Readers’ wildlife photographs

June 16, 2016 • 7:30 am

Keep those photos coming in, folks; I’ll be here all year. Our first few come from (who else?) reader Stephen Barnard from Idaho:

Here’s a better photo (I think) of the Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) chicks than one I sent before, and two more photos of mama hawk (I believe), guarding the nest. She’s a beautiful dark morph.

RT9A1140

The next photo is Desi keeping an eye on the nest from an unusual perch. When I saw him there, and no chicks were visible in the nest, I thought they might have fledged, but they didn’t.

Here’s a Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon) that had just eaten a small fish.

Finally, this Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus) dove into the creek, perched in a Russian Olive tree, and shook himself off, but he’s still wet.

And a landscape:

A couple of years ago I seeded several acres near my house with native wildflowers and grasses. It’s starting to look good. This is predominately blue flax (Linum lewisii).

And these photos come from reader Don Bredes, who sent the moose photo and tanager photos in late May:

This gangly yearling paid us a visit earlier this week. Probably his (or her) mama has driven him off now that she’s about to give birth again.

We have a large population of moose here in northern Vermont. We see plenty of tracks and once in a while a noble specimen or two. Alces alces is the largest animal in North America. While a large whitetail deer can weigh up to 300 pounds, a large bull moose can weigh up to 1800 pounds and stand 6 1/2 feet at the shoulder. The sight of an ambling bull is truly impressive.

Moose in New England have declined quite a lot in numbers recently, particularly to the east of us in New Hampshire and Maine, because warmer winters have allowed the blood-sucking ticks–a real plague–to remain active throughout the winter, so the moose must endure blood loss during all three stages of the tick’s life, larvae, nymph, and adult. The calves tend to suffer the highest mortality.

The scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea) is generally a secretive bird, a denizen of the forests more often heard than seen, according to David Sibley. One visited our place high in the wooded hills of northern Vermont yesterday afternoon and stuck around for an hour or so. Vivid against the pastels of early spring. They’re avid insectivores. This one may have been attracted by the golden dung flies that arrived with the load of cow manure delivered last week by my dairy farmer neighbor—I don’t know.

They don’t stay here long. Sibley says they breed in May in June and start migrating back to the tropical forests of Central and South America in July.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 16, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, June 16 (excuse my slipup yesterday about why we weren’t halfway through the year; all I can say is that you try writing half asleep at 4:30 a.m.! I’m off to California tomorrow morning for more R&R, and will be back Tuesday. Posting will be light, so bear with me; like Maru, I do my best.

On this day in 1904, James Joyce began his romance with Nora Barnacle, furnishing plenty of material for Ulysses, including the final soliloquy. And, of course, that was the exact day portrayed in the novel, in which all the action takes place in Dublin. (Joyce did that to commemorate his tempestuous romance), so it’s officially BLOOMSDAY!

Notables born on this day include Adam Smith (1723), Edward Davy (1806), Barbara McClintock (1902), and Joyce Carol Oates (1938; she has a Bengal cat). Those who died on this day include Wernher von Braun (1967). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pretends to have wisdom:

A: Look how beautifully the roses are still blooming.

Hili: Any fool can bloom, the question is how to wilt beautifully.

In Polish:

Ja: Patrz jak te róże nadal pięknie kwitną.
Hili: Kwitnąć każdy głupi potrafi, pytanie jak ładnie więdnąć.

Out in Winnipeg, Gus is intently watching a bird, completely ignoring the photographer:

Extra lagniappe: the latest episode of Savage Chickens by Doug Savage (h/t: jsp):

How to straighten a pig’s curly tail

June 15, 2016 • 3:30 pm

I bet you didn’t know this trick. Don’t try this at home—unless you live on a farm.

Does moderate religion promote the extremist version?

June 15, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Again, Betteridge’s law of headlines suggests “no”, but an article in Quillette by Henry Rambow, identified as “a writer and teacher who formerly served as an evangelical missionary in China” argues that yes, moderate religion fuels fundamentalism.

