Happy Birthday, Lucy

Today in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born. Last year was the 100th anniversary of her most famous book, Anne of Green Gables. She wrote 19 others, all but one set on PEI. My favorite? Jane of Lantern Hill.

Happy Birthday, Mark

Today in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 Mark Twain was born.

How to sum up this man in the few words of a birthday post? I don't think it can be done. Check the link for a bio and works. Go here for Boondocks' Twain site. And here are just a few quotes ... I could go on and on.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Phillippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

Monday Science Links

Late again...

• Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science blogs about hammerhead sharks and their weird eyes: The hammerhead shark's head is one of the strangest in the animal world. The flattened hammer, known as a 'cephalofoil', looks plain bizarre on the face of an otherwise streamlined fish, and its purpose is still the subject of debate. Is it an organic metal detector that allows the shark to sweep large swathes of ocean floor with its electricity-detecting ability? Is it a spoiler that provides the shark with extra lift as it swims? All of these theories hypotheses might be true , but Michelle McComb from Florida Atlantic University has confirmed at least one other -the hammer gives the shark excellent binocular vision.


• Revere at Effect Measure blogs about swine flu's frightening adaptability: Swine flu started in pigs (although we don't exactly when or where), adapted to and passed to humans who returned the favor and passed it back to pig herds. Then we heard that turkeys in Chile had contracted the virus, followed by ferrets and a house cat. We can infect animals cross species with flu in the laboratory, but all of these are cases acquired in the natural world by animals interacting with humans. Once cats were on the menu, the next question was dogs, another population "companion animal" (aka, pet) in the US and Western Europe (and literally a menu item in many parts of Asia). In recent years there have been periodic outbreaks of "dog flu," an H3N8 subtype that didn't seem to infect humans but produced "kennel cough" like symptoms in dogs. Now we get reports out of China that the family dog can also be infected with swine flu -- by us.


• PalMD at White Coat Underground gives a look into medical history: I have in front of me a weathered copy of Cecil's Textbook of Medicine from 1947. It belonged to my father, who graduated from medical school in the 1940s. Even then, it was known that pneumoccus, a common bacterium, can live harmlessly in the nose and throat and only sometimes causes disease. Pneumoccocal disease was and is still a leading cause of disease and death*, killing perhaps a million children per year. It causes ear and sinus infections, but also meningitis, and is the most common cause of pneumonia. In the past it was referred to as "the captain of the men of death" for it's ability to claim so many. It is also closely associated with influenza---the pneumococcus that may live harmlessly in the mouth may find the damaged lung of the flu patient a nice place to set up shop. The pneumonia that follows an influenza infection can be devastating and preventing it is an important public health goal.


• Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine weighs in on the Belgian "coma man": This is a wonderful story for the media. But to this neurologist, and I would think to any critically-thinking journalist, some questions come to mind. The biggest problem with this case as presented is that the finger-typing of Mr. Houben looks suspiciously like facilitated communication. But first, a little background.


• And Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy looks at why spiral galaxies have bulges: Why do spiral galaxies have central bulges? Some are bigger, some smaller, but pretty much every spiral galaxy we see has a roughly spherical puffy bulge of stars in its core (like in the edge-on spiral NGC 4565, shown here to the right). This downtown region of a galactic city is a bit mysterious. It contains old stars, very little gas, lots of dust… and we’re not sure how they form. But a new observation of a cluster of stars in our Milky Way’s bulging center may have the key we’ve been looking for.

Enjoy!

Gricean Maxim of Relevance backfires again

I know ads like this are generated by algoritthms, but this is a particularly unfortunate result:

Who searches for GLBT novels at Amazon and wants sex offender reports? Really. The very association of "Sex Offenders" with books about gays is offensive.

The Week in Entertainment

Live: A Community Playhouse production of "Willy Wonka", which was a pleasant, entertaining evening.

Film: The Fantastic Mr Fox, which I truly enjoyed - a delightful blend of stop-action, Roald Dahl, and Wes Anderson. (If you find Anderson annoying, as many apparently do, you won't like this one any better, though.)

DVD: Angels and Demons, quite acceptable, even exciting. Up, which is delightful the second time around, too.

TV: Not much... Nova "What Are Dreams?" (I know Dierdre Barrett, who was interviewed). Modern Family, a funny birthday party episode with an hysterical turn by Cam as "Fizzbo the Clown".

Read: Ghost, by Alan Lightman, a good hard-to-describe story of a man who sees "something" and has his life up-ended by it. Began The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry, and have had to realize that Dan Brown is merely following (or perhaps setting) the conventions of his genre. At least Brown isn't boring, which Berry is. So I won't be finishing it. Am now in the middle of The Kiss Murder by Mehmet Murat Sommer, an intriguing mystery set in Istanbul's gay community.

Happy Birthday, Louisa

Louisa May Alcott was born today in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. She's best known, of course, for Little Women and similar books, but those aren't what she wanted to write. She had started out writing sensational stories about duels and suicides, opium addiction, mind control, bigamy and murder. She called it "blood and thunder" literature, and she said, "I seem to have a natural ambition for the lurid style." She published under male pseudonyms to keep from embarrassing her family. But in 1867 - four years after her first book was published - an editor suggested that she try writing what he called "a girl's book," and, needing the money, she said she'd try. The result was Little Women, and it was a huge success. Such a success that she, with her whole family to support (her father was a Transcendentalist - a well-known one, in fact - and a social reformer, an educational reformer, and an abolitionist, and there's never money in that sort of thing!), felt obligated to keep writing books like it although she hated them.

You know, I've read a couple of those "blood and thunder" books - they're not bad at all. It's a shame she didn't write more. But I do admit that when I was in junior high, I loved Eight Cousins... the sequel wasn't as good, though.

That editor was obviously the model for that horrible professor in Little Women ...

East Tennessee November Birds

I'm visiting my father for Thanksgiving. He lives in East Tennessee, and his backyard abuts the western slope of Black Oak Ridge, down into forest. Lots of birds come through his yard and the edge of the trees. Here's some of the ones I've seen this week; not included are crows, buzzards, and a number of black-capped chickadees that simply will not hold still... There are a couple whose IDs I'm not 100% on, but most I am.

These fluffed-up jays were actually across the street...



... as was this mockingbird.

When I took this shot of a brown creeper, I thought it was a titmouse!

And here's why - they were hanging out together.

A female yellow-bellied sapsucker

My neice was much amused. "Can you imagine the bird convention? 'Hey, what's your name?' 'I'm a yellow-bellied sapsucker.' 'Oh... Hey, thrush, wren - let's find someone else to talk to...'"


A winter visitor: a white-throated sparrow



A mourning dove.



A robin on the grass ...


... and then on the bird bath.



A hermit thrush on ridiculously spindly legs...

And another one the next day...



The robin pushed him into the bush.

An eastern phoebe...

... and a few moments later, amongst the tulip poplar fruit.

The silhouette of a cedar waxing.

And a Carolina wren

A pair of cardinals eating the poplar seeds...







Way down in the woods, a pale hawk settled into a tree. I'm pretty sure he's a red-tailed hawk, but I could be wrong.

He looks like Lucky in The 101 Dalmatians

And here's star of the show - the logcock! This is the female of a pair of pileated woodpeckers that live on the ridge.

I guess they talk about it a lot...

At the movie theater the other evening, two young women were ahead of me, high school probably. They both asked for the same movie: Newman.

I had to look at the marquis marquee (!) to realize which movie they were seeing - which I probably should have been able to figure out without doing.

Added later (after Barry made me feel better!): it is, of course, New Moon. Talk about your stress-backshift!

Happy Birthday, Minnie

Today The Cuban Comet, Minnie Minoso (born Saturnino Orestes Armas Miñoso Arrieta in Havana, Cuba), is 86 years old.

His major-league career spanned five decades (1940s-1980s) and he made a couple of brief appearances with the independent Northern League's St. Paul Saints in 1993 and 2003, which make him the only player to have played professionally in 7 different decades. He played for the Indians, White Sox, Cardinals, and Senators, and was the first black White Sox player. "Mr White Sox", another nickname he had, didn't play regularly until he was 28, but his career numbers are impressive: a .298 batting average, with 186 home runs, 1023 RBI, 1136 runs, 1963 hits, 336 doubles, 83 triples, 205 stolen bases, 814 walks and 192 hit by pitch. His career ended with a .389 on base percentage and a .459 slugging average, combined for a solid .848 OPS. He was a 7-time All-Star. For his excellence in left field, he received the Gold Glove Award three times. He led his league in triples and stolen bases three times each.

Help! What tree is this? A poplar!

This is a tall, not particularly straight, grey-barked tree which is on the edge of the woods at my father's place in East Tennessee. It's a fast-growing tree, thin, and if I remember from this summer the leaves are longish and rough around the edges. None of the on-line tree guides show anything like this fruit, though. Here's a cardinal eating a seed; he'll drop the long, paper-thin samara to the ground, which is littered with them. Also, an eastern phoebe sitting between two of the flower-like pods, which may help with size. Then there's a picture of the whole tree (the front one), the crown, and a close-up of the bark.

Does anybody have any idea what this might be? I'll have to make a point of looking at it this summer, but at the moment there are absolutely no leaves on it, and my father doesn't recall the flowers being prominent in any way.

Thanks, Rainyj317! Tulop poplar, aka yellow poplar. The Virginia Tech dendrology site says "base whorls of samaras persist on fruit into following spring and resemble wooden flowers high in the tree" which is exactly right, but which I couldn't find a good picture of; even theirs isn't late-stage like the ones below.

Sky Watch: Westward Off Black Oak Ridge

Behind the trees, mostly bare as December approaches, the sky stretches off over the ridges.




more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Sprague

Today in 1907, in New York City, L. Sprague de Camp was born. Alternate histories, time travel, ethnocentrism (attacking it, I hasten to add), linguistics ... de Camp was a giant. The Incomplete Enchanter is one of the funniest fantasy novels ever written. Lest Darkness Fall, "The Wheels of If", and "A Gun for Dinosaur", among others, set rigorous standards for time travel novels and short stories to come. Land of Unreason is brilliant. And we can't forget the "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, especially Rogue Queen. He also wrote non-fiction, including history and debunking... There were giants on the earth in those days, indeed. (pictured: l-r, Heinlein, de Camp, Asimove)

Thanksgiving winds down

Another good year. Four generations around the table, and the table loaded up with contributions from everyone. Turkey, mashed sweet potatoes, broccoli, green beans, tart butternut squash, cranberry with orange, rice, salad, sourdough bread, gravy ... wine and good cheer. Pecan pie, cherry pie, fusion cobbler (raspberry/peach), brownies, ice cream. Coffee and more cheer. Kids and great-grandfather, children and parents and sibs. Cold outside and warm in...

I hope your day was as wonderful.


The table...


... and some of us around it.

I and the Bird

A wonderful I and the Bird is up at The Modern Naturalist for you to savor over Thanksgiving. The host's post is full of wonderful bird poem quotes, and lovely pictures, and the individual entries are, as always, excellent birding photos and words.

Savor it and be thankful for the feathered life that shares our planet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers, and happy end of autumn (or spring) to the rest!

I'm having trouble picturing this

I was given The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry, and I've started it. So far (Chapter Six) it's all right. But I've just hit a sentence so bizarre it broke me out of the story and sent me here.

A colorful sleigh appeared, drawn by two prancing steeds, its riders tucked beneath plaid blankets, the driver snatching at the bridles.

First, a steed is generally a riding horse. Second, it's hard to prance in snow. Third, combining those, here's the kind of tourist sleigh you get in Garmisch-Parkenkirchen, where this scene is set. Those horses? Don't prance. And finally ... what the hell is the driver doing "snatching at the bridles"? And how is he doing it?

