A joke

July 2, 2014 • 6:49 am

While writing about the possibly apocryphal story of Napoleon and Laplace (“I have no need of that hypothesis”), a joke suddenly came to me. It is only the fourth joke I’ve invented in my life.*

Q:  Why was the Empress Josephine like Americans at Thanksgiving dinner?
A: Because they all took a bone apart.

I presume that many countries have the tradition of breaking the wishbone.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

______

*Here’s another, which has to be related verbally and pronounced properly:

Q: What do French horses eat?
A: Haute cuisine.

Today’s footie

July 2, 2014 • 5:42 am

None, and thank Ceiling Cat for that! Believe me, I need a break. Try polishing a huge book manuscript and watching two World Cup games at the same time!

But play resumes on Friday, with two cracking matches. I will somehow need to watch both:

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.14.44 AM

Make your predictions, if you wish. Mine (I don’t dare to predict scores) are Germany and Brazil. That’s not too hard, but of course the outcome of all games are unpredictable (though completely determined ages ago)

We all know by now that yesterday the U.S. lost to Belgium 1-2, but it was a splendid game, with the U.S. playing their hearts out in the overtime. I’m only glad it wasn’t settled by penalty kicks. Argentina also beat Switzerland 1-0 with a beautiful pass from Messi to di Maria.  All in all, it was a great day of football. And so it will be on Friday.

Here are the highlights of both games; click on the screenshots to go to them:

Argentina/Switzerland:

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Belgium/US (Dempsey almost tied it up at minute 114):

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.23.23 AM

There’s no Google Doodle, of course, but I want to call your attention to an essay showing, with statistics, that Messi is not only the world’s best player (it’s also my opinion and that of my friend Seamus Malin, who’s seen all the greats of our time), but is an impossibly good player. Reader Hardy called my attention to this piece by Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEightSports called “Lionel Messi is impossible.” It’s an eye-opener, and loaded with stats. Here are two I found interesting, with Morris’s commentary (indented):

To make all those unassisted shots possible, Messi has to take on a lot of defenders one on one. There’s a stat for that, and in my view it’s one of the most revealing, reflecting both Messi’s skill and style, and the relationship between the two. Of all forwards in our data set who’ve played 100-plus games, he “takes on” defenders the most, and he’s the most successful at it.

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Scoring by distance:

If we break this down using shot-location data, it’s clear that Messi is highly efficient across a wide range of distances.

The percentage of shots Messi makes from outside the penalty area is absolutely stunning. He scores almost as often per shot from outside the penalty area (12.1 percent) as most players do inside it (13.1 percent).

Of 8,335 players in our dataset who have taken at least one shot from outside the box, only 1,835 have scored from that distance at any point. There are 47 players with 50 or more attempts from outside the box without a single goal, and about 500 with at least 20 attempts and no goals. Messi leads the world with 21 goals from outside the penalty area, on just 173 shot attempts.

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For many of the stats, of course, Ronaldo is up there with Messi, and both are way ahead of the rest of the pack. You may argue with Morris’s analysis, but his analysis, which I highly recommend, has a ton of statistics, and statistics don’t lie. Watch Messi closely from now on: you may be seeing the best player in history. And I hope Argentina makes it to the final match.

Finally, for LOLz, reader George called my attention to a piece on Mashable that has 15 pairs of gifs using cats to demonstrate the US/Belgium game (there’s also a video at the end). Here’s one pair:

usa-kitty-goal

vs.

thumb-green

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ evolution

July 2, 2014 • 4:54 am

I’m chuffed that the Jesus and Mo artist has a strip on evolution today.  I’d suggest my own book as inspiration, but this strip was first published in 2007:

2014-07-02

As Richard Feynman said in his report on the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled.”

h/t: Linda Grilli (with two new black kittens, making a total of six black cats)

Coco’s new bed

July 1, 2014 • 3:40 pm

Reader Darrelle Ernst brightened my day with an email about his sybaritic cat Coco, which looks to be a Burmese:

My wife and I have a prized bowl, hand carved from a single piece of marble by an Italian artisan, that we bought years ago. When our children were born we stored the bowl to keep it safe. This past weekend, one morning at breakfast, I suddenly decided the children were old enough and so I dug our prized bowl out of storage, filled it with red rose petals and proudly placed it as the centerpiece on our dining room table. The attached photo shows what happened less than 90 seconds later. What are you gonna do?

CAM00444

How thoughtful of them to buy their cat a marble bed, and then fill it with rose petals! But, of course, it’s only what Coco deserves.

Darrelle also enclosed a poem about the cat that his ten-year-old daughter wrote for him on Father’s Day:

CoCo

Coco, my cat, is brown.
When she is wet she looks like a clown.
Sometimes she sits like sphinx,
With big green eyes that are round,
And inside her is a treasure just waiting to be found.
She looks pretty but doesn’t make a sound,
And her beauty and attitude will surely astound.
But when nobody’s looking, down the hall she will bound,
And once in privacy, chase her tail round and round!

Finally, for extra LOLz see the video that reader Sara calls “the euphonium cat mute.”

The shrinking Arctic ice cap

July 1, 2014 • 1:00 pm

If you’re not worried about global warming yet, read this new report by National Geographic Daily News on the melting of the Arctic icecaps.  It’s a special problem for the magazine, which is famous for its maps. How do you draw an icecap that keeps changing in the definitive atlas, National Geographic’s Atlas of the World?

Here’s their solution, as implemented in the alarming drawings below:

The multiyear ice—or older ice—is shown on the map as a large white mass; the maximum extent of sea ice—the pack ice that melts and refreezes with the seasons—is depicted as a line on the map, according to Rosemary Wardley, National Geographic’s senior GIS cartographer. In the 10th edition, which will be released September 30, the multiyear ice is much smaller in area than on previous maps. The 5th edition of the atlas, published in 1989, was the first to comprehensively map the Arctic.

Wardley and Valdés relied on two government resources that track Arctic ice data: NASA and the NSIDC. To map the multiyear ice, they took data from a 30-year study by NASA, published in 2012. “We wanted to have that comprehensive coverage,” Wardley said.

Well, look and weep: here’s the change in the last 18 years.

1994:

Screen shot 2014-06-24 at 6.32.13 AM

2012:

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And, of course, the why:

As the ocean heats up due to global warming, Arctic sea ice has been locked in a downward spiral.Since the late 1970s, the ice has retreated by 12 percent per decade, worsening after 2007, according to NASA. May 2014 represented the third lowest extent of sea ice during that month in the satellite record,according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

Ice loss is accelerated in the Arctic because of a phenomenon known as the feedback loop: Thin ice is less reflective than thick ice, allowing more sunlight to be absorbed by the ocean, which in turn weakens the ice and warms the ocean even more, NASA says.

Because thinner ice is flatter, it allows melt ponds to accumulate on the surface, reducing the reflectiveness of the ice and absorbing more heat. (See pictures of our melting world in National Geographicmagazine.)

“You hear reports all the time in the media about this,” Valdés said. “Until you have a hard-copy map in your hand, the message doesn’t really hit home.”

Some scientists argue that the map is a bit misleading (but not that it doesn’t reflect global warming); but you’ll have to go to the original article to read about that.

h/t: Amy

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 1, 2014 • 10:06 am
Reader Pete Moulton sends in two photos from Arizona (click to enlarge):
We’re still waiting for the Pied-billed Grebes who own this pond at Papago Park in Phoenix to debut this year’s brood, so here are a couple of photos I took in the last ten days or so, just to amuse myself.
The three little chicks are the second brood of a pair of American Coots (Fulica americana) from 28 June. I call them the Three Mus-coot-eers. The adults have some nasty habits, and aren’t all that much to look at, though I hear from my British friends that one has drawn a lot of their twitchers to the north of England recently, but the chicks are colorful and cute.
AMCO_6-28-14_Papago Pk_2550
The other guy is a Green Heron (Butorides virescens), of course. I just can’t help but photograph every one I see, but in my defense they’re infinitely interesting little herons, always busy, and infinitely entertaining. This one reminds me of Kramer from the old Seinfeld television program.
GRHE_6-22-14_Papago Pk_2328

Hamas kidnaps and kills three Israeli teenagers, Palestine fires rockets at civilians

July 1, 2014 • 7:42 am

UPDATE: Hamas has denied responsibility for the killing, and so, until more information comes out, I’ll assume that the perpetrators are simply unknown. Their denial, of course, doesn’t mean they didn’t do it. As for my hearing they were responsible, I did, so what I said below was true. The title of this post, however, is inaccurate for the present. Stay tuned.

___________

As the Israel/Palestine crisis seems stalemated, the forces of terror continue their beastly depredations against Israel. This time, according to both the New York Times and the Telegraph, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed last week. Hamas was suspected, and has now, so I hear, admitted responsibility.

The teenagers, Gilad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19, were kidnapped while hitchhiking, and then shot. Their bodies were found under a pile of rocks yesterday. The kidnappers are apparently known to Israel, who entered their homes, blowing off the doors after being refused entry.

As well as committing this cold-blooded murder, the Palestinians, without provocation, also fired 18 rockets into Israel before the bodies were discovered. The aim, of course, was to kill and terrorize Israeli civilians. Israel has responded by going after 34 targets in Palestine. Some sources mistakenly report that the Israeli strikes were retaliation for the kidnappings. In reality, they were a response to the missile attacks. (As we all know, Palestine fires its missiles from civilian areas, endangering innocent people nearby and inhibiting retaliation.)

As the Times of Israel notes:

Three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood on their way home from school only because they were Israeli Jews. Their Palestinian Arab murderers, as identified by Israel, did not know their victims and they did not care. The objective was to attack some hated Israelis, and perhaps exchange them or their bodies for jailed murderers. Any random Jews would do.

Can you deny the truth of that? The “Islamophobia” card is a canard, leveled at those who dislike the tenets of Islam, not Muslims themselves. But those who kill children, or want to wipe out Israel, are anti-Semites, pure and simple. This is not hatred of the tenets of Judaism. It is hatred of Jews themselves: a hatred that permeates the Arab world just as it permeated medieval Europe. Europe has largely (but not completely) gotten over it; the Middle East has not. Every day vile anti-Semitic caricatures and videos appear in the Arab media. 

The Hamas charter still calls for the complete elimination of Israel. It also includes references to the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery supposedly laying out plans for a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. If you were an Israeli, surrounded by those who wish to push you into the sea, how would you feel if three innocent kids were kidnapped and killed for the crime of being Jews? How would you feel if rockets were being fired randomly into your country?

In the face of this, President Obama urged  “restraint on both sides” (though he at least had the decency to call it a “tragedy”). What does that mean? Israel is supposed to stand by idly while its children get murdered and it remains the target of randomly-fired rockets? Did we exercise restraint when the World Trade Center went down? Would we exercise restraint if, say, the Mexican government fired rockets into Texas and their operatives killed three American teenagers in Arizona?

As the Times of Israel argues, this is not a “cycle of revenge” that perpetuates the stalemate, but unilateral and unconscionable acts of terrorism against Israel:

Similarly, today, there is no “cycle of revenge,” as many journalists, diplomats and self-proclaimed human rights activists often claim. A cycle means symmetry, automatic tit-for-tat, mindless action and reaction, in which all sides, and none, can be held morally responsible.

But attack and defense, terror and counter-terror, incitement and fear are not symmetric or morally equivalent. When diplomats and academics repeat the “cycle” analogy, and meekly issues calls “to both parties to exercise restraint,” as the European Union, the UN and even the US did after the kidnapping, they are endorsing a dangerous fiction. When journalists invent an artificial balance and an immoral equivalence between attacker and victim, or an NGO with European and US taxpayer funds equates the mother of a Palestinian terrorist with the mothers of Gilad, Naftali, and Eyal, this is fundamentally immoral.

For years, Palestinians and their supporters have been able to peddle the fiction that murderous terrorists in Israeli jails are political prisoners, guilty only of participating in the “cycle of violence,” including opposing the “occupation,” albeit with violent means. European human rights funds have also channeled government money to lobbying groups (non-governmental organizations) to promote this fiction and the public campaigns on their behalf.

I still favor a two-state solution for this problem, but it’s not going to happen so long as Israelis are being targeted in this way and so long as Hamas swears to destroy Israel.  And if you think a two-state solution is going to stop the attacks on Israel, I have a bridge over the Jordan I’d like to sell you.  The Palestinians, and other Arab states, are simply too deeply permeated with the hatred of Jews.

And if you say that the rocket-firings at civilians and the murder of children are justified by Israeli “apartheid” (a false comparison if ever there was one), then you’ve lost your moral compass. These are the acts of monsters. They are given a pass by the West because, for some reason, anti-Semitic Muslims are not held to the same standards of civilized behavior as everyone else.