, but I’ve fed everyone this morning, and will do it again (with Anna’s help) this afternoon. As you can see below, and it’s still true, all eight ducklings are still around and in good shape.

Frank and Henry are around, too, and Frank’s been a pretty good duck (Henry gets chased out of the pond by Honey, but I make sure he gets some corn). I’ve discovered that if I don’t whistle for the ducks, and if I creep up on the pond silently when Sir Francis isn’t around, I can feed the family until he finally cottons on to the fact that I’m there with food.  Sometimes I can distract him by feeding him corn on the lawn or the lily pads, enabling the family to get down a good amount of food. I have ordered a Super Soaker water cannon if I need to drive him away. He chases the ducklings all the time, though he doesn’t hurt them.

Here he is, eating corn from the lily pads:

Sadly, the video feature of my point-and-shoot camera seems to have crapped out. I wanted to take a movie yesterday, as bathtime was a real trip, with all the ducklings cavorting, splashing, and grooming in their tub. One might even think they were having fun!

Grooming:

Quacking:

A proud mom:

And, of course, the cuties:

“When a man is tired of ducklings, he’s tired of life.” —Dr. Johnson

Title IX regulations for sexual misconduct and the huge mess they’ve created in American universities

June 6, 2018 • 11:30 am

In September of last year, I wrote a piece about the Obama-era changes in the Title IX laws. Rather than re-describe the situation, I’ll quote from that post:

In 2011, the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) of the U.S. Department of Education sent its famous “Dear Colleague” letter to American colleges and universities, suggesting how sexual harassment and assault cases should be handled. Before that, it was pretty much up to the colleges how to handle such in-house investigations, and different colleges used different standards of evidence.  There are three that could be used (see here for more explanation):

  • Conviction requires guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”, which of course means that the bar is very high for conviction.
  • Conviction requires “clear and convincing evidence”, that is, it must be “highly probable or reasonably certain” that harassment or assault occurred. This is conventionally interpreted to mean a likelihood of 75% or higher that the assault took place.
  • Conviction requires a “preponderance of the evidence” for assault or hasassment. This means that it is more likely that not (likelihood > 50 %) that the offense occurred.

Criminal courts in the U.S. use the first standard for conviction. The “clear and convincing” standard is used in some administrative court determinations and certain civil or criminal cases (a prisoner seeking habeas corpus relief from capital punishment, for instance, must prove his innocence using this standard). The “preponderance” standard is used in civil and family courts; it is, for instance, the reason why O. J. Simpson was found guilty of by a civil court for damages in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, thus owing them lots of money even though he was exonerated in his criminal trial.

I then took a poll among readers (you needn’t remind me that this is not a random sample or a “scientific” survey) to see how they felt about how colleges could handle sexual harassment and assault cases. Here are the results:

About 80% of readers thought—and I agree—that these behaviors—which are crimes, should be adjudicated by the courts rather than by the schools themselves. Indeed, universities have made a complete botch of it, not allowing students to hear the charges against them, confront their accusers, have legal representation, and so on.

If you want to see the draconian, Star-Chamber nature of how colleges screw up the process (often knowing exactly what they’re doing: trying to convict a male using a paucity of evidence) read Laura Kipnis’s book from last year, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. Kipnis, a feminist professor of communications at Northwestern University here in Chicago, reports the doings of two Title IX investigations at her university. You’ll  be horrified to learn how shoddy these “investigations” can be, how motivated they are by animus or personal beefs rather than a desire for justice, and how people’s lives have been ruined through tissue-thin allegations. Indeed, just by writing the book, Kipnis herself was subject to a Title IX investigation and a lawsuit from a student who (unnamed) had made Title IX allegations against a man in Kipnis’s narrative.

The problems go deeper than just the shoddy standards of evidence and incompetent proceedings. There is often a presumption that a male student is always guilty simply by virtue of being a male, as men are presumed to be the sexual aggressors.  Further, if a student is incapacitated or has lost inhibitions from alcohol, that student is often judged to have given up “affirmative consent”, and so can accuse her sexual partner of having committed rape.

This makes me shudder, for virtually everyone my age has had one or more sexual encounters when both partners were inebriated, and I don’t remember any of these that were followed by accusations of malfeasance. But now things have changed, and if both sex partners are drunk or tipsy, what happens? Can there be mutual rape?

In fact, as described in a new article in The Atlantic, “Mutually nonconsensual sex,” Caitlin Flanagan answers “yes,” but shows what happens: mutually drunken (and therefore mutually “nonconsensual”) sex can lead to a race in which both participants in a drunken hookup suddenly realize that their partner might file a Title IX rape complaint, and so they try to be first to inform the authorities that they were raped. The first complainant, apparently, wins. Something like this happened at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, and the first responder was the man, so the woman was suspended from college until her male partner graduated—a common judgment in these cases. But she’s suing, and she has a pretty good case. As Flanagan notes:

It is Jane Roe’s [JAC: the pseudonym of the woman student] good fortune to have as her attorney Josh Engel, whose practice is largely centered on suing universities—including, on five occasions, the University of Cincinnati—on behalf of plaintiffs who faced discipline for sexual misconduct by campus disciplinary proceedings—all of whom, until now have been men. In the lawsuit, he cites a recent and underreported ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which has significant relevance to the large number of campus sexual-assault proceedings involving two drunk students. Doe vs. Miami University found that a school acts in a discriminatory manner when it finds that both a male and a female student are intoxicated and engage in sexual activity yet chooses only to discipline one of the students. As Engel told me, “From a constitutional standpoint a public school violates the equal-protection rights of their students when there is no rational basis to differentiate between male and female students. The court found that even if only one student makes a report, if the school possesses knowledge that both were intoxicated, “the school has an affirmative obligation to investigate both students for misconduct without waiting for a ‘report,’” Engel said.

In other words—college students and administrators take note—the days of blaming one person (almost always the man) for a no-harm, no foul, mutually drunken hook up may be coming to an end. It was a ridiculous standard, one that that infantilized college women, demonized male sexuality, and was responsible for harsh punishment meted out to an unknown number of college students, almost all of them male. It trivialized something grave: sex crime. And because it poured all of these experiences through an interpretive system that forced women into the role of passive victims and men in that of aggressive predators, it has helped stoke understandable resentment among young men on campuses across the country.

Flanagan concludes that it’s time for colleges to stop micromanaging the sex lives of their students. Yes, I think they can give them “education” about what’s permissible and legal, and what is not, but these Star Chambers are a recipe for lawsuits, and colleges will eventually realize it. In fact, one of the very few good things that happened under the Trump administration might be Betsy DeVos’s rolling back of the “Dear Colleague” standards of the Obama administration, and the publication by the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education of recommendations for dealing with accusations of sexual misconduct (see them here). The standards seem quite reasonable.

A climate in which men are deemed guilty from the outset by having a Y chromosome, in which a 50.1% judgement that an assault was likely leads to ruining someone’s life (and face it—that standard is basically a judgment call), and in which when both partners are intoxicated the male must be the rapist, is a climate that begs for lawsuits. This new one is not the first: there are several others—including the case of Emma Sulkowicz (“Mattress Girl”) at Columbia—in which the new rush to judgment has led to injustices.

I think that if someone has committed a real crime on campus, and that includes sexual harassment and sexual assault, it should be left to the legal system rather than to colleges for disposition. If there is a conviction, then the colleges should act.  Colleges simply aren’t equipped to dispense justice, and they may have ideological agendas not held by juries and judges.

Obama’s revision of Title IX was a mistake, and we’re beginning to see the consequences. But even given that, colleges aren’t required to abide by the newer standards, and I suspect most of them will retain the “preponderance of evidence” mistake promulgated by Obama’s administration. But Lord only knows how they’ll deal with the common cases of two inebriated students having sex.

I close with Flanagan’s conclusion:

Now, in many regards, universities monitor the sexuality of their students more intrusively than in the 1950s. There are fulltime employees of American universities whose job is to sit young people down and interrogate them about when and where and how they touched another person sexually, and how it felt, and what signs and sounds and words and gestures made them believe that consent had been granted. This was how homosexuals used to be thrown out of schools and sports teams and the military; this is how young women were punished for acting on their sexual impulses by a wide variety of American institutions in the past. This is beyond the overreach of the modern university; this is an affront to the most essential and irreducible of all of the American ideas: the freedom of the individual.

