This one's sweet

For the conman, that is. How many people will read this, figure they can't tell him about his mistake anyway, and try to take advantage of it? If it's only one, his time and effort have paid off huge... He won't be checking his email, even though he wants you to contact him to share "joy after sufferness", so, please: Feel free to give his Secretary all your banking details.

Hello ,
I'm happy to inform you about my success in getting those funds transferred under the cooperation of a new partner from Paraguay.
Presently i am in Paraguay for investment projects with my own share of the total sum. meanwhile, i didn't forget your past efforts and attempts to assist me in transferring those funds despite that it failed us some how.

Now contact My Secretary in Burkina Faso his name is Mr Umaru Hassan on his Email address (mr_umaru1@yahoo.com) ask him to send you the total of $800.000.00 (Eight hundred Thousand United State dollars) which i kept for your compensation for all the past efforts and attempts to assist me in this matter. I appreciated your efforts at that time very much.
So feel free and get in touched with my Secretary and instruct him where to send the amount to you.

Please do let me know immediately you receive it so that we can share the joy after all the sufferness at that time. in the moment, I'm very busy here because of the investment projects which me and the new partner are having at hand, finally, remember that I had forwarded instruction to my secretary on your behalf to receive that money, so feel free to get in touch with him, he will send the amount to you without any delay, for your information you should not write to my email because i will not be checking my mail.
Regards,
Mr SANUHO OUEDRAGO

Sky Watch: Seattle Sunset

Seattle set a record today: the all-time highest temperature (103 F, 39.4 C). Ridiculous. On the other hand, it created quite a lovely sunset. I caught it on I-405 near Everett.




more Sky Watchers here

Smiles

These are just the cutest damn little fish... From the "Welcome to Metzler's - Have a Nice Day!" sign where we had breakfast today. They make me smile.

Ummmm... just one thing...

So I went to check in on line this morning (good thing I didn't remember to do it last night), and United's website told me the flight was "unavailable for check in". The flight is one and a half hours late, and I won't make the connection in Chicago. They offered me four options - two to make the connection (one with two stops before then!) and two that just skipped Chicago and routed me to Knoxville some other way. But all four of those planes had already left Seattle.

Not much use, that.

So I had to call them, and spent ten minutes arguing with the automated system until it finally gave me a person. So I'm getting to Knoxville at midnight. Good times.

Oh, yeah. Orbitz? They called to tell me the flight was delayed - and in time that I wouldn't have left for Sea-Tac yet. But they didn't notice that I needed to do something about my connection.

Ridiculously Beautiful

Sorry for the skimpy posting, but we've had long days the last couple - driving from Tahoe to Ferndale via the Sacramento airport, and then Ferndale to Depoe Bay (where we are now, getting reading to head on up to Everett...). Both California and Oregon have plenty of stimulus money for infrastructure, it seems: road work is everywhere... But this Oregon coast is simply breath-takingly beautiful, so it's worth it.

Happy Birthday, Alexis

de Tocqueville, that is - born in 1805.

"He went with his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, and after a brief stop in Newport, they arrived in Manhattan at sunrise May 11, 1831. Over the course of the next nine months, Tocqueville and his friend traveled more than 7,000 miles, using every vehicle then in existence, including steamer, stage-coach, and horse, going as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and as far south as New Orleans. He interviewed everyone he met: workmen, doctors, professors, as well as famous men, such as Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the richest man in America. At the end of nine months, Tocqueville went back to France, and in less than a year, he had finished his masterpiece, Democracy in America (1835)." [quoted from The Writer's Almanac]

America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State. ... Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough.

I hope our passions aren't necessarily so "small", nor our intelligence just "practical" - let's make it more than "enough" this time.

Happy Birthday, Gerard

Born today in 1844 in Stratford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets (still today, though I don't agree with his philosophy).

Bless you, Robert Bridges, for publishing his work after he died, in 1888, too young and no longer writing...

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer énds now; now, bárbarous in béauty, the stóoks ríse
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of sílk-sack clóuds! has wilder, wilful-wávier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I wálk, I líft up, Í líft úp heart, éyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gáve you a
Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic -- as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! --
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wánting; whích two whén they ónce méet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder,
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.


Vale of Clwyd Sept. 1 1877.

Carnivals!

Here are some carnivals I forgot to mention due to the whole on-vacation thing. If you haven't already checked them out, please do so:

The Humanist Symposium,

I and the Bird,

and a reborn Bone Yard (yay!!).

Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science:

• Over at THe Loom Carl Zimmer looks at "slow-cooked" science and its value: Chimpanzees get AIDS. This is an important discovery, but what intrigues me most about it is how the discovery was made. It is a story of two kinds of science, both of which are essential to getting a deeper understanding of life, but which today are staggeringly out of balance. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall carried out some of the first long-term studies on chimpanzees in the wild. Goodall made important observations, noting that chimpanzees can be surprisingly cooperative but also quite violent, with troops engaging in war-like conflicts. Goodall’s research was part of a long tradition of going to where the animals are, and tracking them for years on end. Goodall didn’t take giant crates of lab equipment with her to Tanzania; instead, she brought patience and careful observation.


• At Cosmic Variance Daniel posts on bending light: A few hours ago the longest total solar eclipse of the Century swept across Asia. And a few days ago Evalyn Gates provided a wonderful guest post on gravitational lensing. This seems like an opportune time to note that gravitational lensing and total solar eclipses are inextricably linked..


• At Why Evolution Is True Jerry Coyne posts on toucan bills: If you’re like me, you’ll have asked yourself many times, “Jerry, why do toucans have such ridiculously big bills?” (See Figs. 1 and 2.) The first answer that might strike you is that the bill — like bodies, plumage ornaments, and other traits in birds — was driven to extreme size by sexual selection. But that won’t wash because male and female toucans have identical-sized bills, and if the male’s bill is brightly colored, so is the female’s. (There are several dozen species of toucans in five genera, all Central or South American.) The next most obvious hypothesis is diet: maybe toucans eat a type of food that requires large bills to handle. But that doesn’t seem likely, either...


• At Backreaction Stefan and Bee (together! yay!) post on making new elements: Besides the fun it brings to slam together heavy things, these experiments have the scientific purpose of better understanding the structure of elementary matter. Eventually, you know, physicsts want to derive all chemistry from QCD, but we're far away from that. The heavy ion beams produced at the GSI have also been used since 1997 for cancer treatment.


• And at Dynamics of Cats Steinn talks about how things keep hitting Jupiter: Now, the interesting thing is that we can assume we are essentially complete in out observations of current Jupiter impacts, and we infer sub-km impactors are hitting every decade or two, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than previous estimates of one every few centuries, up to the small number statistics we have at this point. This suggests, very tentatively, that the flux of the most worrying planetesimals - those large enough to do serious damage, or "continent killers" as we like to call them, but which are also hard to see, is high.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

I actually did nothing whatsoever this entire week that would fit in a category. Too busy going to Seattle and down to Lake Tahoe, where we're all talking and writing...

Cup half full...

Bob Parks writes, about Cronkite,

The poll also reflects the chaotic state of the news industry at the start of the 21st century. When Cronkite reigned, a handful of major networks broadcast the evening news at about the same time. You either watched the news or turned off the television; now you have a thousand mindless alternatives to the news.

This is true. But of course, back then you could only get the news at that time - no other. Now you can get the news whenever you want it.

Happy Birthday, Robert

Today in Wimbledon, England, in 1895, Robert Graves was born. 18 when WWI started, he was immediately shipped off to France. He was badly wounded and reported dead; he believed his life had been spared to write poetry. He suffered from PTSD - recurring nightmares and flashbacks that paralyzed and terrified him. But after he married he began to write, prolifically. In 1929 he published a memoir called Goodbye to All That, and he was able to support himself and his family on his writing for the rest of his life. He may be best known for The White Goddess, a exploration of poetry and myth, and his novels I, Claudius and Claudius, the God, his translations from Latin, and the controversial King Jesus. But he also wrote poetry:

Jonah
A PURPLE whale
Proudly sweeps his tail
Towards Nineveh;
Glassy green
Surges between
A mile of roaring sea.

“O town of gold,
Of splendour multifold,
Lucre and lust,
Leviathan’s eye
Can surely spy
Thy doom of death and dust.”

On curving sands
Vengeful Jonah stands.
“Yet forty days,
Then down, down,
Tumbles the town
In flaming ruin ablaze.”

With swift lament
Those Ninevites repent.
They cry in tears,
“Our hearts fail!”
The whale, the whale!
Our sins prick us like spears.”

Jonah is vexed;
He cries, “What next? what next?”
And shakes his fist.
“Stupid city,
The shame, the pity,
The glorious crash I’ve missed.”

