Discussion thread: The Google fracas or anything else

August 8, 2017 • 10:15 am

I’m hellishly busy today, and posting will be very light. I will, however, put up the Five Cat Winners at about 2 pm Chicago time.. In the meantime, maybe we can try a discussion thread.

As you may have heard, a Google employee wrote a ten-page “diversity memo” that you can find here; it’s called “Google’s ideological echo chamber.” I have to say that I haven’t read a word of it, so I’m completely without any basis for an opinion. All I know is what I’ve read in this Bloomberg Reports piece, which is that the author, Google engineer James Dalmore, was just fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes”. The article says this, in part:

Earlier on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a note to employees that said portions of the memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” But he didn’t say if the company was taking action against the employee. A Google representative, asked about the dismissal, referred to Pichai’s memo.

Damore’s 10-page memorandum accused Google of silencing conservative political opinions and argued that biological differences play a role in the shortage of women in tech and leadership positions. It circulated widely inside the company and became public over the weekend, causing a furor that amplified the pressure on Google executives to take a more definitive stand.

After the controversy swelled, Danielle Brown, Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, sent a statement to staff condemning Damore’s views and reaffirmed the company’s stance on diversity. In internal discussion boards, multiple employees said they supported firing the author, and some said they would not choose to work with him, according to postings viewed by Bloomberg News.

“We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company,” Brown said in the statement. “We’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul.”

The memo and surrounding debate comes as Google fends off a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Labor alleging the company systemically discriminates against women. Google has denied the charges, arguing that it doesn’t have a gender gap in pay, but has declined to share full salary information with the government. According to the company’s most recent demographic report, 69 percent of its workforce and 80 percent of its technical staff are male.

Finally, I know from various tw**ts and Facebook posts that the memo has been both attacked for being sexist and misogynistic, and defended as simply an opinion that should have been allowed to be expressed freely without the writer being fired.

This controversy is reminiscent of Harvard President Larry Summers losing his job for expressing an opinion on biologically based differences in abilities between the sexes. But again, I have no idea what differences this memo claims to exist, nor whether it argues that the perceived differences are purely cultural, hard-wired, or a combination of both.

If you’ve read the memo (and those who express an opinion should), and read about the fracas, weigh in below. I’ve just printed it out to read this evening.

If you don’t want to talk about this, other topics are appropriate, like “What’s going to happen to Trump?” or “Are we going to war with North Korea?”

My wildlife post: the mystery plant

August 8, 2017 • 7:30 am

Two days ago I posted a photo of this mysterious and scary-looking object that I found on the trunk of my car:

I asked readers to identify it, and they weighed in yesterday. The consensus seemed to be that it was a seed pod from a Turkish Hazel tree, Corylus colurna (also called the Turkish Filbert), and certainly did not come from the tree that hung over my car—probably a black locust, which produces a legume pod that looks nothing like the above.

To solve this mystery, I inspected the trees and ground around my car, which I hadn’t moved since the triffid pod appeared on its trunk.  First, here is my car in situ (far side of the road second car from the left). Every one of the three trees you can see are locust trees, so the pod could not have fallen from one of them.

Nevertheless, the ground under the locust tree next to my car (and the one behind it) was littered with dried pods. See them?

More:

The underside of the pod, showing the seeds. They look like hazelnuts to me.

And the two trees across the street from my car. This one looks like an oak (remember, I am a “fly guy,” not a botanist):

And the leaves of the other (you can see my car at upper left). I couldn’t get a better shot as the wind was blowing hard and the leaves out of reach.

Now the leaves of that tree sort of look like those of the Turkish hazel, as do the seed pods, as shown in this photo from Wikipedia, but the shape isn’t exactly the same. But of course leaf shape can vary depending on the local environment, sun, and other factors:

So this may be a Turkish hazel, which readers have found is a tree planted along Chicago streets. If it’s not, perhaps it’s a relative.

The only remaining mystery is this: why were the pods found only underneath locust trees across the street? I found NO pods underneath the putative Turkish hazel or oak.  One answer may be that the squirrels took the pods tree across the street to eat the nuts (or cache them)—but why would they do that? Or the pods underneath the locusts could have been blown across the street, or fallen from the tree across the street. That doesn’t make sense, either given the absence of pods under the putative source tree.

I will refrain from further comment, as I have no solution. If readers want a better picture of the putative hazel tree, let me know.

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

August 8, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, August 8, 2017, and I’m duckless. It’s National Frozen Custard Day; if you’re near a good place to get this treat, like Ted Drewes in St. Louis, you’re lucky.

More important, it’s INTERNATIONAL CAT DAY!!   The first five people who email me good pictures of their moggie will have them featured later today in a post. Send a short paragraph of information, too. Photos are limited to five, there must be information (including of course the cat’s name), and the entries must be received by noon Chicago time. If you’ve had your cat featured here before, please let others have their turn.

UPDATE: We now have five cat photos (that didn’t take long), so hold off sending yours. There will be other opportunities to have your moggie on show.

On this day in 1786, Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in France, was climbed for the first time; the successful summiteers were Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard. On August 8, 1942, the Quit India Movement began as a response to Mohandas Gandhi’s call for complete Indian independence from Britain. That quitting took place 4½ years later.  On this day in 1963, the famous Great Train Robbery took place in England, with 15 robbers absconding with £2.6 million in paper currency. Eight were eventually caught and given long prison sentences: 30 years. Finally, it was on August 8, 1969 that photographer Iain Macmillin took the photo below in London. If you don’t recognize it and you’re over 40, you are either blind or lack musical taste.

Here’s the Cassini Imaging team reenacting that photo on Abbey Road in 2001; NASA scientist Carolyn Porco (the team boss), who loves the Beatles even more than I, is playing the role of John Lennon.

On this day in 1974, Richard Nixon went on television to announce that he was resigning as President of the United States. Here’s that glorious moment:

And in 1990, the Gulf War was touched off when, on August 8, Iraq occupied and annexed Kuwait.

Notables born on this day include Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896; read her novel The Yearling), Paul Dirac (1902), Esther Williams (1921), Roger Penrose (1931), Keith Carradine (1949), and The Edge (1961; real name David Howell Evans). Few notables died on this day; they include James Irwin (1991), Fay Wray (2004), and Karen Black (2013; I didn’t know she had died.) Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing that she is a (secular) Jewish cat:

Hili: I see a mountain.
A: It’s a molehill.
Hili: Everything is relative.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzę górę.
Ja: To kretowisko.
Hili: Wszystko jest względne.

Stephen Stills—in the NYRB

August 7, 2017 • 3:00 pm

Ever since Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, died in March, I wondered what would happen to the magazine. He had been the editor, along with Barbara Epstein (who died in 2006) since the magazine began in 1963: 54 years! His talents and diligence as an editor were legendary, and my friends who published there uniformly praised him, though sometimes beefed at what they considered his overly punctilious and demanding editing. But it was largely Silvers who brought the NYRB to prominence among real and self-styled intellectuals, and readers of all stripes.

I had an on-again off-again relationship with the magazine. When I had subscriptions (several times), it was others who gave them to me. In general I liked it, but I found too many of the articles pretentious and boring. On the other hand, they had some really good stuff, too, and tapped some excellent people as their regular writers. I always hoped to write for them, not just for the prestige but for the dosh (around $4500 per article, I believe); but that never happened. Still, my first graduate student, Allen Orr, has had a good run writing for them.

When reader Jon directed me to the new article below, however, I sensed that the Silvers era was over, as i don’t remember anything like this in the old NYRB (click on screenshot to go the piece). While its nominal excuse is a review of a new biography of Stephen Stills, one of my musical heroes, it’s really a Rolling-Stone styled piece about the author’s reaction to Stills’s music. The verdict on the book review is mixed, but the love of Stills is very strong, as it is for me.

Regular readers have heard me say that if I could change places with anyone, and live their life, it would have been Stephen Stills. Enormously talented in the trifecta of songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist (he could play anything), he was also one of the best-looking rock stars ever—in his prime. See the picture below:

If you like Stills—and that’s the same as saying “if you like good rock”—you’ll want to read this piece.  The author, Lorrie Moore, is described as  “the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt and the author of four story collections and three novels.” She’s a Stills-loving academic, just like me.