It's funny because it doesn't work

As is often true with these Stick cartoon, this one doesn't work for me, either. However, I expect it does work for lots of people. Problem is, for me Lent and lint sound the same (like pen and pin). I can make an effort and say /lɛnt/ or /pɛn/, but normally it's just /lɪnt, pɪn/ for both.

Though I have to say, her "lint" is a lot more plausible than Teena's "Day of Atonal".

"a terrible anger"

Nice.

For at least the past 10 years, the megachurch evangelical movement has been telling its parishioners that Jesus wants them to get rich. That fit rather nicely with the triumphalism of Bush/Rove & Co. as it built its "permanent majority" with their votes, testifying that it was their all-American duty to trample the environment and the poor, and to kill Afghan and Iraqi Muslims, on the way to God's kingdom. In imitation of the way Bush paid for his wars, many of the devout simply loaded themselves up with debt, buying SUVs and McMansions in spanking new developments.

Since the capitalist collapse, of course, that debt has become toxic. Now, in their dismay and confusion over having supported Bush--one of the first governors, by the way, to declare an annual state "Jesus Day"--evangelicals are left with a terrible anger. And they desperately don't want to turn that anger inward.

Instead, some of them want to smite Obama because they can't admit that Bush led them, lemming-like, into a betrayal of Protestantism's founding belief. Debt, trade, and the work ethic were all central to the disputes that launched the Reformation, after all. The Catholic Church preached that bank interest was "usury," that it would corrupt society and impoverish the people, and the early Protestants were sensitive to this criticism. In compensation, they hemmed in their financial speculations with strict condemnations of personal excess--whether through sex, drink, cards, dancing, sumptuous dress, or what have you--in order to project a prudence that would make economic risk seem manageable, even respectable.

And now we have the Great Unraveling. As the waters recede, what's left behind are follies like the "Drowning Jesus" (a/k/a "Touchdown Jesus"), a 62-foot-high sculpture of Christ set chest-deep in a reflecting pool at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, one of the non-coastal states Palin is visiting on her book tour. And who's to blame for that embarrassing excess, constructed in 2004?

(Source: The Nation)

Comment Closing

I'm finding that my old posts are garnering some spam (particularly the Russian posts). So I'm closing comments on some of them. Sorry bout that, Chief!

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness is late - I'm on vacation!:

• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at two genes and their reporter: Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.


• Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science looks at extinction secrets hidden in poop: Around 15,000 years ago, North American was home to a wide menagerie of giant mammals - mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, short-faced bears, American lions, dire wolves, and more. But by 10,000 years ago, these "megafauna" had been wiped out. Thirty-four entire genera went extinct, including every species that weighed over a tonne, leaving the bison as the continent's largest animal. In trying to explain these extinctions, the scientific prosecution has examined suspects including early human hunters, climate change and even a meteor strike. But cracking the case has proved difficult, because most of these events happened at roughly the same time. To sort out this muddled chronology, Jacquelyn Gill has approached the problem from a fresh angle. Her team have tried to understand the final days of these giant beasts by studying a tiny organism, small enough to be dwarfed by their dung - a fungus called Sporormiella.


• Brian Switek at Laelaps is hard on Nova's Becoming Human series, which I actually enjoyed: Though I might be a little more merciful on the producers of this documentary than Greg, he was right to point out that the opening segment of the [third part] is worn old tripe about how our species has fulfilled a kind of evolutionary destiny set in place millions of years ago. The entire hominin family tree can be split, the preface suggests, into our proud ancestors and the unimportant evolutionary "dead ends" that lived alongside them. The narrator references discoveries that are "shining light" on the "final stages of our evolution" as if our species is fulfilling some pre-ordained plan that has reached a stop. This is unfortunate, I would have thought better of an award-winning science program like NOVA, but when it comes to human our evolution our own hubris still obscures our view.
  
• Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex wonders why Tiger Woods affects other golfers' scores: Despite the individualistic nature of the sport, the presence of Woods in the tournament had a powerful effect. Interestingly, Brown found that playing against Woods resulted in significantly decreased performance. When the superstar entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even more pronounced when Woods was playing well. Based on this data, Brown calculated that the superstar effect boosted Woods' PGA earnings by nearly five million dollars. Brown argues that this phenomenon is caused when "competitors scale back their effort in events where they believe Woods will surely win." After all, why waste energy and angst on an impossible contest? That hypothesis is certainly possible, but I'd argue that the superstar effect has more to do with "paralysis by analysis" than with decreased motivation. I'd bet that playing with Tiger Woods makes golfers extra self-conscious, and that such self-consciousness leads to choking and decreased performance. The problem, then, isn't that golfers aren't trying hard enough when playing against Tiger - it's that they're trying too hard.


• Carl Zimmer at Discover looks at doing math: The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s. Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Prince Caspian ... interesting that they decided to make the Telmarines Spanish instead of Arabic/Moorish. And this time no one saddled and bridled a Talking Horse... On the other hand, I hate the way they twist the words. "We can never know what would have happened" is not at all the same as "To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that." And I'd much have rather seen the river god smash the stone bridge than the new wooden one. "... down to the Ford of Beruna." "Beruna's Bridge, we call it." "There was no bridge in our time..." And the Susan-Caspian subplot was uncalled for, though it does rather foreshadow "the problem of Susan", if with a somewhat positive spin.

TV: House. Wow. I never thought Cameron's leaving would make so much sense and ring so powerfully. But why oh why is Hadley back? And poor Mrs Taub... The Mentalist. Well. I'm extremely glad they didn't kill off any of the regulars. It was a very good episode, and Jane really took a gut-blow at the end, didn't he? The Nova Becoming Human series was, I think, quite well done. Modern Family again made me laugh out loud a lot.

Read: Finished Jade Lady Burning, and also by the same man (Martin Limón) Hungry Ghost and The Door to Bitterness. The setting of these is well drawn, and the look at Anglo-vs-Korean culture is fascinating

Pale hawk in a gray wood

It's a very gray day today. (In fact, it's started raining, my father just announced.) Not quite an hour ago, just before noon, a large bird caught my eye settling into a tree well down the western slope of Black Oak Ridge. A hawk of some sort - I don't know for sure but I think he's a red-tailed hawk. He was really too far away to be sure of his size, but bigger than a sharpie, that's for sure. Big. The distance and branches hid his tail, and the gray washed out his color, but he was very pale on the underside of his wings as well as his breast.

Happy Birthday, Hrihoriy

Григорій Савич Сковорода - Hrihoriy Savych Skovoroda - was born today in Chornukhy, near Poltava, in the Hetamanate of Ukraine which at the time (1722) belonged to Russia. He spent the last thirty years of his life wandering Ukraine with a flute, teaching and philosophizing; he wasn't published till after he died. His epitaph - which he composed - reads: Світ ловив мене, але не піймав (The world tried to catch me, but did not succeed / Svit lovyv mene, ale ne pijmav).

On a linguistic note, this epitaph is interesting as it contains an aspectual pair of verbs which come from different roots, a rare but not unheard of situation. The verbs - ловити and піймати (lovyty, pijmaty) - mean "to catch" but the imperfective means "to be trying to catch" (success not implied); "ловити рибу (lovyty rybu)" is thus "to go fishing". Hence, the compact "ловив мене" becomes "tried to catch me", and "не піймав" is "did not catch".


(Find some Skovoroda in Ukrainian here.)

a game with "good moral values"

Okay, I know this is Elly Patterson, and it's futile to hope for much from her, but still. Checkers has "good moral values"?

ummm

Hmmm.



First, I'm not sure that telling a little girl - how old is Gracie, anyway? 10? - she might be too young to apply to college counts as "deprecat[ing]" her. Second, do colleges really only care about vocabulary? And third, since when does "expostulate" mean "deprecate, disparage, demoralize" or "sell short"?

Happy Birthday, Voltaire

Born today in Paris in 1694 was a man who helped spark the Enlightenment in France: Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. He spent most of his life in exile, and his writings built up support in Europe for what we now think of as basic human rights.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.