Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 10, 2015 • 5:02 am

It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day and also Mother’s Day, and although neither Hili nor I are mothers, we are both children of Ceiling Cat, so all praise to Hir.  My back continues to improve, it’s cold in Chicago; and it’s early. But we must be about our Father’s work. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cat/d*g dialogue is enigmatic

Cyrus: New times are coming.
Hili: Do you think they will come from that direction?

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In Polish:

Cyrus: Idą nowe czasy.
Hili; Myślisz, że przyjdą z tej strony?

The dialogue reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’s interchange with Dr. Watson in the story His Last Bow. Both men are standing on the cliffs of Dover, looking east, and Holmes foresees War One. Watson, befuddled, thinks that Holmes is talking about the actual wind:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

More creationist legislation from Dixie

May 9, 2015 • 2:45 pm

It’s in Alabama (of course), and in a bill introduced by a Republican (of course). To quote Pete Seeger, “When will they ever learn?” Well, the tactic of passing bills urging “critical examination of science”, a euphemism for “being able to give creationist alternatives to evolution,” has worked, at least in Louisiana and Tennessee, which have passed similar bills. It’s a sneaky and clever tactic, but it’s also a last resort, and it’s not going to allow creationism or intelligent design to be taught legally. (They are, of course, being snuck in under the radar by religious teachers.)

As Alabama.com reports, the new bill was introduced by Republican representative Mack Butler, a god-fearin’, flag-wavin’ True Amurcan who is, unfortunately, on the state House Education Policy committee:

Legislation that would allow Alabama educators to teach alternatives to mainstream scientific theories like evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning was introduced late last month in the House of Representatives.

. . . The ACLU of Alabama is already speaking out against the bill introduced by Rep. Mack Butler, R-Rainbow City. The bill has yet to be considered in committee.

“This is a thinly-veiled attempt to open the door to religious fanatics who don’t believe in evolution, climate change or other scientifically-based teaching in our schools,” said Susan Watson, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama. “It also opens Alabama to costly litigation that it just cannot afford.”

Well, we’ll see about that “costly litigation.” I’m not sure whether the Tennessee and Louisiana bills have yet been contested or litigated, for they’re “stealth” bills that, on the face of it, look innocuous. But their purpose is insidious.  You can find the pdf of Butler’s Alabama Bill HB592 here. Below are the critical parts; note that Butler shows his hand by emphasizing the areas that might be seen as “controversial” (my emphasis):

Section 1. (a) The Legislature finds that an important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens. The teaching of some scientific subjects required to be taught under the curriculum framework developed by the State Board of Education may cause debate and disputation including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, and human cloning. Some teachers may be unsure of the expectation 19 concerning how they should present information when debate and disputation occur on these subjects.

(b) The State Board of Education, local boards of 22 education, public school superintendents, public school 23 principals, public school administrators, and public school teachers shall endeavor to create an environment within K-12 25 public schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about scientific subjects required to be taught under the curriculum framework developed by the State Board of Education.

Here’s the bit where they say that teachers can’t be penalized for pushing critical or “alternative” views’ (aka, creationism):

. . . (d) Neither the State Board of Education nor any local board of education, public school superintendent, public school principal, or public school administrator shall prohibit any teacher of a public school from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of all existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught within the curriculum framework developed by the State 19 Board of Education.

Finally, there’s the obligatory but disingenuous claim that this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION:

(e) This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or promote discrimination for or against a religion.

If you look in the dictionary under “lie,” you’ll find the sentence above.

The Raw Story gives some details of Butler’s history (he is a Baptist, of course), as well as a selection of his Facebook posts. This one is a doozy:Screen-Shot-2015-05-07-at-3.40.15-PM

If the intent of the bill isn’t transparent from what Butler says, you need new glasses (or a new brain). In fact, this shows clearly that the bill violates two of the three prongs of the Lemon Test, which mandates that any such bill must have a purely secular purpose as well as not serve to advance religion. Does anybody think that Butler’s purpose is secular, or that he’s indifferent about pushing Christian views?

Here’s one more contribution by Brother Butler:

Screen-Shot-2015-05-07-at-3.36.49-PM

Tell it, Mack! And God bless America!

h/t: Terence

We’re #1!

