Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s Monday, February 26, 2018, National Pistachio Day. With cashews and macadamias, it makes up the Trio of the World’s Best Nuts. In the UK it’s National Wear Red Day to raise awareness of heart disease. Is anybody wearing red?
On February 26, 1616, Galileo was banned by the Church from teaching or defending the idea of a heliocentric solar system. But of course this had NOTHING to do with religion. Nope, it was political, personal animosities, the Pope’s hemorrhoids—anything but religion. (Just ask Ronald Numbers.). On February 26, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act creating the Grand Canyon National Park, and exactly 10 years later Calvin Coolidge established the Grand Teton National Park. On this day in 1980, to everyone’s surprise, Israel and Egypt established full diplomatic relations. On February 26, 1993, the first Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center took place with the explosion of a truck bomb parked in the garage below the North Tower (the bombers intended for the North Tower to fall on the South Tower, destroying both). Six people were killed and over a thousand injured. Six people were subsequently convicted. Finally, on this day in 2008, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed in Pyongyang, North Korea. I didn’t know of this until this morning, and I wondered how it went. The link just above will tell you. Kim Jong-il didn’t attend the concert (what a churlish act!), but 300 foreigners were allowed in the DPRK and were also given unprecedented internet access. Wikipedia describes the program:
The program, conducted by Lorin Maazel, included the national anthems of both North Korea (“Aegukka”) and the United States (“The Star-Spangled Banner”), the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, and George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Encores included the Farandole from Georges Bizet’s Second L’Arlesienne Suite, Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, and concluded with the popular Korean folk song “Arirang”. The Dvořák, Gershwin, and Bernstein works were each originally premiered by the New York Philharmonic, which is the oldest U.S. orchestra.
This was supposed to herald an era of cultural and diplomatic exchange. Fat chance! But here’s the folk song “Arirang” as played in Pyongyang. It is a lovely song and performed very well. Read about it here; it’s considered the “unofficial national anthem of North Korea.”
You can see the audience at the end; note that none of the Koreans are fat.
Notables born on February 26 include Victor Hugo (1802), Honoré Daumier (1808), Levi Strauss (1829), Buffalo Bill (1846), John Harvey Kellogg (1852; yes, the cornflake inventor), Jackie Gleason (1916), Theodore Sturgeon (1918), Fats Domino (1928), Johnny Cash (1932) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the odious president of Turkey. Deaths were thin on the ground on this day; we have only Harry Lauder (1950), Roy Eldredge (1989), and Judge Joseph Wapner (2017; remember him?) Here’s a drawing by Daumier “7 Heures du Martin”, with a lazy Frenchman being awoken by a dog-and-cat fight. 7 a.m.! Really? That is way late for a cat to wake someone up! (Note once again that the cat is not drawn well.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a preprandial wash:
Hili: Just a moment and I’ll be ready.
A: Ready for what?
Hili: It doesn’t matter as long as there is plenty of it and it’s scrumptious.
In Polish:
Hili: Jeszcze chwila i będę gotowa.
Ja: Na co?
Hili: Wszystko jedno, byle było dużo i dobre.
Matthew sent a bunch of good tweets, including Kitty curling:
I just personally discovered yareta, dense plants that grow in the Andes mountains. They can live for 3,000 years! Good gravy, this planet is amazing. pic.twitter.com/EcLD2y2WYy
Here’s Bill Gates being a good sport on Ellen DeGeneres’s show.
I’m a big fan of Bill Gates, as he’s giving away most of his fortune to improve the world, not the lot of his kids. So I’m not trying to make fun of him here—just showing how insulated really rich people are from how the rest of us live. In truth, I had no idea what a box of Rice-A-Roni costs. but I know it’s not $5. When you click on the video, you’ll be asked to watch on YouTube, which you can do by clicking on the underlined sentence.
I guessed $2.50 on the dental floss, but I order it in bulk from Amazon (this is the best one). I have no idea what pizza rolls cost; I’ve never had or bought one. But I do buy my own groceries!
This 2015 Pew poll was mentioned by Lionel Shriver in her piece about the policing of literature tthat I discussed the other day. It shows a surprising degree of censoriousness in various Western countries. Pew asked people in the U.S. and Europe the following question:
We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things.
