Monday: Hili dialogue

August 7, 2017 • 6:45 am

Good morning; it’s a cool Monday in Chicago (at this moment, 62° C, 17° C), and a work day in the U.S., though Grania reports a “bank holiday” in Ireland. It’s August 7, 2017: National IPA (India Pale Ale) Day, the egregiously overhopped brew favored by hipsters and those with asbestos palates that can be stimulated only by an overdose of hops. I eschew such one-note brews and still prefer the British-style ales, with the apotheosis, increasingly hard to find, being Timothy Taylor’s Landlord.

On this day in 1930, the last confirmed lynching of blacks in the Northern United States occurred in Marion, Indiana, though lynchings continued in the South. The victims, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were arrested for robbery, murder, and rape the night before, and a crowd broke into the jail, absconded with them, and hanged them (you can see the gruesome image here). Exactly eight years later, the construction of the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp began in Austria. On August 7, 1947, Thor Heyerdahl’s raft, the Kon-Tiki, completed a 7,000 km, 101-day voyage across the Pacific in an attempt to prove that early Polynesians could have visited South America (he went in the wrong direction!). The voyage ended when the balsa raft smashed to pieces on a reef in the Tuamoto Islands. Many of us, including me, have read his famous book on this voyage. Finally, on August 7, 1987, Lynne Cox became first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing between two islands in the Bering Strait in 2 hours and five minutes in water that was 6-7°C! She was also the first woman to swim the Cook Strait in New Zealand.

Notables born on this day include Emile Nolde (1867), Mata Hari (1876), Louis Leakey (1903), James Randi (1928, still with us), Don Larsen (1929, also still alive), Garrison Keillor (1942), David Duchovny (1960) and Charlize Theron (1975),

Don Larsen, a baseball player, was the only man ever to pitch a no-hitter and a “perfect game” (a game in which nobody reaches first base: they all strike out or hit a ball that is caught) in World Series history. He was playing for the Yankees and pitched the game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in game 5 of the series on October 8, 1956. Larson is still alive and lives nearby, in Michigan City, Indiana. Here are some highlights from that famous game.

And it’s also Theo the Coffee-Drinking Cat’s birthday in London. As reader and catstaff Laurie announced on her website, A Classicist Writes, the black moggie is exactly 13 today. Yes, he drinks espresso, and prefers it black. Here’s his birthday video featuring his special talent (he attributes his longevity to coffee):

Those who died on this day include Rabindranath Tagore (1941), Peter Jennings (2005; was that really 12 years ago?), and Judith Crist (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, where I’ll be in a month, the animals’ dialogue is enigmatic, and I’ve asked for an explanation. Malgorzata’s reply:

What am I to answer? Hili and Cyrus are looking for something and they don’t know what they are looking for. Hili is worried that you would not understand the dialogue. Cyrus answers like I do: if we don’t know ourselves what we are looking for, how are we to explain it to Jerry?

Hili: It’s here.
Cyrus: No, it’s a bit further down.
Hili: Jerry will ask what is it.
Cyrus: But we don’t know ourselves.
In Polish:
Hili: To tu.
Cyrus: Nie, kawałek dalej.
Hili: Jerry znów będzie pytał co.
Cyrus: Przecież my też nie wiemy.
And reader Howie sent an evolution cartoon emphasizing perhaps what is—besides syntactic language and our knowledge that we’re going to die—the only unique characteristic of H. sapiens:

 

What kind of monster is this?

August 6, 2017 • 5:34 pm

On my walk home this evening, I noticed this evil-looking thing sitting on the trunk of my car. I have to admit that it frightened me at first—until I inspected it closely. I suspect I was triggered because it reminded me of a young triffid, the venomous, human-eating plant in the horror novel and movie The Day of the Triffids.

