Oh, and speaking of ranting about nature

I mentioned in passing a while back that I moved my other blog Coyote Crossing to a brand new home. What I didn’t mention was that said move is part of plans to slowly put together a biodiversity-preservation-oriented blog network, inspired in no small part by the wonderful community at FTB, called Coyot.es Network. In addition to my joint, we’ve also got Madhu Katti moved in with his blog Reconciliation Ecology and Mojave Desert protection blogger Shaun G. (best known for the Mojave Desert Blog) with his new,  more general blog The ‘Not Essential’ List, and though hordeling Ron Sullivan’s taking a short break from writing aside from for money, her blog Toad In The Hole is there relaxing comfortably until she feels like writing there. We’ve got a couple other experienced bloggers strongly considering joining up, and coming soon, a new mystery blog by a couple of desert herpetologists which is simply awaiting a first post.

And as we’ve got the biggest of the new site bugs worked out, we’re interested in hearing from biodiversity, wildlife, natural resources, and other related issue bloggers who might be interested in coming aboard. If that sounds like you, check out the  about page and FAQ  and if you’re interested in exploring the notion more deeply, get in touch.

Fake eagles don’t sound like that

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Probably also faked: the sweater looks completely ‘shopped. Via Ed Lam.

I held forth on the fake eagle video thing at some length over here at KCET yesterday, but there was something I didn’t mention there that irked me about the hoax: in the recap part, where the “amazing footage” of the “eagle” “catching” the “child” gets “replayed” in slow “motion,” the filmmakers dubbed in a bit of sound effect right at the moment where CGI talon hit virtual toddler.

And of course it was a red-tailed hawk call. It always is, It doesn’t matter what bird of prey is in a film: the SFX guys will always dub in a red-tailed hawk call. 

Not that the red-tail sound was a dead giveaway: during the 45 minutes or so in which I was somewhat taken by the hoax in I was prepared to grant that perhaps the videographers just did a clumsy, misguided dubbing job, for much the same reason that nature YouTubers always seem to want a horrible music track to cover up their occasionally interesting footage. But it was the same kind of mistake as inflating a CGI osprey to eagle size and calling it a golden and expecting birders to believe it for a second.

In case you’ve never seen a bird of prey represented in video and have no idea what I’m talking about, here is a red-tailed hawk’s call:

By way of comparison, here’s what golden eagle vocalizations sound like:

Bald eagles have calls you might well mistake for a gull’s:

[Update: in comments, otrame offers a more characteristic adult bald eagle call.]

Almost without exception, the red-tailed hawk call is what the sound engineers will use. I do know of one such exception. In the 2010 remake of Clash Of The Titans, which I suspect most people here watched solely for the Kraken and the releasing thereof, there was a scene where Zeus and Perseus were having a difficult father-son moment. Perseus is recalcitrant, whereupon Zeus transforms himself into an eagle and flies away. And that eagle doesn’t “keeeer” — he peeps. Like a golden. Honestly, that one moment of verisimilitude was worth the preceding hour. I was impressed that they got that one detail right. Though the Kraken did disappoint.

Exemplary efforts like Clash Of The Titans aside, it seems like there’s a secret world law governing natural sounds in TV and film that requires all raptors sound like red-tailed hawks. All rats squeak incessantly. Horses whinny while chewing placidly. Tropical rainforests in Africa and South America always have kookaburras in them. And as soon as you start to pay attention to how things actually sound in the real world, that kind of mistake unsuspends your disbelief pretty damned quickly. It’s a bit like having a scene where John Wayne is leading a wagon train westward to Oklahoma City, and they pass the Tetons on the way.

It’s the natural world version of illiteracy, and it makes those of us who know a few things wince.

Oh, no! Not Sweden, too!

It’s everywhere. Iris Classon is woman and a programmer in Sweden, and it turns out that some Swedish men are harassing jerks, too. It’s a painful read, and it all started with a nice newspaper article that published her picture and story … and of course, being a software geek and an attractive woman means you’re a target.

Don’t read it if you’re just tired of the constant drone of ugly misogyny everywhere, or just don’t want to be reminded of that familiar condition. I will highlight the summary she selected for her post:

If you EVER harass me you WILL be published on the blog, twitter, facebook and whatever media I have. I don’t back down, I don’t back of. And I’m sure my friends won’t either. And girl, if you have ANY problems with ANYBODY – please reach out to me. Now

Yeah. Don’t cross Iris Classon.

Which god, I wonder?

Hmm. Apparently, Donald Vroon thinks music is evidence of god, and he cites his emotional response to Easter music to back up his claim.

That’s right — a guy thinks that because his favorite music makes him burst into tears, his emotional experience is a sign that a god exists.

I can counter that, though. My son is home for the holidays, and I’ve been hearing a lot of death metal in the car and wafting down from the upstairs bedroom. I wonder if we threw Mr Vroon into the mosh pit at a Cradle of Filth concert, if he’d relate to the ecstatic experience of their fans? Would he burst into tears? What god would that demonstrate, I wonder?

moshpit
Rapture and ecstasy always indicate the presence of a deity, obviously.

Behold! The Legendary Intelligent Design Creationism Research Laboratory!

The Discovery Institute released a video of one of their stars, Ann Gauger, explaining the flaws in “population genetics” (I put it in quotes because it wasn’t a description of the field of population genetics that any competent biologist would recognize). Larry Moran points out the errors.

But then, someone noticed something else: the video was fake. It was Ann Gauger, all right, talking in a “lab”. Again, the quotes are because she was actually talking in front of a green screen, and a stock photo of a lab was spliced in behind her. Oops. It adds comic absurdity on top of the egregious errors in her babbling.

But of course that’s exactly what the DI wants. They can’t answer for the stupidity of her comments, but they can wave their hands and shout, “We do too have a lab! A real lab! And it’s sciencey and everything!” Because, after all, when you’re doing cargo cult science, the props are all important, and the substance doesn’t matter.

So, yeah, the indignant DI released a real photo of their real lab, with Gauger gazing at a petri dish. And here it is:

Annlab

Errm, are we supposed to be impressed? I could give you an equivalent photo of a few shelves in one of our student labs — it would look similar, just messier. A petri dish, a few orange-top bottles, a small hood in the background—all they needed to make it really sciencey were a few bubbling bottles of colored water. D. James Kennedy did a better job in “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.

kennedylab

See? Now that’s a lab!

But seriously, the furniture does not make the lab — the work being done in it does. When you think it matters that you can pose with a petri dish, you really are doing cargo cult science.

The total cultural solution

I told you that this problem of mass shootings was amenable to skeptical analysis, and that it would take a comparative analysis to work out exactly why America was so violent. But of course, someone has already done this; this is what sociology is all about. So here’s one interesting explanation that I didn’t think of.

Mass shooters in any nation tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families, says Peter Squires of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom, who has studied mass shootings in his own country, the United States and Europe.

Many other countries where gun ownership is high, such as Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Israel, however, tend to have more tight-knit societies where a strong social bond supports people through crises, and mass killings are fewer, Squires said.

…

“What stops crime above all is informal social controls,” he says. “Close-knit societies where people are supported, where their mood swings are appreciated, where if someone starts to go off the rails it’s noted, where you tend to intervene, where there’s more support.”

What, a better social support network would reduce violent outbreaks? You know, that’s the very same solution that also breaks the dependency on religion. Atheists should be entirely behind building stronger government support for everyone: it weakens religion, it reduces violence, and it reduces economic disparities, giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop and grow. It’s the best and greatest solution ever!

Too bad it’s the antithesis of Republican (and conservative Democrat) policies.

Aaargh, go away, silly physicists!

It pained me to see that bad biology peddled by Davies and Lineweaver, who tried to argue that cancer was a revived genetic atavism, a kind of throwback to a primeval state. But they just won’t learn. It’s as if they don’t care to learn. Now Lineweaver has a new article up flogging the same old dud of an idea, claiming that an “astrobiological view” of cancer's evolutionary origin is relevant. He does have a new metaphor.

Genomes have a complicated history, like a canvas that has been painted on over and over again with different scenes in each layer. When the top surface of this palimpsest gets old and cracks and peels off, you don’t get random mutations of colour – you get glimpses of the underlying scenes that were painted years earlier.

Those underlying scenes are the ancient genes that used to rule the roost. And those ancient scenes don’t contain the genes to regulate cell proliferation. So cells can proliferate without knowing where they are in the body, and cancer emerges.

You know, rather than an astrophysicist’s view, I’d rather have a microbiologist’s view. She wouldn’t be assuming that ancient single-celled organisms lacked genes to regulate cell proliferation — she’d probably know that bacteria have cell cycle regulators, and control their reproduction to match opportunities and constraints in the environment. It would be nice for these bozos to get some input from people who actually know how cells work, rather than that they continue on with their ignorant assumptions.

Also, he repeats this really annoying rationale.

Our model gives hope to cancer researchers because it predicts that the number of adaptive behaviours available to cancer is not open-ended.

You know what else would give researchers hope? If your model predicted that a shot of penicillin would cure cancer. It doesn’t, but it sure would be hopeful to pretend that something that simple would fix all our problems. Also, maybe it could fix global warming and end the wars in the Middle East, too…see how hopeful it could be?

But we don’t evaluate hypotheses by how much we wish they were true — we test them against reality, instead. Davies and Lineweaver really need a good solid whack on the noggin by the 2×4 of reality, that’s for sure.

A serious atheist survey

This one will take a little effort to respond to responsibly: no just clicking a button and going on! A sociologist is asking a lot of questions:

What do we know about the make-up of the atheist community both here in the United States and around the world? What are the perceptions of atheists about the state of atheism-related organizations and what these entities can or should do for them? What are the perceptions of atheists about believers? What types of atheists are there? How does being an atheist impact how one navigates in the social world? What is the demographic makeup of the atheist community both in the United States and around the world? What similarities and differences are there among atheists of different genders, ages, and geographical locations?

Take a half hour and answer the survey. There’s also a blog where the data is being discussed.