Before I summarize Rambow’s piece briefly (and you should read the whole thing), let me recommend Quillette as a site you should be bookmarking. Think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism. Its slant is definitely progressive, but its motto is “a platform for free thought” and it has articles like these (all are on the front page):

The site is just starting out, and could use some traffic if it’s to grow. If you’re a writer, consider submitting there. But do visit from time to time.

Rambow’s piece, “The Josiah effect: How moderate religion fuels fundamentalism,” is the view of a former fundamentalist Christian who now feels that his own faith enabled even more radical brands of Christianity, right up to those brands that favor death for both gays and abortion doctors. This slippery slope, you may recall, was also discussed by Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great.

I think Rambow is right, but not necessarily for the reasons he gives. Here are his three reasons why moderate religion fuels radical and extremist faith.

First, moderate religion primes children — by the millions, if not billions — from an early age to accept without question the authority of the very same books that serve as the basis for fundamentalist ideologies, and it teaches children that the gods described in those books are worthy of worship. This renders these children susceptible to fundamentalist ideology when, as young adults, they begin seeking a purpose for their lives.

Second, moderate religion propagates and legitimizes the vehicles of fundamentalist ideology — both the texts and the rituals. The fact that millions upon millions of Americans believe that the Bible is a holy book drives publishers to print millions upon millions of copies every year. Bibles are available in every home and on the back of every church pew. And all it takes for a fundamentalist to be born is for one lost soul to pick up a copy and find a powerful sense of purpose in a literal interpretation of the text. The same is true of the Koran.

Third, moderate religion lends credibility to fundamentalism by claiming to believe in the very same gods and the very same divinely-inspired texts that are exalted by fundamentalists. If not for moderate religion, the absurdity of fundamentalist beliefs would be much more obvious. But those beliefs are not as easy to identify as absurd when billions of people worship the same god and study the same scripture. The result is that fundamentalist beliefs are seen not as ridiculous, but as merely unorthodox or misguided interpretations of an ideology that is, on the whole, widely regarded as correct.

The first point seems a bit weak, for children brought up in “moderate-faith” homes are likely to retain that moderate faith. Yes, some may become more radical if their religion has weakened their bullshit detectors, but I’m not sure that there are more converts from moderate to fundamentalist Christianity than the other way around. I’m speaking here about Christianity, and am not sure if moderate Muslims, for example, are more likely to become Islamists or jihadists than vice versa.

The second point, the texts—and let us not pretend that the Christian Bible isn’t violent, misogynistic intolerant, and homophobic, at least in the Old Testament*—are a big worry for Rambow. That, in fact, is why he calls his piece “The Josiah Effect”, for in the Bible Josiah commits unspeakable acts in the name of God. But let us remember that while some Christians fundamentalists are intolerant (think Kim Davis), few turn to murder, and I doubt that you’d find as high a proportion of Christians damning homosexuality, urging the stoning of adulterers, or promoting the murder of non-Christians and ex-Christians, as you would among Muslims (see here). The fact is that Christianity’s worst aspects have been hugely de-fanged by the Enlightenment, something that hasn’t yet happened to modern Islam.

The third point is pretty much the same as the second, and I won’t say more about it.

Rambow’s arguments do make sense, but religious people would argue that he’s neglecting the good that religion has done. While Rambo mentions the damage that fundamentalist religion does, and by proxy its supposed moderate facilitators, he doesn’t even consider the argument that, on balance, religion does more good than bad. Before you argue that moderate religion is bad because it promotes extremist religions, you have to show that the whole enterprise is bad for humanity.

I happen to believe that it is, but, as I’ve said before, I can’t prove it (nor can religionists prove otherwise), for how can you weigh the intangible benefits of faith versus the tangible deaths of gays, the terrorization of children, the oppression of women, and the endless faith-against-faith wars caused by religion? (Perhaps someone can at least tot up the lives lost versus lives saved.) But we can at least argue that it’s better to know the truth than believe in falsehoods, and I think even believers would agree with that. It’s just that they don’t have reliable ways to know the truth.