Okay, botanists, tell us what it is:

 

The bizarre mating dance of the hooded grebe

August 6, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Reader Charleen sent me the tweet below, which shows the courtship ritual of the hooded grebe (Podiceps gallardoi), a rare and critically endangered species (fewer than 1000 individuals) that lives in isolated Patagonian lakes. Have a look at this craziness, and ask yourself “Why the hell are they doing this?” or “What selective advantage is there in testing each other this way?” And don’t ask me, because I have no idea! It’s clearly a bonding ritual, but may be a form of mutual sexual selection in which potential mates size each other up in some way:

A photo:

That in turn led me to a new article in Audubon magazine that identifies the clip as coming from a new movie about the species, “Tango in the Wind.” Fortunately, the half-hour documentary is free on Vimeo, and I’ve put it below. Grebe species are known for some really fancy footwork during courtship (Google “courtship grebe”), but the Hooded takes the cake.  And, as Audubon notes,

But the Hooded Grebe’s courtship hasn’t been nearly as well documented [as that of other grebes], thanks to its limited range in the harsh and isolated barrens of Patagonia, near the tip of South America. In fact, the species wasn’t even known to science until 1974. “There aren’t many people who know much about Hooded Grebe courtship,” says Audubon field editor Kenn Kaufman. “The people who made this video probably know as much about the bird as anyone does.”

. . . The Hooded Grebe’s courtship dance may look funny, but with fewer than 500 breeding pairs remaining, this is serious business. Its numbers have declined by about 80 percent in the past 25 years, largely due to the introduction of the non-native American mink and rainbow trout, according to BirdLife International. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature labeled the species critically endangered in 2016.

Researchers interviewed in Tango in the Wind say climate change further threatens Hooded Grebe’s habitat and survival, noting that it’s already drying up the lakes where they nest. While more abundant than their Patagonian cousins, Western Grebes and Clark’s Grebes both face significant losses of their summer range, thanks to climate change. They’re among the 314 climate-endangered North American bird species identified by Audubon.

Now, if you have half an hour, watch this lovely but sad movie—sad because this wonderful species is on the verge of extinction, probably due to global warming. And watch it on full screen; the link for that is here. (The courtship segment begins about ten minutes in and you can see a bit at the very end.)

 

A California doctor ponders assisted suicide

August 6, 2017 • 1:00 pm

California is now the fifth state in the U.S. that allows doctor-assisted voluntary suicide (the others are Delaware, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon), but apparently the details of the procedure have not been worked out, nor how it should be paid for. In the article below, in today’s New York Times, Dr. Jessica Zitter shows the dilemmas facing doctors who now can suddenly be asked to help terminate the life of a patient but haven’t thought about it much. Zitter is identified as “a critical care and palliative medicine doctor at Highland Hospital” (California) and “is the atuhor of Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life.”

I don’t have much to add to her article, which raises the very real complexities of putting such a measure into practice. Let me just say that it’s about voluntary euthanasia of adults, and deals not with when to withdraw care, like turning off a respirator, but when to prescribe medications for terminal patients that can end their life. She does not discuss, nor does any American law allow, the possibility of euthanasia for terminally ill, malformed, or permanently unconscious newborns, something we’ve discussed here recently:

Here’s how Zitter describes the law:

California’s law permits physicians to prescribe a lethal cocktail to patients who request it and meet certain criteria: They must be adults expected to die within six months who are able to self-administer the drug and retain the mental capacity to make a decision like this.  

But that is where the law leaves off. The details of patient selection and protocol, even the composition of the lethal compound, are left to the individual doctor or hospital policy.

One problem is that some patients, like those with ALS, will be unable to self-administer the “lethal cocktail” but deserve such euthanasia anyway.  It’s unconscionable that a doctor could not help these patients with an injection. After all, yes, an injection is a deliberate act, but so is giving a patient a prescription that they know will be used to kill them, and standing by to make sure it works properly. (And, by the way, so is turning off a respirator, which is legal if the patient or her family requests it.)

Second, Zitter notes (and I did not know) that the American Medical Association is opposed to such doctor assisted suicide. To me that shows a failure to even consider whether, when a patient requests a prescription or an injection, fulfilling that request might be more merciful than forcing the patient to endure up to six months of intolerable suffering. Click the screenshot to see the article.

