Count birds, save birds! Citizen science needs you! #Autumnwatch

October 26, 2017 • 8:15 am

by Matthew Cobb

The BBC TV programme Autumnwatch has teamed up with Zooniverse to analyse photographic records of seabirds on cliffs from around the UK. This is something that machines are very poor at, and humans can do easily.

The idea is to calculate how many of different birds are based on cliffs around the UK’s coast. Many species are under threat, so the aim of the project is to help preserve their habitats and protect their futures.

All you have to do is go here and then simply follow the instructions, clicking on every blob that you think is a bird. That’s it. Go and do it now, even if it’s just for five minutes. You’ll be helping seabird conservation!

SW

JAC: I endorse this effort so please go invest give minutes.

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 26, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Duncan McCaskill from Canberra is a new contributor, so give him a hearty welcome for his photos of his country’s robins. Duncan’s notes are indented:

I’ve been a regular reader of your website for years, but have never sent in photos before. Here a few from photos of mine of some Australian robins.

Australian robins (family Petroicidae) are charming perch-and-pounce insect eaters, some of which have red breasts. They owe the name “robin” to their resemblance to the Robin Redbreast of England. Unlike their English namesake, the red breasted Australian robins are bright red. The common name “robin” is used for many, but not all, of the non-red members of the family, including in New Zealand, where there are no red breasted robins.

These photos were mostly taken in the last few months in and around Canberra.

Scarlet Robin (Petroica boodang):

Scarlet Robin (m)

Another scarlet robin:

A Flame Robin (Petroica phoenicea). They are slightly bigger than Scarlet Robins and have a more orangey-red colour.

Flame Robin

A Red-capped Robin (Petroica goodenovii). They are the smallest of the red robins.

Red-capped Robin

Only the male red robins are brightly coloured. The females are duller, such as this female Red-capped Robin. It has a pale wash of red on the forehead. Young birds have no colour.

Red capped robin (female)

Several species of robin have yellow breasts. The Eastern Yellow Robin (Eopsaltria australis) is the only yellow robin that occurs in the Canberra region. It is a bit bigger than any of the red robins. Male and female are identical in appearance.

Eastern Yellow Robin

From further afield, here is a Lemon-bellied flycatcher (Microeca flavigaster) I saw on a recent trip to Darwin in Australia’s top end.

Lemon-bellied Flycatcher

And lastly, from a couple of years ago, a Pale-yellow Robin (Tregellasia capito) in a patch of rainforest on Tamborine Mountain south of Brisbane.

Pale-yellow Robin

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 26, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning; it’s Thursday, October 26, 2017, and we’re already moving toward Halloween—and November. It’s the 299th day of the year. It’s also National Mincemeat Pie Day, a dessert I eschew rather than chew. And it’s Intersex Awareness Day.

I have shoulder therapy this morning, so posting may be a bit light. But it comes to you without remuneration, so forgiveness should be automatic.

On this day in 1774, the first Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, and in 1863 the oldest football association in the world, appropriatly called The Football Association, was formed in London. It is the “FA” in the “FA Cup.” On October 26, 1881, the famous  Gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurred place at Tombstone, Arizona. It lasted only 30 seconds; only bad guys were killed while the good guys, including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, were either uninjured or slightly wounded. Read about it at the link. On this day in 1947, the Maharaja of Kashmir and Jammu decided to let his kingdom join India rather than Pakistan—a decision that is still violently contested.

And, exactly 40 years ago, and I’ll quote Wikipedia with links here, “Ali Maow Maalin, the last natural case of smallpox, develops rash in Merca district, Somalia. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination.”

There’s one other mammalian disease that’s been eradicated from Earth. I mentioned it the other day; do you remember what it is? It’s here. Try to remember this.

Notables born on this day include Domenico Scarlatti (1685), Beryl Markham (1902; read her wonderful book West with the Night), Mahalia Jackson (1911), Hillary Clinton (1947; did anybody read What Happened?), and Julian Schnabel (1951). Those who died on October 26 include Hattie McDaniel (1952), Igor Sikorsky (1972), and Nobel-winning biochemist Arthur Kornberg (2007), who discovered the enzyme DNA polymerase, which turns nucleotides into the DNA strings during DNA replication.

Today’s Hili dialogue was opaque to me again, so I asked Malgorzata for an explanation. Here it is:

I will try to explain: there is (in Polish) a saying “to look the truth in the eye” which means (more or less) “to confront an unwelcome truth”. And there is a search for the truth/facts which is what normal people do when they need to decide something or to form an opinion. Now, people who deal in narratives do not care about the truth/facts. So Hili combined all three and got the people who want to avoid unwelcome facts by looking only at their own narratives in which they see what they want, but definitely not the truth nor facts.

