Winners: Underwater photography contest

January 8, 2015 • 4:27 pm

Here are some of my favorite photos among the winners of Underwater Photography Guide’s 2014 Ocean Art Contest (for all the winners, go here; and if you want the details, click on “story of the shot” beneath each photo).

First prize for “Marine Life Behavior” went to Borut Furlan. As The Big Blue notes, it shows a rarely seen event:

One of the more remarkable events in nature is the spawning and incubation process of the Mediterranean cardinal fish [Apogon imberbis] whereby the female transfers her eggs to the mouth of the male in the blink of an eye. [JAC: The eggs have obviously been fertilized beforehand, probably by an intromittent organ of the male. The link above says that there are about 20,000 eggs, and that the male clearly can’t eat until they hatch.]

The male then broods up to 90 eggs in its mouth for 30 days, during which time it doesn’t eat.

Photographing the egg transfer is nearly impossible, since it can occur in less than two seconds. So it is understandable that underwater photographer Borut Furlan had no idea what he had shot in a semi-dark cave of the Adriatic Sea off Croatia—until he reviewed the photo on the camera’s screen.

Marine-Life-Behavior_Borut-Furlan-egg-transfer

This one, “Underwater—Kirra Point”, by Ray Collins, which won the Best of Show, is pretty amazing. His story:

 I love to make images underwater. The sand on the Gold Coast reflects light really well so it is one of my favourite local places to shoot. On this morning I was trying to show the clarity and surroundings while composing for the wave to go past me.

ocean-art-best-show

“Follow me,” by Montse Grillo, was shot off Tenerife, and took fourth place in the wide-angle category:

Wide Angle Open_Montse Grillo_Followme

“Tiny refuge”, by Ron Watkins, was taken off Kona, Hawaii, and shows some fascinating biology. It won first place in the Macro category. Note: a pyrosome is a colonial tunicate, so this fish is inside an invertebrate for protection.

While in Kona, I went out on a Black Water Dive with Kona Honu Divers where we were attached to a 40′ vertical line in over a thousand feet of water at 10PM.  While suspended in the black water you observe life forms that you have never seen before or even imagined that surface in the shallows.  Every dive is an adventure and full of life.  This juvenile carangids seeks the refuge of a tiny pyrosome as a temporary commensalism for protection against predators in the dark.  After viewing the image on the computer, I also noticed that the fish had a few room mates in the pyrosome.

Macro open_Ron Watkins_tiny refuge in the dark

“Eyes”, by Uwe Schmolke, won honorable mention in the Portrait category, and shows one of this website’s favorite invertebrates, a mantis shrimp:

Portrait_uweschmolke_Portrait

 

 

Finally, here’s “Eyes bigger than the stomach,” which won Jack Berthomier a first place in the Compact Marine Life Behavior (?) category. It was shot off New Caledonia, and here’s the story:

I was able to see this scene three times in three years time. The first time, it was a big Hydrophis (about 130 cm) – took a few shots and one of which was selected 2nd at Ocean Art in 2013. The second time I saw one Hydrophis, it was a smaller one but unfortunately all botched shots because it bit my swimfin twice… The third time I was able to shoot one (the selected photo) measured approximately 60 cm. When I first saw it, it was at the surface and was just beginning to swallow its prey. Very few divers were lucky enough to watch this kind of scene, and apparently no other shot of this kind has been taken. This sea snake is very poisonous and can be murderous and also very agressive. (sic)

Compact Marine Behavior_jack berthomier_Hydrophis major attack_small

The site has many other outstanding underwater photos, and the quality of these photos has increased year by year, perhaps due to an improvement in equipment. Go have a look at the other good snaps I didn’t have room to show.

Donald Trump embarrasses himself again

January 8, 2015 • 3:38 pm

That’s right, the man who has 2.8 million followers on Twi**er, for no obvious reason save his wealth, has put his foot it in again. His solution to the terrorist attacks in Paris: give the French more guns!