Away goes Jonah grumbling,
Murmuring and mumbling;
Off ploughs the purple whale,
With disappointed tail.

Happy Birthday, Zelda

My father grew up in Montgomery, and once when he was ill Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald read him a story. She was beautiful and crazy, and her life is a tragic romance... Her husband loved her dearly, and she him, and he wrote once, "...For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness."

Deadly, Beautiful Geology

So, as promised, the picture of Mt Adams. Also Mt Lassen (the farthest south - it erupted in the earlier 1910s, several times) and two of the truly gorgeous Mt Shasta. It's difficult to express how astonishing these mountains are, reaching high into the sky, dominating the landscape, covered in glacier-and-snow even in mid-July... They sit alone, seeming to float over the horizon, and at any moment one might rip open the way St Helens did... and they're so incredibly beautiful.

We're in Susanville tonight...

Adams

Lassen

Shasta

Sky Watch: No Borders

I got this shot in Coupeville on Whidbey Island in Washington. It's Mt Baker across the Sound.




more Sky Watchers here

Okay, Portland, what's the big idea?

Driving to Lake Tahoe - first stage today, Everett to Eugene. It was all clouds at first so we didn't see Rainier, but I've seen it before. I did get a nice shot of Adams, which I will post tomorrow, which was cool.

But Hood.

That's a terrific mountain, and I didn't get one picture of it. For that matter, we spent 25 minutes driving through Portland, and I got about 2 minutes worth of seeing Mt Hood - not, mind you, 2 continuous minutes. It was like someone went along I5 and said, "Oh, hey: they can see Mt Hood from here. Plant some trees!"

Anyway, it's a tremendously striking mountain, as you can see in this Portland picture I found on the web... I'm glad I saw it. I just wish I'd gotten a picture. (We're driving back via a different route, so I won't get the chance. This trip...)

Happy Birthday, Stephen

Vincent Benet, that is. Born in 1898. This fragment is one of my favorite bits of poetry - it's from The Army of Northern Virginia and is describing Traveller. I love it for its sentiment and its complexity.

They bred such horses in Virginia then--
Horses that were remembered after death,
And buried not so far from Christian ground
That if their sleeping riders should awake
They could not witch them from the earth again
And ride a printless course along the grass
With the old manage and light ease of hand...

Walter Cronkite

A lot of people have been waxing poetic over the death of Walter Cronkite.

I don't have much to say, mainly because Cronkite was never "Uncle Walter" to me. My family mostly watched NBC news back in the day (Chet Huntley and David Brinkley), and I watched Apollo 11 on ABC with Jules Bergman - I watched a LOT of Jules Bergman's science stuff.

I suppose I'd like to say that Cronkite was never "the" news broadcaster, that even back then before 24-hour news there were alternatives and that lots of people took them. I'd also like to say that while "if Cronkite said it, you believed it - and you knew you should pay attention to it" as one friend of mine put it, that the reverse was just as true: If Cronkite didn't say it, you knew it wasn't true and you didn't have to pay attention. And in those days, before his big Tet broadcast, Cronkite came out with the government line on a lot of things... It's true that he did decide to go and see, and then reported what he believed (correctly labeling it as his belief), but for years that wasn't so. (Also, of course, those decrying the de-obectivifying of news are all praising him for that moment when he wasn't objective. Irony is delicious.)

So, yes: Cronkite was a great newsman. But he wasn't the news.

Weyrhauser's op art

In the blast zones at Mt St Helens, Weyrhauser has been planting trees - noble firs, to be precise. Take a look at these pictures. Select them to get the full size - that blur is not in the image; it's in your mind. Imagine mile after mile of mass-planted firs, all the exact same age, all with those thin branches leading into each other... It's disorienting, to say the least!

Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science (better late than never!):

• At Tetrapod Zoology Darren tackles a paper claiming birds can't be dinosaurs: In contrast, say the authors, theropod dinosaurs (non-avian theropods from hereon, thank you very much) lack these features and, worst of all, had a highly mobile femur that cannot have been incorporated into abdominal support - ergo, non-avian theropods cannot have had abdominal air-sacs that functioned like those of modern birds, ergo non-avian theropods were fundamentally different from modern birds. The implication from this - it's not mentioned in the paper but was of course bigged-up in the press interviews - is that birds cannot be dinosaurs! I said a while ago that I wasn't planning to cover this research, predominantly because I don't find it at all interesting nor worthy of review. After all, Ruben and colleagues seem to have made a career of publishing papers in which they assert that 'birds cannot be dinosaurs because of [insert supposed fatal flaw in the 'birds are dinosaurs' model]', and there's no indication that criticism of their conclusions will cause them to stop now. However, a brief discussion held over at Penguinology has changed my mind: we should try and set the record straight. Or, with great power comes great responsbility, or whatever. What makes this research particularly grating is that, like all the other papers by Ruben, Feduccia, Martin and colleagues, the 'birds are not dinosaurs' movement relies on two under-handed tricks that should be exposed.