In the US people were sub-classified by age, sex, political affiliation, white vs. nonwhite, and degree of education.
Now in the U.S., this is a straight First Amendment question, as indicated by “whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things”, and therefore 100% of people agreeing with that fundamental freedom should agree, regardless of whether they think it’s right or ethical to offend minority groups. (And of course some things that offend some people in minority groups, like the wearing of dreadlocks, are contentious.)
In fact, 4 out of ten Millennials (18-34) agreed that the First Amendment should be ditched. As people got older, they got less censorious. Among all ages, women were 10% more likely to favor government censorship, and Democrats nearly twice as likely as Republicans (35% vs 18%, respectively). That appears to show that the Right is more open to free speech than the Left. But of course this isn’t about free speech in general, but free speech that offends minorities. Thus Republicans might favor it more simply because they don’t care whether minorities get offended.
The more education one gets, the less likely one is to favor such censorship.
What surprises me was the degree of general assent to government censorship. But again, maybe people simply don’t understand the First Amendment or how it’s been interpreted. Perhaps they just were triggered by the phrase “statements offensive to minority groups”. But still, if you understand that Amendment—as all Americans should—you should be against government censorhip in toto.
I’m curious, as well, what people consider “minority groups” in this survey. Muslims and Jews—and in fact all religions save Protestantism (53% of Americans)—are in the minority in the U.S. Does that mean that these people think that the government should censor statements that offend Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, but that it’s okay to offend Protestants? After all what one construes as a “minority group” depends on the beholder. I suspect most people think of it as “racial minority groups”, like blacks and Hispanics: groups traditionally subject to bigotry.
But wait! There’s more! It’s even worse in Europe, where 70% of Germans and nearly half of the French think the government should ban such speech (see graph below). Those countries, of course, have hate speech laws that don’t exist in the U.S. To quote Pew:
In Europe, where long-simmering racial tensions are of a different nature, compounded by the recent flow of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, people are more willing than Americans to accept government controls on speech against minorities. A median of 49% across the six EU nations surveyed say this compared with 28% of Americans.
That’s a big difference. I suppose that you could say that, okay, Germany is just as well off as the U.S., or even better off, so why can’t we modify the First Amendment in the U.S. to ban offensive statements? The problem is that interpreting “statements offensive to minority groups” is very slippery, and ropes in some issues things that should be criticized, like religious beliefs and actions. Also, I suspect that in the EU, enforcement of these speech laws is either lax or nonexistent.
The dearth of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in the U.S. and U.K. is well known, and it turns out it’s also an issue in other Western countries. It’s usually attributed to sexism that bars women from entering these fields. Other explanations are a difference in interests and preferences: perhaps women prefer to enter fields other than STEM for reasons other than the presumption that they’ll be discriminated against or criticized in the field. That idea—that there are inherent differences in the preferences of males and females (and we don’t know whether these are acculturated, genetically based, or a mixture of these)—was the subject of James Damore’s infamous Google memo, for which he was demonized and, at least in part, fired. (I’m told that Damore had a history of bad interactions at Google.) Finally, one can claim that women have lower abilities in STEM fields than do men, so even if they preferred such studies, the meritocracy would weed them out.
A new paper in Psychological Science (free Unpaywall access; pdf here, reference at bottom) by Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary points to the second explanation: consistent differences in preference, and dispels the third, finding no consistent sex differences in abilities. This doesn’t rule out sexism, as they didn’t test for that, but the important factor seems to be preference. That’s because the authors find a strong and counterintuitive correlation between the gender gap in stem degrees and the index of gender equality in countries. In those countries with more gender equality, the gap between men and women in getting STEM degrees is larger. The authors explain that as resulting from a combination of sex-based preferences and the standard of living in different countries.
Let me say first that I think there’s plenty of evidence that men and women differ in their preferences for what kind of work they want to do. I suspect, but don’t know, that part of that difference is based on evolution. After all, men and women have evolved separately for some six million years since we split from our common ancestor with the chimps, and it’s not unreasonable to think that different sex roles over that period led to the evolution of different preferences. I hasten to add that even if this be true, it is no reason to treat men and women unequally or give them different educational opportunities based on their sex. I’ve often emphasized that true equality between the sexes means that nobody be treated differently because of their gender, and that men and women be given the same opportunity from birth to realize their talents and ambitions. But if preferences be different, this may still lead to different outcomes.
It turns out that this is what Stoet and Geary think about the difference between men and women in STEM participation. The paper is a bit complicated, so I may make an error or two in describing the results. I thus urge readers interested in this topic to download the paper and read it for themselves.
The study. The authors used data from PISA, a study of science literacy, mathematics, and reading comprehension in students throughout the world. In this paper the sample was large: 472,242 students from 67 countries (15-16 years old), all assessed for these abilities. Also measured were interest in and enjoyment of science. For the 67 countries, the authors also obtained UNESCO data on college degrees in STEM fields (the range was 12.4% women in Macao to 40.7% wp,em in Algeria, with a median of 25.4% of STEM degrees obtained by women).
Data on “overall life satisfaction” (OLS) was obtained from a UN survey in 2016, using a ten step ladder as a metaphor for life satisfaction (highest at the top), and asking people to imagine which rung of the ladder they stood on.
Data on gender equality as obtained from the World Economic Forum survey in 2015, using data on earnings, enrollment in college, life expectancy, representation in government, and other indicators.
The results:
In overall science literacy, women and men were pretty equal throughout the world. As they authors note, “We found that girls outperformed boys in 19 (28.4%) countries, boys outperformed girls in 22 (32.8%) countries, and no statistically significant difference was found in the remaining 26 (38.8%) countries.” That is, there’s no inherent trend for one sex to be better than the other, though there are statistically significant differences among countries. That militates against some inborn difference and suggest that those differences are cultural.
However, when the authors looked at intraindividual differences in ability, that is, relative ability, they found that women generally ranked higher in reading compared to their average ability, while men ranked higher in science and mathematics compared to their average ability. Combined with the data above, I interpret this to mean that, overall, men and women are equal in science literacy and math comprehension, but since women have higher reading ability than men, they are higher overall academically. Nevertheless, there’s a big and consistent difference in these areas. As the authors note:
” In all countries except for Lebanon and Romania (97% of countries), boys’ intraindividual strength in science was (significantly) larger than that of girls (Fig. 2b). Further, in all countries, girls’ intraindividual strength in reading was larger than that of boys, while boys’ intraindividual strength in mathematics was larger than that of girls. In other words, the sex differences in intraindividual academic strengths were near universal.
“. . . Another way of calculating these patterns is to examine the percentage of students who have individual strengths in science, mathematics, and reading, respectively. To do so, we first determined students’ individual strength. Next, we calculated the percentage of boys and girls who had science, mathematics, or reading as their personal academic strength; this contrasts with the above analysis that focused on the overall magnitude of these strengths independently of whether they were the students’ personal strength. We found that on average (across nations), 24% of girls had science as their strength, 25% of girls had mathematics as their strength, and 51% had reading. The corresponding values for boys were 38% science, 42% mathematics, and 20% reading.
“. . . The above analyses show that most boys scored relatively higher in science than their all-subjects average, and most girls scored relatively higher in reading than their all-subjects average. Thus, even when girls outperformed boys in science, as was the case in Finland, girls generally performed even better in reading, which means that their individual strength was, unlike boys’ strength, reading.”
Remember, this is a gap in performance between men and women in their individual areas of strength (an “intraindividual gap”), not an absolute gap between individuals.
When the authors looked at this “gender gap” in relative performance, they found out that it was larger in countries that were more gender equal. That is, the more equal the country in gender treatment, the greater the relative performance of women in reading over science and math, and the greater the relative performance of men in science and math over reading. Here’s a figure showing that, which also shows you the countries that are more gender equal (higher on the y axis) and those at the bottom (countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria):
(from paper): Scatterplots (with best-fitting regression lines) showing the relation between gender equality and sex differences in (a) intraindividual science performance and (b) the percentage of women among science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates. Gender equality was measured with the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), which assesses the extent to which economic, educational, health, and political opportunities are equal for women and men. The gender gap in intraindividual science scores (a) was larger in more gender-equal countries (rs = .42).
