Caturday felid trifecta: Cats in the U.S. Navy; are cats liquids? ; how to call a cat; and lagniappe

May 20, 2023 • 9:30 am

This article from Insider gives a brief history of cats on ships, and has a lot of cool photos of maritime moggies. Click to read (excerpted text is indented)

Much of the information comes from Scot Christenson,  director of communications for the US Naval Institute and the author of “Cats in the Navy.”

British, French, and Spanish explorers in the late-15th century carried cats to the Americas upon the discovery of the “new world” during the age of exploration.

The animals were so universally revered that local islanders visited by British trading ships would often sneak onboard the ships to try and steal a cat for themselves, Christenson said.

During the Age of Sail, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century, rats were known to leave an easily-ignitable trail of gunpowder aboard wooden ships as they scurried across the deck, posing a risk to the sailors on board, Christenson said, and cats could help stop the rodents in their tracks.

Even in the modern era, rats and mice remained an inherent danger to many ships, spreading disease, chewing through sails, and eating food supplies, according to Christenson

“But cats are effective predators,” he told Insider.

. . .Cats were considered akin to crew members aboard the British Royal Navy, according to Christenson.

Some sailors would bond so closely with a cat that they would bring the animal home with them at the end of a voyage.

When the US Navy was founded in the 18th century, the military branch borrowed certain customs from its British predecessor, including a penchant for seafaring cats.

Long believed to be powerful and spiritual animals, cats served as omens and portents among early sailors, according to Christenson.

The Japanese believed cats could protect their ships from evil spirits, Christenson told Insider.

Sailors around the globe also believed that a cat’s behavior could predict the outcome of a voyage.

If a cat jumped on board a ship prior to setting sail, seaman believed their vessel would be protected on its journey. But if a cat deserted a boat ahead of its departure, sailors thought themselves doomed, according to Christenson.

The worst sign of all was the sight of two cats fighting on the pier ahead of a sailing, which some sailors interpreted as the devil and angel fighting for their souls, Christenson said.

Sailors initially believed cats were in control of their fate, Christenson said. The animals were thought to have a gale inside their tail because they would begin shaking during storms.

Sailors interpreted this behavior as angry cats calling down foul weather.

Seamen later discovered that moody cats weren’t in fact conjuring storms, instead, they were responding to the physical agitation they felt when the air pressure around them would drop.

Sailors started to watch cats’ mannerisms to detect coming storms.

The animals are also sensitive to high-pitched whines, so cats helped Navy sailors detect coming air crafts during the World Wars, Christenson said.

Feline members of the Royal Navy received a weekly allowance, which the sailors often paid themselves, contributing one shilling and sixpence to buy treats and milk for their cat friends, Christenson said.

The extra snacks helped make sure the cats were sustained on board even after they had caught all the rodents.

During World War I, the US Navy scooped up hundreds of thousands of stray cats and assigned them to ships, Christenson said.

. . . The animals would typically stay on the same boat for long periods at a time, becoming territorial over their space. But every once in a while, a cat would jump ship if they determined they could get better food options on another boat, even if it was with another country’s navy, according to Christenson.

The smartest cats claimed control of the ship’s galley where they received extra treats and grew extra fat. Other felines opted to spend time in a boat’s laundry room where there were plentiful soft and warm items on which to sleep.

Budget cuts after World War II dealt a death knell to Navy cats, Christenson said.

Advocates for the financial cuts ridiculed the Navy, accusing the military branch of complaining about a lack of funds while planning birthday parties for their cats.

The public relations aspect of the campaign embarrassed the Navy, even though more often than not, it was the sailors themselves paying for the upkeep of their feline friends.

But it was updated quarantine laws that ultimately led to the end of cats’ seafaring days, according to Christenson.

For years, Navy cats were granted special permission to forgo most country’s standard laws that required incoming private citizens to quarantine their accompanying cats and other pets for several months.

But as nations began cracking down on animal quarantine laws in the aftermath of World War II, ship captains faced serious repercussions if one of their boat’s felines escaped and went exploring in a port city, Christenson said, leading to the demise of the practice altogether.

And a story:

Christenson spent years collecting stories of the cats who served in the Navy.

Of all the cases he found, his favorite anecdote is the tale of “Mis Hap.”

Mis Hap was a tiny kitten found by a Marine [Frank Praytor] during the Korea War, Christenson told Insider. The animal had just been orphaned, and her human rescuer named her Mis Hap because she had “been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The Marine was photographed feeding the cat with a medicine dropper in a heartrending photo that was picked up by dozens of newspapers around the globe, according to Christenson.

Prior to Mis Hap’s discovery, the Marine in question was at risk of being court-martialed after submitting one of his own photographs of wounded Marines to a photo contest, flouting military censors that had banned the publication of such content at the time.

But the marine’s newfound newspaper fame ultimately spared him from the charges and yielded hundreds of marriage proposals from women across the country who were moved by his tender care toward Mis Hap, according to Christenson.