If Trump had his way, the citizens of Europe would be just as armed as those of Alabama.  All the employees of Charlie Hebdo would have had guns, and thus could clearly have taken down the two murderers armed only with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.

Here are of The Donald’s tw**ts from yesterday:

Screen shot 2015-01-07 at 6.22.00 PM

This is a guy who wants to be President of the U.S. God save America. Oh wait. . . . that’s not possible.

 

The Paris murders: Catholic League’s Bill Donoghue gets it wrong; New Yorker’s George Packer gets it right

January 8, 2015 • 12:02 pm

Bill Donohue is the Muslim of Catholicism. What I mean by that is that he thrives on offense, and though he doesn’t kill anybody when he’s offended, he’s made a career out of raging at those who insult the Pope, the Church, preachers and nuns, or anything associated with the Vatican Mafia. So far Catholics have been loath to criticize him, but his latest piece at the Catholic League site, “Muslims are right to be angry“, may change that. For in it, Donohue pins a fair amount of blame on the murders on the Charlie Hebo journalist and cartoonists themselves.  The only way I can account for this lapse in judgement is from Donohue’s own  personal history. For he’s spent so much time defending his own religion against perceived smears that he’s now taken it on himself to defend Islam, too, and so sees the satirical cartoonists as just as offensive as those who criticize Mother Teresa.

In his first paragraph, Donohue gives the game away. He pays lip service to morality by decrying the murders (he more or less has to; who would approve of them?), but then shows where he’s going:

Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.

With that out of the way, Donohue goes off the rails, arguing that Charlie Hebdo brought the murders on themselves by “intentionally insulting” Muslims in a vulgar way. The bolding below is mine (indeed; the whole thing should be in bold):

While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them.

Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. In 2012, when asked why he insults Muslims, he said, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me.” Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive. Muhammad isn’t sacred to me, either, but it would never occur to me to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing him.

Anti-Catholic artists in this country have provoked me to hold many demonstrations, but never have I counseled violence. This, however, does not empty the issue. Madison was right when he said, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”

A touchstone for a right-thinking person in this tragic situation involves whether or not they blame the magazine itself for the murder of 12 people. If they do, they should be ridiculed or dismissed, for they’re claiming that if you make fun of people’s faith, you’re complicit in your own murder.

That’s like blaming rape victims for dressing in a way that supposedly provoked their attack. Donohue, in fact, is not acting like the person who tells women that their chances of being raped may be higher if they wear scanty clothing or walk in unsafe places; he’s acting like the person who says they deserve what they get. The people at Charlie Hebdo understood the dangers, and went ahead and published anyway. As cartoonist Stephan Charbonnier said, “I would prefer to die on my feet than live on my knees.”

By claiming that Charlie Hebdo committed an “abuse of liberty,” Donohue aligns himself with every fascist and tyrant who would stifle the criticism of authority. And he’s made himself irrelevant. The proper response to this tragedy by any enlightened person is to defend the right of free speech and condemn those who kill to prevent it.

But we have a palliative article, and, surprisingly, it’s in the New Yorker, which has been notoriously soft on religion. I would have expected the magazine to decry the killings but avoid blaming religion. But they pin the blame directly where it belongs: on the excesses of faith. In George Packer’s website pice “The blame for the Charlie Hebdo murders“, you’ll find stuff that you rarely see in a major journalistic venue. Read and cheer:

The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.

They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of a great religion.

He’s talking about you, Ben Affleck, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Pape, Krista Tippett, Karen Armstrong, and the rest of the unctuous Islamic apologists.

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique. Charlie Hebdo had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism. For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.

. . . The cartoonists died for an idea. The killers are soldiers in a war against freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to offend—against everything decent in a democratic society. So we must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day.