May 9, 2015 • 1:33 pm

Well, at least in this small field:

Screen Shot 2015-05-09 at 10.47.15 AMBefore there are any reviews, I will now predict the two most common tactics the faithful (and faitheists) will use to go after it (both of which are discussed and dismissed in the book, but the petulant won’t notice).

1.  “Coyne attacks a caricature of religion, one that nobody believes in. It’s typical New Atheist strawmanning.”  This is what I call the Eagleton/Armstrong Gambit. People who use it need to get out more.

2. “Coyne assumes that religion is largely based on factual propositions: beliefs about what is true. That’s an old-fashioned and obsolete version of religion. Religion isn’t about truths; it’s about community and morality and feeling.” Sadly, the data show that while religion does have these other functions, it’s simply not the case that truth is irrelevant. Even theologians (the honest ones) admit that without an underpinning of beliefs about what’s really true about the universe, religion crumbles. Where would Christianity be if adherents thought that Jesus’s divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection were just a fictitious but convenient framework on which to hang their emotions? Would Mormons wear their sacred underwear if they knew Joseph Smith was really a con man who fabricated those plates? Do the Sophisticated Critics really believe that if Muslims knew for certain that Muhammed didn’t get the Qur’an from the mouth of God, via an angel, but made it up himself, that Islam would have the sway it does? Get serious.

Bring ’em on (but take a number)!

And feel free to add your own predictions.  After all, the reactions to books that criticize religion are almost 100% predictable.

There’s always a “but” when it comes to Islam

May 9, 2015 • 11:30 am

Here’s a melange of media commentary on the Texas cartoon shootings. The first part of the video shows the dutiful nods to free speech, the second the inevitable “buts”. There seems to be much more passion in the second bit!

If you consider the two discussants in the video below, the rest of the media have paid far more attention to the woman on the left than to the man on the right. What is wrong with that picture? And doesn’t it make you worry about the Left’s attitudes toward free speech when someone like Sean Hannity actually seems reasonable?

h/t: Malgorzata, Ben Goren

Final notice: book contest

May 9, 2015 • 10:15 am

Remember that the competition for a free autographed hardback copy of Faith versus Fact, with a cat drawn in it to your specifications, expires tomorrow, Sunday May 10, at 1 pm. The rules are here, and entering is simple, just post, at the links just given, a short answer to this query:

Recount the funniest or most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you. (Note: it doesn’t have to be embarrassing if it’s just funny, or it can be both.)

I’m disabling comments on this post so you’ll remember to post at the contest site.  As of right now there are 300 comments there, but not all are official entries. Hey, what do you have to lose?

 

A novel but clever behavior: ants form daisy chain to haul prey back to nest (and fly lagniappe)

May 9, 2015 • 9:40 am

I believe it was a reader who sent me a link to the first video below, but I can’t remember that reader’s name, so my apologies. But when I saw the video of ants pulling prey back to the nest by forming a long daisy chain, linking their bodies by biting each other to increase pulling power, I couldn’t believe it. I had neither heard of nor seen any insect behavior like this. Watch these ants hauling a millipede back to the nest:

I wrote to Dr. Phil Ward, one of our three Official Website Entomologists™, asking him if these were army ants. He responded this way, “Pretty cool, eh? These are ants in the genus Leptogenys, forming daisy-chains to more effectively pull their prey back to the nest. Alex Wild posted about this last year.” But they are not army ants; as Phil said, “No, they are group-raiding ponerine ants, with some army-ant like behavior: army ant wannabes.”

He then gave me a link to a post of Alex Wild, another Official Website Entomologist™ (Piotr Naskrecki is the third), who had posted about this behavior on his website Myrmecos:

The quality isn’t great, but the clip appears to show an Asian Leptogenys daisy-chaining their bodies in parallel lines to haul away a large millipede. I have spent the morning searching the technical literature for mention of this unusual behavior, and am coming up empty. Some Leptogenys species, including L. diminuta, L. nitida, and L. processionalis, are known to forage in groups and transport prey “cooperatively” (source, source). What is meant by “cooperative” is often vague. (For more, see this excellent recent review of cooperative transport by Helen McCreery).  Yet I didn’t find any explicit description of workers linking up, mandible to abdomen, to pull together.

