Today is the anniversary of that day when people show paintings of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and I ask, “General Grant, why are you shaking hands with that piece of shit?” I also wonder if American generosity to bloody-handed traitors might have something to do with our current habit of appeasement to Nazis, anti-Semites, and insurrectionists.
The surrender, 9 April 1865
I didn’t see much of them while I was growing up near Seattle, but then I spent a year in Indiana, where the cicadas are deafening in the summer. I learned to detest their shrill noisiness then. Now I live in Minnesota where we get the annual cicadas, but they aren’t so numerous as to generate the cacophony people have to live with elsewhere.
It’s going to be bad this summer, because two broods of the 13- and 17-year periodic cicadas are going to be crawling out simultaneously and singing continuously. There’s nothing you can do about it.
See how Minnesota is free of the Magicicada plague? I’ll be staying away from Iowa & Illinois & Indiana, that’s for sure.
Although…I do not dislike the cicadas so much that I would wish a fungal infection on them, especially not a fungus as creepy as this one.
Once the cicadas emerge from the ground, they molt into adults, and within a week to 10 days, the fungus causes the backside of their abdomens open up. A chalky, white plug erupts out, taking over their bodies and making their genitals fall off.
“The cicada continues to participate in normal activities, like it would if it was healthy,” Kasson told CBS News. “Like it tries to mate, it flies around, it walks on plants. Yet, a third of its body has been replaced by fungus. That’s really kind of bizarre.”
Kasson said the reason the cicadas might be able to ignore the fungus is that it produces an amphetamine, which could give them stamina.
“But there’s also something else unusual about it,” he said. “There’s this hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they’ll continue to try and mate with females — unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus. But they’ll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them. And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with.”
What’s really evil about that fungus is that despite all the body horror, it doesn’t shut the cicadas up. In another bizarre twist, it also affects animals around them.
The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat them, Cooley said.
There’s more! Cicadas have another repulsive habit.
Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans. He couldn’t look at the periodical cicadas that mostly feed and pee underground, but he used video to record and measure the flow rate of their Amazon cousins, which topped out around 10 feet per second (3 meters per second).
They have a muscle that pushes the waste through a tiny hole like a jet, Bhamla said. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he happened on a tree the locals called a “weeping tree” because liquid was flowing down, like the plant was crying. It was cicada pee.
“You walk around in a forest where they’re actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it’s raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That’s their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end … It’s called cicada rain.”
I hope the residents of states south and east of me are looking forward to a summer of getting pissed on by shrieking zombie insects while the birds are tripping balls and spacing out.
Behold our midwestern sky!
We’re going to be 100% socked in all day long, with rain.
I don’t think our 68% eclipse maximum is going to be visible this afternoon. I’ve got class at that time anyway.
I knew my recent criticisms or Richard Dawkins would enrage the usual crowd. I’m used to it and I knew it was coming. Also unsurprisingly, the noise is coming from Jerry Coyne, who is always willing to praise the hierarchy of atheism.
But the main error of both her [Rachel Johnson, Dawkins’ interviewer] queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur? Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.
The problem with that complaint is that I haven’t claimed that Christianity and Islam are equally bad. To the contrary, I think that Christianity and Islam are equally complicated; there are people in each faith who use their beliefs to motivate good social behavior, and others who use it to justify horrors, and that the bigotry lies in treating all members of a religion as the same. Here, Coyne is giving Xians the benefit of the doubt, and claiming that most have denied the “bad parts of the Bible,” while implying that most Muslims are accepting every jot and tittle of the Qur’an. Christianity has been defanged! Except, presumably, the ones in the Republican party that want to institute an American theocracy. We’ll just close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist.
Is he even aware that the US is on the edge of a precipice? That our next election could be our last, if a certain madman and his delusional, evangelical followers get their way? I’m not claiming that they are worse than Jihadi terrorists, but that they’re pretty awful, and that the majority of Muslims have no desire to perpetrate the terrors that bigots like to smear all followers of Allah with.