Hili is a smart cat! And, as you can see below, also a cute one:

Hili: Some people in search of the truth are looking their narrative in the eye.
A: And what do they see?
Hili: Whatever they want.
In Polish:
Hili: Niektórzy szukając prawdy patrzą swojej narracji w oczy.
Ja: I co widzą?
Hili: To co chcą.

Out in Winnipeg, we hear from one member of Gus’s staff that “Yesterday, I was in the garden tidying up a bit. Gus wanted to help.”

And so he did:

From reader Barry we have a tweet with videos of cats pwning kids; Barry adds:

If some of these are staged (that appears to be the case), isn’t that dangerous? I suppose a cat would only lash out with its claws when it’s really pissed or threatened. Still, as humorous as some of these clips are, I think it’s generally a good idea to not put babies and cats together.

From Heather Hastie we have a Pareidolia Cow. Look closely! I don’t think this is Photoshopped:

https://twitter.com/landpsychology/status/922629799784402945

And my favorite New Zealand bird, the kea, won the country’s “Bird of the Year” contest. Yay! Here are a few celebratory tw**ts found by Heather:

And a video tw**t:

Heather also has a short analysis of the Harvey Weinstein affair in her latest post.

Clarification: Weinstein post

October 25, 2017 • 5:30 pm

I wrote my post on Harvey Weinstein typing as fast as I could as we were getting ready to board our plane, and would have made it more concise (and hopefully more thoughtful) if I was able to brain faster.

The point I was trying to make was simply this: regardless of whether someone commits crimes because of their genes and environments, or because they have a “mental disorder”, both boil down to someone’s brain obeying the laws of physics and making them behave in a way they couldn’t have behaved otherwise. Thus, Bruni’s desperate attempt to draw a line between these two “causes” (and any line will be arbitrary) was misguided, ignoring what we know about physics and neuroscience. Yes, depending on what the causes were, the treatment and punishments may differ among offenders, but in neither case can you say that the miscreant could have behaved otherwise. I was in fact disturbed that a few commenters seemed to think that there is some libertarian form of agency that could ignore or override the laws of physics. We have no evidence for that, for such evidence would be identical to saying that some physical phenomena are independent of the laws of physics.

In fact, what I wanted to say, but couldn’t quite articulate, was stated by reader “sherfolder” in the comments (I’ve edited this a tiny bit for clarity):

You ask for the reason why Bruni insists on the distinction between psychopathology (formal diagnosis) and harmful predatory behavior – the answer is simple: Only the absence of a formal diagnosis allows him to express all his disgust and aversion to a person like HW is. You are not free to do in the same way to a person who is officially diagnosed with mental disorder.

I’m not sure whether sherfolder interprets this the way I do, but I see it as Bruni’s way to signal his own moral virtue—in a way that’s not helpful.

 

 

Fats Domino died

October 25, 2017 • 4:18 pm

Actually, there were two deaths on Tuesday. One was Mel Green, an old friend and sort of a mentor to me in genetics when I was a postdoc (more on that tomorrow), who died in Davis at 101. The other was  Antoine “Fats” Domino, who died yesterday in Harvey, Louisiana (right near New Orleans) at the age of 89. Given his rotundity, which gave rise to his nickname (he also was only 5’5″), I was surprised to learn he was still alive.

You can read his obituary at the Wikipedia link above, or in the New York Times, so I won’t reprise his life. Although one reader, who informed me of the death, guessed that I didn’t know much about Fats’s music, I certainly knew and appreciated many of his songs. The NYT points out his influence on the formation of rock and roll, and it’s a big one:

Mr. Domino  [JAC: I love how the NYT refuses to use first names, adding a “Mr.”!] had more than three dozen Top 40 pop hits through the 1950s and early ’60s, among them “Blueberry Hill,” “Ain’t It a Shame” (also known as “Ain’t That a Shame,” which is the actual lyric), “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans.” Throughout he displayed both the buoyant spirit of New Orleans, his hometown, and a droll resilience that reached listeners worldwide.

He sold 65 million singles in those years, with 23 gold records, making him second only to Elvis Presley as a commercial force. Presley acknowledged Mr. Domino as a predecessor.

“A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” Presley told Jet magazine in 1957. “But rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

If you listen to his song “The Fat Man“, you can clearly hear the beginning of rock but it was from 1949! (You can hear that and others on Rolling Stones‘s nice page of “Fats Domino: 12 Essential Songs.“)  Here: you listen for yourself and tell me if you don’t discern the roots of rock and roll. In fact, this is rock and roll, mixed with blues and boogie-woogie: you can hear Jerry Lee Lewis coming. If you didn’t know better, you’d guess this was made in the mid 1950s:

If you like Fats, go have a listen at the Rolling Stone page; but I’ll add one more  song: an old live performance of one of his best songs.

RIP Mr. Domino (yes, that’s metaphorical, as some reader always reminds me).

A new book from Piotr Naskrecki

October 25, 2017 • 2:01 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Here are some great recent tweets by ace photographer Piotr, one of which advertises his new book about Costa Rica.