• At Backreaction Bee asks What do we mean by "fundamental"?: A theory is fundamental if it cannot be derived from another, more complete, theory. More complete means the theory is applicable to a larger range. Note that a fundamental theory can be derivable from another theory if both are equivalent to each other (though one could plausibly argue then one should consider both the same theory). Throughout history, the search and discovery of more fundamental theories in the natural sciences has lead to a tremendous amount of progress. That however is not a guarantee it will continue to be the path to progress. The issue is in the expression “cannot be derived” which could mean three different things...


• At Not Exactly Rocket Science Ed looks at moths that jam bats' sonar: Some insects gained ears; others simply rely on outmanoeuvring their attackers. But one group, the tiger moths, play bats at their own game. When attacked, they unleash ultrasonic clicks of their own to jam the calls of their pursuers, disrupting their ability to accurately gauge distances or even feigning echoes off non-existent objects. This technique has been suggested ever since moths were first discovered to click several decades ago, but Aaron Corcoran from Wake Forest University has found the first conclusive evidence that moths actually do this. They pitted moths of the species Bertholdia trigon) against four big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) against each other over the course of three days, in gladiatorial arenas surveyed by high-speed infrared cameras and ultrasonic microphones.


• At Why Evolution is True Jerry looks at the vestigal grasp of infants: In WEIT there is a chapter on vestigial traits, defined as those traits that are evolutionary remnants of features useful in an ancestor, but now either useless or used in a different way. The paradigmatic case is, of course, the appendix, the remnant of a caecal pouch used to digest leaves and vegetation in our ancestors. But behaviors can be vestigial, too. One such behavior is the “grasping reflex” of human infants. When you put your finger into the palm of an infant, it will immediately and securely grasp it. The grasp is so tight that it’s sometimes hard to make the kid let go! It is said — though I have never seen this demonstrated — that up to a couple months of age a baby can hang suspended from a horizontal stick for several minutes.


• And at Cocktail Party Physics, Alex tells us about Dr Walter Cheadle and "case-based reasoning": In 1877 in the well-to-do London suburb of St. John’s Wood, a sixteen-month-old infant is dying. Georgie has cried for weeks, but now he doesn’t have the energy to cry. Too feeble to sit up, he won’t move at all, if he can help it. He can’t bear for anyone to touch his legs, which are covered with bruise-like spots. His face is ash white. His gums are inflamed and spongy. His breath smells like a corpse. The pediatrician, Dr. Sumner, has prescribed chlorate of potash and quinine bark – strong general-purpose medications – and later syrup of iodide of iron and cod-liver oil. For the inflamed gums, he orders alum and glycerin applied locally. But Georgie’s condition only worsens. The swelling of the gums grows still more extensive, until the whole of the mucous membrane of the upper and lower jaw seems to be involved, and the bleeding becomes more profuse. Georgie begins to have spasms in his throat that cut off his breathing. Children die in Victorian England. In the upper-class areas of Liverpool, according to an 1899 report, 136 out of 1000 newborns die before they reach the age of one. Working class districts maintain a rate of 274 infant deaths per 1000, and 509 slum children die for every 1000 born, all within the first year after birth. A very sick child like Georgie, not responding to treatment, unable to eat, having difficulty breathing, is expected to die. But he gets a lucky break.

Enjoy!

On the banks of the Snohomish

I've seen these guys high in the sky, but this is as close as I've ever been to one not in a cage... There were a couple of bare trees around and my friend said she was surprised he wasn't on one of them, but maybe he likes the shade. And maybe he didn't want the crows to spot him?

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Jurassic Park 3 with a friend who hadn't seen it. The Changeling, which is brilliantly acted and depressing. Yeomen of the Guard, with Joel Grey as Jack Point.

Read: The Little Book by Selden Edwards, which is a time-travel paradox-laden romp.