He also conveniently forgets that Dawkins said this:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
I haven’t. I agree with that, actually. I’m not the ones making excuses for Christianity: the god of the Bible has not been re-written, but suddenly some former New Atheists would have us think Jehovah has reformed, and now Christianity is just pretty Christmas bells and cathedrals and lovely parish churches, and they’re making that argument entirely because they want to make sure we don’t compromise in our hatred of those evil Muslim terrorists, who know nothing of beauty and peace and art and science. The bigotry lies in the insane polarization that is being promoted. If only Islam could be defanged, so they could have beautiful cathedrals, too!
Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.
Except, of course, that I don’t make that claim (which is irrelevant anyway, he says, despite making that the bulk of his argument.) Both religions contain archaic horrors and bad ideas. The reason he and Coyne are bigots are that they pretend that the cherished traditions of their familiar religions are better and more important than the comfortable happy traditions of Muslims, and that Christianity has been “defanged” while Islam is a nest of evil. Remember, Dawkins’ first complaint was that he didn’t want to hear that Ramadan was promoted instead of Easter. What’s wrong with Ramadan? I don’t care. I celebrate neither Easter nor Ramadan, and I don’t worry that Christianity or Islam are using their holidays to cloak heinous, barbaric practices.
He has one final gotcha for me.
The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?
Oh, that is easy. I’d rather live in a secular country, but since he’s made it a binary choice, I’ll pick the country where my native language, English, is spoken, and where nobody is trying to bomb me into a bloody paste. That narrows my options down to primarily Western countries, which are mostly Christian. I think it would be wise to avoid living in countries that have been wrecked by colonialism, like, say, anything in the Middle East, or that have been crippled by sanctions or brutal, American-led wars.
If we want to identify religions that have had the most pernicious effects on the modern world, we really ought to focus on evangelical Christianity, which dominates in the most powerful nations, and which is now endorsing genocide of Palestinians, and which has dispatched missionaries to various countries in Africa to legislate for death penalties against gay people, or which is striving to demolish American democracy, or which is actively trying to inject anti-scientific nonsense into educational curricula. A Christian sneezing in America has a greater influence in the world than a Muslim preaching jihad in the ruins of Iraq.
Oh, but I forget — I’m supposed to reduce the history and culture and humanity of entire peoples to just their religion, where Christianity gets a pass on any flaws while Islam is a monolithic univocal monster. Sorry, only bigots do that. QED.
I spend my weekends preparing the lectures for my coming week, and today the Far Side featured the perfect image for my title slide.
The subject? Aging and cancer as developmental diseases.
It is kind of awkward being a 67-year-old geezer talking to 19-21 year olds about aging. If this were a laboratory course I could just flop down on a table and let them dissect me.
Well, well, well. Richard Dawkins declared himself a “cultural Christian” on Easter, which is no surprise and no big deal. He has been saying how much he likes Christmas and church bells for years, so this is absolutely nothing new. I could say that I’m a “cultural Christian,” too, being brought up in a functionally Christian country with Christian traditions and a Christian history, but I’m defined more by my atheism, and my rejection of many of those beliefs. It’s meaningless and trivial to say that we have all been shaped by our environment…although, of course, many Christian believers think that this is a huge deal and are acting as if Dawkins has renounced his unbelief.
He has not. What he then goes on to do, though, is to declare his bigotry, and that is what I find disturbing.
He likes hymns and cathedrals and parish churches — fine, uncontroversial, kind of boring, actually. But then he resents the idea that people would celebrate Ramadan instead of Christmas. Why? They both seem like nice holidays, that some people follow a different set of customs shouldn’t be a problem. Then he goes on to say that Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that Islam is not.”
How so? Because Islam is hostile to women and gays. He goes on to talk about how the Koran has a low regard for women.