Why I see this incident as a watershed moment in the war on terrorism is that it’s almost impossible to pin the murders on anything but blind adherence to religious faith. The murders come directly from the belief that making fun of or even depicting the prophet is a capital offense. Why else would the terrorists target Charlie Hebdo instead of, say, French government offices? If the murders are due to colonialism or simply angry males looking for an outlet, it’s hard to see why the target is so obviously connected with Islam. What may have changed with this tragedy is people’s willingness, as we see in Packer’s piece, to recognize that religion causes people to do bad things. That has been obvious to most of us for some time, but has been adamantly resisted by religionists like Karen Armstrong, who are incapable of finding any harmful consequences of faith, and liberals who, in their desire to coddle the underdog, will blame Muslim violence on the colonialism and oppression by the West.

Yes, some of that violence is undoubtedly due to other factors besides religion. But the time is past to say that all of it is. Right now the West is not occupying the Middle East, and much of the violence we see is not only inflicted by Muslims on other Muslims, but, as in this case, is explicitly justified in the name of Islam. It’s only when we recognize this that we can fully apprehend the problem.

I don’t know how to address the problem of terrorism save by increased surveillance and intelligence. But I do know that the way not to solve it is by demonizing free speech. For if we do that, we become like the enemy—and then we are truly lost.

*******

And a p.s.: Read Ayaan Hirsi’s reaction at The Daily Beast. A snippet:

The ball is now in the court of the media. If the press responds to this by not reprinting the cartoons, by not defending the principle that Charlie Hebdo was defending, then we have given in. Then they have won. Those three men yelled, “Allahu Akbar.” They yelled, “The Prophet is avenged. Charlie Hebdo is dead.” Our duty is to keep Charlie Hebdo alive. Our duty is to make sure that they realize that the Prophet is not avenged.

In 2006, when Jyllands-Posten in Denmark published the Muhammad cartoons, the mainstream media made the decision not to reprint those cartoons, to respect the sensibilities of Muslims and to avoid Muslim rage. This time it would be the biggest mistake for the Western press to repeat that—absolutely the biggest mistake.

. . . But the most important point I want to make is about what the press does now. When you’re all sitting in your editorial rooms and you’re reflecting on this, when you’re asking yourselves, “Should we reprint these cartoons or not? Should we print cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad? Should we use satire to depict these things?” Please ignore those voices saying, “Please let’s not provoke.”

I would urge everyone in the media to take a stand now. An entire magazine has been wiped out. If you think they won’t one day come for you, too, just because you abstained from mocking the Prophet, then you are gravely mistaken.

h/t: Ben Goren, Chris

Readers’ wildlife photo, and an evolutionary lesson: speciation in action!

January 8, 2015 • 9:13 am

Reader pyers from the UK sent a photo of a bird at his feeder that brings up a cool evolutionary story. Birders and biologists have known for more than 40 years that this species, the Eurasian blackcap, may be splitting into two species before our eyes, as birds going to their original overwintering ground have now split into two different groups overwintering in different places.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First I’ll show the photo and then let pyers tell a lot of the story, supplementing his comments with what I know about this case. It may involve a form of evolution that creationists say simply doesn’t happen: new species forming before our eyes—in real time!

Pyers’s comments are indented, mine are flush left.

This not brilliant photo  (it is dark and gloomy outside today); it’s of a Eurasian Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla)  having a nom at my bird feeder.
image%5b3%5d

Here’s a bit of evolution in action, which I hope will interest you.

Now normally this wouldn’t be considered for any of your wildlife photos – except for one thing: it shouldn’t be here [in the UK] – at least not in winter!
Blackcaps are normally summer visitors to the UK but is a new(ish) change to their behaviour.The normal migratory route for these birds is to Spain & tropical Africa, but over the last 50 odd years (say from the 1960’s) a small population from Germany, where they breed,  has come to overwinter in the UK because of human-provided food (like my feeder) . What is fascinating is that the change in their behaviour is genetic and has evolved over a very few generations. My only slight complaint is that they are rather thuggish birds, even if they have a beautiful song, and are perfectly capable of bullying a robin (which are normally the birds which deserve an ASBO).