Mis Map went on to become the mascot of headquarters in Korea.

Her Marine eventually brought her back to Chicago where she lived a long, happy life.

A video of Mis Hap and her marine. The story has a twist to it (but no worries: the cat was fine):

This is indeed a photo of Mis Hap and Frank Praytor. He became famous for this photograph:

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A liquid is traditionally defined as a material that adapts its shape to fit a container. Yet under certain conditions, cats seem to fit this definition. This somewhat paradoxical observation emerged on the web a few years ago and joined the long list of internet memes involving our feline friends. When I first saw this question it made me laugh, and then think. I decided to reformulate it to illustrate some problems at the heart of rheology, the study of the deformations and flows of matter. My study on the rheology of cats won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.

The prizes are awarded every year by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to science and humor. The goal is to highlight scientific studies that first make people laugh, then think. A ceremony is held every year at Harvard University

Here a cat, whose body fits perfectly within a sink, behaves like a liquid. William McCamment, CC BY-SA

At the center of the definition of a liquid is an action: A material must be able to modify its form to fit within a container. The action must also have a characteristic duration. In rheology this is called the relaxation time. Determining if something is liquid depends on whether it’s observed over a time period that’s shorter or longer than the relaxation time.

If we take cats as our example, the fact is that they can adapt their shape to their container if we give them enough time. Cats are thus liquid if we give them the time to become liquid. In rheology, the state of a material is not really a fixed property – what must be measured is the relaxation time. What is its value and on what does it depend? For example, does the relaxation time of a cat vary with its age? (In rheology we speak of thixotropy.)

Could the type of container be a factor? (In rheology this is studied in “wetting” problems.) Or does it vary with the cat’s degree of stress? (One speaks of “shear thickening” if the relaxation time increases with stress, or “shear thinning” if the opposite is true.) Of course, we mean stress in the mechanical sense rather than emotional, but the two meanings may overlap in some cases.

What cats show clearly is that determining the state of a material requires comparing two time periods: the relaxation time and the experimental time, which is the time elapsed since the onset of deformation initiated by the container. For instance, it may be the time elapsed since the cat stepped into a sink. Conventionally, one divides the relaxation time by the experimental time, and if the result is more than 1, the material is relatively solid; if the result is lower than 1, the material is relatively liquid.

And the answer:  Yes, under some circumstances cats are indeed liquids.

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This piece from Gizmodo tells you the best way to summon a strange cat, either outdoors or at a friend’s house.  Click to read:

An excerpt:

The study was conducted by researchers at Paris Nanterre University’s Laboratory of Compared Ethology and Cognition, led by Charlotte de Mouzon. De Mouzon has been studying the ins-and-outs of cat-human interaction for several years now. Last October, for instance, she and her team published a paper suggesting that pet cats can readily distinguish their owner’s voice from that of a stranger’s and can also often tell when their owner is directly speaking to them.

. . .For this latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Animals, she wanted to get a better sense of how cats respond to our different modes of communication, both alone and when interwoven with each other.

“When we communicate with them, what is more important to them? Is it the visual cues or the vocal cues? That was the starting question of our research,” de Mouzon told Gizmodo.

They recruited help from 12 cats living at a cat cafe. The experimenter (de Mouzon herself) first got the cats used to her presence. Then she put them through different scenarios. The cats would enter a room and then de Mouzon interacted with them in one of four ways: She called out to them but made no gestures toward them otherwise, like extending out her hand; she gestured toward them but didn’t vocalize; she both vocalized and gestured toward them; and, in the fourth, control condition, she did neither.

THE ANSWER:

The cats approached de Mouzon the fastest when she used both vocal and visual cues to catcall them, compared to the control condition—a finding that wasn’t too unexpected. But the team was surprised by the fact that the cats responded quicker to the visual cues alone than they did to the vocal cues. De Mouzon points out that owners routinely love to adopt a “cat talk voice” with their pets, so they figured that cafe cats would respond better to vocalizations. They now theorize that this preference might be different for cats interacting with human strangers than it would be for their owners.

So, when calling out to a strange cat on the street (something I do EVERY time I get near an outdoor cat), extend your hand and call to them in a soft baby voice.

Langiappe from France (be sure to click the links):

A separate key lesson learned from this research is that French people seem to have their own unique way of getting cats to notice them. The paper details de Mouzon using “a sort of ‘pff pff’ sound” as her vocal cue, which is apparently widely used by people in France to call cats. When she demonstrated the gesture over Zoom, it sounded like a “kissy” sound, at least to this reporter’s ear. And importantly, it was subtly distinct from the “pspsps” sound that’s common among English-speakers trying to attract a cat.

