When I started cob-logging here a couple months ago I made a stray reference to conflicts I’ve experienced in having been a skeptically oriented person in the environmental activist sphere. A few of you suggested you’d like to hear more about that. I found an example today, one of probably several hundred of this particular phenomenon I’ve seen in the last 20 years or so.
I’m in the process of moving my blog Coyote Crossing to a new home. As a result, I’ve been spending odd 20-minute spans in between tasks over the last few days importing archival blog entries into WordPress. WordPress is pretty good at importing other content management systems’ data, but my blog had been run on ExpressionEngine, which is not at all good at exporting data. That’s just one of the reasons I’m abandoning the software.
As it turns out, I am not the first person to make the decision to leave ExpressionEngine. And because of that, there are a couple well-established work-arounds for importing your data from EE into WordPress. The one I chose was to adapt someone else’s template which output blog entries into something close enough to Movable Type export format that WordPress will happily gobble it up.
It works okay, but due to memory limitations and the fact that I’ve got almost ten years’ worth of blog entries on the old site, I’ve had to do it in chunks. One such 2-megabyte chunk just refused to import, no matter how often I made sure there weren’t any trailing spaces or odd characters in the text file being imported. The new database just found that file too hard to swallow.
I figured out one of the posts in that chunk had been slightly corrupted — a bug that comes up with EE now and then having to do with the database record for the URL title. I got the entry number and went to fix it. I found the post, one from January 2007. Swallowed hard and cursed to myself.
It’s safe and sound on the new site now.
I need a drink.
When he was a boy in Afghanistan, Massoud Hassani and his brother made toys that would roll across the desert landscape pushed by the wind. Too often they’d lose those toys. Not in a neighbor’s yard, or a tree too tall to climb, but because the toys would blow into land that had been filled with one of the most horrible weapons of modern warfare: land mines, which have killed or injured over a million people worldwide since 1975.
Now Hassani is back in Afghanistan, developing a grown-up version of one of his old toys, the Mine Kafon, as a way of safely detonating landmines for about 1/100th the cost of conventional mine-clearing methods.
Thankfully, landmine use has dropped rather significantly since a treaty barring their use was enacted about 15 years ago, but they’re still used in a number of places today. (Notably and unsurprisingly, the U.S. hasn’t signed the treaty.) They can cost as little as $1 per mine to place, and are often dropped from the air, making precise mapping hard. Conventional means for finding and disarming the mines — designed to maim rather than kill, thus tying up other soldiers’ time and energy in caring for their wounded comrade — can run up to $1,000-1,500 per mine.
Hassani says his Mine Kafon costs about $50 to build and can detonate three or four mines in a single trip. That brings the cost to underdeveloped communities of getting rid of the mines to only about 10 times what it cost the armies to put them there in the first place. It’s certainly not a complete solution, but it’s an elegant one — and well within the reach of many of the communities most-affected by land mine placement. Sometimes simpler technology really is beautiful.
More on the general topic of landmines at the Landmines and Cluster Munitions Monitor.
[It’s been a while since I’ve revived an old Pharyngula-safe post from my old blog, and it seemed like we have the appropriate theme going here today.]
Biologists have long assumed that evolutionary psychology, a controversial branch of psychology that ascribes many common social behaviors to genetics, is a muddled blend of half-understood evolutionary biology, selective data mining and resentment of women’s changing roles in society.
A new study, published in today’s issue of the German publication Unwirklichen Genetikjournal, does not challenge that assessment. But it does suggest that some men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady.
Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.
Many such men hold to these beliefs despite an absolute lack of supporting scientific evidence, says Dr. Ulrike Mann-Esser, chair of the sexual anthropology department at Universität Ulm and the study’s lead researcher. “But we had no way to determine why this was so until last year’s discovery of the locus taedius.”
The locus taedius, discovered accidentally last year by a graduate student working with David Gelernter, is a section of the human hindbrain that shows significant electrical activity when a person retrieves long-term memories that he or she does not find interesting.
