Boot weather boots

March 11, 2015 • 6:03 am

It’s warm, the streets are fairly dry, and there’s no salt on the sidewalks. That means that Boot Weather has returned, and so I can wear these fancy Falconhead boots (high tops: 14 inches instead of the regular 12). Guess the hide (I’ve added a picture that should make it easy).

P1070878

P1070879

A note on value: The lowest price for any new Falconhead boot is $900. If purchased at the factory or in their L.A. store, these would be on the order of $1300. I got them, virtually new on eBay, for less than a quarter of that.

Wednesday: Hili Dialogue

March 11, 2015 • 4:33 am

I have given up on my hope that Hili will ever become as wise or perspicacious as her predecessor Pia.

A: I’m afraid this picture will be foggy.
Hili: The most important thing is for the cat to be in focus.
P1020358
In Polish:
Ja: Obawiam się, że to zdjęcie będzie zamglone.
Hili: Najważniejsze, żeby kot był wyraźny.

 

The Centrifuge Brain Project

March 10, 2015 • 3:40 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Have you ever wondered why children love going round and making themselves dizzy, and what might be the effect of all that centrifugal force on their brains? If you haven’t, never fear, because Dr Nick Laslowicz has been doing that for you, as outlined in this excellent brief film from 2011 called The Centrifuge Brain Project.

I think Dr Laslowicz is a close colleague of Dr Denzil Dexter, who has a rather similar research outlook:

 

h/t Simon Ings

Personal space in Patagonian cormorants: a huge and neatly-arrayed group of nests

March 10, 2015 • 2:30 pm

From Grind TV we have lovely video and photographs of 5300 pairs of Imperial Cormorants (Phalacrocorax atriceps, also known as “Imperial Shags”) nesting en masse in Patagonia.  The nests cover an area of 2000 m², which is less than half the area of an American football field.

From the site:

Dr. Flavio Quintana, who has studied cormorants for more than 10 years, shot video from a drone, which is proving to be a cheaper and safer method for studying the seabirds than using pilots and photographers, as in the past. Here’s the captivating video provided by Caters News Agency:

And some photos:

Incredible Nesting Birds

Quintana, as we said, is no stranger to these seabirds.

A few years ago, he discovered just how amazing the feeding techniques are of the imperial cormorant, which dives into the water to catch fish. His research showed that one “superbird” dove 150 feet underwater in 40 seconds, spent 80 seconds searching for a meal on the ocean floor—eventually catching a snakelike fish—then returned to the surface 40 seconds later.

Incredible Nesting Birds

Incredible Nesting Birds

Incredible Nesting Birds

The aerial photographs not only allow an accurate census, but also give behaviorists the ability to see how even the spacing really is, and whether it corresponds to how far the birds can stick out their necks. My own theory, which is mine, is that they’re spaced just far enough apart to prevent the birds from pecking each other. But I’m sure that some ornithologist has already got the answer.

h/t: Doris

Reza Aslan gets his own religious CNN show

March 10, 2015 • 1:33 pm

Okay, if the Cable News Network (CNN) is really an unbiased and objective news source, they’ll have to counter this program with another. According to MediaIte, the unctuous apologist and atheist-basher Reza Aslan is going to get his very own show. I can’t bear to describe it, so I’ll just copy the announcement:

One day after CNN announced its Kevin Spacey-led campaign docu-series, the cable channel announced two more original series, part of anetwork reorientation away from breaking news coverage and commentary.

The two new shows will be headed by religious scholar Reza Aslan and stand-up comic W. Kamau Bell, and are set to debut in 2016.

Aslan will host a series tentatively called Believer. “In each episode, Aslan will immerse himself into one of the world’s most fascinating faith-based groups to experience life as a true believer,” CNN said in a statement Tuesday. “The series will feature Aslan participating in endurance worship, spellbinding rituals, and unusual rites of passage to learn about rarefied worlds that have been molded by faith and tradition.”

Aslan, a bestselling author, came to cable news prominence during a truly bizarre Fox News interview over his book on Jesus.

There have been other series as well:

CNN plans a dozen of these series over the next year, complimenting original programming by Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe. Finding Jesus and Bill Weir’s The Wonder List both debuted last month to salutary ratings.

Really, “finding Jesus”? A show whose website describes it like this:

Finding Jesus discovers fascinating new insights into the historical Jesus, utilizing the latest scientific techniques and archaeological research.

Of course that presumes that there was a historical Jesus. I didn’t watch the blasted thing, but perhaps a viewer did, and can describe it below.

But where’s the “Unbeliever” series to counter Aslan’s apologetics? Would CNN even consider hosting such a series? It’s as if they decided to host a show called “Republican Views” and wouldn’t have one called “Democratic Views.”

I need a shower.

h/t: Jeff

Werleman goes full Cunk, calls U.S. “the world’s #1 rapist”

March 10, 2015 • 12:00 pm

If I were asked to name the most vicious, ignorant, and jealous person among all the New-Atheist-hating atheists, there would be no contest: C. J. Werleman wins the gold, silver and bronze trifecta. With Werleman’s career now derailed because of his serial plagiarism (see below), one would think that he’d dial back his invective, but, afflicted with Acute Maru’s Syndrome, the man simply can’t. In fact, exposure of his plagiarism seems to have only intensified his craziness. After all, he was exposed not by religious people but by his fellow atheists.

Here’s a series of tw**ts Werleman was involved in yesterday (thanks to Heather Hastie for calling them to my attention). Werleman has accused the entire United States of being a “rapist,” presumably to show that we’re just as bad as any Muslim country. Agent Number 67 and Godless Spellchecker, who uncovered several instances of Werleman’s plagiarism, call him out.

image001

Where did Werleman’s data come from? I suspect from this Wonderslist page written by one Ejaz Khan, since that page makes not only the same assertion about the U.S. (“The super power of the world is at the first position in the race of rapes. Males are majorly the rapist holding a proportion of 99%” [sic sic sic]), but also has the very same picture that Werleman used. Yet that page also says this:

Note:- These stats are two years old. Here are recent stats for the countries with highest rape cases.

And when you go to the link with “recent stats”, also on Wonderslist, you find this statement, completely contradicting what Khan (and Werleman) say:

The countries with highest rape cases are Lesotho (91.6 per 100000), Trinidad & Tobago (58.4 per 100000), Sweden (53.2 per 100000), Korea (33.7 per 100000), New Zealand (30.9 per 100000), United States of America (28.6 per 100000), Belgium (26.3 per 100000), Zimbabwe (25.6 per 100000) and United Kingdom (23.2 per 100000).

The Wikipedia page on “rape statistics” gives this figure for a 2012 survey of reported rapes, which again puts the lie to Werleman’s claim:

Rape_rate_per_100,000_-_country_comparison_-_United_Nations_2012

Clearly, Sweden is the “world’s #1 rapist”! But of course Werleman could still claim that the highest rates occur in non-Muslim-majority countries, so that the U.S. is, say, still worse than any Muslim land (his obvious point). But isn’t he curious why there are no data for those Muslim-majority countries (except for Indonesia and the UAE in the chart above)? Does he not realize that, as Agent Number 67 does, that reporting rapes is a dangerous thing to do in many Muslim-majority countries, and that, in fact, the police often don’t take action even if they are reported? As we all know, in many Muslim lands a woman can be ostracized or even killed for having been raped, since it supposedly brings shame on the family. Under such circumstances, don’t you think there would be a strong onus not to report it?

Finally, lest we forget, this is what Werleman did (from Wikipedia):

In October 2014, Werleman was shown to have plagiarized the writing of Fareed Zakaria, Vali Nasr, William Broyles Jr., Robert Pape, Eduardo Porter, and others as was documented on The Godless Spellchecker Blog.[8][9] Whole sentences and passages from Werleman’s published articles in Salon Magazine and AlterNet[10] were published previously without any citation or attribution.[8] Upon learning of this discovery, reporter Michael Luciano of The Daily Banter and atheist author and philosophy professor Peter Boghossian began searching for more instances of plagiarism, unearthing several examples.[11] Werleman addressed the allegations in a Facebook post, admitting some instances of plagiarism.[7]

AlterNet went on to remove all of Werleman’s articles from their archives and issued an apology to readers and those who had been plagiarized.[12]Salon also addressed Werleman’s plagiarism in their “Corrections” section, telling readers that plagiarized passages will be emboldened and hyperlinks to the original material will be included.[13]

It must be really galling to know that every time someone Googles you, they’ll find a list of your transgressions. And let us not forget that Alternet did the right thing by removing Werleman’s articles, while Salon, eager for clicks, did not.

Baby mantis jumps for its life

March 10, 2015 • 10:45 am

UPDATE: Cambridge University has a longer but very lucid description of these results on its research publicity page.

__________

I always read the original paper before reporting on a new scientific finding, but this time I didn’t, for I just want to show a cool video of a Great Leap by a Small Mantis filmed by Malcolm Burrows et al. and given as supplementary material in their new paper in Current Biology (reference and link to summary below).  First, the relevant part of the paper’s abstract, which of course is opaque to most of us, including me—except for the part about mutilating the insects and forcing them to crash:

We show that when making targeted jumps, juvenile wingless mantises first rotated their abdomen about the thorax to adjust the center of mass and thus regulate spin at takeoff. Once airborne, they then smoothly and sequentially transferred angular momentum in four stages between the jointed abdomen, the two raptorial front legs, and the two propulsive hind legs to produce a controlled jump with a precise landing. Experimentally impairing abdominal movements reduced the overall rotation so that the mantis either failed to grasp the target or crashed into it head first.

Here’s the video, with an explanation from Eurekalert below; see if you can notice all the movements described in the piece:

To watch a young, wingless praying mantis jump is a truly remarkable thing. The jump from take-off to landing lasts less than a tenth of second–literally faster than the blink of a human eye. During a jump, the insect’s body rotates in mid-air at a rate of about 2.5 times per second. And yet, according to researchers who report their observations in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 5, the mantises’ jumps are precise. When mantises jump, they land on target every time.

“This is akin to asking an ice skater who is rotating at the same speed as these mantises to stop suddenly and accurately to face a specific direction,” says Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge.

. . . “We could not scare them into jumping or get them to jump away from a threatening stimulus,” Sutton says. “So instead we offered them a target to jump towards and found that they would do this consistently and accurately.”

. . . What the researchers saw was this: in preparation for a jump, first the insects sway their heads sideways, scanning for their targets. Then they rock their bodies backward and curl their abdomens up, tip pointed forward. [JAC: That part’s already over when this video begins.]

With a push from their legs, the mantises’ bodies launch into the air, spinning in controlled fashion. The insects rotate three distinct body parts–the abdomen, front legs, and hind legs–independently and in a complex sequence. As the mantises sail through the air, the spin is transferred from one body segment to the next, keeping the body as a whole level and right on target. [JAC: Yep, this is all visible.]

“Maintaining stability so that the body does not rotate uncontrollably in mid-air is a difficult task,” Burrows says. “When the movement is rapid, as it is in a jump, and you don’t have wings, then the task is even more difficult. Nevertheless, a praying mantis moves rapidly and controls the rotation of its body so that it lines up precisely with a target, and does all of this in less than 100 milliseconds.” (That’s a tenth of a second.)

This kind of jumping control is rather unusual in the insect world. Most insects lose all control once their legs leave the ground, the researchers say, spinning in unpredictable directions with frequent crash landings.

___________

Burrows, M., et al. Mantises Exchange Angular Momentum between Three Rotating Body Parts to Jump Precisely to Targets. Current Biology, online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.01.054

 

h/t: Su