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Lagniappe: Jared Leto as Choupette (the late Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved still-living cat) at the Met Gala:

h/t: Bill, Ginger K., Thomas

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 20, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have another photo-and-text story from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them

Cleared for take-off

In 1930s Germany, a renowned aerodynamics engineer was having dinner with a biologist when the conversation drifted to the subject of flying bees. The engineer, possibly animated by a sip or two of schnapps, showed the biologist some back-of-the-envelope calculations to prove that bees could not generate sufficient lift to fly. Apparently impressed by his interlocutor’s acumen, the biologist went on to share with his peers the scientific proof that bees can’t fly. The press picked up on the story, and an urban myth was born – although this is only one of a few tales explaining the origin of the widespread belief that scientists have proved that bumblebees can’t fly (nobody knows how bumblebees got involved).

But as bumblebees carry on stubbornly contradicting science by doing what they are supposedly unable to do, one group of people found the explanation for this paradox: creationists. “Of course, our Creator God knows how to make a bumble bee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out” (Creation Moments, an American creationist broadcaster); “God created all living things, therefore, He knows exactly how to make a bumble bee fly, even when it defies logic, and when even the best of modern science can’t figure this thing out” (The Washington Informer, an American creationist publication).

A flying bumble bee: a miracle in action © marsupium photography, Wikimedia Commons.

Alas, what the anonymous engineer proved to the gullible biologist was that 1930s mathematical models were too crude to explain the flight of a bee. The aerodynamics theories available then were based on observations and experiments with the rigid wings of an aeroplane. Under these models, a bee couldn’t possibly fly however much wing-beat power it mustered; its wings are too small for its body size, and would generate too much drag.

But the flight of a bee is much more complex than an aeroplane’s. Bees’ wings are not stiff structures that flap up and down; they bend, twist and rotate to make quick, arched and sweeping waves forwards and back. The angling of wings and a very high wing-beat frequency create vortices of low pressure under the bee, keeping it aloft. So bees are more similar to crude helicopters than to aeroplanes. Bee aerodynamics have been extensively studied and explained with no need for heavenly input (e.g., Sane, 2003. Journal of Experimental Biology 206: 4191-4208; Altshuler et al., 2005. PNAS 102: 18213-18218).

The flight of a honeybee comprises up-and-down movements, forward-and-backward movements, and torsion (the partial rotary movement of the wing on its long axis). The wing tip describes a long, narrow and slanting figure of eight © Arizona Board of Regents / ASU Ask A Biologist:

 

Even with these intricate manoeuvres, flying is challenging for a chunky bee such as a bumblebee. Brute force is needed to sort out its weight problem: a bumblebee beats its wings up to 200 times per second. Such tremendous speed is only possible thanks to the bee’s morphology. Unlike birds and bats, bees’ flying muscles are not attached directly to the wings, but to the thorax. Dorsoventral muscles run from the top to the bottom of the thorax, and dorsal-longitudinal muscles run from the front to the back of the thorax (the wing muscles of mayflies, dragonflies and cockroaches have a different configuration). By alternating rhythmic pulsations of these muscles, a bee squeezes and expands its thorax, generating a great deal of energy that is channelled into wing-flapping at mindboggling speeds, akin to vibrations of a bowstring. Watch the whole cycle in slow motion, and the result in real life. [JAC: don’t miss going to these two links!]

A bee’s flying apparatus: the contraction of the longitudinal muscles and relaxation of the vertical muscles expand the thorax upwards and drive the wings downward. The relaxation of the longitudinal muscles and contraction of the vertical muscles push the thorax sideways, driving the wings upward © John R. Meyer & David B. Orr, North Carolina State University.

The buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) – and presumably other bumble bee species – makes its life even more complicated by flapping the left and right wings independently, which is an aerodynamically inefficient, not to mention inelegant, way of travelling (Bomphrey et al., 2009. Experiments in Fluids 46: 811–821). But inefficiency does not stop bumble bees. Some species are capable of migrating hundreds of kilometres (albeit with the help of wind currents); others have been recorded living in montane habitats as high as 5,000 metres, where oxygen levels and temperatures are taxing to most flying creatures. The fittingly named Bombus impetuosus can go further up: males released inside a chamber with an atmosphere rarefied to pressures equivalent to an altitude of 9,000 m (higher than Mount Everest) could sustain flight by simply beating their wings in broader strokes (Dillon & Dudley, 2014. Biology Letters 10: 20130922). Cold and lack of food would prevent such an adventure, but not aerodynamics.

Fly over that mound? Not a problem for B. impetuosus © Rdevany, Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to their high-energy fuel – nectar – bumblebees can easily fly for several kilometres in search of pollen and more nectar. They can, but prefer not to. Shorter trips are more energy-efficient than long journeys, so bumble bees tend to stick around their nests (50 m to 2 km radius) as long as the surroundings are rewarding, food-wise. Other bees follow a similar pattern. Even small species can go over the 10 km mark, and the orchid bee Euplusia surinamensis seems to hold the record: a marked and released bee found its way home from a distance of 23 km through the jungles of Central America (Janzen, 1971. Science 171: 203-205).

