This video does what it says on the box. Casual Geographic is here it entertain and inform, and in my opinion, he succeeds at both.
Oceanoxia
Exploring an increasingly strange new world
This video does what it says on the box. Casual Geographic is here it entertain and inform, and in my opinion, he succeeds at both.
I do not like the Democratic Party. As an institution, they are corrupt and disingenuous servitors of the upper class, who will demand party unity one moment, then support the loser of a primary over the winner, the next. They claim to care about issues like climate change, but continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, well past the point that will totally destroy humanity. They claim to care about student debt, but refuse to actually do anything about it. They claim to care about reproductive rights, but support anti-choice candidates, and every time they came into power over the last half-century, they insisted that abortion rights were safe, and it wasn’t the time to codify them into law.
For 50 years they did that, in the face of an open campaign to do exactly what has now been done.
I do not like the Democratic party, but- they are still better than the GOP. Not on everything, of course. They’ve been full partners in the long history of attacking left-wing countries, and supporting some of the worst dictators and war criminals on the planet, for example. But even on the issues I listed in the paragraph above, they are better than the GOP, in a very material way.
I mention that because a lot of people on the left, at least online, insist that there’s no difference, and that the Democrats only serve to stabilize the ways in which the Republicans make things worse. Obama’s use of drone warfare comes to mind, as does the continued abuse of children at the southern border. There are issues on which you can absolutely make that case. The thing is, though, they are not the only issues at play. Minnesota is probably the best example right now. The Democrats there are not perfect, but look at what they’ve been up to, and tell me you’d ever get any of it if the GOP was in power there.
The problem, as I see it, is that those people on the left are still stuck on individualism, and on the fantasy of achieving revolutionary change within the infrastructure of a representative democracy. For the first part, I get it. The Democratic Party fights hard to avoid any kind of real working class power in the United States, and voting for them implies that I’m OK with that. I’m not OK with that, I just consider those feelings to be less important than the increased safety or wellbeing that can come from the policies that Democrats do support. I don’t believe souls exist, so I’m not particularly concerned with “tainting” mine. For the second part, well, I understand why people think that way, but I think that they are wrong.
Take the Green Party. I know some people see them as spoilers, and I’m willing to believe that some people fund them as spoilers, but they do actually have a strategy for change, based on the rules of the electoral system in which they exist. The goal of a Green Party presidential candidate, at this stage, is not to get them into the White House, but rather to win at least 5% of the vote. That, under the current rules, would qualify them for official recognition as a national party, and for federal funds for future campaigns. Once they get there, they’ll have a much easier time spreading their message, and increasing their vote share to become a real power for change in the United States. It’s a plan for long-term change, within the rules that currently exist, it’s actually pretty reasonable. Further, I feel I should say that the folks I’ve seen associated with the Green Party in day-to-day life tend to be more politically active than average, working to make the world better.
I do, however, have a couple problems with that strategy.
The first is that I think it is naïve to assume that the rules won’t be changed. I’m sure many Greens don’t assume that, but would say that if that does happen, that injustice will bring them more support and attention. That might be true, but I’m not convinced. My bigger problem is that we are running out of time. I’m a big fan of long-term thinking, but not if you don’t account for what’s going on outside of the electoral rules. Remember, their plan is to get 5% of the vote, and work to grow from there. They wouldn’t need a majority to influence policy, and force coalition-building, but it would still take them time to build support, and make any significant changes. What’s more, every time they fall short of the mark, they have to wait another four years for another shot, and we are running out of time. The global temperature is rising fast, and as capitalism reaches crisis-levels of wealth concentration, authoritarianism is rising as well, with the rich beefing up their goon squads to hold on to their wealth and power.
We need revolutionary change, and that cannot come from within an electoral system designed to prevent such change. To me, “revolutionary change” means a change to the political and economic system on a scale that is generally associated with a successful revolutionary war. It does not mean change achieved through war. I do not want war. I don’t think anyone who sincerely wants the world to get better does want war. My preferred method would be some form of general strike – bringing the country to a halt, until corrupt rulers are replaced, and laws are changed. The degree to which there ends up being violence will depend pretty much entirely on the people who currently hold power. They have a long, and uninterrupted history of using violence to crush movements for change, and I see plenty of reason to believe that they would use lethal force to prevent a left-wing movement from succeeding in its goals. When I wrote my neglected direct action post, I used a shield as a metaphor, because I think that any effort at real systemic change will be subjected to violence, and I believe that people have a right to defend themselves.
So, if voting won’t get the change we need, why vote at all? Well, because it can get smaller changes, that will save or improve lives in the short term, which is a thing worth doing in itself. There’s a sort of freedom in realizing that the system is so corrupt and entrenched that voting will never bring the change I want to see. It means that I don’t have to pin all my hopes on a candidate, only to feel betrayed when they fall short of my expectations. Sure, I still get disappointed or angry when bad things happen, but my hope comes from the work that people are doing to organize, and to take direct action. It’s not a guaranteed win, of course, but by organizing around smaller-scale problems, like working conditions or local laws, we build the capacity to work together on much larger problems.
This started out as me just posting a video, but then I had things to say. Beau of the Fifth Column posted a video responding to someone who was having trouble seeing a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and he said a lot of stuff that I agree with. It’s not surprising, considering that he’s been influential in my own political thought over the last couple years. It can be difficult to look at the world as it is, and not get sidetracked by all the complexity and horror, and I think Beau does a good job breaking it down.
There are a lot of changes we need to make, if we want to get control of how we affect the non-human parts of this planet. One of my favorites to talk about, partly for aesthetic reasons, is filling urban landscapes with plant life. While doing so isn’t enough by itself, and brings its own problems, it would improve the lives of city-dwellers in a number of ways, especially while there are still cars about. With that as my standing opinion, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that my eye was caught by a university press release claiming that “plants remove cancer-causing toxins from air“.
A ground-breaking study has revealed that plants can efficiently remove toxic petrol fumes, including cancer causing compounds such as benzene, from indoor air.
The study was led by University of Technology Sydney (UTS) bioremediation researcher Associate Professor Fraser Torpy, in partnership with leading plantscaping solutions company Ambius.
The researchers found that the Ambius small green wall, containing a mix of indoor plants, was highly effective at removing harmful, cancer-causing pollutants, with 97 per cent of the most toxic compounds removed from the surrounding air in just eight hours.
They go on to talk about the health problems caused by air pollution, which would be fine, normally, but when this research is explicitly in partnership with a corporation that’s trying to sell a product, it starts to come across more like fearmongering to drive sales. I want to be clear – I have no particular reason to doubt this research, on the face of it. They put their “green wall” in a sealed chamber with some car exhaust, took measurements, and got clear results. This is far from the first time that research has pointed to plants as a way to filter out air pollution, and so I’m certainly inclined to believe it, but…
This is also the exact result that a company trying to sell a product would want to get, which makes it all but useless as anything other than an advertisement. Even if it does end up in a peer-reviewed journal (it’s not right now, as far as I can tell – you have to give Ambius your email to get a copy of the report), nobody of good will can entirely trust it, and if it were included as part of a case for change, anybody of bad will could point to the blatant conflict of interest, and use that to derail the whole effort.
This is why public funding is so important, especially in a capitalist society. Between advertising and propaganda, it’s already hard for a lot of people to figure out what’s going on, and that confusion is wonderful for con artists, whether they’re trying to get a few bucks out of people, or trying to drive humanity to extinction for more oil money. We need clarity, right now, and while I’m sure that the business in question is trying to do well by doing good, this doesn’t help.
Casual Geographic, as the name implies, takes a sort of everyman approach to teaching us about the world. This dive into the deep is not exactly a deep-dive, but it’s a fun overview of some of the stranger creatures inhabiting our planet’s oceans
This, Dear Readers, is Mister Elegance. For those who can’t see, he’s a mostly black cat, sitting hunched over with one hind leg (with a white foot) stuck forward a little awkwardly. You don’t notice it much when he’s walking, but when he sits, that leg always sticks out oddly. I call him Mr. Elegance, because he’s always making a leg.
It is exceedingly clever.
Mr. Elegance is one of a few cats (and foxes) that wander through my little corner of Dublin, and while most of them seem to have homes (keep your cats indoors, if you value your ecosystem), I get the impression that Mr. Elegance is on his own in the world. In this next picture, you can see him trying to get a grip on a misshapen toilet paper tube.
He likes to hang out on the roof of my shed, which is right outside my window. It’s covered in moss and twigs, and gets some sun during the day. I put some catnip in the cardboard tube, and tossed it down onto the roof for him. In this next picture, you can see that he’s gripping the tube in both front paws, and biting it very ferociously.
He first showed up a couple years ago. We already have one cat, who doesn’t play well with others, and it’s a small flat. We also can’t really afford another cat, so we have to settle for being friendly, and supplying drugs. In the next picture, he’s rabbit-kicking the tube, but his face looks a little bored.
There was a period of almost a year when we didn’t see him around, and we worried about him. I suppose it’s not good news for the birds, but I was glad when he showed up again. In the next picture, he’s dropping the tube, and looking up at me, looking down at him.
After he’d gotten his fill of catnip, he settled down for a nap, still sticking that leg out.
I’m afraid it’s going to be mostly videos for the next few days. I don’t think I’m going to get this draft totally complete by the end of the month, but I’m getting as close as I can. On the plus side, we all get to learn about cool things like (mostly) vegetarian spiders!
Work on the novel continues, so in honor of International Bee Day, I wanted to share this documentary about Europe’s wild bees. When people talk about the bees dying, it’s specifically the wild bees that are really suffering, so I think it’s worth learning a little about them. I have some wildflowers growing in planters (finding a place for them turned out to be unreasonably difficult), so I’ll share some pictures of those as they begin to flower. It’s hard to say how much my efforts will help, if at all, but I’m far from alone in making the effort, and it’s nice to do at least something concrete, even if it’s not much.
So, I don’t know a whole lot about fish. I can identify a few, and I know about cool stuff like that warm-blooded fish, or the fact that fish aren’t real, but I don’t know, for example, how their gills actually function. I did not know, for example, that it’s apparently possible for sharks to hold their breath?
This was a complete surprise!” said Mark Royer, lead author and researcher with the Shark Research Group at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “It was unexpected for sharks to hold their breath to hunt like a diving marine mammal. It is an extraordinary behavior from an incredible animal.”
Shark gills are natural radiators that would rapidly cool the blood, muscles and organs if scalloped hammerhead sharks did not close their gill slits during deep dives into cold water. These sharks are warm water animals but feed at depths where seawater temperatures are similar to those found in Kodiak Alaska (around 5°C/40°F), yet they need to keep their bodies warm in order to hunt effectively.
“Although it is obvious that air-breathing marine mammals hold their breath while diving, we did not expect to see sharks exhibiting similar behavior,” said Royer. “This previously unobserved behavior reveals that scalloped hammerhead sharks have feeding strategies that are broadly similar to those of some marine mammals, like pilot whales. Both have evolved to exploit deep dwelling prey and do so by holding their breath to access these physically challenging environments for short periods.”
Marine mammals hold their breath because they can’t breath water. The sharks have no problem breathing, but the “air” is so cold down there that they’re better off holding their breath. I’d always had the vague impression that fish breathing was even more reflexive than human breathing, since gills don’t “hold” water, but I suppose it makes sense that with so much musculature going on, they’d have control over their gills. I’m now wondering if the hammerheads living around the Sharkcano do the same thing to keep from overheating or burning their gills sometimes.
Beyond the fun of learning something new about hammerhead sharks, I also appreciate this article for giving us a window into how scientists are able to figure this sort of thing out:
The research team discovered this unexpected phenomenon by equipping deep-diving scalloped hammerhead sharks with devices that simultaneously measured their muscle temperature, depth, body orientation and activity levels. They saw that their muscles stayed warm throughout their dive into deep cold water but suddenly cooled as the sharks approached the surface toward the end of each dive. Computer modeling suggested that hammerhead sharks must be preventing heat loss from their gills to keep their bodies warm during these deep-dives into cold water.
Additionally, video of a scalloped hammerhead shark swimming along the seabed at a depth of 1,044 meters (more than 3,400 feet) showed its gill slits tightly closed, whereas similar images from surface waters show these sharks swimming with their gill slits wide open. A sudden cooling in muscle temperature as scalloped hammerhead sharks approach the surface at the end of each dive suggests that they opened their gill slits to resume breathing while still in relatively cool water.
“Holding their breath keeps scalloped hammerhead sharks warm but also shuts off their oxygen supply,” said Royer. “So, although these sharks hold their breath for an average of 17 minutes, they only spend an average of four minutes at the bottom of their dives at extreme depths before quickly returning to warmer, well-oxygenated surface waters where breathing resumes.”
Thermal regulation by cold-blooded animals has always fascinated me. When I was a volunteer at the New England Aquarium, I saw sea turtles that had ended up in too-cold water, and gotten internal frostbite, which is one horror I’m glad I don’t have to worry about. I’ve always though that being unable to internally regulate temperature was limiting, and in some ways it definitely is. Simply having food allows us to comfortably function in a pretty wide temperature range, and by adding clothes (or thicker fur/feathers if you’re not human), you can expand that range pretty cheaply. It seems, however, that I’ve been underestimating our room-temperature brethren. I would imagine this sort of thing is easier with a larger body, but I’m now curious what other tricks there might be for accessing places that “ought” to be too hot or too cold.
The image shows a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, photographed from below. The sharks seem to be mostly silhouetted, but you can see the sunlight, filtered blue by the water, reflecting off their sides. Photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Espanto
With the rise of fascism in the United States, a lot of people have been comparing the current era to the Weimar Republic, in the years prior to Nazi rule. I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make, and I’ve made it myself. I think there are things we can learn from studying that history, but it’s also worth remembering that 21st century US is not, in fact Weimar Germany. The Three Arrows video I posted last August goes into both similarities and differences, and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I like the Lonerbox video below, as an explicit discussion of the differences.
I’m used to thinking of the United States as a young country, and in some ways it is, but it’s worth remembering that as states claiming to be democracies go, it’s quite old. The band Rammstein put out a song called Deutschland a little while back which made the point (among other things) that for all Germany can trace its history back for centuries, it seems like it’s always a very young country. Germany as we know it today is younger than I am, and it was preceded by the era of a divided East and West Germany, which was preceded by the Nazis, which was preceded by Weimar, which was preceded by the empire, each being not just a different regime, but in many ways a different country. To quote Deutschland, Germany is “so young, and yet so old.”
This video digs into what went on during the short years of the Republic, and how, in many ways, it’s nothing at all like what’s happening in the US today.
If I asked a random person to name a pollinator, most people would probably default to “bees”. This is perfectly reasonable. Bees play a huge role in human life, and the decline in wild bees has rightfully caused a great deal of alarm. Today, however, we’re going to step back from the horrors of the world, and instead look at remarkable news from the wonderful world of pollination. Die-hard fans of plant sex will already be aware that pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of insects other than bees that pollinate, and a number of birds and mammals, but I have to admit that until today, I had never heard of a frog acting as a pollinator!
The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira
On rainy nights on the verdant coastal plains outside Rio de Janeiro, groups of tree frogs sometimes gather around the pearly white flowers of the milk fruit tree. But while most tree frogs are on the prowl for night-flying insects, one species is after the sugary nectar in the flowers. The tiny, orange Xenohyla truncata’s sweet tooth might make it the world’s first known pollinating amphibian. And the discovery adds to growing evidence that we need to broaden our understanding of which animals act as pollinators beyond the well-known birds and insects.During a visit to a spot near the Brazilian town of Armação dos Búzios in December 2020, researchers witnessed a group of the frogs—commonly known as Izecksohn’s Brazilian tree frog—feeding on milk fruit. The stomach contents of museum specimens had previously shown that the species is one of the few amphibians in the world to eat fruit, says team member Carlos Henrique de-Oliveira-Nogueira, a biologist at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The researchers saw one of the frogs wiggle into a flower in search of nectar, then emerge with pollen clinging to the secretions on its moist back. This led them to suggest that the amphibians might play a role in carrying pollen from bloom to bloom, aiding the tree’s reproduction. The team’s findings recently appeared in Food Webs. “Some species are photographed in flowers, but nobody’s ever seen a species interacting with a flower,” de-Oliveira-Nogueira says.
So far, they haven’t proved that the frogs do pollinate, but they have shown that the potential is there. To me, it seems more likely than not that these frogs must pollinate the plants at least sometimes, whether or not they play a major role in the milk flower’s continuation as a species. Apparently testing that is the next step, as the researchers plan to enclose flowers in cages to exclude frogs. If the caged flowers don’t get pollinated, then either they depend on the frogs, or there’s something else that’s frog-sized or bigger, that the researchers haven’t considered. I’m holding out for a snake, because that would probably be the weirdest option.
There are also questions about the frog’s back secretions. Do they interact with the pollen, beyond providing a sticky surface? As the researchers say, they could actually be damaging the pollen, in which case, maybe the caged flowers will do better? Or maybe they damage the pollen, but the plant still depends on the frogs, despite that. I expect we’ll probably hear more about this in the future. Not only is this a potentially exciting discovery, it also gives a great excuse to post pictures of frogs in flowers.
The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog’s bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.
