Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 9, 2016 • 6:00 am
After a week of almost no sun, Chicago begins yet another four days of gray, dreary weather, with rain or snow today and Monday, highs near the freezing point, and no sun till Tuesday. On this day in 1916, the bloody battle of Gallipoli ended with a Turkish victory, bringing glory and later the governance of Turkey to Kemal Atatürk, a secularist whose work is sadly now being undone by the odious Tayyip Erdogan.  On this day in 1908, author, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was born, an event celebrated in most of the Northern Hemisphere with a Google Doodle (but, as the next post shows, the U.S. gets butterflies). She’s buried in a double grave with her lover Jean-Paul Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery, where I’ve seen the plot. Pictures of the Doodle and the gravesite are below. Also on January 9 (1922), Har Gobind Khorana was born, later to win a Nobel Prize for helping decipher the genetic code. You can read about his work in Matthew Cobb’s spellbinding new book, Life’s Greatest Secret. In 1950, only eleven days after my own day of birth, Alec Jeffries, developer of DNA fingerprinting, was born. And, on this day in 1324, Marco Polo died at the age of seventy. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still cannot find the Door Into Summer;
Hili: Look, the snow is also on this side of the house.
A: I expected that much.
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In Polish:

Hili: Patrz, z tej strony domu też jest śnieg.
Ja: Tego się spodziewałem.

The Beauvoir Doodle and her burial plot with Sartre:

unnamed

Sartre+Beauvoir_grave

Further lagniappe: a cartoon on cat breeds from Facebook (h/t reader Taskin):

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Pining for the fjords and other stories

January 8, 2016 • 2:30 pm

by Grania

Sometimes Twitter is just what you need on a dismal Friday evening, especially when you tend to follow scientists and comedians, and even more especially when those scientists and comedians know each other and have worked together on such excellent science shows as The Infinite Monkey Cage.

But I expected to see this as much as I expected the Spanish Inquisition or a comfy chair, but there it was; and so I leave it here for your delectation.

 

1

And the immediate response:

2

I don’t think anybody here needs any introductions to anyone, but just in case:

Brian Cox is a UK physicist currently at the University of Manchester, one half of the presenters of TIMC and presenter of various TV science series.

Eric Idle is one of the Monty Python comedy group (I don’t really have to explain this to anybody, surely?)

And of course for comparison, the original Four Yorkshiremen sketch sans Norwegian fjords.

Media hypocrisy: they can’t bear to show Muhammad mocked, but mocking God is fine

January 8, 2016 • 12:45 pm

When the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place a year ago yesterday, it was of course widely reported. But one bit of reportorial information was missing: the cartoons that brought on that attack. It was hard to find images of any earlier cartoons of Muhammad or even of the touching first cover that appeared after the slaughter—this one:

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Of course they had an excuse: “we didn’t want to offend people”, but the real reason was cowardice. The magazines didn’t want the worry of attacks by Muslim terrorists. But those covers were news, so how could you report on the murders without showing what incited them? That reminds me of the reprehensible publication of an entire book by Yale University Press on the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons without showing a single one of them. 

The Daily Caller gives a list (with evidence) of cowardly venues that refused, and still refuse, to publish any Charlie Hebdo cartoons that show Muhammad. They include (and note that I’ve checked only a few for myself):

NBC
MSNBC
CNBC
The Associated Press (AP)
CNN
The New York Daily News (shameful image below):
Blerg

The Jewish Chronicle
The New York Times
The Telegraph (shameful image below):

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ABC News (US)
CBS News (they do seem to have published the cover at the top)

Okay, so those outlets continue to censor or not publish Muhammad cartoons. If their reason—fear of offending the faithful—was genuine, we now have a control. How did these venues do with the new Charlie Hebdo cartoon, the first-anniversary issue that shows not God’s Islamic prophet, but a generic god himself? Whaddya think? If they’re acting out of respect for Muslims by not showing a caricatured Muhammad, surely they’ll act out of respect for all theists by not showing a caricatured God—right?

Don’t bet on it.  Here’s the new cartoon:

Vatican-reacts-to-God-as-terrorist-on-Charlie-Hebdo-cover-Sad-paradox-of-our-world

And here, from MediaIte, are the venues that won’t show Muhammad but will show an assassin God. (The ones with links are those I found myself.) They are not only cowardly but hypocritical.