The orchid bee E. surinamensis, a long distance flyer. Art by Dru Drury, 1770. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Bees’ flying distances are usually correlated with body size, but overall they tend to maximise energy gains by keeping foraging expeditions short. This has implications for the management of pollinators’ habitat. As a general rule, based on results from a number of bee species, flower patches are best placed within a few hundred metres of each other to facilitate foraging and reduce the risk of bees running on empty (Zurbuchen et al., 2010. Biological Conservation 143: 669–676).

The flight of a bee is not mysterious or miraculous, but it is a complex and demanding activity. Bees resort to it judiciously for their survival.

The dream of flying: Jack-of-all-trades Tito Livio Burattini (1617-1681) guaranteed that landing his glider Dragon Volant would cause ‘only the most minor injuries’ to the pilot. Supposedly a cat was its first and last passenger (Hart, 1985. The Prehistory of Flight, U. of California Press). Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on Caturday (shabbos for Jewish felids), May 20, 2023, and National Quiche Lorraine Day. This tasty and deeply unhealthy dish was known outside the Lorraine region of NW France only after the 1950s:

It’s also Armed Forces Day, Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day, National Rescue D*g Day, World Fiddle Day, World Whisky Day, Emancipation Day, Josephine Baker Day (declared by the NAACP for her civil rights activism), World Bee Day  and World Metrology Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 20 Wikipedia page.

Today’s Google Doodle is a “spot the axolotl” animation (these amphibians are critically endangered, living only in freshwater in the Valley of Mexico). Travel along the lake floor and, when you spot one, click. If you get enough photos right, you win!  Click to go to the game:

Da Nooz:

*There’s only a bit more than a week left until the U.S. hits its debt limit, and until yesterday things looked as if there would be a rapprochement between Biden and the Republicans that would stave off a default. Now things have hit a snag again.

Negotiations between top White House and Republican congressional officials over a deal to raise the debt limit hit a snag on Friday when a G.O.P. leader in the talks said it was time to “press pause,” complaining that President Biden’s team was being unreasonable and that no progress could be made.

It was a setback in the effort to avert a debt default before a June 1 deadline, though it was not clear whether the delay was a tactical retreat or a lasting blow to chances of getting an agreement.

The halt came one day after the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus declared that Republicans should cease negotiations with Mr. Biden and insist on their debt limit legislation, which demanded steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the federal borrowing cap and is a dead letter in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The abrupt announcement of a pause also came just a day after Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters that he believed negotiators could reach a deal in principle as early as the weekend. But on Friday Mr. McCarthy and his deputies sounded a starkly different tone, saying that White House officials were refusing to come their way on spending cuts.

. . .“We’ve got to get movement by the White House, and we don’t have any movement,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol not long afterward. “We’ve got to pause.”

He hinted that a major sticking point was over how to cap federal spending. House Republicans passed a debt limit bill last month that would raise the nation’s borrowing limit into next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels for a decade.

It’s getting down to the wire, and I’m hoping that, given the gravity of this situation, the desire to compromise outweighs a partisan fight for “victory.”

*Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance, and a short speech, at Thursday’s PEN America Gala, and I’m very glad that he’s able to do this. He even had some booze!

Salman Rushdie walked onstage at PEN America’s annual gala on Thursday night, his first public appearance since he was stabbed and gravely wounded in an attack last August at a literary event in Western New York.

His appearance at the gala, which had not been announced, was a surprise. But no surprise, to those who know him, was that he began his speech with a joke.

“Well, hi everybody,” Rushdie said, as the crowd at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan greeted him with whoops and a standing ovation. “It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also an option. I’m pretty glad the dice rolled this way.”

His remarks, just a few minutes long, in accepting an award for courage may have been uncharacteristically terse. But Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye because of the attack, was his voluble self during the cocktail hour, for which he had slipped in through a side door before taking his place for a red-carpet photo op.

Flashbulbs popped. And as the crowd began to notice him, friends headed over for handshakes and hugs.

“I just thought if there’s a right thing to chose as a re-entry, it’s this,” he said in an interview. “It’s being part of the world of books, the fight against censorship and for human rights.”

Here’s a photo with the caption from the NYT:

Salman Rushdie, whose appearance at PEN America’s gala was not publicized beforehand, was greeted by the crowd with a standing ovation.Credit: Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.

What’s a bit ironic about this is that six PEN America members refused to show up at this gala in 2015 when Charlie Hebdo was getting a “courge” award. Their reason? Because the French magazine was making fun of Islam, held by “marginalized people”. Well, that’s why Rushdie was given a fatwa that was supported by many in the West.

*Here are three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: The suburbs are back.” Speaking of PEN:

→ Masha Gessen resigns from PEN Board: Prestigious literary group PEN America was hosting their annual World Voices Festival of International Literature and decided that Russian dissident writers were still too Russian to attend. So they canceled the Russian writers panel. The writer Masha Gessen, one of those Russian dissidents, resigned as vice president of the PEN board over it. Anyway, it’s a typical mess. Amid bad publicity PEN apologized, calling it a big misunderstanding. I’m all for helping the Ukrainians and am pro–Team America World Police, but liberal America’s intensity on this war has gotten to the point where we’re going to have to watch out for suburban dads terrorizing local pierogi joints.