Her piece is tripartite, beginning with an attempt to list Stills’s five best songs (I agree on many of them, with “4+20” among my favorites), but she quickly gives up, as I did (there’s good stuff from the Buffalo Springfield through CS&N [&Y] and Manassas), and describes going to a recent concert at the famous Ryman Auditorium, where the aging star croaks out his old hits and suffers from arthritic fingers. Buried in the piece is a review of a new biographya; Stephen Stills: Change Partners, by David Roberts, which Moore doesn’t like very much.

But addressing the book is a minor part of the review, as it often was in the old NYRB, and the piece is a must-read for Stills fans, as we hear so little about the man these days. And it’s free, unlike many articles in the magazine.

Here’s Stills singing “4 + 20”. There’s a typical Stillsian mind-dump (perhaps fueled by drugs) at the beginning, but you can ignore that and listen to the song, which begins at 0:43. This was 1969, and he really was 24 that year.

 

My duck is gone

August 7, 2017 • 1:30 pm

I’m sad and luckless,
For my pond is duckless.

Yesterday I fed Honey a huge dollop of peas and corn; she was on land, so it was easy to give her large amounts without them quickly sinking below dabbling level. As I fed her, I noticed that her flight feathers had grown pretty big. You can see them here.

Here she is scarfing down her lunch:

But today I’ve gone to the pond, food in hand, twice—and she’s gone! Flown the coop! Yes, I think her molt being over, and her wings ready to go, she simply flew off for bigger and better ducky things.

I am quite sad, though that’s tempered with the knowledge that she was heathy and well fed. Perhaps she’ll return next year, and maybe I’ll recognize her by the black stippling on the sides of her beak (I have an enlarged photo). But feeding the red-eared sliders isn’t quite the same; I’m unable to bond with turtles. And what am I going to do with the half pound of freeze-dried mealworms that I ordered to fuel her departure, and which will arrive today?

At least when your kids go off to college, and you become an empty nester, you know you’ll see them again.

A crustacean whodunit: which sea creature attacked an Aussie teen?

August 7, 2017 • 12:45 pm

by Greg Mayer

Appropriately following upon Jerry’s monstrous, triffid-like seed pod,  an attack by tiny monsters on an Australian teenager has been splashed across world media, including the BBC and the New York Times. The victim, Sam Kanizay was cooling off after a football match by wading in the sea near Melbourne. After a half hour in the water, he emerged bleeding profusely from the ankles, and the bleeding did not readily stop. He was taken to the hospital and should be just fine.

Sam Kanizay being treated in hospital. Photo by Jarrod Kanizay, via Australian Associated Press.

The interesting question from a biological point of view is “What did this to him?” We have a natural history whodunit, with two contenders, both crustaceans, and both quite small: isopods or amphipods. The BBC, citing Genefor Walker-Smith, said it was amphipods. The Times said the consensus was that it was isopods. Sam’s father Jarrod put some meat out in the water, and collected a host of critters, and posted a video of them to Youtube.

Most people in the north temperate zone are probably familiar with what we call in New York “cement bugs”, but are known by many other names: sow bugs, pill bugs, rollie pollies, etc. These are isopods, and there are marine ones called sea lice. Amphipods are less familiar in the Northern hemisphere, as they are aquatic and marine, and thus less commonly encountered. (There are terrestrial ones in the Gondwanan continents.) The ones that live at marine beaches are called sand fleas. One way to tell at least the usual ones apart is that isopods are dorso-ventrally compressed (‘squashed’ from above); while amphipods are laterally compressed (‘squashed’ from the side), and typically lay and move about lying on their sides. Both are said by the news reports to occasionally bite people.

In the video, you can clearly see that the critters are amphipods– pause the video, and enlarge on the screen if necessary, to see this. The Times quotes Alistair Poore, of the University of New South Wales, as also saying the critters are amphipods. However, although Jarrod trapped them by using meat as a bait, it’s not certain that what he trapped are the same things that bit Sam.