Mt St Helens

Yes, on this trip I've been able to see all three: Baker, Ranier, and St Helens. We went to Johnston Ridge... It's genuinely overwhelming. I can't imagine that day. Looking at all the still existing devastation, looking at that immense mountain with that hole in its side, watching the film... Words fail me.



Mount St Helens from Washington State Road 504... still around 40 or 50 miles away



From Johnston Ridge (where the geologist who was observing the eruption died)




The line between Zone Two (trees uprooted and laid flat by the blast) and Zone Three (trees 'merely' boiled where they stood)...


From Coldwater Lake, which was created by the eruption

Mt Baker

I'm on the second leg of my vacation, visiting a friend who lives near Seattle. I thought I'd share this with you - taken this afternoon on the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry where we could see from Baker to Ranier.

Happy Birthday, Peter

It's the birthday of Peter Schickele (1935)! A Julliard-trained musician who writes good stuff under his own name, he's probably most famous for his "discovery" of JS Bach's youngest son - the incomparable PDQ Bach, composer of such works as Oedipus Tex, Iphigenia in Brooklyn, The Abduction of Figaro, and innumerable shorter works. I saw Schickele in concert two years - he's still got it!

Happy Birthday, Erle

Born today in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889, the creator of America's most famous fictional lawyer. Erle Stanley Gardner qualified as a lawyer himself without attending law school, only working in a law firm. After passing the bar, he made his living defending poor immigrants in California, and writing an enormous number of stories. He finally settled into the Perry Mason novels, and wrote more than 80.

Here I must add that as well as the tv series I remember so well, there were a lot of movies made in the 30s - with a Perry Mason Raymond Burr wouldn't have recognized (especially the boozy Nick-Charles-wannabe from The Case of the Lucky Legs)!

Happy Birthday, Hermann

Herman (Hermann) Jadlowker was born today in 1877 in Riga, Latvia.

Destined to be a merchant, he ran away from home at 15 - heading to Vienna, where he studied classical singing with Josef Gänsbacher. In 1899 (some sources say 1897), he made his operatic début at Cologne in Kreutzer's Nachtlager von Granada. He then secured engagements in Stettin and Karlsruhe. Kaiser Wilhelm II heard him and was so impressed that he offered him a five-year contract at the Royal Opera in Berlin. Apart from Berlin, Jadlowker sang also in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Lemberg, Prague, Budapest and Boston during the course of his career.

In 1910-12, Jadlowker appeared at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, where he proved to be one of the company's most versatile artists although his performances were overshadowed by those of Enrico Caruso. He returned to Europe prior to the outbreak of World War I and continued his operatic career in a number of German cities. During the 1920s, Jadlowker sang increasingly on the concert platform and, in 1929, he was chosen to be chief cantor at the Riga synagogue. Jadlowker subsequently became a voice teacher at the Riga Conservatory before emigrating to Palestine with his wife in 1938. He taught in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, dying in the latter city at the age of 75.

Jadlowker possessed a dark-hued, lyric-dramatic tenor voice of extraordinary flexibility. His agile vocal technique enabled him to sing runs, trills and other coloratura embellishments with ease and accuracy. He made a large number of records in Europe and America across a 20-year period, commencing in 1907. Many of these recordings, which include arias by composers as diverse as Mozart, Auber, Verdi, Rossini and Wagner, can be heard on CD reissues.

Among the very best of those is Hermann Jadlowker: Dramatic Coloratura Tenor which has everything he ever recorded, from Mozart to lieder by Strauss and Tchaikovsky, including his incomparable "Noch tönt mir ein Meer im Busen (Fuor del Mare)" (they say that when Mozart wrote Idomeneo, his tenor was a sexagenarian who thought Mozart was a brat. Be that as it may, he must have had a voice to die for: since then, not until Jadlowker, and (I think) not since, has anyone sung the "long" aka "hard" version of this aria, with trills and coloratura like you've never heard before.) and "Ecco ridente in cielo" from Rossini's "Barber of Seville". Marston 52017-2. Because of the age of the recordings, there is some noise, easily (in my opinion) overlooked.

As soon as I found this, I had to buy it. As Tom Kaufman's liner notes say, "Jadlowker's voice and skills were unique." Simply a fantastic collection, 2 discs, and I can (and have) listened to the first disc for literally hours.

Sky Watch: Weather Sky

Weather is blowing in from the northeast on this Sunday morning.





more Sky Watchers here

Sometimes, I hate Google

Third time in six days: I try to log onto my blog and get a screen telling me that Google is doing spiffy new security things and I'll have to log on with my Google account (you know, like I've been doing for at least a year now) and a two-step security verification system but don't worry, nothing will be changed, so please enter my password. Then a new screen telling me to enter my password again.

Then a screen saying the password or user name is incorrect. The same ones I've been using, this same actual day in fact.

Nothing works. So I have to send myself an email via Google to get the link to reset my password. You know, answer the stupid security question, and choose a new password.

Three times in six days.

Google, I hate this "new" stuff.

Playing the Book

I saw someone (I don't remember where, I think TMC, but while I wrote down the words I forgot to write down the source) the other day:

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has released the 50th anniversary of The Diary of Anne Frank ... with Millie Perkins in the title role.

Oh, really?

Le 14 Juillet

Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé ! (bis)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons ! Marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Happy Birthday, Woody

Woody Guthrie, born this day in 1912.

He wrote a lot, and he he gave a voice to the unheard.




Plane Wreck At Los Gatos
(also known as Deportee)

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

Woody Guthrie lyrics

Not at all

A story on Live Science (called Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds) has a bit of over-dramatic headlining and a very interesting syntactic construction.

What the study shows is that some cats use a particular purr-plus-cry (which the researchers call "solicitation purring") to ask for food, a sound which is apparently harder for humans to ignore.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."

That's not exactly "control", it's a learned behavior which is quite interesting on its own.

But here's the paragraph that caught my linguistic ear:

McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.

"Not all cats use it at all" - that's odd to me. For me, "at all" goes with a negated verb. I'd say "not all cats ever use it" or "only some cats ever use it" or (with "at all") "some cats don't use it at all".

I think I understand what happened: they wanted to say "not all cats" - because "all cats don't use it" has a scoping problem that would lead some of their readers to say, but you just said some cats do! So they change "all don't" to "not all do", which is fine. But then they wanted to emphasize that some cats never use it, but so they ended up with "not all cats use it at all". But even though I understand what they mean, it just doesn't sound right to me.

(photo is my Gwen, exercising control)

"not in the pulldown menu"

Remember I said I'd intended to enter the Audubon Magazine photo contest, but wasn't eligible? What I didn't say was that I had in fact entered, meaning I'd paid the fee. I emailed them asking if that would be refunded; today I had a response saying it would be. Jerry also said:

I'm curious about how you were able to enter the contest from Maryland. Since there was no MD in the state pulldown menu, you should have been prevented from entering.

Just one problem: MD is in the pulldown menu (see below). In fact, all seven of those states are in the pulldown menu - the image shows North Dakota, and the others are there, too.

I had wondered why they hadn't set up their software to reject ineligible applicants. Apparently, they thought they had. I replied to Jerry and told him they may need to screen their entries...

ps: note in the screenshot the oddly placed MP - true, it's Northern Marianas, but I'd still put it under the M's, not the N's, if I were doing this list. In fact, the abbreviations are all, to my eye, out of order!

Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science:

• Carl Zimmer at The Loom looks at E. coli (well, it's his latest book): There’s no better way to kick off Microcosm Week than with some chocolate chip cookies. Or, to be specific, some raw cookie dough carrying a dangerous cargo of toxic E. coli. The name "E. coli" embraces a veritable empire of bacteria. While all E. coli share the same backbone of certain genes, they can be divvied up into a vast number of strains, each with a distinctive genetic profile. Many of those strains are harmless. You have a couple dozen strains of E. coli dwelling inside you right now, quietly grazing on the extra sugar in your gut. But some strains are extremely nasty. One strain, known as E. coli O157:H7, can stick to the walls of the intestines and build needles through which it can inject molecules into host cells that can alter them in many ways, so that the cells disgorge food the microbe can eat. Typically this manipulation leads to painful, bloody diarrhea but little more. On rare occasion, however, the bacteria unleash toxins that can spread through the blood stream, killing cells and leading to kidney failure.
  
• Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology blogs on a new species of salamander: The naming of new amphibian species is a fairly routine thing. This doesn't mean that - despite the global amphibian crisis - amphibians are actually ok and that we can stop worrying; it means that we haven't been paying enough attention, and indeed many of the species that are being named anew are endangered, or threatened, or with tiny ranges. The current edition of Journal of Zoology includes the description of a new plethodontid salamander (aka lungless salamander): the Patch-nosed salamander Urspelerpes brucei Camp et al., 2009. The big deal about this entirely new species is that it's from the Appalachian foothills of Georgia, USA.