I disagree with PEN, which is woke, but I also disagree with Bowles’s ire towards “liberal America’s intensity” about the war.

→ Because the culture war was getting boring: The LGBTQ advisory group of Massachusetts is recommending that the commonwealth expand child abuse laws to include “the withholding of gender-affirming care for LGBTQ youth.” (H/t Wesley Yang for finding that.) Tasking child protective services with taking children away if they’re not immediately put on hormone therapy will surely calm the conversation around this.

Meanwhile, Texas Children’s Hospital said they would stop performing hormonal and surgical interventions on gender nonconforming children but has not stopped, according to a City Journal investigation. And The New York Times, in attempting a takedown of pediatric patients who detransitioned, accidentally confirmed that 15-year-old girls are getting mastectomies.

→ MeToo is out: There were a few years when the focus of modern society was on women and the slogan was #BelieveWomen and make them feel safe and comfortable. Now, #MeToo is #done.

Case #1: The group of sorority sisters in Wyoming who are suing their sorority for allowing a biological male who occasionally IDs as a woman to join, alleging that the new member had a boner while they changed clothes. The villain in the modern telling? Those girls! (Also I will say, the “transwoman” here doesn’t seem totally legit, as it were, in that they haven’t changed the sex on their driver’s license, haven’t had surgery, and apparently rarely even wear women’s clothes. I’m gonna need to see a little more effort before you can go full Kappa Kappa pillow party.)

Case #2: In Seattle, a city official who is a rape survivor didn’t want a convicted repeat sex offender to serve on the homelessness council but was overruled this week. The new line: believe none of these crazy ladies! They’re being a little touchy, don’t you think? A little. . . hysterical?

*In his Weekly Dish column, “The Queers versus the homosexuals,” Andrew Sullivan takes a look at what the “queer movement,” including transgender activists, has done to the gay and lesbian movements, and he doesn’t like it. First, he argues that “queers now run the gay rights movement, and adds:

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. . . .

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.). . .

Gay hook-up apps now include biological women seeking gay men and straight men looking for chicks with dicks. “NO MEN” some profiles now say — on what was once a gay man’s app. There are fewer and fewerexclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant. (Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: “I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.” We are going backward, not forward.)

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

. . . The queers regarded any therapy exploring other possible reasons for a child’s transgender identity — autism, family breakdown, abuse, bullying — as “conversion therapy,” and have made it illegal in some states. But the original Dutch study on which this entire medical regime stands specifically excluded any child with any other mental health challenges. It’s not as if the queers ignored the original safeguards, or didn’t know about them; they just consciously threw them away.

. . .You might imagine that, given this record, the queers would go out of their way to reassure us, to show how tight the safeguarding is, how they screen thoroughly to ensure that gay kids are not swept up in this. But they regard the very question of whether gay kids are at risk as out of bounds. Children are regarded as the ultimate authority on their own treatment: not the doctor or the parents, but the child.

Here’s a queer activist writer, Masha Gessen, saying that one thing “should be off limits” in this debate:

[In the NYT] there’s a [paraphrased] quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist, who says, Well, maybe these people would’ve been gay—implying they’re really gay and not really transgender. That really clearly veers into the territory of saying ‘These people don’t exist. They’re not who they say they are.’ So that’s why it’s so painful.

No it doesn’t. It’s perfectly possible to believe that transgender people exist, but that children may not know who or what they are before they’ve even gone through puberty.

. . . But we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.

He goes on to claim that this kind of activism is driving gay men and women away from liberal politics. I’m in no position to evaluate that, but Sullivan does make some credible claims.

Oh, and a bit of self-aggrandizement: from the “Money quotes” for the week section:

“White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways. P.S. Nature is amazing. P.P.S. Sex is not binary,” – Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. The sparrows have just two sexes, as Community Notes corrected. Jerry Coyne has a beaut of a piece on this.

*If you’re into good but inexpensive red wines, and who’s not, then have a look at the WSJ’s article “Italy’s Best Bargain in Red Wines Now“.

What’s your favorite bargain red? That’s a question I’ve fielded many times, and after a recent tasting I have a new reply: Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

Produced in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, a good Montepulciano d’Abruzzo can cost as little as $9, though many cost more and tend to be, correspondingly, more complex. I hadn’t tasted much Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in recent years, but the 15 bottles I bought, priced between $9 and $28, were, with a few exceptions, so good that I will definitely be buying more.

. . .I’ve never been to Abruzzo, but I’ve heard it described in such captivating terms that I’m determined to rectify that fact. San Francisco-based restaurateur and wine director Shelley Lindgren is a big fan who’s visited Abruzzo seven times and described it as “hauntingly beautiful.” Although the region has long been undersung and overlooked, Lindgren thinks that thanks to the heightened quality of Abruzzo wines and the beauty of the region, it’s “having a moment and deservedly so.”

Lindgren said that Montepulciano d’Abruzzo wines are always among the bestselling by-the-glass offerings at both of her A16 restaurants, in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.

Author Lettie Teague recommends five wines between $9 and $26, and here’s one that intrigues me:

And how can the lush, aromatic 2021 DeAngelis Montepulciano d’Abruzzo cost a mere $12 a bottle? It seems the DeAngelis family, whose winery is located in Marche, just across the border from Abruzzo, maintains a long-term contract to buy organic Montepulciano grapes from a great Abruzzo source.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are philosophically sardonic:

Hili: even narcissuses wither with time.
A: But they do not stop thinking highly about themselves.
In Polish:
Hili: Nawet narcyzy z czasem więdną.
Ja: Ale nie przestają o sobie dobrze myśleć.
And a lovely picture of Baby Kulka with a caption:  “In case anybody has any doubts, this picture was, of course, taken by Paulina.” (In Polish: “Gdyby ktoś miał wątpliwości, to zdjęcie jest oczywiście zrobione przez Paulinę.”)

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From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Now That’s Wild!:

From Beth:

From Masih, more punishment for protesting:

From Barry. Cat: “I was just checking the wall.”

From Malcom. INCOMING!

From Ricky Gervais, the world’s most disgusting selfie:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, mother and child gassed upon arrival:

From Dr. Cobb, who’s on his way home from the USA. A medieval hybrid:

Digging through Francis Crick’s papers in La Jolla, Matthew found a reference to his own Ph.D. advisor:

Ah, Vonnegut:

New college admissions scam

May 19, 2023 • 12:00 pm

This article at ProPublica  (also co-published at the Chronicles of Higher Education) recounts what I consider a “scam” because it seems to be a largely unethical way to get students into college. Now that affirmative action is about to go down the drain, and standardized tests like the SAT are becoming more and more optional (the two issues are connected), canny entrepreneurs are developing new ways to give students college-worthy credentials.  But it sounds dubious to me.

Click to read:

Here’s how it works:

A.)  A company arises that promises to help students get into college by having them get some research published. (Real published research by high school students is rare).  They charge huge fees: from several thousand dollars to more than $10,000.

B.) Usually the companies pair a student with a “mentor”, a professor or graduate student who can help the student cobble together a paper.  (As you can imagine, many–but not all–of these papers are not of high quality.)  The “mentors” are paid huge fees for this: up to $200 per hour, far higher than graduate student wages)

C.) A publication is founded that will consider and accept papers written by high-school students (as you might guess, the ideas and writing itself often comes from the “mentors”).  Here’s one of them: the Scholarly Review. These journals also show “preprints”, unreviewed manuscripts that a student can put on their college-application c.v. There are many of these journals, and, unfortunately, some are connected with the very companies that charge students for getting mentors to help them write papers for college applications. Looking at the link will give you an idea about what counts as “publication.”

As you can imagine, many of these journals aren’t very selective, and publish papers with no reviews and no corrections. As the article says, “Almost any high school paper can find an outlet,”

D.) The papers are then touted on college applications. They do seem to help, but of course few evaluators are able to find time to read the papers, much less assess the research. Overall, it does burnish an application, though a lot of the burnishing is bogus. Given the stiff competition to get into good schools, though, parents are willing to pay high fees for the “service.”

E.) As it’s even harder for foreign students to get into American universities, there’s a lot of money to be made getting students overseas to “publish”. Here’s one company in India:

A short walk from India’s first Trump Tower, in an upscale neighborhood known for luxury homes and gourmet restaurants, is the Mumbai office of Athena Education, a startup that promises to help students “join the ranks of Ivy League admits.” An attendant in a white uniform waits at a standing desk to greet visitors in a lounge lined with paintings and featuring a coffee bar and a glass facade with a stunning view of the downtown skyline. “We all strive to get things done while sipping Italian coffee brewed in-house,” a recent Athena ad read.

Co-founded in 2014 by two Princeton graduates, Athena has served more than 2,000 students. At least 80 clients have been admitted to elite universities, and 87% have gotten into top-50 U.S. colleges, according to its website. One client said that Athena charges more than a million rupees, or $12,200 a year, six times India’s annual per capita income. Athena declined comment for this story.

Around 2020, Athena expanded its research program and started emphasizing publication. Athena and similar services in South Korea and China cater to international students whose odds of getting accepted at a U.S. college are even longer than those American students face. MIT, for instance, accepted 1.4% of international applicants last year, compared with 5% of domestic applicants.

A former consultant said Athena told her that its students were the “creme de la creme.” Instead, she estimated, 7 out of 10 needed “hand-holding.”

For publication, Athena students have a readily available option: Questioz, an online outlet founded by an Athena client and run by high schoolers. Former Editor-in-Chief Eesha Garimella said that a mentor at Athena “guides us on the paper editing and publication process.” Garimella said Questioz publishes 75%-80% of submissions.

Athena students also place their work in the Houston-based Journal of Student Research. Founded in 2012 to publish undergraduate and graduate work, in 2017 the journal began running high school papers, which now make up 85% of its articles, co-founders Mir Alikhan and Daharsh Rana wrote in an email.

Last June, a special edition of the journal presented research by 19 Athena students. They tested noise-reduction algorithms and used computer vision to compare the stances of professional and amateur golfers. A survey of Hong Kong residents concluded that people who grew up near the ocean are more likely to value its conservation. Athena’s then-head of research was listed as a co-author on 10 of the projects.

Publication in JSR was “pretty simple,” said former Athena student Anjani Nanda, who surveyed 103 people about their awareness of female genital mutilation and found that they were poorly informed. “I never got any edits or suggested changes from their side.”

As colleges abandon indices of merit (this is of course a way to accept students who would not get in using traditional merits), and go to “holistic” evaluation, this kind of scam will become more and more common. For you can include anything that makes you stand out as “holistic”, and money-grubbing  people will find a way to take advantage of that.

h/t: Steve

Oxford students try to deplatform Kathleen Stock and punish the university group inviting her

May 19, 2023 • 9:45 am

Kathleen Stock was a professor at Sussex until she was forced to resign after being harassed and ostracized for her views on gender. I don’t know much about her except she’s a serious and honored scholar with views that are opposed by gender activists, and that is sufficient reason to defend Stock’s right to free speech. That right includes the right not to be shouted down or deplatformed if she has a valid invitation to speak.  But that appears to be difficult if you’re involved in the gender wars.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about her:

Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.

Her views on transgender rights and gender identity have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of over 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock’s “harmful rhetoric” contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex.  This came after a student campaign took place calling for her dismissal and the faculty trade union accused the university of “institutional transphobia.”  A group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signed an open letter in support of Stock’s academic freedom.

An OBE is not to be taken lightly! Stock is also a “gender nonconforming lesbian”.  As far as I can see, her views align with those of J. K. Rowling, questioning the rights of transgender women only insofar as they encroach on essential rights that devolve only on natal women.  And, again as far as I know, she left Sussex because, in view of the harassment, bullying and pervasive calls for her to be fired, she did not feel safe on campus, the University administration didn’t lift its finger to defend her. In view of this ostracism, Stock got panic attacks and suffered a mental breakdown. Unable to do her job, she therefore left Susses. Apparently, Stock’s academic freedom did not outweigh her “harmful rhetoric” or right to not be harassed.  Here’s a bit from a Guardian article about her:

In a lengthy interview with BBC Woman’s Hour, Kathleen Stock claimed the student protests grew out of hostility from other academics. She said a lack of support from her colleagues and the unions led her to resign.

“There’s a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me, using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students, or they go on to Twitter and say that I’m a bigot.

“So thus creating an atmosphere in which the students then become much more extreme and much more empowered to do what they did,” Stock said.

Stock said her “personal tipping point” came after Sussex’s branch of the University and College Union responded to a protest against Stock on campus in early October by calling for a university-wide investigation into transphobia.

“It was when I saw my own union branch’s statement, which basically backed the protesters and implicitly made it obvious that they thought I was transphobic and accused Sussex University of institutional transphobia,” Stock said.

“When union committee members basically back intimidation against you as an employee, then that’s a bit of a blow.”

Again so long as her views are debatable—which they are, as the dons below emphasize—Stock should be given the right to be heard, not be deplatformed, and above all be heard by those who oppose her.

I asked Emma Hilton about Stock, and got this response (quoted by permission):

Now Kathleen writes and teaches at University of Austin. And speaks publicly, like at Oxford. She recently debated at Cambridge, and one of the students on her side of the debate spent half of his talk blasting her. I was in Italy with her a couple of months back. She’s warm, funny as hell, great company and it’s just unreal that the image of her as a monster was allowed to take hold.  

No matter whether you agree with her views, and even in view of Britain’s lack of a First Amendment, it’s wrong to try to deplatform Stock. But this, according to the Torygraph article below, is precisely what Oxford students tried to do when Stock was invited to debate at the Oxford Union, the university’s famous debating society.  That she is just one of several people involved in a verbal to-and-fro is not sufficient for the protesting students.  One side of the debate cannot be allowed to be give ! These students are immature, acting like children stoppering their ears when they hear something they don’t like. Worse: they are trying to stopper other people’s ears!

Click to read. If the article is paywalled, I found an archived version here:

The attempt to deplatform her  has been fought by 40 academics (see Dawkins’s tweet below), and this attempt has been connected with the Oxford Student Union (different from the Oxford Union) voted to sever ties with the Oxford Union, which would deny the latter a booth at the fresher’s fair that’s essential in recruiting students. From the Torygraph:

Oxford dons have warned students that freedom of speech is at risk as a trans row engulfs the university.

More than 40 academics – including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian – have intervened in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.

In the biggest row to erupt at the university since Rhodes Must Fall, students have tried to cancel Prof Stock’s talk – claiming that she is transphobic for her view that it is fiction to claim “transwomen are women”.

It comes amid a spate of free speech rows at universities featuring speakers with gender-critical views – including attempts by the University of Bristol to ban the public from a feminist society talk and activists at the University of Edinburgh preventing a screening of a women’s rights documentary.

The view that “transwomen are women” is certainly a debatable one; we’ve debated it here. It can be construed in several ways: are transwomen equivalent to biological women, and should be called “women”; do they have all the rights and privileges of biological women, most notably the “right” to compete in sports against biological women, or to be incarcerated in women’s prisons? And so on.  Society desperately needs to thrash out these issues because, given the skyrocketing rate of transitioning—particularly from biological men to trans women—the issues are only going to get more pressing.

Here’s Richard’s tweet, and I’ve put the faculty letter below, adding the signers below the fold. There’s also a student letter here.

More from the Torygraph:

The letter from the Oxford dons is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent controversies over free speech on campus.

They say they possess “a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right”, but are united in their belief that “universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.

The letter adds: “Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting.

. . .The row at Oxford first erupted in April when the university’s LGBTQ+ society said it was “dismayed and appalled” that the debating society had “decided to platform the transphobic and trans exclusionary speaker Kathleen Stock”.

It accused the Union of “disregarding the welfare of its LGBTQ+ members under the guise of free speech”.

The Junior Common Rooms of Christ Church, St Edmund Hall, St Anne’s and St Hilda’s have backed the LGBTQ+ society and passed motions calling for her invite “to be rescinded in support of the trans community”.

The row escalated last week when Oxford’s Student Union (SU) voted to sever ties with the 200-year-old debating society, accusing it of having a “toxic culture of bullying and harassment”.

The move would prevent the Union from having a stall at the freshers’ fair, which is an important source of membership sign-ups that fund the university.

But there is some hope:

The Union has said that the talk with Prof Stock will go ahead despite planned protests. It will set up “welfare spaces” to help students cope with the gender debate.

The university said it “does not support the no-platforming of any lawful speech at university events or on university premises”.

It is understood that trustees of the SU have written to the Union and could reverse the move to ban the debating society from the fresher’s fair after the university sought to understand the decision and uphold its free speech duties.

The faculty letter is below, with the list of signers (given in the Torygraph) below the fold. Note that the letter emphasizes the diversity of political views among the dons, and is basically a simple defense of free speech and of the right to debate controversial issues,  as well as a condemnation of the Student Union for punishing the Oxford Union.  I can’t see anything objectionable about the letter, or about Stock’s appearance, particularly because it’s a debate, Jack, and one side is given the opportunity to go after Stock’s views.  It appears that many extreme gender activists have reached the point where they believe that anyone who disagrees with them should be censored.  Here’s the faculty letter:

Sir,

We are academics at the University of Oxford, possessed of a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right. We wholeheartedly condemn the decision of the Oxford University Student Union (Oxford SU) to sever its ties with the Oxford Union (the Union) after the latter’s refusal to rescind an invitation to the philosopher and gender-critical feminist Kathleen Stock.

Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Stock’s views, there is no plausible and attractive ideal of academic freedom, or of free speech more generally, which would condemn their expression as outside the bounds of permissible discourse. Unfortunately, the position of her opponents seems to be that Professor Stock’s views are so illicit that they cannot be safely discussed in front of an audience of consenting and intelligent adults at the main debating society at the University of Oxford. If this were the case, it is doubtful that they could be safely expressed anywhere – a result that, as her opponents are no doubt satisfied to find, would amount to their effective prohibition.

Fortunately, it has become clear that the Union’s capitulation cannot be secured by the usual methods of moralistic browbeating and social censure. However, Oxford SU is now threatening its financial model by seeking to prevent the Union from having a stall at future freshers’ fairs. This is dangerous territory. Universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument. To resort to coercion and financial threats when unable to secure one’s preferred outcome in debate would represent a profound failure to live up to these ideals.

Universities must remain places where contentious views can be openly discussed. The salient alternative to this, one apparently favoured by many of Professor Stock’s opponents, is simply unacceptable: a state of affairs in which the institutions of a university collude to suppress the expression of controversial, but potentially true, viewpoints in an effort to prevent them from becoming more widely known.

Signed:

h/t: Emma

Click “read more” to see the academics who signed.

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Spot the hawk!

May 19, 2023 • 9:00 am

This “spot the. . . ” post comes directly from Matthew, who probably took it himself. Can you spot the hawk? It’s not too hard. I’ve put the photo below so you can enlarge it, and the reveal will be at noon Chicago time.

Please don’t put the answer in the comments so that others can try. But you can write “Got it” or something similar if you spotted the bird.

Spot it!