In Mann-Esser’s study, 200 male subjects, who had small electrodes implanted in their locus taedius and glued to various places on the skin, were asked to stand outside the door of a glass cubicle and open the door for anyone trying to enter. Inside the cubicle was a male Pilates instructor posing as a researcher. A handful of highly attractive female graduate students were instructed to approach the cubicle, ignore the subjects while the door was opened, then proceed into the cubicle and place a hand on the chest of the “researcher.” Levels of locus taedius activity were recorded for each subject.
“By setting up a stimulus that often spurs EvPsych statements in the susceptible,” says Mann-Esser, “we hoped to be able to detect increased locus taedius activity among those men who had half-remembered bits of evolutionary biology come to mind from high school. The skin electrodes measured galvanic response and thus sexual arousal, which allowed us to determine which subjects were merely trying to recall female sexual anatomy from textbook figures so that we could exclude them from consideration.”
At first, approximately fifteen percent of male subjects showed significant locus taedius activity without sexual arousal. “We thought that seemed rather high,” says Mann-Esser, “until the Pilates instructor’s boyfriend showed up and two-thirds of that fifteen percent showed dramatic galvanic response changes.”
Further study by Mann-Esser’s team found a surprising commonality among the five percent of subjects showing clinical signs of susceptibility to evolutionary psychology, which the team refers to as “Desmond Morris Syndrome,” or DMS. Ninety percent of the DMS-positive subjects shared a single allele, first isolated by researchers at the University of Lucerne. The recessive allele, named luz-R, was absent from the remaining 95 percent of test subjects. (The corresponding dominant allele, luc-ID, has been tentatively linked to critical thought faculties and penis size.)
Mann-Esser admits that the existence of a “DMS gene” is confusing from an evolutionary standpoint. “Most genes persist because they contribute to reproductive success in one way or another. Sometimes this is in surprising ways, such as the gene for sickle-cell anemia, a crippling condition for those possessing two copies of the gene, but conferring resistance to malaria to heterozygous individuals with one normal gene. But the luz-R gene is strongly correlated with complete reproductive failure due to sexual selection against the gene by human females.
“It may be that early human populations carrying the recessive gene in their genome benefited from having certain individuals who were more likely to stand there and lecture the lion about how man is clearly the most fearsome predator on the savannah and then be eaten, thus allowing the rest to escape. It’s puzzling, though. We clearly need to study the issue further.”
One evolutionary psychology partisan maintains that evolutionary psychology itself holds the key to understanding the existence of the luz-R gene. “It’s ridiculously obvious, and has been proven time and again beyond the point where any rational person not swayed by politically correct feminism could dispute it,” says BigBoyBob87, a frequent commenter on a number of feminist blogs.
“You only need to look at sage grouse,” continues BigBoyBob87. “They reproduce by leks, in which a group of males converge in a spot to attract females and only the alpha males get to mate, while the others complain about the alpha males being big jerks. Anthropologists have proven that that very same evolutionary psychology observation is a major theme in Paleolithic art, as in for instance the Mousterian Pluvial cave painting Females of Breeding Age Always Mate With Damn Metro sapiens and Toss Us Nice Guys on Communal Trash Midden.” [See figure 1.]
When asked how any of the preceding actually supported his contention that DMS conferred selective fitness on men with the luz-R allele, BigBoyBob87 suggested that this author was only parroting the feminist line in order to get laid.
Damaged petroglyph
Happy Thanksgiving from those of us in the United States! It’s a day in which we Estadounidenses traditionally gather to celebrate the debt of gratitude we owe the original inhabitants of the land for helping the first European colonists survive. The remembrance takes many forms. Most commonly, we commemorate our Native cousins by not paying any attention to them at all, though on occasion we note their contributions by red-baiting their allies. And every once in a while, we celebrate this holiday by destroying irreplaceable Native ceremonial art dating back to a time contemporaneous with the European Bronze Age.
From my KCET story linked above:
The petroglyphs are thought to be as much as 3,500 years old, and still play an important role in the cultural life of the Owens Valley Paiute and Shoshone people. Paiute tribal historic preservation officer Raymond Andrews told Los Angeles Times reporter Louis Sahagun this week that the vandalized petroglyphs are regularly visited by modern-day Native people of the Eastern Sierra. “We still use this sacred place as a kind of church to educate tribal members and children about our historical and spiritual connections. So, our tribal elders are appalled by what happened here.”