Not only was the intraindividual “gender gap” larger in more gender-equal countries, but the percentage of women getting STEM degrees was lower in more gender-equal countries. Places like Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland, which rank high on gender equality, had a much lower percentage of women among college STEM graduates than less gender-equal countries like the UAR, Tunisia, Turkey, and Algeria. Would you have expected that? The negative correlation is striking (same Y axis: higher Y scores mean more gender equality):
(From paper; first part of caption is the same as in graph above): The percentage of women with degrees in STEM fields (b) was lower in more gender-equal countries (rs = −.47).
What does this mean? The authors interpret this to mean that in countries with greater gender equality (which also have higher life satisfaction, as you might expect), women can exercise their preferences in careers, which is to go into careers that are more reading-oriented than STEM-oriented. They’re able to do that because those societies are also more socialistic, and thus women don’t have to be forced to go into the higher-paying STEM careers simply to get by. In contrast, less gender-equal societies tend to make women pursue STEM careers because those are a faster way out of poverty (such careers tend to be higher paying). Or, as the authors say in academ-ese:
We propose that when boys are relatively better in science and mathematics while girls are relatively better at reading than other academic areas, there is the potential for substantive sex differences to emerge in STEM-related educational pathways. The differences are expected on the basis of expectancy-value theory and are consistent with prior research (Eccles, 1983; Wang & Degol, 2013). The differences emerge from a seemingly rational choice to pursue academic paths that are a personal strength, which also seems to be common academic advice given to students, at least in the United Kingdom (e.g., Gardner, 2016; Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, 2015).
The greater realization of these potential sex differences in gender-equal nations is the opposite of what some scholars might expect intuitively, but it is consistent with findings for some other cognitive and social sex differences (e.g., Lippa, Collaer, & Peters, 2010; Pinker, 2008; Schmitt, 2015). One possibility is that the liberal mores in these cultures, combined with smaller financial costs of foregoing a STEM path (see below), amplify the influence of intraindividual academic strengths. The result would be the differentiation of the academic foci of girls and boys during secondary education and later in college, and across time, increasing sex differences in science as an academic strength and in graduation with STEM degrees.
The fact that the intra-individual differences also decrease with gender inequality would, then, reflect the fact that women are pursuing STEM paths more often in those countries, and those studies reflect on their test scores, narrowing the gap between their reading abilities and their science/math abilities.
What do we do about it? These results (and of course they need to be replicated, and do read the authors’ list of caveats) suggest that in freer, more egalitarian societies, women will be less likely to pursue STEM careers because, for one reason or another, they’re simply less interested in science. That will upset those who think that men and women are equal in preferences, but the data are there. It also leads to the notion that to get more women into STEM fields, the way to do it is not to make societies more egalitarian. Indeed, the way to do it is make them less egalitarian! Nobody wants that!
So what do we do? First, we have to ask whether we really want to strive for full gender equality (equal numbers) in STEM careers—or in careers in which women gravitate.
If women aren’t interested in STEM careers, what is the point of such striving? Well, there are some points; one being that women in STEM careers serve as role models for women who want to be in those fields but may be discouraged by an imbalanced sex ratio. That, at least, mandates that we work to make sure that women face no barriers to entering such careers, as other studies have pointed to gender bias as a bar to entry. The authors suggest that we find those women who have a higher STEM scores than reading scores, and concentrate on giving them the opportunities to get into STEM. And of course (this is my suggestion), we need to monitor various bars to women’s entry and try to eliminate them; academic departments are doing this now by, among other things, making sure that qualified female candidates are not neglected.
This comment appeared in the remarks following my letter to the Chicago Maroon (our student newspaper) asking the paper to take a stand on free speech. Nearly all of the comments were pro-free speech, which is good, but this one stood out in contrast:
Becker’s link at the end is to the faculty letter opposing Bannon’s appearance here. Do read it, or at least look at the faculty affiliations of the signers. Note the imbalance among disciplines, which says something about which areas of scholarship tend to harbor censorious faculty. (Note: not everyone who signed is a faculty member.)
Now I don’t know who Jay Becker is, and I don’t much care, but I hope he’s not organizing or participating in some kind of disruption when Bannon appears. Here are all the errors in his reasoning (I’m assuming “Jay” is a man’s name):
Becker is correct that the First Amendment (should be capitalized) prohibits government suppression of speech. But the law itself does “prohibit people from objecting and even mobilizing to stop a specific person or group from speaking at any one time or place.” People can object, of course (that’s one of the purposes of the Amendment), but if speech is being legally disseminated, as in a permitted rally or talk, then law will punish people who “mobilize to stop a person or group from speaking”. Such individuals would be prosecuted not on constitutional grounds, but on the basis of disorderly conduct—or worse if there’s violence involved, as there was when Yiannopoulos tried to speak at Berkeley. And certainly the University of Chicago has made its intentions clear to punish students who disrupt speakers.
