Readers’ wildlife photos

November 5, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader “Michael Michaels” sent some pictures from the Pacific northwest:

I’ve attached three pictures, one of the view from the beach at a local park called Witty’s Lagoon, on the West coast of Vancouver Island, looking looking onto the Strait of Juan de Fuca towards the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. The remaining two are local wildlife.
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The dragonfly was having trouble of some sort, flying very erratically and crashing into everything, including my foot. I just had enough time to take its picture when it took off and crashed into my leg, the fence, a bench, some grass and then I lost it to sight. I considered catching it and mounting it, as it was so beautiful and probably not long for the world, but I just couldn’t.
Blue Dragon
The next is from the same place but a closeup of what I first thought was a mandarin orange—but eventually realized it’s a Opisthobranch, or more commonly known as nudibranchs, a sea slug. I found this one trapped in a small warm tide pool. I put it in the ocean but it didn’t swim away. I hope I didn’t shock it with the change in temperature. It’s not a great picture but this is the first and only sea slug I’ve ever come across.
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Jacques Hausser from Switzerland documents The Life of a Spider:
Here’s a series of four photos about Pisaura mirabilis and its nursery.
Some time ago (Oct. the 15th) Mark Stuvesant presented us a nice photograph of Pisaurina mira, a Nursery web spider (Pisauridae). Here is its European counterpart, Pisaura mirabilis, and how the female cares for her progeny.
Pm-1
Unfortunately, I don’t have any picture of the mating, with the male offering a fat and juicy fly to the female (a larger gift usually ensures a longer and more effective sperm transfer: see here). But here is a female carrying her eggs in a silky egg sack held in her jaws and palps. She is looking for a good place to establish her nursery.
Pm-2
Building the nursery, a fuzzy web tent incorporating several leaves (bushy asters in this case). The creamy egg sack is visible to the left above and behind the spider.
Pm-3
Just after the hatching: you can see the open egg sack (open by the mother herself) and the brown mass of the spiderlings, some of them starting to explore the nursery. The mother stays around to protect her young for some time.
Pm-4

Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 5, 2015 • 5:14 am

It will be another un-November-like day today, overcast but no rain, and with a high of 71°F (22°C). On this day in history, Guy Fawkes was arrested in England (1605), Susan B. Anthony voted in the U.S., breaking the “no-woman-vote” law, and was fined $100 (1872), and the Vienna State Opera reopened in 1955, after its destruction during WWII, with a performance of Fidelio. It’s also a good day for actors: Sam Shepherd was born in 1943, and Tilda Swinton in 1960. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili appears to be obstructing work on Listy.

A: Hili, I can’t work this way!
Hili: You can, I’m just going to Malgorzata.

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In Polish:
Ja: Hili, tak się nie da pracować!
Hili: Da się, już idę do Małgorzaty.

 

 

Peter Boghossian on “the regressive left”

November 4, 2015 • 2:00 pm

“The regressive left” is a term coined by Maajid Nawaz to refer to those leftists in bed with extreme Islamists. In this week’s “The Humanist Hour,” presented by the American Humanist Hour, philosopher Peter Boghossian talks, eloquently, about the regressive left and its attendant tropes (denigration of free speech, concepts of safe spaces, etc).  If you have a spare 51 minutes, you could do worse than listen.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the podcast.

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Hitler’s raccoons

November 4, 2015 • 1:00 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Yesterday I mentioned the brief return of Autumnwatch on the BBC (the autumn series only four days, while Springwatch sprawls over three whole weeks, simply because there’s more going on). Last night, on Autumnwatch Unsprung, the informal, on-line only magazine programme that follows the main show, presenter and naturalist Chris Packham came up with this gem – German raccoons and their link with the Nazis.

I missed it as I was watching Manchester City romp all over Sevilla (we won 1-3, and thereby qualify for the knock-out stage of the  Champions League), but the Springwatch tw*tter feed posted it this morning. The video should work if you click on it, wherever you are in the world. I had no idea there were raccoons in Europe – and so many!

[JAC: The Los Angeles Times gives the story of European raccoons, which appears to have nothing to do with Nazis, nor with their desire to march into London looking like Davy Crockett]

The new Pew survey: religiosity in America continues to decrease, “nones” are biggest group among Democrats

November 4, 2015 • 12:15 pm

This time I won’t digest the whole thing for you, as the title of the newly released Pew Survey, called “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” tells the tale (full pdf here). But they try to leaven the “bad” news with some other findings:

Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.

But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.

Here are a few graphs and tables showing that “nones” are increasing:

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And the percentage of “nones” who are atheists and agnostics, as opposed to simply believing in God but not having formal church affiliation, is growing—from 22% to 33% over seven years:

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From the survey:

Declining Religiosity. At the same time, the share of the population with low levels of observance (e.g., those who seldom or never pray or go to religious services, and who say religion is unimportant in their lives) has, itself, grown. And the percentage of American adults who are highly observant – at least as measured by traditional indicators, such as their certainty of belief in God, frequency of prayer, self-reported rates of attendance at worship services and self-assessments of the importance of religion in their lives – has declined.

As I predicted (this isn’t rocket science), America is inexorably, but slowly, becoming increasingly secular. More good news is that attitudes towards gays have changed: acceptance of homosexuality has increased across both believers and secularists—another inexorable trend showing “the better angels of our nature.”

Finally, those of you who want to see the religious breakdown of American Democrats versus Republicans, here it is. God bless those secular Democrats! And look at the difference in the proportion of evangelical Protestants between the parties. This is why the GOP is so gaga for Ben Carson, and why all the Republicans fight to outdo each other in goddiness during their debates:

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Smart guns: an innovation in firearm safety that is, of course, violently opposed by the gun lobby

November 4, 2015 • 10:30 am

And when I say “violently opposed,” I mean it: those who try to make or sell “smart guns” (those guns that can be fired only by authorized owners, usually wearing a special ring or watch that unlocks the trigger) have been subject to horrible threats of murder, rape, and destruction of their shops. And both individual gun owners and the gun lobby—including the National Rifle Association—oppose smart guns, for that paranoid segment of society sees such restrictions as putting us on a slippery slope toward (gasp) tighter gun regulation, and perhaps the complete elimination of privately-owned guns.

Yet I think smart guns are a good idea, for by allowing only the owner or other authorized people to fire a gun, they’ll help prevent the following tragedies:

This won’t completely eliminate the problem of gun violence, of course, but the idea of smart guns seems eminently sensible. Yet you can’t even buy a smart gun in the United States, and no manufacturer is making them! Why? See the video below, which is sad and horrifying.

The 13-minute segment was part of last Sunday’s 60 Minutes, the only television show I watch save the evening news. This bit, reported by Lesley Stahl, tells about smart guns, how they work, and what happens to those who try to sell them. (Hint: they’re threatened with death.) Do watch it: it’s a few minutes well spent, for it will tell you how dire the gun situation is in the United States, and how wedded the firearms nuts are to their weapons. They will oppose any measure that regulates guns out of their sheer petulance, a misunderstanding of the Second Amendment, and their paranoia that anything making weapons safer to use must represent the gub’mint trying to take their guns away.

Click on the screenshot to go to the segment; you’ll probably have to watch a brief commercial first, and I’m not sure whether those overseas can see this. You’ll be amused to see the arguments trotted out by the gun nuts to oppose the sale of smart guns. Try to guess them before you listen to this:
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The National Rifle Association is an evil and immoral organization.