Okay, I have a poll for Matthew; no need to join Twitter

February 14, 2018 • 9:35 am

I didn’t realize that you had to actually JOIN Twitter to vote on Matthew’s poll about microbes. My apologies, and I’ll put Matthew’s poll here as well. PLEASE vote, and he’ll add our results to those on his poll from a few hours ago. Here it is, but you can vote here:

If you already voted on Twitter, please don’t do so here, as then the votes wouldn’t be independent.

 

The “normalization” of North Korea

February 14, 2018 • 9:15 am

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that American animus towards the world’s most repressive and tyrannical country—North Korea—has waned during the Winter Olympics. To represent his country, dictator Kim Jong-un sent his 30 year old sister Kim Yo-jong, who is now being seen as more appealing than Mike Pence. Well, she may be more attractive, but remember that Trump and his regime, though odious, is infinitely preferable to the DPRK. Further the North Korean cheerleaders are getting favorable attention, and everyone seems to think that the North Korean presence is some kind of harbinger of peace. It’s all beer and skittles over there.

Well, I do favor us trying to talk to North Korea, but as I’ve said before, I think it’s futile. If we know anything, it’s that Kim Jong-un will give up neither his nuclear program nor his relentless propaganda campaign against the U.S.—much less the shameful and disgusting way he treats his people—and I see little to be gained from talks. Well, let us still talk to them if it will make us feel better, but let us not think that North Korea is now serious about any settlement that doesn’t let it have nuclear weapons or dominate a unified Korea. South Korea, I maintain, was duped, and what we see is a “charm offensive” by the DPRK that’s actually working. It’s almost as if people hate Trump (and his emissary Pence) so much that they’re willing, in their anger, to smile on a representative of the world’s worst country.

BuzzFeed recounts some of the “normalization” of the DPRK in an article called (apparently to appeal to the kids) “PSA: Kim Jong Un’s sister is not your fave shade queen. She’s a garbage monster.” (Subtitle: “What the hell is wrong with you people?”)

And here’s some of that normalization:

Look at this bullshit!:

Here’s the headline of the NYT story (click on screenshot), which spends a lot of time criticizing Pence, adding just a bit at the end to tell us that the DPRK has “repression and human rights abuses”.

And this from a credulous Tweeter:

https://twitter.com/flyosity/status/962148537076240384

For a riposte to the following WaPo tweet (don’t they know better?), read Frank Bruni’s column in today’s New York Times: “The Ivanka Trump of North Korea? Oh, please.” It ends with these two sentences: “But there can be no mistake: America is in a rotten moment. North Korea is rotten to the core.”

And USA Today called the North Korean cheerleaders, who creep me out, “amazing” and “a huge hit”, adding this tweet:

Do we really need to be reminded of the perfidies of North Korea: how the government starves its people, prevents them from having any outside contact with the world, imprisons them in horrible camps (along with their families) for imagined crimes, and executes them in public, forcing people to watch? Has Donald Trump got us so deranged us that we’ll ignore all these human rights abuses in admiration of Kim Yo-Jong’s “style”?

The Hill also reproves the media for their unseemly fawning in a piece called “At the Olympics, North Korea’s appalling media boosters.” An excerpt:

Kim Yo-Jong, sister to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, received not merely respectful, but even complimentary coverage. Most egregious among the media outlets was a CNN piece titled “Kim Jong Un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.” It’s opening line stated “If diplomatic dance were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister would be favored to win gold.”

This is bizarre and disgraceful. For one, Kim Yo-Jong is not a powerless dignitary or mere figurehead family member in North Korea. She is the director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Worker’s Party of Korea, where she helps oversee the brainwashing and psychological terror apparatus of the North Korean state. The rush to praise the “diplomacy” of a woman whose country currently holds around 100,000 political prisoners in multi-generational concentration camps is malicious stupidity.

Kim is also a member of the Politburo, and is considered one of the most senior and trusted advisors to Kim Jong Un. She is specifically sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for her role in North Korea’s crimes against humanity. By all accounts, Kim is not just complicit in the atrocities of the North Korean state: she is an enthusiastic participant. While the South Korean government has to treat Kim according to protocol, there is absolutely no excuse for journalists to fawn over her.

This is from Think Progress (click on screenshot). Historic? We’ll see about that. And again, it’s mostly critical of Pence:

Now I’ll grant that Pence could have been civil to Kim Yo-jong, and shook her hand, but to say that this is some kind of contest that North Korea is winning is to neglect the whole historical background of the conflict. It is to be duped—just as many on the American Left were duped by Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Here’s another so-called “Leftist” who’s been duped. He’d do really well in North Korea! I suppose this is the Leftist equivalent of lying for Jesus:

https://twitter.com/danarel/status/963504921923305472

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 14, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Ken Phelps sent some artistic photos of nature. His notes are indented:

Due to positive feedback on not-always-wildlife images,  Jerry is graciously allowing me to post my Flickr address.

Here’s a heavy coating of dew/melted frost on fir saplings.

Cladonia fimbriata [a lichen], growing on an old piece of knotted rope hanging in the yard.

Macro shot of the melting edge of a snow bank. Looks like a small bird, with the colors of the bank behind giving it a Tuscan feel.
Chatterbox Falls, Princess Louisa Inlet. [British Columbia]:
Princess Louisa again. 80 degree day in September, looking up from the boat at a glacier 6000ish feet above us.

Just for fun, some pareidolia. Snow melt rushing down a steep ditch beside a logging road. I see a skeletal wraith, his ghostly female companion, and an angry lizard.

A poll from Matthew: please vote

February 14, 2018 • 7:15 am

Matthew has asked me to request that readers here, which are numerous, give an answer his “quiz”. Please oblige him (and me) by simply clicking on his tweet below and giving your answer. You have less than a day.  I don’t often ask readers to do anything, but I’d appreciate this.

Thanks!

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 14, 2018 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Valentine’s Day: Wednesday, February 14, 2018. I hope you got sufficient goodies for your inamorata or inamorato. And so the food day is also St. Valentine’s Day, but it should be Chocolate Day. For those of us without valentines, well, we should have a treat.

Matthew offers readers this card, which he says is “droll and creepy”:

Grania proffers a nicer valentine, with kitties. :

And here is mine:

There was a St. Valentine, of course, but the man is obscure. Wikipedia says this about him:

Saint Valentine (Italian: San Valentino, Latin: Valentinus), officially Saint Valentine of Rome, is a widely recognized 3rd-century Roman saint commemorated on February 14 and since the High Middle Ages is associated with a tradition of courtly love.

All that is reliably known of the saint commemorated on February 14 is his name and that he was martyred and buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia close to the Ponte Milvio to the north of Rome on that day. It is uncertain whether St. Valentine is two different Saints. Several different martyrologies have been added to later hagiographies that are unreliable.

Because so little is reliably known of him, in 1969 the Catholic Church removed his name from the General Roman Calendar, leaving his liturgical celebration to local calendars.[3] The Roman Catholic Church continues to recognize him as a saint, listing him as such in the February 14 entry in the Roman Martyrology, and authorizing liturgical veneration of him on February 14 in any place where that day is not devoted to some other obligatory celebration in accordance with the rule that on such a day the Mass may be that of any saint listed in the Martyrology for that day.

The Google Doodle (click on screenshot) has an animated pair of animated waterfowl for Valentine’s Day:

On February 14, 1556, the third Mughal Emperor, Akbar, was crowned. On this day in 1779, Captain James Cook was killed by Hawaiians on the Big Island.  And on this day in 1849, James Knox Polk became the first U.S. President to have his picture taken. Here’s that photo, taken by Matthew Brady:

On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for the telephone, and so did Elisha Gray—on the very same morning. Circumstances resulted in Bell’s getting the patent, but it was a complicated mess (see here). On February 2, 1912, Arizona was admitted as the 48th state of the U.S., and the last one contiguous with the other states.  And, of course, it was on this day, in 1929, that the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in Chicago. Engineered by Al Capone, his thugs, disguised as cops, machine-gunned six members of a rival gang in a garage. On this day in 1966, Australian currency was decimalized, and in 1989 this was the day on which Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeni issued his fatwa urging Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. 