“This is not about free speech; it’s about fascist speech.” This is the mantra of every censor in American colleges. It’s a blanket statement that means any speech deemed “fascist” by the censor is illegal and can be shut down. Of course “fascist speech” is not defined. What it really means is either “speech I don’t like” or “all speech uttered by anyone I deem a fascist.” I suspect that Becker means the latter. If Becker knows his First Amendment, he’ll know that the courts don’t see anything Bannon says as a violation of that Amendment.
Is Bannon a fascist? I don’t know, and I don’t much care about those labels. He’s an extreme right-winger, and has many views I consider odious, but that’s no reason to ban him. Further, not all of his views are “fascist”. He has, for instance, called for a 44% federal tax on incomes over $5 million a year. When he was in the White House, Bannon advocated a big pullback of US involvement in Afghanistan. Are those “fascist” views? As I noted the other day, after a conversation with Bannon, New York Times columnist David Brooks, while vehemently disagreeing with Bannon’s views, nevertheless “highly recommended” Bannon’s visit to campus as a way to acquaint people with his populist views (Brooks is a U of C graduate). Apparently Becker doesn’t think anybody needs to hear those views, even if they are opposed to them, want to question Bannon, or want to sharpen their own thinking. Having Bannon here is in fact promoting critical thinking, not suppressing it.
The idea that someone speaking at a university gets the university’s official imprimatur, and that Bannon’s visit is somehow “legitimizing his ideology” is wrong and, frankly, stupid. All kinds of people come here, from all sides of the political spectrum, and it’s simply impossible for the university to be “legitimizing” all these conflicting views. In fact, the university is legitimizing nothing—except for someone’s right to speak. I despise creationism and those who lie to people to further a religious agenda, but if a creationist spoke here (as one did: Bill Dembski), I would not for a minute think that the university was “legitimizing creationism.” The “legitimizing” argument is rejected by the University of Chicago and all enlightened universities.
Finally, letters like this, as well as other stuff I see, makes me think that people (not necessarily connected with the University), are planning to “mobilize” to disrupt Bannon’s appearance. That would not be wise. I am sure the University is preparing for this, and will ensure that Bannon gets to speak without disruption. I am also sure that there will be police to remove disruptors. Nobody will gain by trying to prevent him from speaking. Already the group of humanities professors who wrote the “Ban Bannon” letter look censorious, and I have no sympathy for them. I, too, despise what Bannon stands for, but that’s no reason to prevent him from speaking. Remember, he’s in a debate, so there will already be planned counterspeech. Are people worried that Bannon will actually convert people who are more liberal? If so, they’d better examine their own arguments against him.
I’m curious about Becker’s logo above, which says “Not this time” in the middle, and around the triangle some words that begin “First they came for. . ” Does anybody recognize this, or can make out the rest of it? The quote appears to resemble the famous “First they came for the socialists . .” quote by Martin Niemöller, in which case Becker is claiming that there’s a slippery slope from Bannon to (OMG) Nazis!
Today we’re featuring the work of a regular, Joe Dickinson, with some lovely geese pictures. Goose-o-Rama! His notes are indented:
Here are some photos of geese wintering at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge complex in the northern Central Valley of CA. I’lll send soon a second set, mostly ducks, waders and raptors.
First, here is the setting, an extensive wetland lying east of the California Coast Range.
Now for the cast of characters: here is a snow goose (Chen caerulescens), recognizable by yellowish tinge on head and a prominent “grin patch” on the bill. I expect the species name in the binomial (think “cerulean”) reflects the fact that there is a dark morph (common in the east) formerly recognized as a distinct species, the blue goose. If that morph was described and named first, conventions of priority would stick the snow goose with that name when the two were unified.
Ross’s goose (Chen rossi) is a bit smaller, typically has a white head and a smaller bill with little or no “grin patch”. In this shot, I particularly like how ripples in the water reflect up onto the geese.