Here’s a map of the different migration routes taken from the Berkeley “Understanding Evolution” website (the African overwintering sites aren’t shown):

blackcapmap

What pyers doesn’t add is that the birds from Spain and Africa both return to the summer breeding grounds a bit later than the birds from the UK, because the latter have less distance to cover on the return.  Since birds form mating pairs soon after they get to the breeding grounds, the change in migration, perhaps based originally on small genetic differences, has led to two subpopulations that mate largely among themselves, so that gene flow is reduced between the two groups. Early-arriving birds mate with other early-arriving birds, and the same assortative mating goes for the late arrivals. That means that the interbreeding that normally prevents genetic differentiation is minimized, and the two differentially-migrating populations can diverge from each other by either natural selection or random genetic drift.

One might indeed suspect that, subject to different selection pressures—including adaptation to very different food and temperatures—the two groups of birds might indeed diverge by selection. And that seems to be what’s happening. There are already genetic differences in body form. The south-migrating birds have pointer wings (favoring flight for long distances) as oppose to the rounder wings of the UK-migrating birds. And the southern migrators also have shorter and stouter beaks, which may reflect a difference in diet (fruit, insects, and pollen for the southerners, suet, seeds, and other human-provided foods for the UK migrators).

These body-form differences are supplemented by other genetic differences that have accumulated: DNA analysis of birds on the breeding grounds can tell where they have overwintered with about 85% accuracy.

Over time (and this has happened in only a few decades), the blackcap species may eventually fragment into two groups that, while breeding in the same location, mate only with members of their own group and not with those from the other. Since this would have a genetic basis (the genetic propensity to migrate one way versus the other is probably increasing over time, since stragglers wouldn’t find good overwintering grounds), what we would have is speciation: the formation of two reproductively-isolated groups descended from an original common ancestor. Certainly what we see now is what evolutionists call speciation in statu nascendi—speciation in the “nascent state”.

Creationists say that we have no cases of this, but, as I show in WEIT, we surely do, especially in certain plants—something that Greg will write about shortly.  And we have lots of cases of species that are likely in the process of forming, as in the blackcaps.  But pyers has more to say:

I have 2 issues. Firstly: as I  said, they are thuggish birds so what effect will they have on the native birds?, and, secondly, this is a human driven change (not deliberate, I know) so what are the long-term chances for the bird? (I am not suggesting that we in the UK stop putting feeders out—we DO love our garden birds—but over thousands of years).

You can find more here on the change to the Blackcap.

And there are papers here (the first one is good)

and here ($$$ required!)

Also check out the link from Understanding Evolution given above.

We don’t often get readers’ photos that tell stories like this, so h/t to pyers and thanks for the references.

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Charlie

January 8, 2015 • 7:15 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “nous“, clearly expresses the author’s solidarity with other cartoonists (and people) appalled at the terrorist murders in Paris. (Yes, the killers have now been identified as Muslim extremists.) In his/her email to subscribers, the artist says this:

After yesterday’s horror, the latest strip seemed so trivial and inadequate. So here is a placeholder until next time.

What is incongruent about this is that given the history of the character Mo, I doubt that he’d ever have expressed the sentiments below. Clearly, in this case emotion effaced the plot line.

2015-01-08

I have a feeling—and I may be wrong—that this time the extremists crossed a line, one that will mark a turning point in how liberals regard terrorism. I suspect that it will be increasingly hard for those liberals and for Islamophiles to justify such acts as the result of colonialism, the disaffection of the disempowered, or as anything other than the expression of pure, misguided religiosity. But, as we’ll see later today, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue still pins blame on those religion-hating French cartoonists themselves.

The latest update from the New York Times includes this:

The two chief suspects in the attack on Wednesday, Said and Chérif Kouachi, 34 and 32, who are brothers, remained at large as a manhunt continued over a wide area of northern France. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, 18, turned himself in at a police station in Charleville-Mézières, about 145 miles northeast of Paris.

This verifies what was suggested by not only the act itself, but the shouts of “Allahu Akbar” from the murderers.