According to the BLM, the vandals drove ladders, power saws, and portable generators to the site to attempt to remove the petroglyphs. Four were apparently removed successfully. A fifth, shown above, was damaged by saw cuts but left in place: a sixth was broken after removal and left on site. BLM rangers also reported hammer damage to dozens of nearby petroglyphs.
You don’t have to buy into Paiute/Shoshone religious beliefs to find an act like this appalling, just as you wouldn’t need to be a Magdalenian animist to get pissed off if someone took a crowbar to the Megaloceros paintings at Lascaux. A couple years ago a couple of slack-jawed nitwits took their paintball guns into a canyon in southern Nevada that figures prominently in the origin myths of a number of Native people along the lower Colorado River. Said nitwits defaced a number of petroglyph panels there. One doesn’t have to actually believe that Mastamho the creator’s son dug the Colorado out of the desert sands with his walking stick and sent the local tribes off in different directions to feel grief and anger at that damage to culturally significant artwork.
I won’t venture a guess as to the motivation of the thieves, though I suspect — to steal a joke from Professor Bérubé — a primitive form of outrage influenced by what the Greeks called μεθαμφεταμινε. Whatever their motivation, they need to be found and corrected before they do it again. The desert has a deep human history every bit as fascinating and inspiring as its natural history. Damaging it damages our common heritage. On the off chance a reader here has a friend of a friend who knows something, the BLM and the local Tribal government have set up a reward for info.
Interpreting the pupfish
Hilary Rosner has an interesting piece at Wired Science on the campaign to keep the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish from going extinct.
Background: during the Pluvial period there were a lot of occasionally interconnected lakes in the American southwest, and some of those lakes had little fish in them of what we’d later call genus Cyprinodon. Climate changed, the desert dried up, and desert Cyprinodons found themselves restricted to smaller and smaller bodies of water in the desert. Predictably, speciation occurred when populations were separated, and now five species live in the little bits of remaining fresh and not-so-fresh water in the desert.
Cyprinodon is a cosmopolitan genus, and many of its member species are doing okay, but desert Cyprinodons are having a tough time, as you might expect of freshwater fish in the desert. The Devils Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolus, is facing the biggest threat of all: its only remaining natural habitat is Devils Hole with no apostrophe, a geothermal spring (92°F/33°C) in a limestone cave in Nevada, with the breeding habitat of the entire species limited to a small rock shelf just beneath the surface of the water. A century of groundwater pumping for agriculture has made that habitat even more tenuous. The fish live a year, and there’s a significant seasonal population crash each winter when less light means less algae. In September, according to Rosner, the global population of Devils Hole pupfish dropped from its usual level in the mid-100s to about 75 individuals.
There’s some question rising whether the Devils Hole pupfish is actually a “good” species, or simply a perpetually starved and overheated strain of the neighboring Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes, the Ash Meadows pupfish. (Cyprinodon nevadensis is commonly split up into six subspecies, all of them but the extinct Cyprinodon nevadensis calidae still holding on slightly better than their cousin in Devils Hole. As Rosner describes, when an Ash Meadows pupfish somehow snuck into a holding tank with some Devils Hole pupfish in it, the pupfish suddenly started breeding more successfully, and within a few generations all the fish had Ash Meadows ancestry. Predictably, a pupfish biologist has suggested that a few Ash Meadows pupfish be slipped into Devils Hole to reinvigorate the population, and just as predictably others are horrified at the idea.
You remember the guy I told you about a couple weeks ago, on the payroll of the USDA’s “Wildlife Services” division, who trapped coyotes, set his dogs on the immobilized coyotes to tear them to shreds, and then posted boastful pictures about it on Facebook and Twitter?
There’s a petition at Causes.com asking Congress to investigate the sadistic jerk, whose name is Jamie P. Olson, and they’re a few thousand signatures from their goal. Update: Some commenters have noted that the causes.com petition requires a Facebook account to sign. At change.org there’s a similar petition you can sign without a Facebook account.
Since I wrote the above-linked post here Olson has gotten some press attention. (No, I’m not claiming credit. A bunch of people have been flogging this.) Perhaps most notably, Olson got a thorough going-over by veteran environmental journalist Tom Knudsen at the Sacramento Bee, who added this observation by one of Olson’s putative colleagues:
Gary Strader, a former Wildlife Services trapper in Nevada, was not surprised to learn about the controversial photos. “That is very common,” Strader wrote in an email. “It always was and always will be controversial. It has never been addressed by the higher-ups. They know it happens on a regular basis.”
Read my old post if you missed it, check out Knudsen’s piece, and then — if you’re so inclined — sign the petition. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t go well past the number of signatures the organizers are hoping for.
The most recent iteration of The Oatmeal is a lovely, lengthy treatise on creativity, inspiration, and public response. Complete with bonus beaver slap fight and hipster goats.
I don’t know about you, but the “inspiration is like food poisoning” line is going to stay with me for a long, long time.
Sunrise Rock with no cross, as God intended
You know what I hate? I hate when Fox News notices my favorite slightly secluded campsite in the Mojave Desert. They attract pest organisms. There you’ll be sitting quietly among the Joshua trees, enjoying the company of Mojave green rattlesnakes and tarantulas and kissing bugs and other such perfectly honorable animals, and then suddenly a chill wind will blow up the back or your shirt as the television news trucks arrive and some putrescent individual like Sean Hannity steps out into the sunlight, pasty and blinking and malignant. You can actually feel the cacti wither in revulsion.
It happened again this weekend.
There’s so much opportunity for sweet, sweet schadenfreude coming out of yesterday’s electoral results, from the Big News about Romney losing to local things like Sonny Bono’s widow getting edged out by a progressive Latino physician, thus flipping the Coachella Valley House seat to a non-Republican for the first time since the Reagan Administration. But this one’s my favorite:
California Democrats appear to have picked up a supermajority in both houses of the state Legislature Tuesday night, a surprise outcome that gives the party the ability to unilaterally raise taxes and leaves Republicans essentially irrelevant in Sacramento.
I first moved to California in 1982, just four years into the Great Reign of Stupidity launched when the state’s voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978. Prop 13 was (and is) politically popular due to its strictly limiting property tax increases on residential properties. Since 1978 any criticism of the measure is taken as demanding old people be taxed out of their homes, and thus it’s become a third rail in California politics.
But the measure also did two other things:
Since then, especially as the electorate in California gets younger and browner and more liberal, the whole purpose of the California Republican Party has been to obstruct the state government’s authority to raise and spend money doing frivolous socialist market-meddling things like paving roads, or fixing broken windows in schools, or buying textbooks that were published sometime after the Apollo Program ended. And a fair number of otherwise non-braindead Californians went along for the ride, because who likes taxes?
It was a pretty foolproof business plan on the Republicans’ part:
There have been other horrible effects of Prop 13 besides the obvious cuts in education infrastructure and social services kind. For instance, the cap on property tax assessments provided a serious incentive for municipalities and counties to approve sprawling development so that they could generate revenue by taxing the new properties. Local governments have had little incentive to promote things like infill development, which would add new properties to the tax rolls by destroying existing properties.
And if you’ve paid attention to the Left Coast at all in the last few months, you know the end result of all this: a state teetering on the edge of an insolvency that would make New York City’s crisis in the 1970s look like running out of lunch money — all due to the Republican Party’s stranglehold on the legislative process.
Yesterday the voters of California approved not one but two tax increases — one more a loophole closing on out-of-state businesses — and, it seems, whittled the Republican presence in the Assembly and Senate down just below 1/3. There are still Republicans in Sacramento, and they still serve important functions. For instance, in the case of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, America’s Stupidest Legislator, he often provides much-needed comic relief.
But now it seems that they may not have much to say about actual adult pursuits like paying for services and raising revenue, because the Dems may well have that supermajority. The Democrats are not in any way immune from the temptation to grandstand or engage in chicanery, but I still allow myself the hopeful sense that maybe, for the first time since I landed here, the grownups will be in charge for a while.