The other species present in large numbers in the winter is the greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons), named for the white forehead.
This is a fairly typical scene with a large concentration of snow/Ross’s geese and white-fronted more dispersed. I had the feeling that the latter actually might be more numerous overall because they were everywhere on the refuge rather than just in a couple of large flocks.
The geese move frequently from the wetlands to nearby fields.
Here are some snow geese (I’m pretty sure) taking flight.
The white-fronteds display a striking chevron patter on the tail when taking off (perhaps a signal to group members?).
I don’t know what these guys are up to, perhaps a courtship thing?
Now for a real highlight: we were lucky to be on an observation platform at sunrise on a beautiful clear morning and caught the snow/Ross’s geese flying back in. The low sun illuminates the birds from below and with a wonderful warm glow.
Finally, a nice group coming in for a landing just in front of us with the sun at our backs.
It’s a quiet Sunday in Chicago: February 25, 2018, and National Chocolate-Covered Peanut Day. I’ll eschew these (as a friend of mine used to say when I rejected food with that phrase, “I’ll chew it, too!). It’s also Meher Baba’s birthday, who was born on this day in 1894. He died in 1969, and for the last 45 years of his life he didn’t speak a single word (he communicated with an alphabet board). I have this picture on a small card taped to the wall next to my desk. It’s always cheered me up in Black Dog times:
Here’s another showing his alphabet board (and Tallulah Bankhead!):
On February 25, 1836, Samuel Colt was given a patent in the US for his famous Colt revolver. And, in 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, was sworn into the United States Senate; he was the first black person ever to sit in the U.S. Congress. His election was to fill a seat that was vacated, and he was in Congress for just one year. Here he is:
On this day in 1932, Adolf Hitler, who was of course Austrian, became a naturalized German citizen, which allowed him to run for office in Deutschland. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev, in a speech called “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” began the dismantling of Stalin. Exactly thirty years later, Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines after a presidency of two decades, and Corazon Aquino became the nation’s first woman president. Finally, on this day in 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a right-wing Jewish extremist, slaughtered 29 Palestinian worshipers and wounded 125 others at the Cave of the Patriarchs in the city of Hebron. He was beaten to death by those who survived.
Notables born on February 25 include Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841), Enrico Caruso (1873), Meher Baba (1894; see above), Anthony Burgess (1917), Téa Leoni and Nancy O’Dell (both 1966), and Chelsea Handler (1975). Those who bought the farm on this day include Bugs Moran (1957), Mark Rothko (1970), Theodor Svedberg (1971, Nobel Laureate), Tennessee Williams (1983), and Glenn T. Seaborg (1999, another Nobel Laureate).
To honor Renoir’s birthday, here are two of his paintings:
“Young Girl with Cat” (1879):
“Julie Manet with Cat” (1887):
To see more of his cat paintings, and those of many other artists, please see the site The Great Cat, which covers cats in art, history and literature. It’s an excellent site, full of information about our feline friends.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili speaks, but her words require some exegesis from Malgorzata:
Hili is commenting both on current policy of Polish government (the dignity of Polish nation is more important than historical truth) and on an essay by Professor Richard Landes about a culture of honour and shame she was recently reading. She obviously can see the prevalence of such attitudes everywhere—they are ubiquitous.
I am told that Hili reads English, Polish, and Swedish, though her Russian is a bit spotty.
Hili: Truth is less important than dignity.
A: What made you say this?
Hili: Generally speaking.
In Polish:
Hili: Prawda jest mniej ważna niż godność.
Ja: W związku z czym to mówisz?
Hili: Tak ogólnie.
In nearby Wloclawek, the Dark Tabby is recumbent:
Leon: Because life is mainly about resting. (In Polish: “Bo w życiu chodzi głównie o to,żeby odpocząć.”)
A few tweets from Grania. Here are the two moons of Mars in one video clip:
Dueling reviews of Pinker’s new book (I’m 125 pages in with 325 to to go; I like it but reviews have been mixed, as they always are for his books):
Two diametrically opposed (but intellectually stimulating) reviews of Stephen Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’ which, taken together, characterise my alternating optimism and pessimism about our current predicament in the U.K. and US. https://t.co/oZDipCWB8Ihttps://t.co/IVgiCZGnBQ
Becker’s link at the end is to 