Jesus. It’s true, but has this “cultural Christian” read the Bible? I don’t see any difference. The interviewer tries to bring up the record of actual practicing Christians, and he dismisses that as only those weird American protestants, as if jolly old England has no gay baiting, no murders of young women, and as if JK Rowling were just an open-minded, beneficent patron of the arts. Many American Christians are virulent homophobes who treat women as chattel, but his equally nasty culturally English Christianity has people and organizations that are just as awful.
70% of women teachers in the UK face misogyny. The British empire left a legacy of homophobia. The UK is so transphobic that some people are fleeing. Cultural Christianity does not seem to have made Great Britain a kinder, gentler place, but Dawkins must have some particularly rosy glasses that he wears at home, and takes off when he looks at any other country.
Dawkins has come out as sympathetic to Christianity, but only because it justifies his bigotry. At least he’s being open and honest about both biases.
The other day, I told you that Republicans were trying to legislate against chemtrails in 6 states. I regret to inform you that another state has joined the club, and it’s Minnesota.
Republicans in the Legislature, including Senate assistant minority leader Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids, have introduced legislation (HF4687/SF4630) inspired by the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
The bill contains a mishmash of conspiratorial pseudoscience, including references to made-up phenomena like “xenobiotic electromagnetism and fields,” with just enough parroting of actual science to give it a veneer of credibility.
It requires county sheriffs to investigate citizen complaints of “polluting atmospheric activity,” and grants the governor the authority to call up the National Guard and ground any aircraft suspected of spreading pollutants.
To professionals who study and understand atmospheric science, the legislation bears all the hallmarks of the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, which posits that airplane exhaust is deliberately laced with harmful chemicals for various nefarious purposes, including forced sterilization and mind control.
“Because the text of this bill focuses so much on electromagnetic radiation, you can tell that it is coming from the community of people concerned with chemtrails,” said Holly Buck, who studies geoengineering at the University at Buffalo in New York.
The proposed law says that if anyone alleges that “weather-engineering or other atmospheric experimentation that involves releasing xenobiotic agents or producing electromagnetic radiation” is going on, a sheriff must be dispatched to shut it down. They’ve got a list of electromagnetic criteria that defines unlawful levels that sounds scientific, but has little connection to reality.
(1) radio frequency or microwave radiation, including maser, of signal strength metered at the reported, publicly accessible location in excess of negative 85 dBm for any frequency or channel band specified by a transmitting entity’s FCC transmission license;
(2) extreme-low-frequency alternating current electric fields in excess of 1 volt per 25 meters;
(3) magnetic fields in excess of one milligauss;
(4) ionizing radiation in excess of 0.02 millisievert per hour;
(5) laser or other light with harmful effects; or
(6) any vibration, noise, laser, sonic weapon, or other physical agent exceeding building or biology guidelines.
Uh-oh. Light bulbs put out about 5V/M — we’re already exceeding the legal limit. Watching Fox News on your color TV is criminal, because that’s about 60V/M. If you’re concerned about magnetic fields, one of the deadliest tools in your home is the hairdryer, which generates about 300 milligauss…and you stick that right up next to your brain!
But yeah, that airplane at 20,000 feet that is surrounded by a 1 milligauss magnetic field must be grounded.
I’m always so critical of the police…maybe I should give the Central Marin Police Authority an opportunity to express their side of the story first, to be fair.
Police Chief Michael Norton declined an opportunity to be interviewed, but in an email said that his department “regrets that Bruce Frankel has elected to pursue litigation against us for an alleged improper emergency medical response to him.”
Norton added that his department “will vigorously defend itself against this meritless and factually inaccurate litigation. Unfortunately, this individual has decided to first litigate his case in the media rather than in court, where we are confident the action of our officers will be vindicated.”
Oh, dear…they are being unjustly accused, they say. Of what, you might wonder.
Bruce Frankel’s wife called for emergency help because he was having a grand mal epileptic seizure, expecting EMTs to come to the rescue. He was incoherent and flailing about. The police arrived instead (uh-oh!), repeatedly told the unresponsive man that they were there to help, and help him they did: by handcuffing him and tasing him. They charged him with resisting arrest.
I guess the police considered that a proper emergency medical response.
I weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces when I was born on Saturday, 9 March 1957, at 7:07 in the morning. I know this because all the 7s were memorable, but mainly because this is what doctors and nurses do: they document everything.
You know this. Everytime we visit a doctor, they write down our weight, our height, our blood pressure, every parameter they can squeeze out of us. I can go online right now and read the doctor’s notes on every medical visit I’ve made in the last 20-some years — every prescription, every measurement, all of my complaints, every recommendation, every vaccination…it’s all there. Doctors are obsessive record keepers. There is so much medical data stored away that I sometimes wonder how anyone can extract useful information from it.
But they have! One attempt that has had significant influence was to correlate birth weight data in infants with their adult history of cardiovascular disease. Surprise, your weight on the day you were born is associated with your blood pressure, 60 years later (in a broad statistical sense, of course — this is a population-level correlation.) This led David Barker to make the specific hypothesis that “poor nutrition, health and development among girls and young women is the origin of high death rates from cardiovascular disease in the next generation.” This idea has since been broadened to form the developmental origin of adult disease hypothesis, that all kinds of medical phenomena have their origns in fetal development, and in the environmental effects that have influenced that development.
Credit where credit is due, the original exploration of the hypothesis was thanks to careful records kept by one midwife, Margaret Burnside, who assisted in the birth of over 15,000 babies in Hertfordshire between 1911 and 1930, and also the records of over 2000 births at Jessop Hospital in Sheffield between 1907 and 1924. They then compared birth records with death certificates in the 1950s-1990s to extract the first hints of associations.*
There’s a huge industry of papers being turned out now that look at correlations between birth weight and adult medical conditions. We’re also seeing more complex connections between disease and growth rate in the first year.
Some of them are very well established associations with low birth weight, like hypertension, coronary artery disease, non-insulin dependent diabetes, stroke, dislipidaemia, elevated clotting factors, and impaired neurodevelopment. Other ‘problems’ have been associated with low birth weight in a small number of studies — there really are amazing numbers of papers where researchers mine the medical data for connections, some of them possibly spurious. So small babies may be more likely to develop issues with chronic lung disease, depression, schizophrenia, and general behavioral problems. They may have reduced uterine and ovarian size and precocious pubarche. They might be more prone to breast and testicular cancer.
Surprisingly, they may also marry later, if at all, be left-handed, and have denser fingerprint whorls. You can find it all in the scientific literature.
If you are thinking that you were a plump, fat baby, so you have nothing to worry about, think again. There are correlations between large birth weight and breast cancer (everything seems to cause breast cancer,) prostate cancer, childhood leukemia, and polycystic ovary disease.
This week in my eco devo course, we talked about this hypothesis, and I also handed out a bunch of papers, a different one for each student (there are so many papers in this field!), and today we’re going to have the students assess the literature. It should be fun! The goal is to get a feel for how strong or how valid the various correlations actually are. We’ve also discussed the Dutch famine data. The Nazis starved much of Holland, including the major cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Leiden, for 7 months in 1945, until the country was liberated by the Allies.
Wasn’t that nice of Nazis to do a massive experiment on a whole nation of 9 million people for us? They let women in each trimester of their pregnancy subsist on 580 calories/day, and then went away and let us analyze the effects. Maternal malnutrition in the third trimester turns out to be bad for babies, who knew? Anyway, the subtext for this week, as it should be for every week, is that Nazis are bad***.
The bigger message is, of course, that development matters and has lifelong consequences, and good, responsible governments provide adequate nutrition to pregnant women and children.
*All these records were handwritten on pieces of paper! The effort to transcribe everything and extract the information in a computational form must have been daunting.**
**My daughter is currently involved in a research project to use natural language processing to synthesize information stored in modern medical records at UW Madison Department of Medicine. That’s useful for a lot of reasons, including drilling down through years of impenetrable treatment notes.
***I hope that overtly political message doesn’t get me in trouble with the university administration.