And that’s where I think Rambow misses the boat. While his three points above are reasonable, my own take is that moderate religion enables extremist religion because the former gives credibility to faith—to believing in stuff for which there is no evidence. That practice is common to both moderate and extremist religions, and is why the moderates are so loath to call out the extremists: they know that if one suddenly examines the evidence for religious beliefs, all ships sink immediately. And if you look at your own faith rationally, you’ll see that there is no more evidence for it than for those other faiths you consider false*.

It is the practice of faith; nay, the completely unjustified respect given to faith, that is the real reason moderate religions enable extremist ones. The sooner we banish from our planet the idea that it’s admirable to have strong beliefs without good evidence, the faster humanity will progress.

____

*Word for word, however, the Qur’an has at least twice as many violent passages as the Bible (the Bible has more violent bits but is much longer).

**See John Loftus’s “Outsider Test for Faith.”

Do cats understand the laws of physics?

June 15, 2016 • 1:00 pm

Betteridge’s law of headlines would suggest that the answer is “no”, but the authors of a new paper in Animal Cognition beg to disagree. This short report (reference and free pdf below) tests the idea that cats can identify a rattling sound in a box as denoting an object in the box, and then, when the box is opened upside down, will get flummoxed if something doesn’t drop out of the rattling box. They will also get flummoxed if a toy drops out of a shaken box that didn’t make a rattle. In other words, cats can somehow sense the incongruity between an auditory stimulus (the rattling) and a visual stimulus (the expected object causing the rattle).

So, to be brief, here’s what Saho Takagi and her colleagues did. They studied 30 domestic cats of both sexes, all tested in —yes—cat cafes: a delightful staple of Japanese culture. Each cat was given four tests involving a box and a putative object. The box was designed with an electromagnet and all of them held three metal balls, with the magnet activated by pushing a button on the box. When the balls were in the box, shaking it would make a rattling sound—unless the balls were affixed to the electromagnet.

The kicker is that the electromagnet not only did the electromagnet allow a box to contain an object without making a rattling sound when shaken, but also enabled the investigator, when the bottom of the box was opened, to either release the ball to drop on a cushion, or keep the ball inside the box, stuck to the electromagnet.

Each cat was thus exposed to four conditions:

Box rattles, cat hears it, then box opened and balls drop out.
Box rattles, cat hears it, then box opened but NO balls drop out (electromagnet turned on).
Box does not rattle (though it has balls in it), then box opened and balls drop out
Box does not rattle (though it has balls in it), then box opened but NO balls drop out (electromagnet activated the whole time).

These four conditions, imposed in random order on each of the 30 cats, are shown like this:

As the caption above notes, conditions 1 and 4 are congruent with expectations from Cat Physical Law, but conditions 2 and 3 are “incongruous”: the cat either hears an object and perhaps expects it to fall out (but it doesn’t), or doesn’t hear an object and nevertheless sees it fall out. These two conditions should flummox the cat—IF cats can associate an auditory stimulus with the appearance of an object they haven’t yet seen.

The researchers made two predictions. The first one, which is not surprising, is that cats would spend a larger amount of time looking at a box that’s rattling before the object either does or doesn’t drop out. This was verified by the data below (“mean looking time” is the number of frames of the videotape that the cat looked at the box during the five-second shaking period; these frames were scored by observers who were blinded as to the condition). Whether or not an object was going to drop out of the box (“object” or “no object”), cats paid significantly more attention to the box that rattled. No surprise here:

But then the cats got the chance to be flummoxed: the boxes were opened, and the ball either did or didn’t drop out. After 5 seconds of holding the box upside down, it was placed on the floor for 15 seconds, and the cats were released to look at the apparatus for a 15-second inspection period (they were held by their owners during the shaking phase and five-second post-opening phase). The authors predicted that cats would look at the box longer under the two “incongruent” conditions (2 and 3 above) than under the congruent conditions, because they’d be flummoxed by the lack of a visual stimulus matching the auditory one. And that, in general, is what they found (again, the length of inspection was judged by the number of frames of the videotape during which the cat was looking at the box:

As the graph shows, cats looked the longest at the box when an object fell out but there was no sound, or when there was a sound but no object fell out, than under the other two conditions taken together. (Whether an object fell out also in general increased their inspection time). The comparisons above are statistically significantly different when connected by a bracket with an asterisk. In particular, the authors’ predicted differences in inspection (between sound/object vs. no sound/object, as well as between sound/no object vs. no sound/no object) were upheld. HOWEVER, there was no difference between inspection time for the sound/object vs the sound/no object condition.

The authors interpret this as the cats looking longer at the apparatus when conditions 2 and 3 obtained: those conditions with physical incongruity. This is what they say:

This study may be viewed as evidence for cats’ having a rudimentary understanding of gravity. We have found no study specifically testing knowledge of this fundamental physical rule in cats. Some nonhuman animals have been shown to respond spontaneously in accordance with gravity (e.g., tamarins: Hood et al. 1999; dogs: Osthaus et al. 2003), which suggests that an innate tendency to react in accordance with the gravity rule may be common among mammals.

Well, forget the “understanding of gravity” part, and look at this as cats showing an association between a sound and the expected appearance of an object. The results support this to some extent, but the lack of difference in inspection time between conditions 1 and 2, in which 2 is incongruous and 1 is not, weaken this conclusion somewhat. (To be fair, one might argue that condition 1, in which a rattling box releases a ball, would really interest cats!) The similar results in studies with tamarins and dogs led the authors to suggest that an “understanding of gravity” may be “common among mammals.”

Finally, I’m pleased to see that the first author of the study owns a cat. Here’s a picture of Saho Takagi and her cat. Who else but a cat lover would even do such a study?

117630_web — Source. Photographer: Mayu Takagi

h/t: Gethyn

____

Takagi, S. et al 2016. There’s no ball without noise: cats’ prediction of an object from noise. Animal Cognition, 2016; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-1001-6

The University of Wisconsin to require “cultural competency” training for all incoming students

June 15, 2016 • 9:00 am

It looks as if the University Follies aren’t over, even though the academic year of 2015-2016 has ended. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, a previously respected school—the University of Wisconsin at Madison—is going to require 1000 of its entering students to receive “cultural compentency training” this fall, and then for all its first years (over 7,000) to get that training in the fall of 2017. The new program is called “Our Wisconsin,” and is described in a University Press release. The program is more or less what you’d expect: an attempt to indoctrinate students into a politically correct point of view:

“College is often the first time where people are exposed to people who are different from themselves — those could be religious differences, racial, socio-economic status, or sexual orientation,” says Joshua Moon Johnson, who is leading the program’s development as interim special assistant to the Vice Provost for Student Life. Most of the problems seen on college campuses stem from ignorance, not malice, he says.

Johnson, who chairs the UW–Madison Hate and Bias Incident Team says many of the incidents reported to the team involve disrespectful speech that was intended to be funny or inquisitive. Those result from people lacking an understanding of the historical context surrounding race, difference and violence, he says.

The training will be conducted in person in two sessions. It will provide an opportunity to discuss topics such as identity, culture and microaggressions.

“This pilot is an effort to definitely create some broad awareness of difference — not to tell people how to think, but to tell people how to critique the ways in which they think,” Johnson says.

And if you believe that last line, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. The dissimulation here is revealed by what was said by one organizer of the “Our Wisconsin” team:

Katrina Morrison, a junior from Milwaukee, is one of the students who are helping to shape the program. She campaigned as a representative for the Associated Students of Madison pledging to address campus climate and continues to fight for progress on the Equity and Inclusion Committee.

“We wanted to talk about privilege. What is white privilege? What are sets of privileges that we all have?” says Morrison. “It’s okay that we all have these different sets of privileges and identities and we can still coexist.”

Yes, so long as the “privileged” acknowledge their status and the shame that is supposed to accompany it.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports a bit more:

Michael Davis, a black graduate student who helped organize a protest this spring, said the training program could be one step toward improving the campus. But he said UW shouldn’t only address racism on an individual level, and must take steps to combat structural inequality.

“Cultural competency has a place when done right,” Davis said. “But ultimately if the University of Wisconsin wants to see real change, they’ll shift power to students.”

Now I don’t mind students being acquainted with a college’s rules and sanctions when they enter, but I do bridle at what seems like ideological indoctrination. The indication that “privilege” will be a part of this indoctrination suggests that we have an Authoritarian Leftist program. “Disrespectful speech” will certainly be taught as a no-no, as will “microaggressions.”

I wonder, but doubt, whether there will also be a unit on freedom of expression. So, readers, do you think such training should be part of the college experience?

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ their petard

June 15, 2016 • 8:00 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “uh-oh”, acknowledges its sources:

Many thanks to the Archbishop of Canterbury for co-scripting this week’s strip.

If you’re too lazy to click the link, here’s the Torygraph’s report:

The BBC should be legally required to treat religion on a par with politics, sport or drama, the Archbishop of Canterbury is to say.

In a speech in London on Wednesday the Most Rev Justin Welby will call for the corporation’s new charter to include a specific protection for religious programming.

A recent Government White Paper includes calls for the BBC to be required to reflect the “diversity” of the British Isles.

But in a speech at the annual Sandford St Martin awards for religious broadcasting at Lambeth Palace, he will call for it to be required to treat faith issues with “the same seriousness as other genres like sport, politics, economics or drama”.

Good luck with that! When faith tells what actually happened, as in sport or politics, or admits implicitly that it’s it’s fiction, like drama (and becomes as compelling as, say, Shakespeare), then perhaps we can give it more airplay.

It seems that the last two Archbishops have had the propensity to gnaw on their metatarsals.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

June 15, 2016 • 7:30 am

If your photos haven’t appeared, in all likelihood it’s because of the backlog. (But keep sending them in!). These, for example, were sent on May 1 by reader Mark Sturtevant, and so the robins are already grown up. Mark’s notes are indented.

I do take bird pictures, when I can, and here I have a series of pictures that your readers might enjoy. We keep a wreath on our porch, and if the wife does not take it down in the Spring it almost always becomes a nesting site for an American robin (Turdus migratorius). She forgot last year, and well… the first photo shows what happened. I would encourage this complication every year, of course.

Last year was the first year with my camera, and I decided to document the growing family. I tried to keep the disturbances to a minimum. This next picture shows that the eggs were hatching. This was taken 11 days after the first picture.

Next, we see that they are all hatched by the next day. One can see that there is a difference in size among the chicks.

In the next picture, just 3 days later, one can appreciate that the rate of growth is incredible. The little one is still lagging behind, though.

And, just 3 days after that (!) they are definitely getting crowded in there. Where is the little one? Well, sadly I found it on the porch, no bigger than in the previous picture, and it was barely clinging to life. There was no chance it would survive with its siblings, and so I had to euthanize the poor thing. This is how it is for birds.

In the next two pictures we see a visit from mama. I do not know if both parents care for the chicks, but I never saw the male. Perhaps the readers could share what they know about parental care in this species.

Finally, we have a last look at the chicks. It was incredible how fast they grew! A day or two later, they were gone.

As a postscript, this season I was hoping for another nest and indeed one was being started on the wreath. I kept quiet about it, but the sharp-eyed Mrs. caught it early and took the wreath away. I think it is that robin who is now building her nest in our trumpet vines high off the ground, and well out of reach of interfering humans.

8GrowingUpRobin

	Debi on Jesse Singal on the ridiculous…
	Mark Sturtevant on Bill Maher on gender apartheid
	Mike on Bill Maher on gender apartheid
	Laingholm on Jesse Singal on the ridiculous…
	Emily on Bill Maher on gender apartheid