Doug Muir

Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction.

Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly and suddenly filled up with life. The first water skater appeared literally on day one. Now there are about a dozen of them. We’ve also picked up water beetles, a couple of aquatic snails, some little swimming shrimp-like things, and several of these guys:



Ichthyosaura alpestris, “fish-lizard of the Alps”, aka the Alpine Newt.

But how did they get there?
[click to continue…]

This is the second in a very occasional series of posts discussing the following proposition: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of text and visual mass media intended for children. The first post, on kids’ animated cartoons, is here.

As noted in that post, “intended for children” here means mass media particularly targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, Disney movies are included here, while the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.  Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)  Movies means movies in theaters, not including TV movies or straight-to-video stuff.

So then: from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, movies for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but not many; and the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.

But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies suddenly started getting better, and then around 1995 they started getting very good indeed. The period 1970-1986 was a dark age for kid’s movies; the period 1995-2012 (0r so) was an astonishing age of gold. There was a massive cultural transformation here, and it happened fairly quickly.

[click to continue…]

And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.

— Alan Moore

Today’s Occasional Paper comes to us from the James Webb Space Telescope.

So let’s start with some basics:  nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  So when a telescope looks out into space, it’s also looking back into time.  Look at the moon?  You’re seeing it as it was when the light left it’s surface about 1.5 seconds ago.  Look at the Sun?  You’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.  The Sun could have exploded 5 minutes ago, and there’s no way you could possibly know about it until 3 minutes from now.

Okay, so keep going.  Look at the nearest star?  You’re seeing it as it was about four years ago.  Look at the center of our galaxy?  30,000 years.  The light from there left around the high point of the last Ice Age.  Look out of our galaxy, at our neighbor galaxy Andromeda?  About 3 million years.

Now it starts to get weird and interesting.  Because as we start to look at things that are billions-with-a-b light years away — very distant galaxies — things start to change.  That’s because we’re looking back into the distant past of the Universe.  And the Universe is only 13.5 billion years old, so… yeah.  In theory, if you had a strong enough telescope, you could see back to the Big Bang and the beginning of everything.

Of course it’s not that simple.  The Universe is expanding.  Distant galaxies are receding from us.  More distant galaxies are receding faster, often at significant fractions of the speed of light (from our perspective).  This means that the distance to them is greater than you might expect.  It also means that their light is “red shifted” by the Doppler effect.  Also, while the Big Bang was very bright, once it cooled down the Universe was just a hot dark cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen with a bit of helium mixed in.  In that earliest pre-dawn epoch, there was not much to see, and no light to see with… until the first stars switched on.

And now for a brief historical digression.

[click to continue…]

Today I’d like to talk about that delightful little companion of field and garden: the shrike.

[copyright Rosemary Mosco, 2024, birdandmoon.com]

If you know, you know.  And if you don’t know… well, let’s talk about shrikes.

[click to continue…]

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?

Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.

If you have a guess, put it in a comment, then come and look. [click to continue…]

The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly.  A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.

But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that lives in shallow water, preying on small fish and crustaceans. A bite that can paralyze a 10 gram fish or a 20 gram crab, sure. A bite that can kill a 70 kilogram human dead? What’s the point of that?

Well: the good news is, a recent paper has discovered just why the blue-ringed octopus is so deadly. The bad news is… um, it’s kind of disturbing.

Trigger warning for sexual assault, cannibalism, and existential horror. I am not kidding.

[click to continue…]

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about some of the work that USAID did.  Now I’d like to drill down a bit and talk about some of the work that I personally did for USAID.

This runs a bit long, because this sort of thing is all about context.  But if you’re curious about what some of these people who just got fired from USAID actually did all day long?  Here’s one story.

[click to continue…]

“America is rock and roll.” — Alfred Howard

Did some of you find it hard to feel the love for President’s Day this year? Well, remember: the reason it exists is because we Americans, as a nation, couldn’t choose between Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday.

Washington is pretty great, but I’m a Lincoln guy myself. You probably know this photo:




As various people have pointed out, this particular picture was photoshopped.  A real ’62 Strat would have a maple fretboard and a single ply pick board.  Also, it’s absolutely not true that Keith Richards gave Lincoln this guitar– Richards was always a Telecaster guy, and anyway he was just a little kid back then.

That said, it’s worth taking a moment to contemplate Lincoln’s musical career.

[click to continue…]

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.

[click to continue…]

So in the last three years or so — since COVID, basically — Romania and Taiwan have both joined a very special club of countries.

There are not a lot of countries in this club. If you’re very generous, you could include perhaps a dozen or so. But to my way of thinking, there are only about eight. They include:

Ireland (pretty much the type specimen)
South Korea
Singapore
All three Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
Taiwan
Romania

There are some definitional issues. Romania, in particular, s a borderline case.  It only qualifies as… half a member, let’s say. Microstates are excluded; to join this club, you must have at least half a million people. In theory, you could argue for the list to include Australia, Israel, Slovenia, and even the United States, but I except them because reasons.  

Okay, so:  What is this club?

The answer is below the cut.  But first: take a moment, look at that list, think about it.  (Here’s a hint: remember what I do for a living.)  Try to come up with an answer, and then put it in the comments. I’ll be curious to see what people think.

[click to continue…]

There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.

Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky. [click to continue…]

Every few years the UN publishes one of these big papers on “world population prospects”, which are… exactly what they sound like: a best guess at what’s going to happen with the world’s population over the next few decades.

Nut graph after the jump:
[click to continue…]

So my wife took this picture in our garden yesterday, here in Kigali, Rwanda:



Take a close look.  This little bird — about the size of an American cardinal, or a European robin — is facing us.  It’s also facing the sun, though you can’t see that.  It is holding two twigs with its little claws, and… it’s puffing out its breast feathers in a very weird way.  It looks like a breeze is ruffling them.  But there is no breeze.

So we did a quick look-up and found: this is Colius Striatus, the Speckled Mousebird.  Long tail, “scruffy” crest, check.  Thin, rather hairlike breast feathers, check. Very common across tropical Africa, okay.  And then this:  

“Speckled mousebirds… can often be spotted roosting in groups where they’ll buff up their feathers. They do this to allow more sunlight to hit their bodies which helps speed up the fermentation process.”

Wait, what?

[click to continue…]

So in the last couple of decades we’ve discovered that many plants rely on networks of soil fungi to bring them critical trace nutrients. This is a symbiotic relationship: the fungal network can access these nutrients much better than plants can, and in return the plants provide the fungus with other stuff — particularly energy, in the form of glucose sugar, made from photosynthesis.

It turns out this relationship is particularly important for large, long-lived trees. That’s because trees spend years as seedlings, struggling in the shade of their bigger relatives. If they’re going to survive, they’ll need help.

The fungal network gives them that help. The fungus not only provides micronutrients, it actually can pump glucose into young seedlings, compensating for the sunlight that they can’t yet reach. This is no small thing, because the fungus can’t produce glucose for itself! Normally it trades nutrients to trees and takes glucose from them in repayment. So it’s reaching into its own stored reserves to keep the baby seedling alive.

Gosh that’s beautiful isn’t Nature great! Well… yes and no.

Because the fungus isn’t doing this selflessly. The nutrients and glucose aren’t a gift. They’re a loan, and the fungus expects to be repaid.

[click to continue…]