Yes, they’re forming these chains by biting each other’s butts! You can see that more clearly in the video below. Alex continues:

Is ponerine daisy-chaining an unknown behavior? Possibly. It is also possible my search skills aren’t up to the task. If you know of a description of it, please drop a note in the comments.

Alex found another video and posted it later:

Alex also posted a photo of similar behavior, also in the same genus, taken by Steve Shattuck in Borneo. In this case the ants appear to make the chain by biting each other’s legs:

Leptogenys1

In his post, Wild quotes ant expert Christian Peeters who saw the behavior in Borneo:

The behaviour was very stereotyped: mandibles grab preceding ant’s gaster (between first and second segment).

Seiki Yamane identified it as Leptogenys sp. 47, closely related to L. chalybaea described from Borneo by Emery (but stronger sculpture especially on gastral tergites).

The millipedes were 130mm long, identified as order Spirostreptida (Diplopoda). Ant is 16mm long.

Back then I reviewed the literature and found no other record of chain behaviour in Ponerinae. No record of millipede predation in Leptogenys.  Specialized hunting on millipedes is restricted to Thaumatomyrmex,Probolomyrmex and Gnamptogenys, but these are solitary hunters on a very different kind of millipedes (polyxenids).

Finally, Alex notes that because the first video appeared on LiveLeak, without attribution or information, we know nothing about who filmed it nor about where or when it was filmed, making it hard to do further study. The behavior is fascinating but so far has not been published in the scientific literature. I’m also curious about whether the leg-biting vs. abdomen-biting method of forming the chains are behaviors specific to particular species (I expect this is the case).

When you think about how this evolved, remember that the ants doing the dragging are sterile workers (they’re eusocial, as we’ve been discussing), so they themselves gain no reproductive advantage by behaving this way. Any evolutionary scenario based on natural seletion has to show an advantage to these ants that can contribute genes for the behavior to the next generation. I’ll leave it to readers to solve this apparent puzzle, which holds for all evolved behaviors of sterile workers.

By the way, head over to Piotr’s wonderful site, The Smaller Majority, and see his latest post about a red-headed fly from Mozambique. There is a lot of swell biology in the post, but I’ll just show the flies, which will make Matthew Cobb wet his pants. (Captions fare from Piotr’s post.)

bromophila
Red-headed flies (Bromophila caffra) are striking and common animals in East and southern Africa, but little is known about their biology.
bromophila5
Red-headed flies, which in Mozambique emerge at the end of the rainy season, like to hang in clusters on leaves.
bromophila3
One peculiar morphological characteristic of the Red-headed flies is the absence of the ocelli, which are typically found on the head of other flies.

Caturday felid trifecta: New record for oldest living cat, a cat who forgot to cat, and Karl Lagerfeld’s spoiled moggie

May 9, 2015 • 7:45 am

To answer your first question, the cat, named Tiffany Two, is all of 26 years old. And according to the Guinness World Records site, she’s now the oldest living cat:

Born on March 13, 1988 in San Diego, California, Tiffany Two was bought by her owner Sharon Voorhees from a local pet shop when the record breaking kitty was six weeks old.  Sharon paid $10 for her and commonly refers to Tiffany Two as the “best money ever spent”.

. . .Sharon settled on the name Tiffany Two as something of a tribute to another tortoiseshell cat she once owned in the 1970s that also boasted a beautiful multi-coloured coat.

Despite her incredible age, she still has good sight and hearing. Besides very small ailments such as high blood pressure from time to time, Sharron describes her as “not feeble and still able to go up and down stairs”.
“She’s not afraid of anything or anyone. She walks right past the dogs, she’s very feisty!” Sharon explains, recounting the record-breaking cat went missing for a full two years.
Nevertheless, Tiffany Two also has a soft side. Inseparable from her owner, Sharon says she has a sweet demeanour and loves to be petted.
She eats a varied diet with both wet food and dry food and resides indoors but frequently also goes outdoors when she fancies.
Sharon got in touch with Guinness World Records after her sister spotted the record for oldest living cat was then held by Poppy, an English feline born in 1990.
 Here’s Tiffany Two, who doesn’t look a day over 18:

Oldest-Cat-Living---Tiffany-Two--Guinness-World-Records-2_tcm25-371032

Oldest-Cat-Living---Tiffany-Two--Guinness-World-Records-with-owner_tcm25-371033

But her longevity is far from seting the record: in fact, it’s 12 year’s shy of the record, as I noted in an earlier post on aged cats, which has some videos and photos. It also shows the record holder, one Creme Puff, owned by Texan Jake Perry, who has raised a number of cats holding records for longevity. As the Wikipedia article on Creme Puff and Jake Perry’s other Cats:

Creme Puff (August 3, 1967 – August 6, 2005), was a female cat who died at age 38 years and 3 days. She was the oldest cat ever recorded, according to the 2010 edition of Guinness World Records. . . ..

Perry also owned Granpa Rexs Allen, who was claimed to have been born in Paris, in 1964 and died 1998, aged 34 years and 2 months. Granpa was posthumously awarded 1999 Cat of the Year by Cats & Kittens magazine. Granpa was featured in an earlier edition of Guinness World Records. The co-authors of at least one book have pondered whether the longevity of Perry’s cats may have had something to do with an unusual diet of, among other things, bacon and eggs, asparagus, and broccoli, concluding that Perry “must be doing something right.”

My earlier post shows Jake cooking breakfast for his cats, giving them their bacon, egg, and asparagus. I’ll put the video below again as it’s adorable. As I said,

Here’s a 9.5-minute video of Jake Perry and some of his many his cats. It’s lovely—watch it! You can see Perry cooking breakfast for the cats; Granpa, a Sphynx, makes an appearance; and record-holder Creme Puff finally shows up at 7:23, looking very good for 35!

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Is this animal, who seems to like water and nuzzles a fish, really a cat, or a small d*g in a cat suit?

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Finally, from OddityCentral.com, we have a report on German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and his famously spoiled cat, Choupette. Get a load of this (my emphasis):

German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is undoubtedly a rich man, but here’s a shocker – even his cat Choupette is richer than most people. The furry white feline managed to earn over three million dollars from just two days of modelling work. She is now believed to be the world’s most pampered cat – she has two maids, enjoys First Class travel around the world and even has her own Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers.

According to 81-year-old Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel and Fendi, Choupette did two modelling assignments last year – one for Japanese cosmetics brand Shu Uemura, and the other for a Opel Corsa car calendar. Collectively, the two jobs earned her a whopping three million euro – a figure that professional supermodels might probably get paid for a much harder year’s work.

Here she is:

Choupette-cat-550x388

Although Choupette’s earnings are dwarfed by feline competitor and internet sensation Grumpy Cat ($100 million commercial deals), Lagerfeld says that’s only because he’s picky about Choupette’s assignments. “I don’t allow her to do foodstuffs and things like this. She’s too sophisticated for that,” he explained.

“She hates other animals and hates children,” he added. “She stays with me always and has two personal maids. They play with her, they have to take care of her beautiful white hair, the beauty treatments for her eyes, and they entertain her. She is the center of the world. If you saw her, you would understand.”

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Look what she eats and drinks!:

Lagerfeld makes sure his feline muse gets all that she deserves. Choupette has her own iPad and only drinks bespoke mineral water that was specially blended for her using a cocktail of Swiss, Swedish, British and German water by LeWater Bar Colette in Paris. Her food, prepared by her own personal chef Patrice, consists of liver pate, chicken and fresh fish. The morsels are served in her favorite silver dishes made by French luxury goods company Goyard.

When she is not eating at home, Choupette dines at the fanciest restaurants in Paris, where she is welcomed like royalty. The famous La Voltaire restaurant on the banks of the Seine is actually preparing a special called ‘Choupette’s Eggs’ – a concoction of chopped boiled eggs with fresh mint. Cafe De Flore also offers ‘Croquettes a la Choupette’ to the special guest.

What can you say to that except “Oy vey!!!”?  But of course all cats secretly desire to be treated like Choupette.

To honor his favorite pet, Lagerfeld has designed a range of accessories like socks, keyrings, and shopping bags, all adorned with a white cat motif. The moody French sensation was also featured in a 128-page coffee table book called The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat. The book consists of accounts from her fabulous life, as told by her personal maids Francoise and Marjorie.

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h/t: T. F., amber