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.
The Dodo reports on a money-grabbing rescue moggie from Oklahoma named Sir Whines A Lot. People love to tease him with dollar bills, which he grabs and pulls indoors. His staff has renamed him “CASHnip Kitty,” and donates the money, as shown in this video, to a homeless shelter. If you’re in Tulsa, the video gives the name and address of the business, and I’ll give a free book of your choice to any reader who gives a buck to the kitty and photographs it.
CASHnip has a Facebook page, and you can read about his antics (or donate) here.
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Reader Ken sent me this video with the note “Here’s a cat listening to the Portsmouth Sinfonia Orchestra – an intentionally awful group.” I’m not sure whether it likes the music.
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For once I like a d*g! Here a helpful hound removed a cup from the head of a stuck cat, though I’m not sure the dog is exhibiting empathy rather than trying to nom the cat or the cup!
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Lagniappe: Maru goes for the ten-box Cat Decathalon, but, sadly, can surmount only nine. Still, I’m amazed that a cat this pudgy can jump that high. This all comes, of course, from Maru’s deep and well known obsession with entering boxes.
We have a potpourri of photos today, first from reader Liz Strahle. (All readers’ notes are indented.)
These are European starlings, gulls, crows, and Canadian geese. The European or Common starlings [Sturnus vulgaris] are a new bird for me. I took all of these pictures in CT. The European starlings and gulls were in the same area and taken at the same time. The crows [JAC: probably American crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos] and Canadian geese [Branta canadensis] were later in the day.
I took the pictures with a Canon T6i with a Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens. I had the camera on the manual setting, adjusting the shutter speed and ISO, and leaving the aperture setting on the camera at f/9. This was my first time out with the camera so I’m still getting familiar again with these. I didn’t edit anything in iPhoto. I only cropped the pictures.
The crows were very far away. They would fly over and then straight down. I found them to be beautiful even though they are crows.
Crows:
Gull:
Canada geese:
Photo of osprey [Pandion haliaetus]with lunch, taken by Bruce Powell and submitted (with permission) by his friend Steven Lawrence:
And an underwater photo by Pete Smith. I don’t know the species of sea turtle, but maybe some readers do:
I had to put up this video because it’s so cool and unusual (Matthew alerted me to it). It’s a cormorant grabbing remoras affixed to the skin of a whale shark off Cabo San Lucas, and a one-off video. (Remember that the whale shark, Rhincodon typus, is the world’s largest fish.)
Fishing is time-consuming business, so diving birds in Mexico’s Baja California are frequenting the local “sushi conveyor” instead. That conveyor comes in the hulking shape of the region’s reigning big fish: the whale shark. The crafty cormorants have figured out that the giant sharks provide an endless supply of remora sashimi.
In the clip, a diving cormorant yanks furiously at a remora fish attached to the skin of a passing whale shark, before finally pulling its meal free. It’s a truly remarkable sighting – in fact, this footage filmed back in 2012 may be the first (and only) example of its kind. According to marine biologist Dr Simon Pierce, who has done extensive work on whale sharks, experts have been excitedly discussing the video since it started making the rounds online earlier this week.
“It’s super cool!” he says. “I don’t think it’s been documented. I’ve never seen or heard of it previously, but that particular cormorant certainly knew what it was doing. Smart bird!”
An extended clip released by Manta Scuba Diving [JAC: this clip] confirms the event was no once-off: after its initial catch, the bird – likely a Neotropic cormorant or double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax brasilianus or Phalacrocorax auritus) – came back for both second breakfast and elevenses.
But wait! There’s more! (My emphasis.):
Remoras attach to their host species (animals like sharks, cetaceans and sea turtles, as well as the odd ship or human diver) using a slatted sucking disc located above the eyes. Once in place, the hitchhikers cruise along effortlessly, ready to gobble up any morsels that float their way.
The immense size of whale sharks offers particularly spacious real estate for remoras – some individuals cart dozens of the freeloaders around – so it’s not entirely surprising that local birds have learned to capitalise on such an abundant food source.
Roominess aside, there’s another reason remoras cling to whale sharks in such large numbers: poop. While it was long believed that the remora diet comprised mainly of their hosts’ mealtime leftovers, scientists have since discovered that the suckerfish prefer to dine on something a bit more plentiful. And you don’t get much more abundant than a whale-shark poop cloud: the animals can drop 56,000 litres in one go.
Well, it snowed for almost 24 hours yesterday, and we have about six inches on the ground in Chicago, but the worst is over, and it has become Saturday, February 10, 2018. No snow is falling now, but we may get an inch or two later. And no word whether the Harris/Krauss/Dillahunty event has been canceled. Today is National “Have a Brownie” Day, again with the mysterious scare quotes, implying that the brownie may be poisoned. Over in Eritrea, it’s Fenkil Day.