The questions that Zitter discusses involve these issues:

  • Should a patient who wants to die because he or she is depressed, and not physically suffering very much, also be offered this alternative? (My answer, as was that of another expert discussed in the piece, is “yes”, but I’d offer them antidepressants first.)
  • What about doctors who are uncomfortable, as is Zitter, helping carry out such a procedure? (My view is that if they are, they must refer the patient to a doctor who can help.) Physicians who often assist the dying by turning of respirators or removing feeding tubes need to think about whether those acts are substantively and morally different from prescribing medication for a patient to use for euthanasia.
  • What should hospitals do about formalizing the procedure and deal with paying for it? (I have to admit that I found the last bit a little churlish in such an article, but it’s a genuine issue.) Doctors need to be trained in this procedure and its ethics now if they intend to practice in one of those five states.
  • What about palliative care as an alternative? Zitter says it’s underused, and somepatients aren’t offered it. Of course they should be. But there are cases where palliative care doesn’t relieve suffering, and when patients prefer to die before they require respirators and other assistance (e.g., as in cases of ALS). So yes, the alternative of a cocktail or injection needs to be available for patients who are informed of the alternatives (part of any decent set of regulations) and still choose euthanasia.

It is a crime that only five out of fifty states allow assisted suicide. They all should—with proper regulations and conditions—and then the states need to consider active euthanasia (i.e, an injection) for those patients who aren’t able to take the “cocktail” themselves. That is what’s done in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Here is a graphic map about the states that have assisted suicide, ones that are considering it, and ones that have banned or criminalized it (all from the sidebar of the article):

 

Chicago’s execrable soda tax

August 6, 2017 • 9:45 am

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”  —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Nearly every day at lunch I have two sandwiches (I’m starting to cut out carbs now and have a salad), a piece of fruit, perhaps a cut-up tomato or baby carrots, and a diet soda. That, I think, is a pretty healthy lunch, especially as my sandwiches contain either peanut butter, tuna, hummus, or sometimes just a ripe tomato with mayonnaise.

I usually buy the diet soda at the grocery store, and there are always sales so that I can get a two-liter bottle for about a dollar. (I favor A&W diet root beer, Diet Squirt, a grapefruit soda, or Diet Cherry 7-Up.)

Last week the price of my lunch went up, as Cook County, which includes Chicago, passed an execrable tax on all “sweetened drinks”, and it’s a big tax: a penny per ounce. That increases the price of a can of soda by 12¢, and my two liter bottles by 64¢: a 64% increase!

Most sweetened drinks are taxed, including sodas in restaurants, sweetened fruit drinks (like Sunny D), and, as the Tribune reported “ready-to-drink sweetened coffee drinks. . . [but not on-demand, custom-sweetened beverages, such as those mixed by a server or barista, or a handmade Frappuccino]”, and probably bar drinks made with soda (like the Cuba Libre: rum and Coke). Regular fruit juices and concentrates aren’t taxed. Why a Frappuccino would not be taxed but a rum and Coke would defies reason.

The ostensible rationale for this was to cut down on public consumption of sugar, and to reduce obesity. I object to this in general because it’s a paternalistic attempt of government to control the diet of its citizens. If they want to do this, why not put some taxes on candy bars, potato chips, fast food like McDonald’s, and triple the tax on cigarettes (it’s already among the highest in the U.S., for a pack of smokes costs $12-$14 in Chicago)? The soda tax, which constitutes a palpable financial harm to many, violates Mill’s dictum above.

Now you’ll be saying that “obesity imposes costs on the public, for obese people get more government health care than slimmer people, and die earlier, contributing less to society.” I find that an unconscionable paternalism, because if you follow it logically, you’d tax everything that contributes substantially to obesity, including, in the U.S., fast food at places like McDonald’s and Taco Bell—massive contributors to our weight problem.

So you might then respond, “But soda is a major contributor to obesity, too!” But if you say that, you’re going to have to do a study of the major contributors to American obesity, and then tax the culprits proportionately.

And here the important thing is this: there is virtually no evidence that diet sodas contribute to obesity, or other health problems. Yes, people have thought of reasons they could (make you seek sugar in other foods by giving you a sweet tooth, etc.), but the evidence for this is very thin, and certainly not sufficient to include diet sodas with the taxed sugary sodas. To confect such rationales means that you’re just a Pecksniff, worried that people might enjoy a diet soda, and eager to keep them from doing so without much evidence. In fact, taxing sugary sodas but not diet ones would improve people’s health by getting them to switch to the diet stuff, which by all accounts is healthier.

Here’s my solution: since one of the biggest contributors to obesity is the consumption of carbohydrates, of which sugar is one, we need a tax on bread–a CARB TAX. That could also include pasta as well, and beer (but not so much wine). I’m only kidding, of course.

The whole thing is ridiculous, for the rationale for the tax doesn’t jibe with its implementation. But, as all of us citizens of Cook County realize, this is not really why the tax is being enacted. Our county is in a severe financial crisis, as is much of Illinois, and this tax is a way to get lots of dough: as much as $561 million per year.  The county can pass such a tax because it has the excuse of controlling health, whereas a simple increase in income tax doesn’t have that excuse.

I think the government’s responsibility is to make consumers aware of health risks, but it’s on slippery ground when it tries to control people’s diets (I’m dubious, too, of cigarette and alcohol taxes). Someone’s diet should be their choice, not the government’s, and, at any rate, where does it end? I’m less concerned about things like seat belt laws because many who wear them are too young to make an informed decision, and they’re not as harmful to the pocketbook of the individual.

Here are some calories in the UNTAXED Starbuck’s barista drinks; each is for a 16 ounce serving. By comparison, a 16 ounce regular Coke has about 180 calories:

  • Caramel Brulée Frappuccino – 300 calories
  • Caramel Brulée Frappuccino Light – 180 calories
  • Caramel Frappuccino Blended Beverage – 410 calories
  • Caramel Frappuccino Light Blended Beverage – 140 calories
  • Cinnamon Dolce Crème Frappuccino Blended Beverage – 350 calories
  • Cinnamon Dolce Frappuccino Blended Beverage – 350 calories
  • Chocolate Smoothie – 300 calories
  • Orange Mango Smoothie – 270 calories
  • Strawberry Smoothie – 300 calories
  • Peppermint Mocha – 330 calories
  • Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha – 440 calories
  • Pumpkin Spice Latte – 310 calories
  • Salted Caramel Mocha – 330 calories
  • Iced Peppermint Mocha – 260 calories
  • Iced Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha – 380 calories
  • Caramel Macchiato – 240 calories
  • Cinnamon Dolce Latte – 260 calories
  • Eggnog Latte – 460 calories
  • Hot Chocolate – 290 calories
  • Peppermint Hot Chocolate – 360 calories
  • Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate – 360 calories
  • White Hot Chocolate – 420 calories

Given that a soda tax is quite clearly a preferential tax on the poor, does the remission for Starbuck’s reflect a concern for the rich?

Welcome to the Nanny State!

 

The further adventures of Angry Catman: The attack of the Dark Net

August 6, 2017 • 9:00 am

Reader Pliny the in Between has made a cartoon of the attacks on me (“Angry Cat Man”) by the religious and conservative people who cannot abide euthanasia of infants no matter how sick, malformed, or conscious they are. And I have someone getting my back.

Click to enlarge:

 

By the way,  the source of the Angry Cat Man character can be found here, and there are several previous episodes (e.g., here, here, here, and here).

 

 

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 6, 2017 • 8:30 am

How about some small soil arthropods today? Tony Eales from Australia sent these, and his notes are indented:

So my latest thing has been sifting through leaf litter looking for likely wee creepy crawlies to photograph. Unfortunately these little blighters are right at the limits of my cheap macro-setup. Anyway, denizens of the leaf litter include these:

There’s beetles like this Rove Beetle Astenus guttulus:

Bugs like this cute Schizopterid bug aka Jumping Soil Bug:

Bark Lice or Psocoptera, their big heads remind me somewhat of cows:

Thrips, Thysanopthera. I found out that thrips is not the plural of thrip, there’s one thrips in the photo or you might see two thrips or 100 thrips.

Springtails, Collembola, were the most common find. I’d never seen one before delving into the leaf litter.

Same with the Two-pronged Bristletail, Diplura, which were also pretty common. These are Hexapods but have been split out of the insects and are now in their own class, Entognatha, along with Proturas which I’ve yet to find.

Getting away from the six-leg plan, there were Soil Centipedes (Geophilomorpha) and Tropical Centipedes (Scolopendromorpha), Isopods, and of course Arachnids.

Soil centipede:

Tropical centipede:

Isopod:

The commonest were Mites in the group Trombidiformes.

 


And of course loads of diverse spiders. I’ll leave them for now as there were so many, but I’ll put in my favourite one of the so-called Ant Spiders, Habronestes sp.: