Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

Yesterday’s birding walk was good, but nothing unusual in the way of bird life. What made it one for the record books was the single cutest thing I’ve ever seen in nature: four Red Fox kits playing together. They must have been out of the den for a couple of weeks because they’re no longer dark, pretty much like the ones in this video:
 
Direct YouTube link

And let me tell you, if I’d had a video camera, a strong lens (I was about 50m away), and a tripod (because, judging by my photography, my cinematography would be Adventures in Shakycam), I could have made something that would get a million views on YouTube.

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Part I was New Jersey to Ithaca, NY.

We stayed overnight in Ithaca, visited Cornell the next day, then left in the afternoon to drive to my parents’ place in eastern Connecticut. We drove back on NY 79, then took NY 206 east.

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Sprog the Younger is a junior in high school, which means Spring Break was for the two of us to do The College Tour, New England Division.

It’s been years since I’ve been on an American Road Trip to places I haven’t been before, and I found myself paying a lot of attention to the landscape: the shape of the terrain, the vegetation, the types of houses and farms. This is something I learned from reading and re-reading Tolkien in my youth, so it soaked into my brain (I once calculated that I’d read the trilogy around 30 times by the time I was 20). The Lord of the Rings has many passages like this one:

Mist lay behind them among the trees below, and brooded on the pale margins of the Anduin, but the sky was clear. The waxing moon was riding in the West, and the shadows of the rocks were black. They had come to the feet of stony hills, and their pace was slower, for the trail was no longer easy to follow. Here the highlands of the Emyn Muil ran from North to South in two long tumbled ridges. The western side of each ridge was steep and difficult, but the eastward slopes were gentler, furrowed with many gullies and narrow ravines. [TT p13]

Being primed by Tolkien to look at landscape, I’m constantly disappointed because most books don’t give me that sense of physical setting at a more-than-human scale. The only exception I found in a haphazard walk through the literary canon was Thomas Hardy.

Movies and TV are much worse. Literature may fail to describe landscape, but movies and TV show you a landscape that doesn’t correspond to the stated setting, and which moves around capriciously. I think that by watching movies and TV, we get used to landscape not meaning anything, they train our vision to be sloppy.

So I’m trying to train my vision to be *not* sloppy, to see what’s out there beyond the shoulders of the highway. These are my notes.

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In our Passover service last Monday night, we quoted from the Song of Songs 2:11-12:

See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.

One of the characteristic harbingers of spring in these parts is not quite so sweet-voiced:
 
Direct YouTube link.

That’s the melodious American Woodcock (formally known as Scopolax minor, very informally known as the Timberdoodle or even Mudbat).

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I heard about The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War from James Fallows. I’m only up to page 107 (out of 368) so far, so these are just my first set of reading notes. Kaplan has brought the history of Petraeus’ career up to 2005 at this point, while also tracing general American military thinking from the Vietnam era forward.

I don’t know if Kaplan intends it to be a theme, but I am stunned by his descriptions of the cultivated incompetence of American military planning — my phrasing, I hasten to add, not his.

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I keep seeing references to how surprised Catholics, including those at the Vatican, are by Pope Benedict’s nigh-unprecedented abdication. I cannot figure out why anyone knowledgeable was surprised.

I am by no means a serious Vatican-watcher, but I knew that Benedict repeatedly said that he thought resignation should be an option for a Pope who’s no longer up to the physical and mental rigors of the role. I never thought he was just blowing smoke about this, because I believe he was particularly aware of what my family calls “the Grand Vizier Problem”.

You know how in stories, when the Emperor or other supreme ruler is getting old and maybe sick, the Grand Vizier is there to help the old guy out, take some of the burden of rulership off his weary shoulders, shield him from all those tedious decisions? Yeah. As Terry Pratchett says in Interesting Times:

Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: “Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted advisor.”

Absolutely no-one in the world knows better than Benedict how this works for a Pope, because when John Paul II was failing he was the Grand Vizier. And I think that from the start of Benedict’s papacy, one of his goals was to make sure no-one grand-viziers[1] *him*.

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Via Slacktivist and Jessica at Friendly Atheist, I’ve learned that WORLD magazine editor and developer of “compassionate conservatism” Marvin Olasky has re-written the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the better to “take the music captive” for Christianity.

Now, I don’t agree with Jessica that “Hallelujah” is The Best Song Ever, but it’s certainly one of the best. Importantly, it’s one of the best and most popular religious songs written in the past several decades. “Religious” in the way Rufus Wainwright described it: “The music never pummels the words. The melody is almost liturgical and conjures up religious feelings.”

The trouble for a Christianist like Olasky is that the complex and poetic lyrics Cohen wrote for “Hallelujah” don’t lend themselves to a single, straightforward, doctrinally pure interpretation. That’s one reason I think they *work*, but it doesn’t make them comfortable in the way he prefers.

I’m cutting here because this somehow turned into 2000 words about “Hallelujah”, religion, the Silmarillion, and Stargate: Atlantis.

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James Fallows at the Atlantic has been covering the ongoing terrible pollution problems in China. I think of Kevin Drum’s discussion of lead and crime, and wonder if the high-crime American past is the Chinese future.

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A MLK Day post, slightly delayed

One of the reasons gun fans give for wanting everyone to bear arms is that armed people are better able to resist or change a tyrannical, unjust government. In one of our recent discussions, for instance, someone said:

Not that guns are the way to fight every problem. Sometimes peaceful ways are much better, like MLK. But I think Nazis would have shot MLK and then gone about their business.

Along these lines, last week Rush Limbaugh said:

If a lot of African-Americans back in the ’60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? I don’t know, I’m just asking. If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?

John Lewis replied:

Our goal in the Civil Rights Movement was not to injure or destroy but to build a sense of community, to reconcile people to the true oneness of all humanity. African Americans in the ‘60s could have chosen to arm themselves, but we made a conscious decision not to. We were convinced that peace could not be achieved through violence. Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means. We took a stand against an unjust system, and we decided to use this faith as our shield and the power of compassion as our defense.

Cut due to spoilers for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey movie:

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It’s winter, which means Rare Goose Time in New Jersey if you can’t get to The Shore. Finding rare birds has become much easier than it used to, as birders use online tools to show and tell about our discoveries. Earlier this week, I saw two

Two days later and a bit north, I saw this Greater White-Fronted Goose.

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Last week (more or less) included my husband’s birthday, and for his celebratory dinner I made Juniper-Spiced Venison with Brown Goat Cheese Sauce[1]. The crowd went *wild* — it may have been the best venison any of us have ever had [2], and it was certainly the tenderest wild-caught venison I’ve ever encountered.

I realize that I generally count as one of the “anti-gun” crowd, so it may surprise you to learn that I have no objection to hunting per se. On the contrary: I support local hunters as much as possible. I don’t hunt, but that’s for lack of hand-eye coordination and depth perception — I pose no danger to the broad side of a barn.

The reason I support hunters is because I’m a serious lifelong birdwatcher. I’ve asked around, and I’ve never known a serious birder who was categorically opposed to hunting, even the vegetarians.

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Why can’t self-proclaimed capitalist, free-market businesspeople recognize the law of supply and demand? In particular, if you can’t find appropriately-skilled employees when you offer salary $S, Adam Smith says you should try offering $S+n. If that doesn’t work, you offer $S+2n. The cost of labor isn’t something the employer decides ahead of time, it’s determined by the free-market value of the labor needed to do the job.

But per links from Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice and her commenters, many employers seem to think that if they can’t find employees willing to do a job at a particular wage, it *must* be because there’s a lack of appropriately-skilled workers. (I’ve talked about this before, with regard to farm labor specifically.)

What are they teaching them in business school? And what are they teaching them in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and other sources of continuing business education?

Rembrandt, The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. 1637.

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The 2012 Presidential campaign can be explained with a single image:

Huh? you say: that looks almost exactly like the final result:

Yes. And yet, that first map is based on predictions made by David Rothschild and Chris Wilson at Yahoo’s The Signal blog, in February.

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