An important New York Times correction about bird poop

August 20, 2014 • 8:18 am

I can’t resist posting this tw**t from Nick Bilton, a columnist for the New York Times (sent by reader Barry):

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And a screenshot of the correction in situ:

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And here’s the original error, appearing in a column called “My life in bicycles,” by Jennifer Finney Boylan:

I prefer exercising at least two miles away from any other human being. For me, biking is a solitary activity. In the Kennebec Highlands, on my mountain bike, I pedal past Kidder Pond, up to the blueberry barrens high atop Vienna Mountain. From there, I watch bald eagles and ospreys, and other birds, whose poop, owing to their diet of berries, stains the gray rocks purple. Sometimes I’ve run into deer and porcupines, and on one memorable occasion, a moose. Another time, I lay with my back against a tree, watching a beaver build a dam in Boody Pond.

In fact, the passage seems ambiguous, for the purple poop might be attributed to the “other birds” rather than the eagles and ospreys.  However, and perhaps a grammarian can weigh in here, the common between “and other birds” and “whose poop” might imply that eagles, ospreys, and “other birds” are a set, all producing purple poop. It would have been less ambiguous without that comma. Where’s Pinker when we need him?

 

My New Republic piece on the Irish abortion case

August 20, 2014 • 7:04 am

I’ve rewritten my August 18 post on the woman in Ireland who was denied an abortion, then strapped to a bed and force-fed until she was given a Caesarian section 25 weeks into her pregnancy (after all, the Catholic country had to claim its baby). The rewritten piece now in The New Republic, and includes a few new facts that surfaced in the last day or so—none of which exculpate the state. There’s also a link to an interview with the woman herself.

The New Republic piece is called “The Catholic Church prefers medieval barbarism to modern abortion,” and you might go over and give it a short read (new facts and all), and proffer a bit of traffic to keep the secular content coming.

And, sure enough, the right-to-lifers are emerging from the woodwork in the comments.  Here’s the first comment:

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Pity that the sex of the baby hasn’t been reported. And I love the argument that if I had been aborted, I’d be really upset! As a respondent said,

“The author should be glad though that he was not a baby conceived by rape/incest and therefore likely to have been aborted/killed.”

That’s really not a good argument. If I would not have existed, then I wouldn’t have been around to rue my non-existence, and there would have been no “me” to feel sorry about not being.

And think of all those angry sperm who simply didn’t make it to the egg!

Here’s the third comment:

Screen Shot 2014-08-20 at 7.03.37 AMIs it “mercy” to force a woman to bear a child after she had been raped? Does that “mercy” hold for incest, too? The idea that the Catholic Church is “merciful” on this issue is laughable. Merciful for the fetus, perhaps—although they don’t give a rat’s patootie about it after it’s born—but there’s no mercy for the mother.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 20, 2014 • 5:29 am

I’m cleaning out the backlog here, but we’re approaching a scarcity of good photos. Fortunately, we still have some treehoppers left from reader Mike McDowell, and three stray pictures from Ed Kroc.

First, the treehopper Smilia camelus:

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A Widefooted Treehopper, Campylenchia latipes (I can imagine horror movies based on giant versions of these things):

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Treehopper,  Glossonotus univittatus.  Mike’s equipment is a Nikon 1 V1 & Tamron 60mm 1:1 Macro Lens.

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From reader Ed Kroc in British Columbia, a Glaucous-winged gull and chicks Larus glaucescens) at Tsawwassen, near Vancouver:

GW Gulls at Tsawwassen

And the fluffy chick. Everybody hates gulls, but aren’t they cute when young?

GW Gull nestling

Finally, a black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus). in velvet:

Black-tailed Deer

 

 

Two cartoons

August 20, 2014 • 4:20 am

First, the Jesus and Mo author comments on the recent crucifixions by ISIS.

2014-08-20On a lighter note, Zippy does interpretive dance on a number of topics, including creationism:

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Zippy’s figure of 42%, taken from a new Gallup Poll, is largely correct, but refers not to the age of the earth but to the proportion of Americans who agree with the statement, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so.” And don’t forget that 31% are theistic evolutionists, believing that humans evolved over millions of years, but “God guided the process.” Only 19% of Americans assent to the purely naturalistic view that humans evolved over millions of years “from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

h/t: Mark

 

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 20, 2014 • 2:48 am

Yay—I pwnd that poseur Cyrus!! Look at his chastened expression!

A: What are we posting today in the science section?
Hili: Something by Jerry.
A: We had an article by Jerry yesterday, we can’t post Jerry every day.
Hili: And who would be bothered by that, except possibly Cyrus?

10612697_10204070810037852_1594926602983263783_n In Polish:

Ja: Co dajemy dziś z nauki?
Hili: Coś Jerrego.
Ja: Wczoraj był artykuł Jerrego, nie możemy dawać Jerrego codziennie.
Hili: A komu to przeszkadza, chyba tylko Cyrusowi?

Sic transit gloria mundi

August 19, 2014 • 7:38 pm

by Greg Mayer

We don’t often note events of general (as opposed to scientific) history here at WEIT, but today, August 19, 2767 AUC, is the 2000th anniversary of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, better known as Augustus, arguably the most significant individual in Western and, indeed, world history. The grand nephew and adopted son of Gaius Julius Caesar, through political acumen and military victories he brutally won the civil wars that followed Caesar’s murder, and then set about settling the affairs of the Roman world under the appealing fiction that he was restoring the Republic, while in fact he was founding the Empire.

Statue of Augustus from the villa of Livia, his widow, at Primaporta, Italy, now on display at the Vatican.

Ezra Klein’s Vox has a wonderful series of maps and figures depicting the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to commemorate the anniversary.

The Roman Empire at its greatest extent under Trajan, in 870 AUC.

The first Roman Emperor, Augustus boasted marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisset:  “I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.” His last successor, Constantine XI, died fighting on the walls of Constantinople, the “New Rome”, in 1453 AD, only 561 years ago, and 1439 years after the death of Augustus. Much of the language, culture, laws, and governance of our world today grew out of the empire he established.

For a fictionalized view of his rise and brutal triumph, see Rome; for a take on his more beneficent middle and old age, see I, Claudius.

h/t Paul Krugman