On Valentine’s Day of 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft snapped what became the famous Pale Blue Dot photo, showing us the insignificance of our planet in the vastness of space. The photo has over 640,000 pixels, and the dot of Earth (visible in the yellow band that is one of the reflections off the camera) occupies less than one pixel:

(From Wikipedia): Seen from about 6 billion kilometers, Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space

Finally, it was exactly 13 years ago that a group of college students launched YouTube, enabling all of us to see cat videos.

Notables born on this day include Mughal emperor Babur (1483), John Barrymore (1882), Jack Benny (1894), Jimmy Hoffa (1913), Florence Henderson (1934), Michael Bloomberg (1942), Carl Bernstein (1944), Terry Gross (1951), and Renée Fleming (1959). Those who expired on this day include James Cook (1779; see above), William Tecumseh Sherman (1891), Carl Correns, one of the “rediscoverers” of Mendel’s work (1933), David Hilbert (1943), Julian Huxley (1975), P. G. Wodehouse (1975), and George Shearing (2011; you’ll remember that in On the Road Kerouac describes the jazz pianist as “the great God Shearing.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is on the bookshelves behind Malgorzata’s desk:

Hili: Do I look like a Ceiling Cat?
A: Yes, like an almighty Ceiling Cat.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wyglądam jak Kot Sufitowy?
Ja: Tak, jak wszechmocny Kot Sufitowy.

Heather Hastie called my attention to a special Valentine’s Day episode of Simon’s Cat. Sadly, Simon’s Cat attempt at amour and a Valentine present come to naught.

 

From Grania we learn a useful new word, especially for you potential Otherkins out there:

The first appearance of Winnie the Pooh was 94 years ago yesterday:

A wind map:

Matthew found this, and I have to say that that video is plenty scary!

Evidence of prehistoric play in humans:

“Oh, dear” is right!

 

 

Bombardier beetles in action, escaping toad digestion

February 13, 2018 • 2:30 pm

I’ve only scanned this new paper from Biology Letters (reference and free access below, pdf here), but it’s a report involving one species of the famous bombardier beetles, comprising over 500 species in four “tribes” of the family Carabidae in the order Coleoptera (beetles).

They all secrete a hot and toxic spray from their abdomens, resulting from the mixing together of two sequestered compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone. This mixing produces a chemical reaction that not only heats up the mixture to near the boiling point, but produces a gas that violently expels the noxious spray from the abdomen, driving away predators. Here’s a Attenborough video of one driving away a praying mantis:

Bombardier beetles are beloved among creationists, who claim that there’s no way this system could have evolved without killing the beetle. (They apparently claim that the evolution of this process, which produces results only after the two chemicals are in place, would require foresight on the part of natural selection, which it doesn’t have.) But scientists have produced plausible step-by-step scenarios for the evolution of the process: see one scenario here.

The spray not only drives away predators, but can even protect the beetle after it’s eaten. The new paper shows that the species studied, when ingested by toad predators, can not only live for two hours in the toad’s stomach, but can force it to vomit by squirting. The beetle comes out covered with toad-stomach slime, as in the video below, but none the worse for wear. Here’s the paper’s abstract, which is easy to understand.

Some prey animals can escape from the digestive systems of predators after being swallowed. To clarify the ecological factors that determine the success of such an escape, we investigated how the bombardier beetle Pheropsophus jessoensis escapes from two toad species, Bufo japonicusand B. torrenticola, under laboratory conditions. Pheropsophus jessoensis ejects a hot chemical spray from the tip of the abdomen when it is attacked. Although all toads swallowed the bombardier beetles, 43% of the toads vomited the beetles 12–107 min after swallowing them. All the vomited beetles were still alive and active. Our experiment showed that P. jessoensis ejected hot chemicals inside the toads, thereby forcing the toads to vomit. Large beetles escaped more frequently than small beetles, and small toads vomited the beetles more frequently than large toads. Our results demonstrate the importance of the prey–predator size relationship in the successful escape of prey from inside a predator.

But of course you want to see this in action, so here it is (don’t watch right after dinner!):

_______________

Sugiura, S. and T. Sato. 2018. Successful escape of bombardier beetles from predator digestive systems. Biology Letters, online, Feb. 7, 2018. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0647