. . . That time [JAC: she’s referring to the Berkeley Free Speech movement and Mario Savio’s call to fix the broken system] is coming again on American campuses, as the strongest and smartest and bravest among the students are beginning to realize that the beliefs and practices that dominate these places are irrational and hugely political. These new students are waking up, resisting, fighting back, in all sorts of areas of college life. The administrators want to crush them, but the wind is at their back. The progressive left has all the power on campus, but this unfolding awareness on the part of these counter-revolutionaries has its own unassailable power: truth, logic, and reason.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ literacy

June 6, 2018 • 9:15 am

Posting will be light today as I’m a bit under the weather and can’t brain. In the meantime, enjoy the latest edition of Jesus and Mo, called “fail”:

 

Well, I’ve often wondered, because Hitchens proclaimed it repeatedly, whether Muhammad really was illiterate.  One counterargument is provided by the website Radical Truth (the “T” in “Truth” is a cross), which is a Christian site apparently devoted to convincing Muslims of the Resurrection. Take what’s below, then, with a grain of salt (there are other arguments), but this Sura of the Qur’an does indeed claim that Muhamed was “unlettered”:

Muslims claim that because Muhammad was illiterate, he could not have written the Qur’an, and thus the Qur’an is a miracle, Muhammad’s primary miracle. This idea of illiteracy is supported in the Qur’an:

Sura 7:157: “Those who follow the apostle, the unlettered Prophet, whom they find mentioned in their own (scriptures), – in the law and the Gospel…

Sura 7:158 –  Say: “O men! I am sent unto you all, as the Apostle of God, to Whom belongeth the dominion of the heavens and the earth: there is no god but He: it is He That giveth both life and death. So believe in God and His Apostle, the Unlettered Prophet, who believeth in God and His words: follow him that (so) ye may be guided.”

Thus, the Qur’an’s very existence is testimony to Muhammad’s status as a prophet. There are a couple of problems with this position.

First, it is doubtful that Muhammad was illiterate. Recall that when he was being raised by his uncle, he traveled as a merchant, delivering supplies to various communities. He also traveled extensively with his first wife Khadijah, who hired him to help her with her trade business. Surely there must have been some sort of written record kept to document these transactions. The merchant trade cannot exist without written records of what and how much was shipped to whom.

Second, Muhammad’s illiteracy is irrelevant to the question of the existence of the Qur’an. Muhammad did not write the Qur’an; he recited it. Others wrote down what Muhammad recited, as the Qur’an was complied over several years. The Qur’an would have been written whether Muhammad could or could not read and write, so the argument is irrelevant.

There are other arguments, too. I can’t be arsed to analyze them, as the whole scenario of an angel reciting the Qur’an to Muhammad is ridiculous.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and a video)

June 6, 2018 • 7:45 am

Stephen Barnard has sent us a batch of lovely photos from Idaho. Among his many great pictures, this first one, of the female American kestrel (Falco sparverius) roosting in Stephen’s nestbox, has to be one of my favorites: Stephen sent some technical info:

Natasha. This photo is with my Canon 5D4 and 700mm lens.

 

And a video; the pair are being severely harassed by Brewer’s blackbirds:

While being harassed by blackbirds, Boris brings a vole to the nest box, Natasha arrives, he hands it off to her, and she takes it inside.

We also have pelicans; Stephen’s notes are indented.

First, a few photos of American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). These are magnificent birds, but whenever I see them on the creek I chase them away, and so does every other fisherman and landowner with water. They can do a great deal of damage to the trout fishery in a short time.  For the second and third photos I’d sneaked up very closely. (They’re very easily spooked because everyone chases them.) I watched them doing their typical feeding behavior — working as a coordinated group, pushing schools of small fish into the shallows where they chow down.


Here is a Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica). This is one of the swallows that build mud nests on my front porch every year.

This Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis) wasn’t happy about me passing by in the truck. This is a male, one of a pair, and I suspect they have a colt or an egg nearby, because they were luring/threatening me into another direction (which wasn’t wasn’t an option).

And a brown trout (Salmo trutta):

 I caught it in one of my ponds on opening day. It took a callibaetis nymph imitation.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 6, 2018 • 6:45 am

We’ve reached Hump Day, so it’s June 6, 2018, and the anniversary of D-Day: the landing of Allied troops on Normandy and the beginning of the end for Hitler and his forces. Foodwise, it’s National Gingerbread Day. Meh.

I’m still feeling grotty, but not as bad as yesterday. I dragged my tired carcass into work to ensure that there are still eight ducklings and that they’ll get fed. For I so loved the ducks that I gave my one and only June 6 so that the ducklings shall not perish. He gives his beloved food.

Speaking of ducks, it was on this day in 1586 that Francis Drake’s forces raided St. Augustine in Spanish Florida.  And on June 6, 1844, the YMCA was founded in London.  In honor of that event, here’s a video; I guarantee that you’re going to get a “YMCA” earworm!

On this day in 1892, the Chicago “L” (elevated train system) began operating. In 1933, the first drive-in theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Are there any of these things left? I spent many hours as a kid with my family, parked in a car with a movie speaker attached to the window.  And, of course, on June 6, 1944, the Battle of Normandy began as part of the D-day landings. 155,000 Allied troops landed in France and began a rapid push inland.  On this day in 1968—exactly 50 years ago—Robert F. Kennedy died from being shot the day before (Sirhan Sirhan, who’s still in jail, was the killer).  On June 6, 1981, the Bihar train disaster occurred: a train in that state jumped the tracks on a bridge, killing between 800 and 1000 people. But it’s only #4 on the list of the worst rail accidents: a 2004 train wreck in Sri Lanka, caused by a tsunami hitting the cars, killed over 1700 people. Finally, on this day in 1985, the grave of one Wolfgang Gerhard was opened in Embu, Brazil, and as suspected, was found to contain the remains of Josef Mengele, the deadly doctor of Auschwitz, who was thought to have drowned in 1979.

Notables born on this day include one of my favorite painters, Diego Velásquez (1599), Nathan Hale (1755), Thomas Mann (1875), Nobel Laureate Edwin Krebs (1918), singer Levi Stubbs (1936), and physicist Lee Smolin (1955). Those who died on June 6 include Patrick Henry (1799), Jeremy Bentham (1832; you can still see his preserved corpse at University College London), Carl Jung (1961), Robert F. Kennedy (1968; see above), J. Paul Getty (1976), Stan Getz (1991), Anne Bancroft (2005), and Ronnie Gilbert (2015).

Here’s Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1656), one of the most famous paintings in the history of art:

And in honor of Stan Getz, one of my favorite jazz saxophonists, here’s a favorite: his rendition of “Gladys” with Lionel Hampton on the vibes:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is replacing Henri the Existentialist Cat, who’s recently retired from making videos:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About the burden of my duties.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym dumasz?
Hili: Nad ciężarem moich obowiązków.

From Matthew, the slow eating the slower. A slowworm is the legless lizard Anguis fragilis, not a snake:

Matthew adds re the tweet below, “That prime thing works only if you treat the number as two sets of digits (193 and 939), and perm them only within each 3-number group (so 139 and 399, but not 133 or 919).”

Now this is amazing:

I’m still stupefied at how wood ducks call their chicks out of the nest the day after they hatch, forcing them to leap dozens of feet to the ground. (The eggs are also laid one per day, but all hatch within 24 hours, even when there are 12 or more. Can you guess how they do that?)

And then they do! Isn’t this cute—and amazing?

Matthew also recommends you read this “wild thread”. It is bizarre!

From the collection of Terrifying Signs. I have no idea what the one at upper right means:

The Big Island is a scary place to be right now, at least if you live on the Hilo side:

Some cat tweets from Grania. I’ve probably put this one up before, but you can’t see it too often.

https://twitter.com/liherbs/status/1002919777873154054

Cat love:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1003593774487031808

Sound up for this one:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1003231353301856256

Cat wants water:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1003301585617858562

And a Jesus tweet:

YMCA!!!!!

Crafty crabs cop cans for cribs

June 5, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I have a sore throat (and probably am getting a cold), so I’m going home to rest. I’ll leave you with this video for today. Don’t worry: ducks will be fed, but the Daily Duck Doings will be postponed till tomorrow.

As you probably know, as hermit crabs grow they have to leave their old shells and move into bigger ones. From BBC Earth, we have this lovely video showing hermit crabs, deprived of empty shells, using beverage cans as new homes. The cans aren’t ideal given the asymmetry of the crab, but kindly rangers leave empty shells for the growing beasts.