• Lee at Cocktail Party Physics looks at radiation around your home: The most common sources for ionizing radiation are nuclear reactions natural and man-made (fusion and fission) and natural radioisotopes. Don't know an isotope from an antelope? An isotope is a version of an element that has a different than usual number of neutrons (a different mass number) but the same chemical properties. A radioisotope emits enough EM energy to strip away the normally tightly bound electrons from an atom, making it a charged particle, like x-rays. Only the shortwave end of the EM spectrum has enough energy to do this—not the electrons coming out of your CRT TV. While it's true that every appliance in your house that uses an electric current is surrounded by an extremely low frequency (EMF) electrical field, that radiation is of the non-ionizing sort, even the microwave. The health hazards of this type of radiation are probably negligible in the low concentrations we're exposed to.There are some exceptions, of course. Stick your head in the microwave and you'll cook yourself, but that's because microwaves excite the water molecules until they give off heat. You won't be radioactive afterwards, just cooked. Likewise infrared radiation, which makes some beautiful photographs!). IR filters allow viewers to see differences in ambient temperature, which is why they're used in night scopes, but the radiation itself is not up to much more in everyday concentrations than heating you up a little.


• Kristjan Wagner at Pro-Science takes up cudgels against David Klinghoffer's DNA claims: One of the token non-Christian of the Discovery Institute, David Klinghoffer, has once again open his mouth to talk about stuff he knows nothing about. This time in the Jerusalem Post. "The alphabet of life DNA are three letters full of paradox. What they represent remains little understood by the public, yet they are on everyone's tongue. Amid the chatter of popular culture, the truth gets lost that DNA is one of the most powerful clues we have of the existence of a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God." One has to be in awe of Klinghoffer's ability to start up an article with something as mindbogglingly stupid as this paragraph. Yes, DNA is widely talked about by people who has little understanding of what it is. Klinghoffer is a good example of this. DNA is not in any way or sense a clue for "a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God".


• And Brian at Laelaps offers us a look at a new crocodylian: When I was trying to come up with a title for this post I almost went with "Armadillosuchus: An armored crocodylian you wouldn't want to mess with." Obviously I changed my mind. Not only was the title too long, but it was redundant to boot. All crocodylians are "armored" in that they have little bony plates called osteoderms (primarily on the dorsal, or top, side of their bodies) beneath their scales, which in turn overlay a layer of bony plates called osteoscutes. Crocodylians are tough! The newly-described crocodylian Armadillosuchus from the Late Cretaceous deposits of Brazil, however, was carrying a more bizarre complement of armor. Right behind its head was an armored dome of hexagonal plates. This bony buckler was rigid, but could be moved independently of the head so that the neck was not always locked in one position. Now comes the really interesting part. Behind this "cervical shield" was a series of about seven mobile armored bands. (What the researchers call "mobile-banded body armor.") This is very similar to what is seen in living armadillos, hence the croc's name Armadillosuchus. This crocodylian had "armadillo-like" armor even before the mammals did!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: I let my friend talk me into Star Trek again, and it was (as I had feared) a mistake. Not that the film isn't still enjoyable, but this time I was completely unable to ignore the fact that these writers know less about how the military - heck, any large organization - functions than even Roddenberry did. It's too bad...

DVD: The Mirror, a thoroughly delightful Iranian film with a kick of politics hidden behind its little-girl-lost story.

TV: American Masters Judy Garland bio, which was very well done. Murder is Easy, one of the new Miss Marple mysteries. They're not as captivating as the Joan Hickson ones, but much better than those irritating ones with Geraldine McEwan, though the fault there wasn't as much hers as it was the writers'.

Read: Finished The Black Book, which was a hard read. Not a bad book by any means, in fact a fascinating one, but a complex book, told in an oblique style and a complicated fashion. I have another Pamuk (My Name Is Red) - I'll see if this is typical of him. It was well worth the effort, but it's not a light novel by any means. Unlike JA Jance's Long Time Gone. I also read David Crystal's delightful autobiography Just A Phrase I'm Going Through.

Sky Watch: Alaskan Summer Sunset

Well, go on holiday and you lose track of time... At least, I do. So here's a late Sky Watch for you (this photo was actually taken by my father):




more Sky Watchers here

with a bamboo splinter

I get a daily haiku by Kobayashi Issa. Some are more memorable than others, of course, but I found this one almost unbearably poignant:

with a bamboo splinter
practicing calligraphy...
the stepchild

Get your own daily Issa!

