Readers’ wildlife photos

October 5, 2017 • 8:00 am

I implore you to send in your good photos. I have a backlog but it’s getting thin.  Today we have some Darwin-themed photos from reader Terry, who wrote these notes (ID the plants if you know them):

My wife and I celebrated 30 years married this year, and back in July we stayed in Dover Castle for a couple of days – bliss.  Being pretty close to Down House we took the opportunity to tour Darwin’s beautiful home and explore the garden.  Attached are some lovely shots of Bees among the flowers.

From reader Tom Carrolan: “Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). At first light!

From reader Bob Felton (ID needed):

This is the view outside my bedroom window this morning, in Youngsville, North Carolina, about 20-feet above the ground … breakfast is about 2-inches long …I have no idea what kind of spider that is, or what the correct name of the green thing he is eating is, either.  Sorry.

And from reader James Thompson, a bison (Bison bison) photographed a few days after the eclipse in Yellowstone National Park:

I noticed that Bison aren’t always in the herd.  Saw a number of these guys wandering by themselves. One came out of trees and I almost hit him.

Ishiguro nabs literature Nobel

October 5, 2017 • 7:00 am

This morning, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I have to say that it’s well deserved. Having read two of his novels (Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, both made into superb movies), I think he deserves the Prize for those alone; and I must read some of his other works.

If you haven’t seen the official announcement of a Nobel, here’s Ishiguro’s this morning; the formal announcement, in Swedish, starts at 15:00. I think you’ll understand the important words.  And there’s an interview with Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Academy, starting at 22:50. She mentions her two favorite Ishiguro novels.

Here’s the brief press release; I suspect that more details will be posted soon:

And a happy man:

Kazuo Ishiguro

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 5, 2017 • 6:45 am

Yesterday on the “pet peeve” thread, which to my surprise got over 340 comments, a reader noted that one big pet peeve was someone greeting you with “Good morning.” But I have to do it here; the laws of physics decree it. So, good morning on Thursday, October 5, 2017. There’s a lot to write about today, but I have shoulder therapy and other tasks, so I’ll do my best. Be aware that one post is about the cleverness of raccoons. It’s National Apple Betty Day, also known as apple cobbler, and I’m told it was one of the Reagans’ favorite desserts in the White House. If you know how this dish got its name, please enlighten us below. The Harvest Moon (an October full moon) will be at its peak this evening, though it looks mighty fine right now (I saw it walking to work). It’s also World Teachers’ Day, so if you’ve learned anything on this site, go into in your wallet, find those green pieces of paper with pictures of Andrew Jackson on them, and send them along.

On this day in 1793, during the French Revolution, Christianity was disestablished in France. Those who opposed this, of course, were espousing antidisestablishmentarianism, a word my father taught me when I was young.  On October 5, 1877, Chief Joseph surrendered his Nez Perce band of Native Americans to General Nelson A. Miles. It was a sad day, but the troubles were just beginning for that tribe. On this day in 1938, the Nazis invalidated all the passports of the Jews.  On October 5, 1944, women acquired the right to vote in France; I had no idea it was that late. On this day in 1962, The Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do” on side A and “P.S. I Love You” on side B, was released in the United Kingdom. On October 5, 1970, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) was founded; I hope you’re watching the “Vietnam” series right now, as it’s very good.  And: First Canadian in Space Day; on October 5, 1984, Marc Garneau, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, became the first Canadian in space.  Also on the ship were rations of freeze-dried poutine and Tim Hortons donuts, which Garneau requested. Finally, in this day in 2001, Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record for a single season, poling numbers 71 and 72 for the San Francisco Giants; he went on to hit one more, setting a record of 73 that hasn’t been surpassed.

Notables born on this day include Jonathan Edwards (1703), Francis Peyton Rous (1879), Larry Fine of the Three Stooges  and Ray Kroc of McDonald’s (both 1902), Willi Unsoeld (1926), Steve Miller (1943; one of the worst rock performers of our time), Maya Lin (1959; see her in the penultimate episode of “The Vietnam War”), our own Website Physicist™ Sean M. Carroll (1966), and Kate Winslet (1975). Those who died on October 5 include Tecumseh (1813), Louis Brandeis (1941), Nobel Laureate Lars Onsager (1976; he was responsible for having me kicked out of my dorm at The Rockefeller University, but that’s another story), Rodney Dangerfield (2004, died without respect) and Bert Jansch and Steve Jobs (both 2011).

Here’s one of my favorite Burt Jansch songs:

Oh hell, here’s another:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has apparently heard of Chairman Meow:

Hili: Do not disturb.
A: Why not?
Hili: I’m preparing for a Great Leap Forward.
 In Polish:
Hili: Nie przeszkadzaj.
Ja: W czym?
Hili: Szykuję się do Wielkiego Skoku.

Matthew sent this tweet in which life imitates art: the rabbit/bird illusion:

And three tweets pinched from Heather Hastie. First, a cat selfie gone wrong:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/915743866925527046

And two kakapo tweets; I guess they’re reducing inbreeding on the island. I wish Dr. Andrew Digby would take pity on me and invite me to the kakapo island:

Poor Jimmy!!!

Tiny owl asks for pats, and bonus bobcat mom with kittens

October 4, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Two animal videos to end a long, overcast day.

From YouTube: “My pet owl Nicha loves to play and for me to show her attention.”

Matthew sent this wonderful trailcam video of a mother bobcat and her two bouncy kittens:

US votes against UN resolution banning the capricious and discriminatory use of the death penalty; vote widely misinterpreted by the Left

October 4, 2017 • 1:30 pm

I’m seeing all kinds of “memes”, like this one on Facebook, about the U.S.’s vote (see also here) against a UN Human Rights Council measure that called for ending the capricious application of the death penalty and its use on juveniles, gays, blasphemers, adulterers, and those who are mentally handicapped:

In fact, while the measure (which you can see here), does call for member states to stop using the death penalty as punishment for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and homosexuality, the measure went far beyond that, in a way that explains why the U.S. voted against it.  But I first have to say that I think the U.S. shouldn’t have voted against it, and I deplore Nikki Haley’s vote.

Here’s some of what the measure recommended; the part that everybody’s singling out is provision 6 (my emphasis):

1. Urges all States to protect the rights of persons facing the death penalty and other affected persons by complying with their international obligations, including the rights to equality and non-discrimination;

2. Calls upon States that have not yet acceded to or ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights aiming at the abolition of the death penalty to consider doing so;

3. Calls upon States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not applied on the basis of discriminatory laws or as a result of discriminatory or arbitrary application of the law;

4. Calls upon States to ensure that all accused persons, in particular poor and economically vulnerable persons, can exercise their rights related to equal access to justice, to ensure adequate, qualified and effective legal representation at every stage of civil and criminal proceedings in capital punishment cases through effective legal aid, and to ensure that those facing the death penalty can exercise their right to seek pardon or commutation of their death sentence;

5. Urges States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that the death penalty is not applied against persons with mental or intellectual disabilities and persons below 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime, as well as pregnant women;

6. Also urges States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not imposed as a sanction for specific forms of conduct such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations; A/HRC/36/L.6 4

7. Calls upon States to comply with their obligations under article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and to inform foreign nationals of their right to contact the relevant consular post;

8. Also calls upon States to undertake further studies to identify the underlying factors that contribute to the substantial racial and ethnic bias in the application of the death penalty, where they exist, with a view to developing effective strategies aimed at eliminating such discriminatory practices;

9. Calls upon States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to make available relevant information, disaggregated by gender, age, nationality and other applicable criteria, with regard to their use of the death penalty, inter alia, the charges, number of persons sentenced to death, the number of persons on death row, the number of executions carried out and the number of death sentences reversed, commuted on appeal or in which amnesty or pardon has been granted, as well as information on any scheduled execution, which can contribute to possible informed and transparent national and international debates, including on the obligations of States with regard to the use of the death penalty;

10. Requests the Secretary-General to dedicate the 2019 supplement to his quinquennial report on capital punishment to the consequences arising at various stages of the imposition and application of the death penalty on the enjoyment of the human rights of persons facing the death penalty and other affected persons, paying specific attention to the impact of the resumption of the use of the death penalty on human rights, and to present it to the Human Rights Council at its forty-second session;

There are 47 countries on the Human Rights Council, and 27 voted in favor of this resolution (nonbinding of course), while 13 voted against. Those against were these:  Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Seven countries abstained: Cuba, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Tunisia, Nigeria, and Kenya. Here’s the overall vote:

But as you see from the measure, most of it is about countries not applying the death penalty in a capricious way, ensuring that those accused have reasonable and consistent rights, and ensuring that it is not applied in a discriminatory fashion or against those who are mentally deficient or underage. (When the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty in 1972, it was because capital punishment was inconsistently applied, and, said some judges, given preferentially to black people. Capital punishment was reinstated in the US four years later.) One could easily have made a meme saying that “Nikki Haley voted in favor of the death penalty for juveniles.”

Finally, note that the measure doesn’t call for ending the death penalty, and in that sense it didn’t go far enough. No civilized country should be executing criminals.

As you may know from reading here, I’m opposed to the death penalty in general, so yes, I think the U.S. should have supported this resolution. But it didn’t vote against it, as some maintain, because we wanted the right to execute gay people, adulterers, or blasphemers. We don’t: those are not crimes in America. The US voted against this resolution—as the Obama administration voted against a similar but not identical resolution—because it implies a moratorium on the death penalty, and the death penalty is legal in America. We were voting against the penalty as a whole, not advocating its use against gays, blasphemers, and so on. As NBC News reports:

In a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert explained why the U.S. voted against the resolution.