There’s another Google Doodle today (click on screenshot to see it), giving an animation of the Animal Olympics. Today is Turtle Curling. Let’s hope Kim Jon-bun doesn’t mess up the games.
On February 10, 1306, Robert the Bruce murdered John Comyn in Greyfriar’s Church in Dumbries, starting the Wars of Scottish Independence. On this day in 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. He was twenty years old, and in the next 21 years had nine children with Victoria. He died at 41 of an unknown stomach ailment. On this day in 1940, according to Wikipedia, “The Soviet Union [began] mass deportations of Polish citizens from occupied eastern Poland to Siberia. During 1939–1941 1.45 million of the people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles, and 7.4% were Jews.” They were engaged in “Sovietizing” the country for the Russians. On November 10, 1962, Gary Powers, pilot of a U2 spy plane that had been shot down two years earlier, was exchanged for the Russian spy Rudolf Abel. On this day in 1996, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue first defeated chess master Garry Kasparov. And, exactly 11 years ago, Illinois senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Presidential election. He won, of course, but the Drumpfenführer is dismantling everything Obama did.
Notables born on this day include John Suckling (1609), Charles Lamb (1775), Boris Pasternak (1890), Jimmy Durante and Bill Tilden (both 1893), Bertolt Brecht (1898), Leontyne Price (1927), Jim and Lou Whittaker, the mountaineer twins (1929; both still with us), and George Stephanopoulos (1961). Those who gave up the ghost on this day include Alexander Pushkin (1837). Honoré Daumier (1879), Joseph Lister (1912), Laura Ingalls Wilder (1957), and Shirley Temple (2014).
Here’s a nice Daumier print of Victor Hugo, done in 1849:
And here’s Leontyne Price singing the beautiful aria “Vissi d’arte” from Puccni’s Tosca:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there’s been a murder, but Hili has clammed up:
A: There are some feathers on the verandah!
Hili: Nothing to talk about.
In Polish:
Ja: Na werandzie są jakieś piórka!
Hili: Nie ma o czym mówić.
Some tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely mantid fly (it’s a fly!). Look at those legs!
Three weeks ago a mantisfly (Pseudoclimaciella sp.) from @GorongosaPark laid about a thousand microscopic eggs. Today all the eggs are hatching. Tiny campodeiform larvae will try to get in contact with a female spider and enter her egg sack to devour all the eggs inside. pic.twitter.com/rkzA9fjGst
This Far Side Cartoon appeared on my Facebook feed, and reminded me how good Gary Larson was. Why, oh why, did he have to completely give up cartooning? Even one a month would be better than nothing!
I still remember that when John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, did his three circuits in 1962, it took about ninety minutes per orbit. Apparently that’s still the case, and this video, made from photos taken by the International Space Station, shows a complete orbit in real time. It’s 92½ minutes long, and mesmerizing. You might just want to put it on your screen (leave the music on if you won’t give yourself away!) and let it roll. Matthew, who sent it to me, gives more information:
Made by Seán Doran using NASA images (with a Joyce quote at the beginning). Crank up the sound and watch in full screen, (lasts 90 mins!) Spot the geographical locations, too.
Extra points if you identify the Joyce quote, and super-extra points if you give its significance in the book. Oh, and look below the video for more information from YouTube.
More stuff;
Orbit is a real time reconstruction of time lapse photography taken on board the International Space Station by NASA’s Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit.
The structure of the film is built around a nested selection of Phaeleh’s last three albums; Lost Time, Illusion of the Tale & Somnus. The tone & pacing of each track influenced the choice of material used.
Typically each time lapse sequence was photographed at 1 frame per second.
Each sequence was processed in Photoshop. A dirtmap was made in order to repair dust, blemishes and hot pixel artifacts that would otherwise confuse the re-timing phase of the workflow resulting in strobes and distracting blurs.
Image processing techniques were used to emphasize features on the Earth’s surface. Every sequence consists of a number of layers that when masked, processed & blended correctly produce the final look of each shot.
To make sure each sequence was recreated faithfully to the actual rate of speed observed I referenced time-stamps on the first and last frame in the sequence and used frame interpolation software to produce the other 59 frames.
The length of the film is exactly the length of time it takes ISS to orbit the Earth once, 92 minutes & 39 seconds.