And my CNN email news bulletin adds this:

There have been “several detentions” during the night in connection with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Thursday, not specifying how many.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

January 8, 2015 • 6:50 am

No feline philosophy today: Hili is back to her normal concerns:

Hili: Life is always surprising us.
A: What are you surprised about this time?
Hili: I looked into my bowl and it was empty again.
P1020181
In Polish:
Hili: Życie ciągle nas zaskakuje?
Ja: Co tym razem cię zaskoczyło?
Hili: Zaglądam do mojej miseczki, a tam znowu pusto.

Cat goes nuts over olives

January 7, 2015 • 5:18 pm

Here’s another of those bizarre and funny Russian cat videos. This time the Soviet moggie apparently loves the smell of olives, which, like catnip, drives her into a frenzy—but she doesn’t seem to want to eat them. Perhaps a Russian reader can translate the YouTube title:

Кошка и оливки

My decision about joining Patheos

January 7, 2015 • 2:53 pm

The short answer: I’m staying here. A few hours ago I sent this email to Leo Brunnick, the founder of Patheos, and to Dale McGowan, who runs the “atheist channel” at the site:

Hi guys,

I’m sorry to say that, after a ton of consideration when I was in India, I decided to remain independent and not join Patheos. While my readers were overwhelmingly against the move, that was not the deciding factor. The factor was, in fact, threefold, none of the reasons reflecting any bad opinion I have of your site.  The deciding issues included the presence of ads, which I simply cannot abide and do not have on my site (I pay to avoid them!); the fact that with increased readership I could not retain my personal monitoring of comments, which I don’t want to outsource; and the fact that Patheos really was founded as a religious website, “hosting the conversation on faith:  “atheism” is, unaccountably, listed as a “faith channel,” but of course atheism is not a faith at all and doesn’t belong with any of the other conventional faiths.  All told, I guess I would like to remain independent, sans ads, and not be part of a network that touts all kinds of religious delusions on other channels.

But I was honored to be invited, for I know you wouldn’t have done so had you not thought I’d contribute something to your site. And it was very tempting to have an opportunity to increase my readership, which I’m certain would have happened had I moved. I like many of the atheist sites (and some not so much!), but your overall effort on the Atheist Channel has been admirable. I wish you the best of luck with your site!

Best,

Jerry

Leo wrote back a nice note saying that they regretted my decision but that some of the issues I raised will be addressed in the near future. But for the time being I will remain The Cat That Walked by Himself.

I have to say that a few of the readers struck me as a bit selfish about this, wishing to keep the smallish community of people (many who know each other) with whom they regularly interact. But I was heartened by most readers’ avowal that although they wished me to remain independent, they’d continue to read the site if it moved.

I should also add that the promise of increased readership, which almost certainly would have happened had I moved to Patheos, was tempting. Let’s face it: nobody wants to write publicly if nobody reads them, and the more readership the better. It certainly would have been useful in helping me find readers for my new book.  The money from Patheos would have been a bonus (probably several tens of thousands of dollars per year), but, as I said, dollars were never my main concern.

Given that I’m abandoning both dosh and readers, and in fact providing content for free (I pay a nominal fee to host the site and keep it free of ads) I’d like to ask the many of you who urged me to stay to do me two small favors. First, buy Faith versus Fact (link above); you can pre-order it now though it doesn’t come out till May 19. If every subscriber bought a book, it would produce an initial sale of 30,000+ copies, a very good number, and one that Viking would appreciate since they want their advance recouped. I can say that I don’t think you’ll consider this investment wasted. Second, recommend the book and this website to your friends if you think they’d enjoy them.  I’m asking for your help since I’ve given up the increased sales of the book that would likely have come by joining Patheos.

And I plan no changes here in the near future, though I’ll probably add a link at the top right for the new book, giving information about it and where you can order it.  As General Patton said in his famous speech to the Third Army, “you’ll know what to do.”

funny-cat-picture-im-not-going-anywhere-and-neither-is-the-box