“We voted against that resolution because of broader concerns with the resolution’s approach in condemning the death penalty in all circumstances,” Nauert said. “The United States unequivocally condemns the application of the death penalty for conduct such as homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery, and apostasy. We do not consider such conduct appropriate for criminalization.”

Even gay rights advocates are calling out the misconception propagated in the meme above:

Jessica Stern, executive director of OutRight Action International, a global LGBTQ human rights organization, acknowledged the U.S. vote on the U.N. resolution was misconstrued.

“There’s been some misreporting and misconceptions,” Stern told NBC News. “The U.S. always opposes this death penalty resolution, because it makes reference to a global moratorium on the death penalty. For both Obama and Trump, so long as the death penalty is legal in the U.S., it takes this position.”

“OutRight will call out the Trump administration on its many rights violations, its many abuses of power from LGBTI violations to xenophobia, but this particular instance is not an example of a contraction of support on LGBTI rights,” Stern continued. “It would be a mistake to interpret its opposition to a death penalty resolution to a change in policy.”

This is another example of a kneejerk reaction against something that people haven’t bothered to read—or understand. Yes, we should have voted the other way, but for other reasons, as being gay is not a crime (much less a capital crime) in America. So, Facebook posters, be aware of the real reason Haley voted against the resolution.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson (and another contest)

October 4, 2017 • 12:15 pm

I’m not keeping track on who’s guessed correctly on the biology, physics, chemistry Nobel Prizes, but we may already have a winner. (If you were the first to guess at least one winner in two of those categories, let me know). As announced by many venues this morning, including the New York Times, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went, not to those who developed the CRISPR/Cas9 system of gene editing, but to Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne, Joachim Frank of Columbia University in New York, and Richard Henderson of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, UK. Their award was for developing high-acuity methods for visualizing biomolecules.

The Swedish Academy of Science’s press release is here, and it’s a good place to see a summary of the research and some of the computer-processed images that have resulted from their cryogenic methods. (For a longer and more technical explanation, go here.) Here’s part of their summary, which explains the contributions of each of the three winners:

Researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.

Electron microscopes were long believed to only be suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroys biological material. But in 1990, Richard Henderson succeeded in using an electron microscope to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution. This breakthrough proved the technology’s potential.

Joachim Frank made the technology generally applicable. Between 1975 and 1986 he developed an image processing method in which the electron microscope’s fuzzy twodimensional images are analysed and merged to reveal a sharp three-dimensional structure.

Jacques Dubochet added water to electron microscopy. Liquid water evaporates in the electron microscope’s vacuum, which makes the biomolecules collapse. In the early 1980s, Dubochet succeeded in vitrifying water – he cooled water so rapidly that it solidified in its liquid form around a biological sample, allowing the biomolecules to retain their natural shape even in a vacuum.

Following these discoveries, the electron microscope’s every nut and bolt have been optimised. The desired atomic resolution was reached in 2013, and researchers can now routinely produce three-dimensional structures of biomolecules. In the past few years, scientific literature has been filled with images of everything from proteins that cause antibiotic resistance, to the surface of the Zika virus. Biochemistry is now facing an explosive development and is all set for an exciting future.

Here are two photos of how it’s done and how the images are analyzed, courtesy of the Swedish Academy site:

Here are images of three molecules visualized by the method:

(From Swedish Academy summary, as is the following picture): Over the last few years, researchers have published atomic structures of numerous complicated protein complexes. a. A protein complex that governs the circadian rhythm. b. A sensor of the type that reads pressure changes in the ear and allows us to hear. c. The Zika virus.

Here’s another molecule, glutamate dehydrogenase, in which the improvement of resolution by the new method can be seen:

Fig. 9. The resolution progression of cryo-EM, illustrated by a representation of glutamate dehydrogenase with an increasing level of detail from left to right. For a protein of this size, 334 kDa, the 1.8 Å resolution to the right (38) could only be achieved after 2012/13. After an image by V. Falconieri (see ref. 38). Illustration: © Martin Högbom, Stockholm University.

And the winners:

(from the NYT) From left, Dr. Dubochet, Dr. Frank and Dr. Henderson. Credit From left: University of Lausanne, Columbia University and Cambridge University, via European Pressphoto Agency

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday in Sweden; the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway; and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday in Sweden. If you want to guess, go ahead. Here’s another offer: if you guess who gets the literature prize, I’ll send you an autographed copy of either of my trade books. You can’t be the other winner, and you get only one guess. (Don’t you think it’s time Salman Rushdie got the Prize? Or Richard Dawkins?)