Audubon Magazine photo contest

I was going to enter the Audubon Magazine photo contest but it turns out I'm ineligible because I live in Maryland (which, along with Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont) prohibits contests with entry fees. Rats. Of course, I don't know if I'd've won - I probably wouldn't have; there are sure to be lots of great photos entered - but it would have been fun to see.

Anyway, since I'd already picked out my photos, I thought I'd post them here. Some you've already seen, but some not for a while.

Heron on Ice
(great blue heron)

Taking Off
(turkey vulture (buzzard))

Eat Me, Not Them!
(killdeer)

Awwww
(black-capped chickadee)

Family Outing
(canada geese)

Great Gray Hunter
(mockingbird)

Wild Repose
(wild-type muscovy duck)

Second Courtship
(red-winged blackbirds)

Winter Dress(house sparrows)

Brunch on the Wing
(cedar waxwing)

Half of these were taken in College Park, Maryland. The sparrows are from San Antonio, Texas, and the Muscovy, geese, buzzard, and cedar waxwing are all from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I don't think so...

Last night I went to a movie at the Wynnsong 16 Carmike theater in Knoxville. This isn't the first time I've been there - fortunately, since we were running a bit late and got there after the commercials had started. I say fortunately because ... well, they aren't where they say they are. The first time we went there we were too late to see the movie by the time we found them...

All of their info claims that their address is 200 North Peters Road. It isn't. Check the map below - the pin is at 200 N Peters. That big gray building with the yellow arrow pointing at it? That's the Wynnsong. Their road doesn't even have a name. Moreover, from N Peters you can't see them: there's a Lowe's in the way (the big black building). Nor is there even a sign on N Peters telling you where to turn. In fact, 200 is not even on the right side of the road!

It's the most bizarre business (lack of) signage and addressage I've seen in a very long time.

"just as you want them"

Saw a commericial for an insurance plan (Heritage) designed to help you pay for your funeral. I'm not talking about the truth of how much you need to spend on one, which is a whole other topic; instead, I'm talking about a sentence in the ad. The plan provides you with a "planning guide" for your funeral so that

everything is done just as you want them to be.

Wow. Talk about notional concord!

"Mere Possibility"

At the Washington Post (among other places) is an AP article on the "President's Surveillance Program" . Since it's AP, I won't quote much, but it says the report said that most leads didn't have "any connection to terrorism". It also quotes FBI agents as claiming that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

No.

The "mere possibility" is not enough. That's not how this country's legal system works. (What we've had for the better part of a decade, if not longer, wasn't working.) The mere possibility that someone might commit a crime isn't enough to arrest them; the mere possibility that someone might be dangerous isn't enough to lock them up; the mere possibility that someone might do something isn't enough to take action against them... And the mere possibility that illegal surveillance might produce actionable intelligence isn't enough to justify it.

Even less is the mere possibility that someone, somewhere, might do something an excuse for mass surveillance.

There has to be cause for belief, not a mere possibility.

This program has been shut down. Others almost as egregious are still running. They, too, should be ended.

We need more than mere possibilities. Or at the very least, we should.

Happy Birthday, Alice

Today is the birthday of Alice Munro (born in Ontario in 1931). I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I read my first Munro story only a couple of years (after watching Away From Her). I've read many since then, and have the rest of her collections in my to-read pile. She's amazing. Her prose is clear, spare, beautiful, and her characters so real and vivid that even in stories where nothing much seems to happen the story draws you in and releases you only well after you've finished. I'd call her a national treasure if she were American; as it is, she's a treasure in the world of English-language writers (and readers).

"I don't care to..."

We spent the day tearing down a deck on my father's house in order to build him a new one - though we (yay!) found out that the basic structure was sound so we'll have much less actual construction to do. But it was in the low 90s and we were tearing down lots of walls and railings, so when my sister and I headed for the Home Depot to buy hangers, we were fairly mucky.

As we crossed the parking lot, she said to me, "This is the only place I don't care to come when I'm dirty, because I've been working."

Whenever I come back here, I have to get used to that. For me, "don't care to" remains "don't want to". For her - and lots of people here - it's "don't mind".

Happy Birthday, Nikola

It's the birthday (1856) of the man who invented alternating current - and made the modern world possible, Nikola Tesla.