Readers’ wildlife photos

July 12, 2017 • 8:00 am

Reader Mark Jones sent some nice butterfly pictures from Old Blighty. His notes and IDs are indented; be sure to enlarge as the markings are lovely.

Plenty of butterfly action in England this sunny Sunday [June 2]; here are a few woodland shots I took today from the West Sussex-Surrey border in England.

Meadow Brown (Maniola jurtina):

Silver Washed Fritillary (Argynnis paphia):

White Admiral  (Limenitis Camilla), one I somehow caught landing, and one showing the beautiful underside:

Speckled Wood (Pararge aegeria):

Small White (Pieris rapae):

Philosophy gone badly wrong

July 12, 2017 • 7:15 am

Matthew found this tw**t showing how a little kid solves the famous philosophical Trolley Problem (you should all know what it is).

The boy starts off well, but then goes off the rails, so to speak. He needs a lesson from Rebecca Goldstein (see my post later today):

https://twitter.com/djsantero/status/884390542670475264

A version with sound is on YouTube:

I have long touted this, and other discussions of ethical issues, as some of the great contributions of philosophy to human thought. Thus I am deeply aggrieved to be called a “philosophy jeering scientist”. But more later.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 12, 2017 • 6:45 am

It’s Hump Day in the U.S.: Wednesday, July 12, 2017. Chicago had a huge rainstorm last night—in some places six inches fell in the city and there was flooding—but it’s stopped now. I trust my ducks have survived the deluge. Now the temperature will rise to 94° F (34.4° C), so it’s going to be muggy and miserable. It’s National Pecan Pie Day, one of the best American desserts, especially when the pecans are larded throughout the sweet filling rather than laid as a thin layer on top:

BAD!

BETTER!

On the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, where I did field work, it’s Independence Day, celebrating its freedom from Portugal in 1975.

There was a big snow in New Zealand yesterday, leading to scenes like this (h/t: Gordon):

Arthur’s Pass, home of my favorite bird (see below). Photo: KATE LE COMTE
My favorite bird, and you’d better know it. Photo: JOEL MCDOWELL/SUPPLIED

In honor of the unusual weather, I am wearing an unusual New Zealand pendant, a toki (a symbol of the Māori adze or axe); they’re usually made of nephrite (pounamu), but this one is made of lapis and carved with Maori designs. The tee shirt pays homage to the One True Deity:

On this day in history, Henry VIII (he appears regularly here) married his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, who was not beheaded. On July 12, 1804, Alexander Hamilton died after being shot in a duel with Aaron Burr. In 1962,  The Rolling Stones performed their first concert—at London’s Marquee Club. And in 1979, Kiribati became independent from the UK.

Notables born on this day include Claude Bernard (1813), William Osler (1849), Louis B. Mayer (1884), Oscar Hammerstein II (1895), Bill Cosby (1937, in disgrace at the age of 80), Eiko Ishioka, Japanese art director and graphic designer (1938; see below), Christine McVie (1943), Brian Grazer and Cheryl Ladd (both 1951), and skater Kristi Yamaguchi (1971; what young man was not in love with her?). In honor of Eiko Ishioka’s birthday (she died in 2012), Google has an interactive Doodle today (click on screen shot to go there):

From Wikipedia:

Noted for her advertising campaigns for the Japanese boutique chain Parco, [Ishioka’s] collaboration with sportswear company Descente in designing uniforms and outerwear for members of the Swiss, Canadian, Japanese and Spanish teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and was the director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula and was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award in the same category for her work in Tarsem Singh’s 2012 film Mirror Mirror.

Those who died on this day include Alfred Dreyfus (1935) and Minnie Riperton (1979),  a one-hit wonder who had the highest voice I’ve ever heard in pop music (she had a five-octave range). Remember this song and those amazing notes? Riperton died of cancer at only 31.

Finally, out in Dobrzyn, Hili is trying to manipulate Cyrus to get the walkies going with Andrzej:

Hili: Tell him to hurry up.
Cyrus: Tell him yourself.
Hili: You have greater influence on him than I do.
In Polish:
Hili: Powiedz mu, żeby się pospieszył.
Cyrus: Sama mu powiedz.
Hili: Ty masz na niego większy wpływ.

 

Criminal squirrel gang purloins chocolate bars in Toronto

July 11, 2017 • 2:30 pm

I am feeling better, thank you, and we’re up to 48,939 subscribers, so my bucket list goal of 50,000 seems within reach. Let’s celebrate with two things everyone loves (except miscreants): chocolate and squirrels.

In January the CBC News reported that a squirrel, or more likely a maurading gang of mixed race squirrels (black and gray) are entering a Toronto shop and making off with candy bars:

In a Reddit Toronto thread first posted this fall, the store’s owner says the shop doors typically stay open because it gets “stuffy and hot” inside. And, for more than seven years, it’s never led to problems.

“Until the squirrel started showing up,” the owner wrote.

And there’s more: The owner later learned the thefts — at least six so far — could be the work of an entire ring of furry thieves, or at least two critters. “A black one (or more) and a light brown/grey one (or more),” the owner wrote.

But there’s hope!

The two, three, or more furry criminals — it’s not totally clear — have now been caught on camera swiping candy bars from a bottom shelf.

In one video titled “Crunchie Caper,” posted on Wednesday, a squirrel sneaks into the store, snags a Crunchie bar, and dashes outside — then scampers across the street.

Here’s a video of the crime:

Now I love Crunchie bars, which aren’t available in the U.S.: they have a honeycomb center coated with chocolate:


But if I were a squirrel I’d go for the best candy I’ve had from Canada, the famous Coffee Crisp, which has layers of wafer separated by coffee-flavored cream, all coated with milk chocolate. Sadly, I’ve seen neither of these bars in the U.S., but a kind Canadian once sent me the latter:

Coffee Crisp

But I suppose a squirrel’s gotta take what it can get. As for leaving the door open, people have suggested putting in a screen door, but what fun would that be? (Besides, the squirrels could gnaw a hole in it.)

 

 

 

h/t: Taskin

The science books that inspired eight science writers (and me)

July 11, 2017 • 11:00 am

Yesterday’s Guardian has nice survey of eight science writers (many of them working scientists): “‘I was hooked for life’: Science writers on the books that inspired them.” They don’t make it clear that they’re really asking about popular books, as some of the books that “fired my imagination”, as the article notes, weren’t science trade books but technical books written for professionals. I suppose they wanted books that the layperson could read with profit.

Nevertheless, I’ll list the writers queried by the Guardian and link each name to the book they found inspiring. (If you don’t recognize someone, the Guardian identifies them.)

Brian Cox
Gaia Vinc
Garry Kasparov
Andrea Wulf
Adam Rutherford
Claudia Hammond
Richard Fortey (and a second book)
Venki Ramakrishnan

Now of course I’m going to ask the readers to name the science book or books that most inspired them, and to be fair I’ll have to give my own list. I’ve divided it up into two parts: trade (popular) books and technical books. I’ll surely forget some of them, but I have a limited time here to remember them! I’m listing only the books that influenced me when I was younger, before I was a professional scientist, but over at Five Books I’ve also listed some books I greatly recommend to the general reader. (The only recommendation I’d change is the Gould book; I’d now recommend reading an early collection of his essays.)

Trade books

The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif. Now almost forgotten, the book, though perhaps a tad overwritten, infected me with a love of research–the thrill of the hunt for facts)–when I was very young.

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. de Kruif in fact collaborated with Lewis when he wrote Arrowsmith, telling Lewis about science and basing the book’s characters on real scientists he’d known. It’s the only novel on my list and the best science fiction (i.e., fiction book about doing science) I know of. Again, it’s written in Lewis’s sometimes breathy style, but portrays the wonder of science better than any novel I know.

On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This was, after all, a book written for the public, and it sold very well. I needn’t say why this was influential except that it shows you how to make one long and unanswerable argument, and testifies to the need for anal thoroughness and hard work when you do science

Technical books

Systematic and the Origin of Species (1942) and its updated version Animal Species and Evolution (1963) by Ernst Mayr. These books and the next one were the books that got me interested in speciation, and drove me to the path of studying the evolutionary genetics of speciation.

Genetics and the Origin of Species by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1937). This is generally seen as the book that launched the “modern synthesis” of evolution, in which the observations of natural history and experiments were made consonant with the findings of genetics. Note the similarity of title to Mayr’s books: both saw the “species problem” as paramount in evolution: the observation that nature isn’t a continuum but is divided into discrete and pretty objective units: the populations we call “species”. That in fact was the major problem of evolution that Darwin didn’t solve, despite the title of his most famous book, which turns out to be more about the origin of adaptations within species than about species themselves. Here’s a statement of “the species” problem from the second page of Dobzhansky’s book:

“Organic diversity is an observational fact more or less familiar to everyone.  It is perceived by us as something apart from ourselves, a phenomenon given in experience but independent of the working of our minds. A more intimate acquaintance with the living world discloses another fact almost as striking as the diversity itself. This is the discontinuity of the organic variation.

If we assemble as many individuals living at a given time as we can, we notice at once that the observed variation does not form a single probability distribution or any other kind of continuous distribution.  Instead, a multitude of separate, discrete, distributions are found. In other words. the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by an unbroken series of intergrades, but an array of more of less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or rare.”

Isn’t that good? It’s a succinct and clear statement of “the species problem.” And it was largely solved by Mayr and Dobzhansky. (Mayr was one of my mentors at Harvard and Dobzhansky was my academic grandfather: the advisor of my own advisor, Dick Lewontin.,

All three of these books are remarkably well written, especially considering that Mayr’s native language was German and Dobzhansky’s Russian. It’s rare to find technical books these days written with such clarity and style. These are the books that, along with The Origin, made me an evolutionary geneticist. And they inspired me by showing me that the problem they raised in the Thirties and Forties had lain fallow for several decades thereafter, with few people that interested in speciation. As a student I saw a vacant niche I could fill, especially doing genetic studies of reproductive isolating barriers, and hence my career. That culminated in the book I’m proudest of having written, Speciation (2004) with H. Allen Orr. It’s a technical book, but rereading it recently I realized that I’ve lost the intellectual acumen I had when Allen and I wrote it. I couldn’t do that now: my mind and ability to synthesize diverse material were keener 13 years ago.

As I said, Speciation is a technical book, so I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who hadn’t studied a lot of evolution. My friends who bought it because they liked me did so against my advice, and found out I was right.  But I hope to write a short popular treatment of speciation for Oxford University Press, and that’s why I’m rereading the earlier book, as well as reviewing the literature on speciation since 2004.

This turned into a bit of an autobiography, and I didn’t mean to do that. At any rate, be you scientist or layperson, put in the comments the science books that most influenced or enthralled you.

 

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Linda Sarsour lies again; blames ISIS on the West

July 11, 2017 • 9:45 am

Here we have Feminist and Leftist Hero Linda Sarsour continuing her campaign to whitewash the nastier bits of Islam. And here she takes on the nastiest bit: ISIS. How does she excuse the Islamic State? Easy, it’s the West’s fault!  That, of course, doesn’t explain why ISIS finds it necessary to kill and torture people who are fellow Muslims (viz. Shiites and those who won’t join up or obey the draconian laws they impose on their territory, including Muslim civilians who tried to flee Mosul), or those who have no real connection to Western policy in the Middle East (journalists, apostates, gays, aid workers, and so on).

But the ultimate refutation of Sarsour’s thesis that the West’s incursions in the Middle East are in the main what is responsible for ISIS is seen in ISIS’s own magazine, Dabiq. Have a look at the article “Why we hate you & why we fight you”, which you can see on p. 30 of issue 15: here. As I wrote before:

“After all, ISIS has said in its own magazine, Dabiq, that they are murdering primarily because Islam calls for the extinction of nonbelievers. After giving a list of reasons “Why we hate you & why we fight you” (of which the first four out of six are explicitly religious), ISIS says this—and read it carefully”:

“What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.”

Other excerpts from the Dabiq piece, in order given (I’ve not included every word in these four reasons):

1. We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah – whether you realize it or not – by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4). Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you, your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you. . .

2. We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you Christian disbelief and paganism 32 separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power. In doing so, you desire to rob Allah of His right to be obeyed and you wish to usurp that right for yourselves. . .

3. In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator. You witness the extraordinarily complex makeup of created beings, and the astonishing and inexplicably precise physical laws that govern the entire universe, but insist that they all came about through randomness and that one should be faulted, mocked, and ostracized for recognizing that the astonishing signs we witness day after day are the creation of the Wise, All-Knowing Creator and not the result of accidental occurrence.

4. We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion. As long as your subjects continue to mock our faith, insult the prophets of Allah – including Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad  – burn the Quran, and openly vilify the laws of the Shari’ah, we will continue to retaliate, not with slogans and placards, but with bullets and knives.

The last two reasons involve the West killing Muslims, invading Muslim lands, and imprisoning Muslims. So those must be taken as reasons, too, but reread the bolded bit above.

Now if the foremost reasons why ISIS is fighting, according to its own “official” magazine, have nothing to do with Western invasions of or attacks on Muslim lands, how can Sarsour ignore the explicitly religious reasons in favor of blaming the West for it all? You know the answer: Regressive Leftists often hold the West responsible for the bad deeds of Muslims. Sarsour knows that, but unless she’s completely pig-ignorant, she must also be aware of the reasons given by Islamist terrorists like ISIS. She ignores them—on purpose.

Sarsour is a liar, and I’ve just proved it. It’s not the first time she’s lied and dissimulated, even saying once that she “may or may not” have tweeted her desire to have the genitals of Ayaan Hirsi Ali taken away. And yet she’s a hero to feminists and the Cntrl-Left. Go figure.

 

Photo “proving” that Amelia Earhart survived turns out to be bogus

July 11, 2017 • 8:45 am

Only five days ago I wrote a post about a new photograph that, some experts thought, constituted strong evidence that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan had survived their crash in 1937 and had been captured by the Japanese. The photo, revealed on a History Channel program, purported to show Noonan and Earhart on a dock on the Japanese-controlled atoll of Jaluit, with Earhart looking at what seemed to be the remnants of her plane being towed by a ship. The speculative story ends with her and Noonan later dying in Japanese custody on Saipan.

The photo:

The interpretation:

As I said in my earlier post, I’m credulous about stuff like this, and I was excited at the finding. Sadly, though, it wasn’t Earhart and Noonan, and the excitement, well, it was all due to credulous folk like me. I did wonder how they knew the photo was taken in 1937, when Earhart and Noonan vanished, since the picture had no label.

Well, a Japanese blogger, in just 30 minutes of work, discredited the whole thing. As the Guardian reports:

But serious doubts now surround the [History Channel’s} film’s premise after a Tokyo-based blogger unearthed the same photograph in the archives of the National Diet Library, Japan’s national library.

The image was part of a Japanese-language travelogue about the South Seas that was published almost two years before Earhart disappeared. Page 113 states the book was published in Japanese-held Palau on 10 October 1935.

The caption beneath the image makes no mention of the identities of the people in the photograph. It describes maritime activity at the harbour on Jabor in the Jaluit atoll – the headquarters for Japan’s administration of the Marshall Islands between the first world war and its defeat in the second world war.

The caption notes that monthly races between schooners belonging to local tribal leaders and other vessels turned the port into a “bustling spectacle”.

Kota Yamano, a military history blogger who unearthed the Japanese photograph, said it took him just 30 minutes to effectively debunk the documentary’s central claim.

Once again, Google is your friend:

Yamano ran an online search using the keyword “Jaluit atoll” and a decade-long timeframe starting in 1930.

“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” he said. “I was really happy when I saw it. I find it strange that the documentary makers didn’t confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That’s the first thing they should have done.”

Indeed. I am exculpated to some degree as I didn’t make the claim, but I did repeat it.

Although the photo was published in 1935, it appears to have been taken much earlier; as the Guardian reports:

Matthew B Holly, a military expert, told Agence France-Presse the photo appeared to have been taken about a decade earlier than the date given by the History Channel.

“From the Marshallese visual background, lack of Japanese flags flying on any vessels but one, and the age configuration of the steam-driven steel vessels, the photo is closer to the late 1920s or early 1930s, not anywhere near 1937,” he said.

So much for confirmation bias: a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. As Emily Litella said:

h/t: Matthew Cobb