Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

July 18, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning to all; it’s Tuesday, July 18, 2017, the 199th day of the year, and National Caviar Day. I had some sevruga caviar years ago and loved it, but wouldn’t eat it today given the rarity of the sturgeon. I’ve had non-sturgeon caviar (whitefish, etc.) more often, but it never came close to the Sturgeon Gold Standard. Now I eschew all caviar. It’s also Mandela Day, honoring the birthday of the South African hero (see below).

The good news is that, at least for the time being, TrumpCare appears to have died in the Senate after two more Republican Senators have defected. With four Republican Senators saying they don’t favor the plan, the bill won’t even be discussed, As CNN reports:

“Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell said in a statement late Monday. He said the Senate would vote in the coming days on a bill that would delay the repeal of Obamacare for two years — all as Trump called for a wholesale repeal of the law.

On this day in AD 64, The Great Fire of Rome occurred, lasting six days and destroying half of the city. It’s the fire during which Nero is said to have played his fiddle, though it’s not at all clear whether the Emperor had anything to do with the conflagration. And on July 18, 1870, the First Vatican Council created the dogma of papal infallibility (or “inflammability,” as Archie Bunker called it). It’s not often realized that the Pope’s infallibility when speaking ex cathedra was simply decided by a vote. It’s amazing how God can channel his thoughts into the Cardinals! On this day in 1926, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf, pretty much laying out the plan for his dictatorship and the extirpation of the Jews. On July 18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy crashed his car into an estuary at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. And on this day in 1976, Nadia Comăneci became the first person in Olympic history to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. Her routine was on the uneven parallel bars, and here it is. Looks pretty flawless to me!

Finally, on July 18, 1992, the very first picture was posted to the World Wide Web: it was a photo of the group Les Horribles Cernettes, CERN employees (the WWW was created there). Wikipedia explains:

. . . was an all-female parody pop group, self-labelled “the one and only High Energy Rock Band”, founded by employees of CERN which performed at CERN and other HEP-related events. Their musical style is often described as doo-wop. The initials of their name, LHC, are the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider which was later built at CERN. Their humorous songs are freely available on their website.

Here is that photo (it should have been a cat!):

This picture of Les Horribles Cernettes was the first photographic image published on the World Wide Web in 1992. From left to right: Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, Lynn Veronneau.

Notables born on this day include Hendrik Lorentz (1853), gangster Machine Gun Kelly (1895), Red Skelton (1913), Nelson Mandela (1918; the year of my father’s birth), Hunter Thompson (1937), and Martha Reeves (1941). Those who died on this day include Caravaggio, one of my very favorite painters (1610), John Paul Jones (1792), Jane Austen (1817), Nico (1998), and William Westmoreland (2005). (Writing this every day is a bit depressing, as it not only brings home death, but who died recently draw closer and closer to me in age.) 

Here’s Machine Gun Kelly, whose sobriquet came from his habitual carrying of a Thompson submachine gun. Convicted for kidnapping a rich man for ransom in 1933 (the victim survived), Kelly spent the last twenty years of his life in prison. His trial was a notable one; as Wikipedia notes:

The kidnapping of [Charles] Urschel and the two trials that resulted were historic in several ways. They were: 1) the first federal criminal trials in the United States in which film cameras were allowed; 2) the first kidnapping trials after the passage of the so-called Lindbergh Law, which made kidnapping a federal crime; 3) the first major case solved by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; and 4) the first prosecution in which defendants were transported by airplane.

Enough lucubration: here’s a wonderful painting by Caravaggio, “The Calling of St Matthew” (1699-1700). In college we used to pose like subjects of famous paintings and ask others to guess what the painting was. This was one I liked to do:

(Wikipedia notes): The painting depicts the story from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 9:9): “Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, “Follow me”, and Matthew rose and followed Him.” Caravaggio depicts Matthew the tax collector sitting at a table with four other men. Jesus Christ and Saint Peter have entered the room, and Jesus is pointing at Matthew. A beam of light illuminates the faces of the men at the table who are looking at Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sounds profound. Malgorzata explained, “Hili discovered a deepity: that you can’t stop the present and admire it, as it becomes a past in a blink.”

Hili: A fraud!
A: What is a fraud?
Hili: The present becomes past when you try to catch it red-handed.
In Polish:
Hili: Oszustwo!
Ja: Co jest oszustwem?
Hili: Teraźniejszość, staje się przeszłością jak tylko próbujesz ją przyłapać na gorącym uczynku.

Summer is fleeting, and Leon and his staff’s house still hasn’t arrived from southern Poland. What a bummer!

Leon: I’m observing how summer holiday is passing by.

And another photo from Malgorzata, whose former tenants are visiting. Here’s their daughter, with a caption: “Hania went to visit her friend and there were kittens!”

SMBC on dualism and free will

July 17, 2017 • 3:15 pm

Reader jsp sent me this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip (creator: Zack Weinersmith); it’s on dualism. tri-ism, quadrism, and then the final panel bit’s on free will.

The character is clearly based on Dan Dennett (see photo at bottom), but I’m a bit puzzled about the last panel. Given the rest of the strip, is this a critique of compatibilism?

Now Dan would never make an argument as dumb as that in the first six panels, so it’s hardly fair. And I do consider him a loyal pal despite our one philosophical difference. But I’ll never forget the last six words he said to me after a three-hour drive from Stockbridge to Boston (song reference here), during which he tried with all his might to convince me that we do have a form of free will and that it gives us moral responsibility. I was not moved and fought back. As he let me out of the car in Cambridge, his big, booming voice announced these words: “I’M NOT THROUGH WITH YOU YET!”

Dan the Man

Sheer genius: Putin and Kim Jong-un scratching posts

July 17, 2017 • 1:30 pm

It’s been a long day, and I’m already beat and emotionally drained from dealing with my ducks. The single female offspring has been demonized by her mother, who swims and feeds with the three male offspring, so that she viciously drives away her little girl when I’m trying to feed them all.

To ensure that the young female gets fed, then, I have to somehow herd her to a remote section of the pond where the Gang of Four can’t see her, and then run back and forth alternately feeding the female and then the Four. (If the Gang sees me feeding her, they’ll get out of the water, follow me, and mom will drive the daughter away.)

My hypothesis is that female mallards are territorial, and mom doesn’t want another female around–even her own daughter. (The male offspring don’t seem to mind their sister very much.)

What was a great pleasure has become a trauma, and when the ostracized female quacks at me from a remote corner of the pond, that mournful sound breaks my heart. (There’s nothing sadder than a lone and distant quack of hunger.) I can only hope that they all fly away soon so that the bullying will end. The “babies” are quite large now, and I expect they’re either able to fly or will soon be.

So it goes when you try to circumvent natural selection.

Well, on to something more congenial. Here is a great idea, and I’d recommend this scratching post for all progressive cat owners (where’s the Trump scratching post?), but, according to Bored Panda, they’re pricey because, well, art:

It took the brilliant masterminds at pro-Internet anonymity VPN service provider HideMyAss.com 200 hours to create this ‘one-of-a-kind protest product and the ultimate feline satirical statement.’ Each scratching post stands at a cat-accessible height of 1.5ft and will set you back by “just” US$7245 (£4,500). Proceeds go to the Index on Censorship in its efforts to promote and defend the right to freedom of expression.


Wait! I found a Trump scratching post!:

Sadly, my search for a Jesus scratching post has come up empty. It would be a trip to see your cat scratching the Savior.

Two geographers say that academics should stop citing so much work by straight white men

July 17, 2017 • 11:19 am

My spirits continue to sink as I see both the Washington Post and the New York Times move toward the Authoritarian wing of Leftism. The latest—and this really hurts—is a piece in the “Speaking of Science” column called “Why these professors are warning against promoting the work of straight, white men“, written by general assignment reporter Kristine Phillips.

Phillips’ column describes (uncritically) a new paper in Gender, Place & Culture by Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, professors of geography at Rutgers and the University of Waterloo, respectively (reference and free link below). The paper’s thesis should be obvious from just the title of Phillips’s piece: that marginalized people—women, gays, blacks, and the like—are even further marginalized when their academic papers aren’t cited as often as they should be, denying them the career advancement that comes with professional recognition. The problem is laid out in Mott and Cockayne’s torturous first paragraph, a veritable dictionary of postmodern buzzwords and tropes:

Scholarship in critical feminist and anti-racist geographies has increasingly focused on the exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization of particular groups or individuals within the discipline itself. This scholarship has examined how knowledge is reproduced and remembered (Monk 2012; Staeheli and Mitchell 2005); how histories are narrated and by whom (Monk 2006; Peake 2015; Peake and Sheppard 2014); and on the neoliberal logics, transformations of reason in institutions of higher education that conflate political and market values, which structure performance review, hiring and promotional practices, and impact evaluation (Berg 2001; Mountz et al. 2015; Pain, Kesby, and Askins 2011). Building upon bell hooks’ (1984) conception of the ‘neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ we use the term ‘white heteromasculinism’ to refer to an intersectional system of oppression describing on-going processes that bolster the status of those who are white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered. Geographers have addressed discrimination and exclusionary authoritative white heteromasculinism at conferences (Domosh 2014a), in research (Faria and Mollett 2016; Louis 2007; Mott and Roberts 2014), and in everyday academic spaces (Joshi, McCutcheon, and Sweet 2015; Mahtani 2006, 2014; Peake and Kobayashi 2002; Sanders 2006). This important research has drawn direct attention to the continued underrepresentation and marginalization of women, people of color, and those othered through white heteromasculine hegemony by focusing on the politics of knowledge and how particular voices and bodies are persistently left out of the conversation altogether.`

Now I haven’t read the entire paper in detail, as even I have limits on my ability to tolerate this kind of writing, but I at least get what they’re saying.  The authors cite data showing that work by women and non-Anglophones is cited less frequently than is work by English speakers and men. I suppose there are several possible reasons for this, including bigotry, but it’s hard to discern what’s at play because one must somehow discern a paper’s importance and visibility (i.e., where it was published) to judge whether it should have been cited, and that’s nearly impossible.

As for citing papers by Anglophones, well, at least in science English—for good or bad—has become the international language of communication, and how many of us read more than one or two languages, anyway?

Now insofar as minorities are underrepresented in academia as a whole, that also needs to be examined. Are there inequalities of opportunity, so that some people have unequal access to academia because of things like poor schooling or unequal treatment in schools? If so, that must be rectified. But if citation differences reflect inequality in outcomes, so that with equal opportunities different groups will still gravitate to different areas and produce different relative amounts of work, then should we try to ameliorate those differences by citing all groups more equally, regardless of the discipline and the importance of the work?

That, apparently, is what the authors recommend: examine carefully who you’re citing to ensure that you’re citing more work by members of marginalized groups. As Phillips says in her piece (my emphasis):

The authors offer what they describe as practical strategies for fellow geographers who work in a largely male-dominated discipline. According to the American Association of Geographers, men and women account for 62 percent and 38 percent of its members, respectively.

One of them: Scholars should read through their work and count all the citations before submitting their work for publication, and see how many people of diverse backgrounds — women, people of color, early-career scholars, graduate students and non-academics — are cited.

“Today, the field is more diverse, but this diversity is largely represented by earlier career scholars. Citing only tenured, established scholars means that these voices are ignored, especially when it is well-known that today’s brutally competitive academic job market continues to privilege the white heteromasculinist body,” they wrote.

Editors and reviewers also can act as watchdogs of sort by scrutinizing a scholar’s body of citation, they argued.

If women are cited less often than men in geography, for instance, could that be because only 38% of geographers are women? Are they cited less than 38% of the time? And if that’s the case, why? Are they on average younger, just now overcoming barriers of diminishing sexism? Is a lot of the work cited “classic” work in geography, work done when women were even scarcer in academia? And how do we overcome such inequities? After all, there’s only one Darwin, and he happened to be an old cisgendered white man.

To me, the solution lies not in policing your citations (Is this guy white or black? Is he straight or gay? A graduate student?) and setting some goal for citing minorities—a goal that would likely force you to rewrite your paper—but to ensure that from the start all groups are given equal opportunities for academic achievement. My own view is that in science we still have a way to go in ensuring that underrepresented groups are given equal opportunity, but it’s also my experience that, among work that is published in the field, important work is nearly always recognized regardless of who published it. The solution is not making your “literature cited” section into a vehicle for affirmative action, but in making science equally open and welcoming to all from the very first time it’s taught in school.

What bothers me almost as much as this virtue-flagging publication is the Washington Post’s decision to publicize it (without critical comment) in a science column. What was the point? I’m sure it wasn’t to mock that article!

h/t: Watson

_______________

Mott, C. and  D. Cockayne (2017). Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’, Gender, Place & Culture, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022

Gwyneth Paltrow’s medical woo gets demolished

July 17, 2017 • 9:00 am

Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop site (“Elevated Essentials for Life”) has been promoting pseudoscience and quack remedies for years, but somehow she manages to shake off criticism, like Trump or Deepak Chopra. Most notorious was her $66 “jade vagina egg“, which, inserted into that orifice, was claimed to do these things:

  • harnesses the power of energy work, crystal healing, and a Kegel-like physical practice
  • cleanses, clears, and detoxifies the vagina
  • removes negativity
  • increases chi, orgasms, vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy.

Did I mention that you could “recharge” the egg by putting it in the light of a full moon?

Despite the weaselly disclaimer, these benefits were touted not by a doctor, but by a quack named Shiva Rose. A real doctor, a gynecologist named Jen Gunter, took apart these claims, pointing out not only that the egg had no vaginal benefits, but could, by carrying bacteria in its pores, cause infection. And yet the egg is still on sale.

Over the years, goop has offered a number of bogus products and health advice, including taking megavitamins (useless), steaming your vagina (useless and dangerous), detox regimens (useless), crystal healing (ditt0), and skin stickers purported to recharge and heal your body by being programmed with different “frequencies” (useless and expensive).

The stickers, I think, were the last straw. They were touted as incorporating material used by NASA, but NASA denied it, and one ex-NASA official said they were “bullshit.”  Although Paltrow has made millions from this quackery, the pushback from the vagina eggs and quack stickers clearly stung her, and her reputation was at stake. She had to do something.

What she did last week was to have her team write a defense of her practices, and enlist two of her advising doctors to tout their credentials and justify their woo, It’s all on view on the goop site: “Uncensored: A Word from our Doctors.” But the goop commentary does not go well, not only questioning the motivations of her critics but also arguing that criticism of her woo is dangerous (my emphasis):

As goop has grown, so has the attention we receive. We consistently find ourselves to be of interest to many—and for that, we are grateful—but we also find that there are third parties who critique goop to leverage that interest and bring attention to themselves. Encouraging discussion of new ideas is certainly one of our goals, but indiscriminate attacks that question the motivation and integrity of the doctors who contribute to the site is not. This is the first in a series of posts revisiting these topics and offering our contributing M.D.’s a chance to articulate theirs, in a respectful and substantive manner.

We always welcome conversation. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do. What we don’t welcome is the idea that questions are not okay. Being dismissive—of discourse, of questions from patients, of practices that women might find empowering or healing, of daring to poke at a long-held belief—seems like the most dangerous practice of all. Where would we be if we all still believed in female hysteria instead of orgasm equality? That smoking didn’t cause lung cancer? If every nutritionist today saw the original food pyramid as gospel?

. . . Asking questions is the job of all of us; it is also the job of the doctors and scientists who collectively move our health forward. There is much that we do not know. It is unfortunate that there are some who seem to believe that they already know it all, who pre-judge information before they’ve even taken the time to read or understand it, who believe that there is actually nothing left to learn, who believe that they, singularly, own the truth. That is troubling, and that is dangerous.

I’d enact the onerous emotional labor of going after this stuff , but fortunately, ArsTechnica has done it all, saving me the trouble. Read Beth Mole’s piece, “Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Good offers case study on how to sell snake oil.“, which goes after goop‘s defense, though not the doctors’. It details eight rhetorical tactics the site uses to defend its woo, as well as detailing a number of goop products that make bogus medical claims. Somehow I’d missed this product, which offers semiprecious pebbles that would cost you about $10 at a rock store:

With these claims!:

For a critique of the two goop doctors themselves, there’s no better place to go than surgeon Orac’s new post at ScienceBlogs, “Gwyneth Paltrow’s quack empire goop strikes back against Dr. Jen Gunther.” Here’s a sample from Orac:

Of course, Dr. Gundry will have none of it. He has a peculiar level of tunnel vision. He paints himself as a science-based doctor at the very highest level of his profession. Arguably, he was, at least until 15 years ago, when, as he brags, he resigned a “Professor and Chairman of Cardiothoracic Surgery at a major medical school to devote myself to reversing disease with food and nutraceutical supplementation, instead of bypasses, stents, or medications, just like Hippocrates asked you and me to do when we took our oath: ‘Let food be thy medicine.’ And he works so, so hard at it. So hard. So very hard that he has to brag:

“And finally, he taught that a physician’s job was to search out and remove the obstacles that are keeping the patient from healing themselves. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been doing just that seven days a week (yes, you read that right, Saturday and Sunday as well, just ask my overworked staff).”

Poor baby. Such dedication. And, he assures us, even though he has concierge patients, he also takes Medicare and Medicaid! He’s also a condescending dude as well [example follows]. . .

I know that people follow celebrities’ fashion and tastes, hoping that some of the stardom rubs off on them, but it’s beyond me why someone would take medical advice from Gwyneth Paltrow over that of their doctor. For crying out loud, you could at least call your gynecologist before you stick a jade egg in your vagina!

And I’m equally puzzled why the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) doesn’t crack down on specious health claims, and make sure that any disclaimers are BIG and BOLD—or better yet deep-six those claims altogether. After all, the FTC recently required homeopathic “remedies” to have scientific evidence backing their health claims, and if not they simply couldn’t make such claims. Why isn’t goop subject to the same regulations?

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 17, 2017 • 7:30 am

Send in those photos, folks: this is an Official Plea™ from Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus).

Today we have two batches of photos; the first is by reader Gregory Zoinerowich, an professor of entomology at Kansas State University. His notes are indented:

I  had been out experimenting with a new camera, so attached are some photos for your consideration. The first two, the butterfly and the snake, were taken at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, near Strong City, Kansas. This preserve is almost 11,000 acres and has a number of public hiking trails, plus a herd of bison.

The butterfly is a variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) on woolly verbena (Verbena stricta). It was pretty windy and the butterflies were very flighty, so this was my best shot.

The garter snake was swimming through a water-filled bison wallow, and periodically poked its head down into the mud. My herpetologist colleague said it was probably hunting small frogs.

The next two photos were taken on my deck, a megachilid bee on butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), and a Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) on basil. Although the Japanese beetle is a pest, they are quite pretty. Both the butterfly weed and the basil draw in a number of pollinators in the form of butterflies, many different bees, and many flies.

The last photo was taken with my iPhone, and is the nest of brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) deep in a bush alongside my driveway. Every time I walk by the bush, the thrasher gives me a verbal thrashing.

And some bird parasitism contributed by reader John Riegsecker. Note that the maternal instinct of the yellowthroat overrides the clear indication that this is not her chick—or even her species! That’s how nest parasites make their living. Of course it would be to the foster parent’s genetic advantage to recognize and reject the cowbird, as feeding it is expensive and consumes time it could use to build a new nest, but apparently the genetic variation for recognition and rejection doesn’t exist. This kind of parasitism shows that natural selection isn’t perfect!

Attached are three photos for your Readers’ Wildlife Photos of a Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) feeding a Cowbird chick. [JAC: probably the Brown-headed Cowbird, Molothrus ater].

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

July 17, 2017 • 6:30 am

Here we are at the start of another week: it’s July 17, 2017, and National Peach Ice Cream Day, honoring a wonderful flavor (if made with fresh peaches). It’s also National Firgun Day and World Emoji Day.

On July 17, 1717 (7/17/17 or 17/7/17, depending on where you live), King George I of England sailed down the Thames in a barge full of musicians, and that’s where Handel’s Water Music was premiered. On this day in 1902, the first air conditioner was created by Willis Carrier in New York (his firm still exists), and, on this day in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, along with his family and servants, were gunned down in a room by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, Russia. A 14-minute reconstruction of the last hours of the Romanovs (trigger warning!: gory at the end) can be seen here. On July 17, 1955, Disneyland (the real one) was opened in Anaheim, California. On this day in 1984, the federal drinking age in the US was raised from 18 to 21; that was the age mandated by the federal government if states were to receive federal highway aid, and was applied to the purchase but not consumption of alcohol. It seems to me that if you can be inducted into the Army at 18, you should be able to buy a beer at 18.

The women’s cricket World Cup is underway in England; it began June 24 and will end in six days. I have no idea who is favored, but Google has an interactive Doodle where you can play as batsman (batsperson?). Click on the screenshot to go there (my high score was 20):

Notables born on this day include Lyonel Feininger (1871; one of my favorite painters), James Cagney (1899), James Coyne, Canadian lawyer and second Governor of the Bank of Canada (1910; I never heard of him but he shares my last name), David Hasselhoff (1952, eligible today for Social Security and Medicare), and Angela Merkel (1954). Here’s a nice painting by Feininger, “Markwippach” (1917):

Those who died on this day include Adam Smith (1790), Henri Poincaré (1912), the 11 Romanovs and their retainers murdered by the Bolsheviks (1918), Billie Holiday (1959), Ty Cobb (1961), John Coltrane (1967), and Walter Cronkite (2009). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata translated Steve Novella’s article “”Conspiracy Thinking and the Need for Certainty” into Polish;  I’m told that Hili, having read it, now sees conspiracies everywhere:

Hili: They are conspiring!
A: Who?
Hili: A spider with a fly.
 In Polish:
Hili: Spiskują!
Ja: Kto?
Hili: Pająk z muchą.

In Winnipeg, Gus is as cute as usual, but his world was a bit upset last night (see below):

His staff Taskin writes, “Since I was an hour late to serve dinner, Gus got some dessert catnip. Am I forgiven?”

As lagniappe, here is a tw**t provided by Grania: