Correction: Dubai drowning incident apparently happened two decades ago

August 14, 2015 • 7:58 am

I recently posted a story, taken from Emirates 24/7 News and other sources, that a father in Dubai let his daughter drown because he prevented male lifeguards from touching her lest they besmirch her honor.

However, reader Sean contacted me, pointing me to a piece on My Secret Atheist Blog—a piece that suggests that if the incident even occurred, it happened over two decades ago. Apparently the information came from a recollection by Lt. Col Ahmed Burqibah, Deputy Director of Dubai Police’s Search and Rescue Department, and, as the Daily Mail (via The Guardian online) reports:

Apparently the article – which originated on the website Emirates 24/7 – was from an interview in which lifeguards were asked to recount the strangest things that had happened to them. As someone who bothered to check out where it came from tells Monkey: “They mentioned this case of the Asian man who prevented his daughter’s rescue, but, and here’s the catch – it was from 1996.”

So this story, represented by me and the news media as new, is in fact old. And we have to question further whether the incident occurred at all given that it’s based on the memory of lifeguards. It could of course be verified, as the stories also reported that the father was charged with interfering with the lifeguards. There should be a record of that, but present circumstances suggest that we take the story with a grain of salt pending further information.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 14, 2015 • 7:30 am

We still have a reasonable backlog of photos, but readers who have good pictures of wildlife (broadly construed) might consider sending them to me.

Today marks another error by Professor Ceiling Cat. I received these nice photos from Stephen Barnard on March 29, but I lost the identifying email, and he trashed it in the interim. Readers, then, can entertain themselves by identifying the animals (hint: there are birds, mammals, and a snake):

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Reader Lauren sent a photo of an arthropodian stowaway, as well as an interesting sans-wildlife photo.
I was flying from Toronto to Sudbury, Ontario, on Wednesday and noticed that we had a small stowaway. I decided to take a picture with my iPhone, and while focusing on the ladybug observed that the propellor looked damned weird in the screen. I immediately captured this video.
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The video:
I’m told this is caused by a combination of the iPhone’s scanning speed and the fact that its camera scans from top to bottom.
Unfortunately we lost our guest shortly before landing. I hope she survived the descent.
Me too. It’s amazing this creature hung onto the plane for nearly the full flight.
Finally, I thought I’d throw this in though it wasn’t not taken by a reader, though it was sent by one (Gina). The Daily Mail reports the sighting of an unknown deep-sea creature (it’s surely a a coelenterate) that resembles the FSM. The headline shows how far the Flying Spaghetti Monster has permeated our culture (click on it to go to the story; not that “god” isn’t capitalized):
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The photo:
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 A video:
And the Mail’s picture of the FSM. Note that its caption is wrong: His Noodliness was created not to mock creationism, but religion in general.
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Anti-creationism: The siphonophore–which was spotted 4,000 feet below the Atlantic by a BP oil rig’s deep sea ROV–looks undeniably like the satirical deity created in 2005 to mock the teaching of creationism

Friday: Hili dialogue

August 14, 2015 • 5:45 am

There is nothing new to report from Chicago: the campus is dead because all the students are gone (we’re on the quarter system, so classes begin at the start of October), but the weather is pretty glorious. And it’s Friday again! Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili couches her usual obsession in literary terms, but she’s as cute as ever:

Hili: Midsummer night dream.
A: What dream is that?
Hili: A faint scratching of a mouse.

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In Polish:
Hili: Sen nocy letniej.
Ja: Jaki?
Hili: Ciche skrobanie myszy.

Tenor sings opera during craniotomy

August 13, 2015 • 3:30 pm

Reader Gijs sent me this today, with the note “I’ve never sent you anything to post about and I wouldn’t be offended if you didn’t post this. But I couldn’t think of a better audience to view this video than your audience. If this doesn’t bring a tear to one’s eye I don’t know what will.”

I think he’s right.  The YouTube notes, apparently composed by the singer himself—Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne—say this:

I’m a professional opera, concert and choral singer that was diagnosed with a brain tumour (a GBM as it turned out). The neurosurgeon’s advice was to do an awake craniotomy so that I could sing during the surgery (on June13th 2014) in order to avoid deficits after the procedure. The music neuro team of the UMC in Utrecht was also involved in order to assist the surgery. There is no blood or exposed flesh in the video.I sing two (first and last) couplets of Schubert’s lied “Gute Nacht”: the minor – major transition in order to see if I can still recognise the key change. All is fine until min. 2:40 when things start to get very interesting…  It’s been more than a year since and I’m doing fine, continuing my professional singing career.

The video:

It’s amazing: the guy is singing, and singing wonderfully, while they’re cutting a cancer out of his brain! (A “GBM” is a glioblastoma, a very serious form of brain cancer, so I’m extra glad that the guy is doing well.) Science!

More information from RT:

An opera singer from Slovenia was performing Schubert while undergoing a brain cancer surgery in a Dutch clinic, later posting the video from the operating room online.

The doctors at the University Medical Center Utrecht asked Ambroz Bajec-Lapajne to sing in order to monitor his ability to vocalize and recognize the key change during the brain tumor surgery.

The tenor opted for ‘Gute Nacht’ (Good Night) by Austrian 19th century composer, Franz Peter Schubert, performing the opening and the final couplets from the song.

The doctors were clearly impressed by the young man’s talent.

In the most dramatic moment of the video, Bajec-Lapajne stopped singing and appeared to be drifting away, but the tenor was able to restart his song from the beginning after a short break.

“I’m just a singer and tenor at that… I believe he rewired my brain for a while and that was the result. I could not control my tongue anymore and could not stop phonating. It was a very weird feeling,” the singer is cited by UPI.

An awake craniotomy was performed on Bajec-Lapajne in order to tackle GMB or Glioblastoma multiforme.

 

 

 

The Atlantic: Must all college humor be politically correct?

August 13, 2015 • 2:15 pm

There are clearly unsavory aspects of a policy allowing “free” speech, even when that policy prohibits, as does America’s legal system, speech calculated to incite imminent violence. Who wants to hear a latter-day Klansman natter on about the inferiority of blacks, or a Muslim talk about the need to keep women from any contact with men? That’s just offensive to all rational people.

But the problem is that what is deemed “offensive” is not clear cut.  For example, debates on abortion, particularly of late-term fetuses, or about how trans women should be classified, can be instructive, even if you’re opposed to what the speaker says. It beehoves us, as liberals who love science, to at least consider the arguments of our opponents—unless, as in the case of racism, they’re so far out of bounds that the issue can be seen as settled. (But even in these latter cases the adherents must be free to speak.) The key point is that what one person considers offensive can be seen by others as instructive, and even when there’s disagreement, well, that’s what education is all about.

And so comedy that is seen by many as offensive, as with George Carlin’s routines about God or the “seven dirty words,” or Lenny Bruce’s infamous routine on “Are there any niggers here tonight?“, can prompt not only laughs, but discussion and even enlightenment. Even Sarah Silverman’s song in the nursing home, telling old people that they’re going to die soon, has a point, reminding us of our mortality and the possiblity that many of us may in fact wind up in such homes. It’s at once disturbing and funny, and funny because it’s disturbing.

All of those performances have been seen as offensive, but does anyone have the right to ban them, or even say that they shouldn’t be performed? Colleges campuses routinely do, banning all but the most squeaky clean comedians from campus—those who adhere to a code that respects all diversity and doesn’t venture into the dark recesses of the human psyche. That’s why both Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock announced that they will no longer perform on campuses: the humor they’d like to purvey simply isn’t welcome there.

The unhealthy relationship between colleges and comedy is the subject of long piece at The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan, “That’s not funny” (subtitle: “Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke”). It’s a wee bit ambivalent, for it recognizes, as I noted above, that free speech can truly be offensive, without redeeming qualities. But the view that free speech is nonoffensive speech has become the norm.

Flanagan visited the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), where prospective comedians who aspire to do the college circuit—described as quite lucrative, as it’s steady work—and found a chilling atmosphere around comedy. Only comedians with the right schtick could secure prized contracts at the convention.

A few excerpts:

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

. . . When I attended the convention in Minneapolis in February, I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.

Clearly Flanagan decries the trend towards squeaky-clean comedy on campuses, where challenging acts should be almost the norm. Her ambivalence occurs at the end of the piece (do read it!), where she describes the dilemma of Geoff Keith, a comedian forced to clean up his act to secure college gigs. (He’s been quite successful.) But she reinforces her thesis with the last sentence.

[Keith] would not tell the jokes that kill at the clubs. He would not do the bit that ends with him offering oral sex to the magician David Copperfield, or the one about a seductive woman warning him that she might be an ax murderer, or the one about why men don’t like to use condoms. Those jokes include observations about power and sex and even rape—and each, in its complicated way, addresses certain ugly and possibly immutable truths. But they are jokes, not lessons from the gender-studies classroom. Their first objective is to be funny, not to service any philosophical ideal. They go where comedy always wants to go, to the darkness, and they sucker-punch you with a laugh when you don’t think you should laugh.

And maybe you shouldn’t. These young people have decided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics. They want a world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’t rigged in favor of the powerful. And it’s their student-activities money, after all—they have every right to hire the exact type of entertainment that matches their beliefs. Still, there’s always a price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughts and ideas. Drive those ideas underground, especially the dark ones, and they fester.

Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a “mouth full of blood”—the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not as a critique of some vile notion but as an endorsement of it. It’s the essential peril of comedy, as performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, Amy Schumer understand all too well. But to enroll in college and discover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand-up comics who tell jokes in the student union—great care has been taken to expose you to only the narrowest range of approved social and political opinions: that’s the mouth full of blood right there.

See a jumping spider’s eyes move in its head

August 13, 2015 • 10:20 am

. . . or rather in its cephalothorax. Matthew Cobb sent me a link to this tw**t by Leilani Walker.

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Jumping spiders are ambush predators, and need to follow and fix their vision on moving prey. How can they do this? It turns out that this group, contrary to what we expect for arachnids, can actually swivel their eyes about, something alluded to in the tw**t.

Here’s the video showing eye movement and its notes:

One of the most transparent jumping spiders I’ve ever seen. Note how visible the primary eyes are. Check out another video to look deep into a jumping spider’s spotted, moving eyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq5ky.

Watch carefully to see the movement: those black objects that are moving back and forth are the eye tubes (see below) scanning the environment, and happen to be visible through the transparent exoskeleton:

The explanation of this video, and of spider vision in general, is given in a piece by Gwen Pearson on Wired, “Spider vision made clear.” I’ll reproduce some of her text:

Spider eyes are different from insect eyes; they are not compound but simple. There is one lens for each eye, made of a thin layer of the cuticle. Below that is the retina, the actual light-detecting cells. Jumping spiders have a problem–how do they focus their eye? They don’t have an iris like we do, and their lens is solid.

The easiest way to deal with this is to angle your head, and you can see the spider carefully tilting his head to get a better look at the videographer pestering him. It’s those adorable head tilts that make photos of jumping spiders so very cute.

But for fine focus, more is needed. The evolutionary work-around for this (if you are a jumping spider) is to have eyes that are a bit of a tube:

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Caption from Wired: Diagram of a Salticid eye, from the fabulously named paper, “‘Eight-legged cats’ and how they see”. Illustration: Fair Use; OA primary research

The movement you’re seeing in the video is the front eye tubes and the muscles that adjust and point them. There’s a second lens at the end of the tube, and unlike the outer lens it’s flexible. Basically, jumping spiders have built themselves two little telescopes.  By adjusting the angle and shape of the inner lens, the spiders can focus and zoom in on what they are looking at.

That’s remarkable. I know of no other group that has two lenses, one behind the other, in their eye. (I may of course be wrong.) Thanks to Gwen for the article and to Matthew Cobb, who brought it to my attention.

Finally, to save you trouble, I’ve embedded the second video as well, which uses special photography showing that apparently stationary eyes are actually swiveling about:

Notes on this one:

This jumping spider’s eyes have strange checkerboard spots on the inside, which you can see if you peer deep into its eyes. The eyes move side to side, as you may have seen in a different species here [first video above linked]. This is Habronattus aztecanus, mentioned also here.

 

Ontario schools require teaching evolution—except human evolution

August 13, 2015 • 9:15 am

A Canadian reader sent me an item from his/her website, Darwinquixote. The post is called “Be careful, evolution is behind you.” The topic is the teaching of evolution in Ontario: apparently provincial standards mandate that while evolution be taught in public secondary schools, they don’t require the teaching of human evolution.

Human exceptionalism when it comes to evolution is not new, of course. Tennesee’s Butler Act, under which John Scopes was prosecuted in the famous 1925 “Monkey Trial,” forbade the teaching not of evolution, but of human evolution alone. (Scopes was of course convicted, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality.) And I understand that while evolution is taught even in some Middle Eastern countries, like Iran (but not Saudi Arabia), teaching human evolution is verboten, for the Qu’ran states explicitly that Allah created humans ex nihilo.

Human exceptionalism of this sort is, of course, derived from religious dogma. It’s okay for everything else to have evolved, but not God’s Special Species.

Now I’m not sure whether this is the reason behind Ontario’s strange curriculum, but Darwinquixote describes the provincial policy and later recounts the efforts of a colleague to get some clarification.

Religion and politics in Canada often intersect. . . Perhaps the most significant religious influence that to this point has largely acted below the radar is the way in which evolution is taught in Canadian schools. The Ontario teaching curriculum for high school students requires that evolution be taught but not as it relates to us, humans. So, students in Ontario learn about how lower animals, plants and fungi evolve but when it comes to themselves, their relatives, their friends and ancestors, they are left filling in the blanks themselves.

. . . The secondary school system can’t be everything to everybody, but shouldn’t it be obliged to share, if not teach, the answers to the most fundamental questions of our species’ approximately 200 thousand year existence – where do humans come from?

The answer, of course, is a vigorous “YES!”, for what good is teaching evolution if it doesn’t include the statement that we, too, came about by the same materialistic process that gave rise to eagles, mushrooms, and beetles? For that gives us our kinship with all living things, as well as an awareness of our similarity to our closest living relatives, the apes. It also motivates an evolutionary search for the roots of human morphology, physiology, and behavior (evolutionary psychology). The notion that Homo sapiens evolved is pivotal in understanding our own species, even if you disagree with Alexander Pope that “the proper study of Mankind is Man.”

And, of course, the evidence for human evolution is multifarious and incontrovertible, including the fossil record and genetic data such as the chromosome fusion (chromosome #2, to be precise) that occurred in our lineage since it diverged from that of modern apes. WEIT recounts other evidence: vestigial organs and genes, bizarre twists of embryological development that can be explained only by evolution, and so on.

So why isn’t this taught in Ontario? I can see only one reason—religious sentiments. That answer is supported by the website’s writer, whose colleague politely interrogated a government official:

It is important to understand the motives behind the Province of Ontario’s omission of human evolution in their curriculum. A colleague of mine set out in search of a rationale for this decision and was shocked at the response he received. In a letter sent to the Ministry of Education he inquired why human evolution was not a mandatory element of the Ontario secondary school curriculum. A portion of the response provided by the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Branch was as follows:

“Ensuring that curriculum is inclusive in nature, addresses the education needs of all students, and reflects the diversity of the Ontario population is very important to our government. The Equity and Inclusive Education section (Section 1.4) in Ontario Schools: Kindergarten to Grade 12, Policy and Program Requirements for example describes a number of principles relating to values which should permeate the school and curriculum. The Statement on Equity and Inclusive Education describes the importance of staff and students demonstrating respect for diversity in school and the wider society. It is expected that teachers will plan units of study, develop a variety of teaching approaches, and select appropriate resources to address the curriculum expectations, taking into account the needs and abilities of the students in their classes. As well, learning activities should be designed to reflect diverse points of views and experiences.”

Now one could take that simply as boilerplate—a form response to all letters about the curriculum—but I don’t think so. The key words, as Darwinquixote notes, are “inclusive” and “diversity”.  My best guess is that the omission of human evolution from the Ontario curriculum reflects the stated “respect for diversity in school and the wider society.”  That is, of course, a euphemism for saying: “We don’t teach human evolution because it will offend some people.” And of course those are religious people.

My response is this: “That’s too bad. You should teach human evolution because it’s true, and because it opens a huge and light-giving window on human origins, characteristics, and behavior. You should teach human evolution because it’s misleading to imply that we somehow got here by a process different from that of other species.”

It may not be irrelevant (an unwarranted double negative, I know) that Canada’s Federal Minister for Science and Technology between 2008 and 2013, Gary Goodyear, was apparently deeply religious, and his views on evolution are, at the least, questionable.

If you want to complain to someone about this policy, here are the email addresses from the Ontario Ministry of Education’s “contact us” page:

E-mail:

If you want a boilerplate email, here’s one I suggest. I’ve sent this already to both addresses.

Dear Ministry of Education:

It’s come to my understanding that Ontario’s secondary schools require the teaching of evolution, but not the teaching of human evolution. I also understand that this policy reflects the province’s “respect for diversity in school and the wider society”. (That phrase is from an earlier response to a complaint similar to this.)

Human evolution happens not only to be true, and is documented with multifarious evidence from fossils, morphology, genetics, and embryology, but its teaching opens up a huge and wonderful window on our behavior and origins. It shows us our kinship with all other species, and clarifies many things about our species (the evolutionary roots of our behavior, as well as weird aspects of development and appearance) that do not make sense under any other hypothesis. What is the point of teaching evolution if humans are implicitly granted an exception by omitting them from the curriculum?

It’s possible that this omission is the result of catering to those religious people who are offended by the notion that humans evolved. I don’t think, however, that it’s good educational policy to omit an important and enlightening truth because of such fears.  I would urge you to include human evolution in the required Ontario secondary-school curriculum, and, if you’re not so inclined, to explain to me this curious omission.

Should you wish to see the massive evidence for human evolution, here are two good websites:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/evidence_mn.html

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence

It seems to me a gross dereliction of the province’s educational responsibility to omit this exciting aspect of evolution from the curriculum.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,