CNN
The Associated Press
MSNBC
CBN
The Telegraph
ABC News (US)
CNBC

I’m not sure which is worse: refusing to show the Muhammad cartoons, which capitulates to fear of Muslim wrath and abjures good reporting, or refusing to show the Muhammad cartoons and showing the God cartoons, which proves that the excuse of not giving offense was a lie. (Remember, the Vatican saw the anniversary cover as “blasphemy.”) In both cases the terrorists have won, but in the second the hypocrisy is deafening.

MSNBC, supposedly a liberal venue, may be the worst. According to The Washington Post (which has shown both Muhammad and God cartoons), MSNBC wouldn’t show Muhammad cover, but published the God cover, and then canceled it when their double standard was pointed out:

As a member of the NBC News family, MSNBC last year elected not to show its viewers the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that circulated in the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — even after those cartoons became newsworthy for motivating a murderous terrorist attack on the magazine’s offices. “Our NBC News Group Standards team has sent guidance to NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC not to show headlines or cartoons that could be viewed as insensitive or offensive,” an NBC News spokesperson said.

So how to handle the edition commemorating the anniversary of that attack? This one carries a depiction of God-as-terrorist, complete with a rifle strapped to his back and a line that reads, “One year on: the killer is still at large.”

An MSNBC rep told the Erik Wemple Blog today that the network, consistent with last year’s approach, isn’t showing images of the cover. Then we pointed out that Mediaite’s Alex Griswold had snared a screengrab of MSNBC indeed showing the cover.

In a reply that merits no further commentary from this blog, the MSNBC rep says that the network showed the current Charlie Hebdo cover up until it confirmed that the image was of God. “Once we found that out, we stopped showing it,” notes the rep.

I would love to hear what Rachel Maddow has to say about this. I don’t watch her regularly, but I do admire her frankness and wonder if she’s ever addressed her own network’s craven behavior.

 

A very nice video on the evidence for evolution from cetaceans

January 8, 2016 • 10:00 am

At last! An evolution video that is informative and doesn’t have any big problems (at least none that I could find). This video, concentrating on cetacean evolution, might be useful for classes that give the evidence for evolution. There are some great photos and great evidence here. The video is made by Stated Clearly, which you can support on Patreon.

Hindu blasphemy: cricketer M. S. Dhoni in trouble for posing as Vishnu

January 8, 2016 • 8:45 am

We usually think of “blasphemy” as a crime committed against Islam, but it’s also a crime to mock religion in many places. Those include India, where people have been prosecuted for “insulting” Catholicism and Hinduism. And remember the three people jailed in Myanmar for advertising an event at a bar with a poster of Buddha wearing headphones? That violated that country’s laws against “denigrating religion.”

In fact, blasphemy laws are widespread. The Wikipedia article on “blasphemy law” gives this map of countries having such laws, and the possible punishments. Note that the death penalty is applied only in Muslim-majority countries, but even in Canada “blaphemous libel,” which mocks Christianity in a manner deemed not in good faith, is illegal, as it is in New Zealand, where you can be jailed for it. (In both places the laws are rarely enforced, but having them on the books is an offense to free speech.)

And while we’re on the subject of Canada, they still enforce “hate speech” laws that may incite “extreme feelings of opprobrium and enmity against a racial or religious group.” Finally, blasphemy, defined as “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter” against religion, is still illegal in Ireland.

Blasphemy_laws_worldwide.svg Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 7.32.51 AM

We don’t hear much about blasphemy in India, which is far away, but such cases will become increasingly visible since the right-wing and pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party came into power.  Famously, my Chicago colleague Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, An Alternative History, was banned, with all copies on sale in India ordered pulped, on the grounds that she denigrated Hinduism. (Needless to say, she didn’t.)

The present case involves a famous cricket player. I hardly know anything about cricket, but I have heard of M. S. (Mahendra Singh) Dhoni, the ex-captain of India’s cricket team and one of the best wicket-keepers and batsmen of our time. Dhoni appeared on this magazine cover:

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According to today’s Hindustan Times, Dhoni’s in trouble for this again (he was previously let off by the Supreme Court for the same image):

A local court in Andhra Pradesh on Friday issued non-bailable arrest warrant against cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni in a case accusing him of hurting religious sentiments by appearing as Lord Vishnu in a magazine cover holding a shoe in his hands.

Dhoni, who is in Australia for a limited over series, was not available for comments but his lawyer and manager said the one-day captain was never issued summons in the case.

The case against Dhoni, 34, was filed by a VHP leader in Anantapur town for allegedly hurting religious sentiments of Hindus while posing as the deity in the cover of Business Today magazine in April, 2013. The magazine’s report titled ‘God of Big Deals’ was on the brand value of the former Test captain.

The court of the additional judicial first class magistrate has asked police to produce Dhoni on February 25.

Of course Dhoni’s holding products other than a shoe (this article is about his lucrative endorsements), but showing the bottom of your shoe to someone in India is considered rude and uncouth. When you sit on the floor, you always tuck your feet under, never pointing your soles at someone.  Once I was chased into an Udaipur post office by a cycle-rickshaw driver who tried to exort a big fare from me (he got lost and tried to charge me a whopping fee for the time it took to find the post office), with the driver taking off his shoe and waving the sole in my face. That, I suppose, is why the article singles out the shoe rather than the soft drink.

There’s not a chance in hell that Dhoni will see jail for this, for the Indian justice system is tilted in favor of the entitled, and how could a judge put away the star member of India’s cricket team?

But others haven’t fared as well.  Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku was forced to flee the country after exposing a supposed “miracle” of water flowing from a Jesus statue. The “miracle” involved seepage from a nearby toilet into the statue (people had drunk the water, too!), but the exposure of fraud wasn’t good enough: Edamaruku was still accused of violating blasphemy laws, and, facing death threats and a prison sentence, fled to Europe, where he is now.

Readers’ wildlife videos

January 8, 2016 • 7:30 am

As a Friday treat, I’ll put up two videos from among reader Tara Tanaka’s many wonderful digiscoped vignettes from Florida and elsewhere. Her Vimeo page, which has 188 videos, is here, and her Flickr site with photos is here. Tara’s notes are indented below.

The first one, from June, 2014, shows a brood of wood ducks, Aix sponsa, hitting the water for the first time.

This box was farther away than the one in the June 24th video, right in front of a large stand of cypress trees. As with the first one, I slowed all of their jumps to 25% of normal speed. I’d thought that the first one had landed on his back, but in slow motion you can see that like a cat, he righted himself before hitting the water just below.

This hen had very distinctive markings around her eyes and on her beak, so when I saw a hen and five young ducklings on August 6th, it was easy to go back to the videos I’d taken of the hens in their boxes and determine that she is the hen that emerged from “box 2” with her 8 hatchlings on June 26th, almost 6 weeks before. A couple of the 6-week old ducklings had some funny feathers on the sides of their heads, and I couldn’t help but wonder if one of them was “Albert Einstein.”

I believe Einstein is the last duckling to emerge—at about 1:42.

And here’s a really nice video of a pair of whooping cranes (Grus americana) leaving at sunrise and returning in the evening. These are the tallest birds in America and one of the rarest. Hunting and habitat destruction drove the species down to just 15 individuals in 1941 (estimates range up to 21), but arduous conservation efforts have caused a modest recovery: there are now about 600 total, with two-thirds of those in the wild and the rest in captivity. That’s still not many, and the species is listed as endangered.  Tara’s notes on the video:

The chance of seeing a Whooping Crane in the wild is 1 in 13,000,000, so having this pair winter in Tallahassee for the last 3 years has been extremely special.

On this foggy morning the pair left their usual nightly roosting pond just as the sun was rising, and they returned after the sun had set.
This was shot with the GH3 + 20mm mounted on a Swarovski STX95 scope using manual focus.  They were a handful to keep in the frame, and I almost lost him on take-off when I had to step around and over one of my tripod legs.  I had to bump the ISO up to 5000 for the evening part of the video.

I hope you enjoy these special birds.

Here’s the range of the bird; as you’ve seen before, the hand-raised young ones are taught to migrate using ultralight aircraft:

grus_amer_AllAm_map

Friday: Hili dialogue

January 8, 2016 • 5:27 am

One more day until the work week ends for normal people, but a week closer to death for all of us. On this day in history, Alfred Russel Wallace was born in 1823 (he lived ninety years), as was Stephen Hawking in 1942. It’s also the Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, a wooden statue in New Orleans, Louisiana, to which are attributed several miracles.  Meanwhile in Dobrzyn and Wroclawek, Hili and Leon are both suffering from the snow and cold weather. I have no Leon monlogue, but here’s Hili:

Hili: Is this snow as cold as last year?
A: Try it.
Hili: I’m afraid it’s colder.
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In Polish:

Hili: Czy ten śnieg jest tak samo zimny jak w zeszłym roku?
Ja: Spróbuj.
Hili: Boję się, że jest jeszcze zimniejszy.

And here’s a picture of Hili and her hot water bottle taken just half an hour ago. The animals can’t go out because of the snow, so they’re keeping warm by fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy:

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Because we’re lacking Leon, here’s a kitten getting out of its leash at the vet’s. LOOK AT THAT FACE!

Unleashed - Imgur