The snow continues to come down, and I’ll soon head home to wrap up, read, and wonder if I’ll see the Great Krauss/Harris Debate tomorrow. In the meantime, I was amused and then saddened by this tw**t, sent by Grania:
Leaving journalism because I'll never be able to write a better headline than this one. pic.twitter.com/rQprQ4WwOc
The headline and story come from Metro, and the backstory is ineffably sad. Yes, Thomas, a goose from New Zealand, fell in love with a black swan named Henry, and courted him for 24 years. The swan’s heart was then stolen by a female black swan named Henrietta, and the goose, a third wheel, stayed and helped the pair of swans raise 68 cygnets over the next six years. Then things went really downhill, including the loss of Thomas’s sight:
His complicated relationship made him a local celebrity with many birdwatchers spending hours watching his love life unfold.
But his happiness came to an end when Henry died in 2009 and Henrietta flew off with another swan, leaving Thomas all alone. He eventually went on to father his own babies, but they were then stolen by another goose called George.
Thomas was then taken to the Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust in 2013 as his health deteriorated
The trust said: ‘As well as making other blind bird friends to spend his days with, Thomas helped foster a couple of broods of cygnets along the way. ‘
[That was] for nostalgic reasons and boy, did he do a good job. ‘He lived for corn on the cob and if it wasn’t there when we put him back into his house at night, he was not happy.’
Thomas just died at 40. Rest in peace, fair unrequited goose.
Here’s Henry helping his faithless friends:
(From Metro): Thomas, the Bisexual goose (pictured centre), has died aged 40 (Picture: Facebook/Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust)
The name Valerie Tarico rings a bell with me; I suspect I’ve heard her name around secular or atheist meetings. And yes, her website confirms that she’s a secularist:
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Iowa and postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington. . . .
As a writer Valerie tackles the intersection between religious belief, psychology and politics, with a growing focus on women’s issues and contraceptive technologies that she thinks are upstream game changers for a broad range of challenges that humanity faces.
Valerie is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light, and Deas and Other Imaginings: 10 Spiritual Folktales for Children. She currently writes for the Alternet, and occasionally for Huffington Post and Truthout.
According to the Daily Wire, Tarico wrote an article for Salon called “Why is the Bible so badly written?”, and, after it was up for a while, there was sufficient pushback from readers that the piece was pulled. Here’s the evidence from Twitter, plus you can see the vestigial remnants of the piece on this page, with its URL and title remaining. Otherwise, the page is blank.
Thank you for your feedback. We heard you. Upon further review, we determined that this article, which was republished to Salon from a partner website, did not meet our editorial standards.
Why was the article pulled? Well, it’s still up on Alternet in what appears to be its original form (I’ve also archived it here), and I’m not sure why it didn’t meet Salon’s abysmally low “editorial standards”. There are parts of it that aren’t written particularly well, but they’re no worse than the fare you usually get at Salon.
No, the article was pulled because it points out something that every rational person knows: the Bible is a human-made document; contradicts itself (e.g., the conflicting two creation stories as well as the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection); is subject to translation errors (e.g, Mary being a “virgin”); is poorly written and tedious (something I’ve always maintained, contra Dawkins; and was cobbled together over hundreds of years, with the Gospels that we have being a selection from a greater number.
Her most damning accusation is that there’s no evidence that the Bible was dictated by God (or written by Moses et al.). Her argument that God would have produced more beautiful language is a bit weak, but this part, a version of Carl Sagan’s critique, is telling:
As a modern person reading the Bible, one can’t help but think about how the pages might have been better filled. Could none of this have been pared away? Couldn’t the writers have made room instead for a few short sentences that might have changed history: Wash your hands after you poop.Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to.Witchcraft isn’t real. Slavery is forbidden. We are all God’s chosen people.
At the end, Tarico made a fatal mistake: she compares the Bible to her friend’s collection of pigs, which, like my own collection of penguins, was a grab-bag of various effigies given by friends and acquired at thrift shops. As she says, “The texts of the Bible are a bit of a pig collection.” Oy! Pigs! She should have used another simile, for that one—and the rest of the article—brought out the termites. Here are a few objections reproduced by The Daily Wire:
Your article decrying a "badly written" book can't even bother to quote or cite any scholarly evangelical definitions or defenders of inerrancy or inspiration.
It goes on. Have a look at Tarico’s piece, which would surely be enlightening to Biblical literalists with an open mind (is that an oxymoron?) who didn’t know the evidence for its human origins. Tarico’s is not the greatest piece in the world, but it’s no worse than most of the stuff on Salon (and is better than some); but it was apparently deep-sixed because it criticized the Holy Bible.
Salon, of course, has a deep history of damning atheists (including indicting us for sexual malfeasance), going after Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and so on. It’s no surprise that they’d excise an article revealing that the Bible isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
The only issue is why The Daily Wire revealed this. The site is a right-wing venue run by an orthodox Jew, Ben Shapiro. The editors are surely sympathetic to at least the Old Testament, but Tarico goes after that, too. All of their articles have an ideological agenda, and I suspect that what they’re doing is simply gloating about Salon having removed Tarico’s piece.