A book recommendation: “Unwanted Advances” by Laura Kipnis

October 4, 2017 • 10:15 am

I recently wrote about the mess that resulted when the Obama administration (the Office of Civil Rights) sent its “Dear Colleague” letter to American colleges, in effect telling them that all cases of sexual assault and harassment on campuses should be adjudicated by a “preponderance of evidence” standard: if it’s more likely than not that the accuser is right, then the accused is to be found guilty. Since there are no uniform standards about how to conduct hearings, and the accused is often denied due process, and because “preponderance of evidence” is often construed as simply “believe the accuser,” it’s resulted in a mess, with palpably innocent people (usually men) kicked out of school (sometimes on the testimony of third parties), and a rash of lawsuits against colleges.

I wrote about the Title IX mess not long ago, and ask readers to decide what standards of evidence to use, putting up a poll about how to adjudicate campus sexual assaults. Here are the results of that poll, which clearly show that readers think these things should be handled by the police and the courts:

I’ve just finished a new book by Laura Kipnis (a professor of filmmaking at nearby Northwestern University): Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which I recommend highly (it’s a short 239 pages). It has three parts: the recounting of how Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern, was drummed out of his job (he resigned in 2015) after two students (a grad student and an undergrad, neither of them his students), who had consensual sexual relations with him, later turned on him and accused him of raping them. Kipnis, whose feminist bona fides are unquestionable, investigated the story in minute detail, and found out that there were holes in the women’s stories so big you could drive a Mack truck through them. There was no way Ludlow was guilty of what he was accused of (he may have exercised bad judgment in having affairs with grad students, but that wasn’t against the rules), but he was put through hell, drained of money by having to hire lawyers, and now, jobless, lives in Mexico. By all accounts he was a terrific professor.

In a 2015 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Sexual paranoia strikes academe,” Kipnis wrote about the sexual paranoia that this and similar cases have produced on campuses. She referred to the Ludlow accusations, but didn’t name names, and gave only a very brief description lacking details. Nevertheless, on the basis of that account Kipnis herself was subjected to a Title IX investigation, which she wrote about in the same venue as “My title IX inquisition“.  She describes how she was sued, not for sexually harassing anyone, but simply writing an essay that supposedly defamed one of the students (names weren’t named, and she just said the student “dated” the professor), as well as supposedly creating a “chilling atmosphere for reporting sexual assault” by merely writing an essay about the problem. And now, according to a piece in the September, 20 New Yorker, Kipnis is being sue yet again over what she says in this book.

Kipnis was cleared of her charges, but Ludlow wasn’t, and it’s pretty clear from Kipnis’s reporting that he was innocent of the charges. Northwestern comes off looking pretty bad, but so would many colleges who conduct these inquisitions if they had a fearless person like Kipnis who isn’t afraid to report on them. (She’s very hard on her own university.)

In the last bit of the book, Kipnis gives her own prescriptions for how to solve the problem, which includes stopping infantilizing women and assuming they have no power in relationships, getting rid of general sexual harassment training, which doesn’t seem to work (I wasn’t aware of that), teaching women how to deal with come-ons, both verbally and physically (this is a no-no since it’s said to “blame the victim”), and, of course, to recognize that sexual relationships in college, particularly when alcohol is involved, are murky areas for law.  During my college years, if anyone who had sex while intoxicated were guilty of rape, we’d have all been jailed. (The men, of course, are invariably the ones to blame for this.) Nevertheless, Kipnis does recognize the different behavior of males and females, with men often predatory on women. Her main point is that the issue is very complex, that we need to discuss it instead of making people shut up, and, as a feminist, she’s irked that the new campus climate infantilizes women, taking away their agency and, in fact, stifling efforts to give them the agency that feminism demands.

Here’s one quote from the book (p. 141) describing the emails she got after her first essay was published:

“Among other things, I learned that professors, even at major research universities, now routinely avoid discussing subjects in class that might raise hackles. A well-known sociologist wrote that he no longer lectures on abortion. I spoke to an Ivy League law professor whose students won’t attend lectures about rape law. Someone who’d written a book about incest in her own family described being confronted in class by a student furious with her for discussing the book. A tenured female professor on my campus wrote about lying awake at night worrying that some stray remark of hers might lead to student complaints, social media campaigns, eventual job loss, and her being unable to support her child. I thought at the time that she was exaggerating, but that was before I learned I myself was a Title IX respondent.”

The book is written extraordinarily well, and Kipnis doesn’t shy away from revealing details of her personal life. I recommend it highly, and consider it must reading for all campus administrators and Title IX officers.

Here’s Kipnis giving a 20-minute interview on how Title IX has criminalized sex: