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Honeyguide birds respond to special calls from human honey-hunters

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 11:00am
Honey-hunters from several African cultures use different sounds to communicate with honeyguides, and the birds respond to local calls more than others
Categories: Science

NYT reports that the IDF deliberately killed journalists; I predict this is wrong

Why Evolution is True Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 10:34am

I am writing this to make a prediction based on my knowledge of the Israel Defense Forces. Below is a new New York Times headline, which I predict will be shown to be wrong. Click to read, and I’ll put a précis below.  I also found the article archived here.

The claims:

An Oct. 13 strike that killed a videographer for the Reuters news agency and injured six others in southern Lebanon was carried out by the Israeli military and appeared to be a deliberate attack, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.

The watchdog group said that evidence it had reviewed — including dozens of videos of the incident, photographs and satellite images, and interviews with witnesses and military experts — showed that the journalists were not near areas where fighting was taking place and that there was no military objective near their position.

“The attack on the journalists’ position directly targeted them,” the report said, labeling the attack a war crime.

The Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to the report.

Reuters published its own investigation on Thursday and said that an Israeli tank crew had killed its journalist and wounded the others.

. . . On Oct. 13, a week after Hamas attacks on Israel sparked an all-out war, the seven journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, were standing on a hilltop in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. They were filming and broadcasting cross-border shelling between the Israeli army and Lebanese militants allied with Hamas.

The report said that the journalists were wearing antiballistic jackets marked “Press” and had a car marked “TV.” They had been at that position for more than an hour and were visible from an Israeli military location more than a mile away, the report said.

The report said that two munitions, fired within 37 seconds of each other, killed Mr. Abdallah, and injured the six others. A car belonging to Al Jazeera was destroyed. Ramzi Kaiss, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that it was an “apparently deliberate attack on civilians and thus a war crime.”

. . . In a separate report, which contained some of the same information, the human rights group Amnesty International said that the journalists were stationary and that their markings “should have provided sufficient information to Israeli forces that these were journalists and civilians and not a military target.”

Now this may have occurred as reported, but I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that this was by no means a deliberate targeting of journalists. Why do I say this?

a.  The IDF does not deliberately target civilians, including journalists.  They may be killed if they’re in the line of fire, but not as targets.

b. It would be completely inimical, and highly damaging to both the IDF and Israel, if the military was discovered to have targeted civilians and especially journalists. The IDF is especially careful not to do this, both because they value innocent life and also because the eyes of the world are on them, watching their every move. No Army in the world is as careful as Israel’s to target only military objectives. (That said, of course, this could be a mistake; see below.)

c. The reports come from two groups known to be resolutely anti-Israel: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. I suspect they are keen to rush to judgement, as has the mainstream liberal media in all of this war. Remember when the NYT, the BBC, and other liberal sources reported that Israel had hit the al-Ahli Hospital in late October, killing 500? It turned out that it wasn’t Israel that damaged the area (it was a parking lot, not the hospital itself), but a misfired missile launched by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, and that far fewer people were killed.

d. Israel’s lack of commenting is, I think, because the IDF is investigating the incident. It didn’t comment right away on the al-Ahli bombing, either, and some took that as an Israeli admission of guilt.

I think the most likely possibility for what happened is that the IDF was fired on from a site near where the journalists were, and returned fire, hitting the journalists who were bystanders to the action. Alternatively, it could have been a simple mistake, but I think that less likely as I don’t think the IDF would fire on a car without any good reason.  What I think did not happen is that the IDF simply wanted to kill journalists and shot them.

Now I may be wrong, and if so I’ll admit it, but, more important, the IDF will admit it, as it has admitted previously when it screwed up. If IDF soldiers violate the army’s code of conduct (such as killing a wounded terrorist who poses no danger because he’s lying on the ground), they can go to jail.

The chance that the headline above is accurate is, in my view, very close to zero. Stay tuned.

Oh, and by the way, when was the last time you saw a NYT headline that Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International condemned Hamas or Islamic Jihad for committing a war crime? Palestinian terrorists do that on a daily basis, you know—most often by firing rockets willy-nilly at Israel.

Categories: Science

Microplastic pollution rained down on Canada during a hurricane

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 9:01am
When Hurricane Larry struck Newfoundland in 2021, large amounts of microplastic fell from the sky, probably because the storm travelled over an ocean garbage patch
Categories: Science

No evidence yet that the shooting of three Muslim students in Vermont was a hate crime

Why Evolution is True Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 8:40am

On November 25, you may recall, three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were shot n Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens (not “Palestinians”); the other a legal resident.  The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill.

Two of the students have been treated and released from the hospital, but the third was shot in the spine and may never walk again. This was a reprehensible crime that may have stolen a huge part of the life from one victim.

But was it a hate crime?

On December 1 I wrote about how desperately the media seemed to want it to be a hate crime, for it fit the narrative of “Isamophobia” touted by progressives. Muslims, too, seemed to share the notion that it must have been a hate crime. After all, two of the boys were wearing kaffiyehs, the Palestinian headscarf, and they were speaking Arabic to each other.

Now, eleven days later, it appears that there is still no evidence for the alleged perpetrator having a particular hatred for Muslims, even though his social media posts have been thoroughly scrutinized. And yet the desire for this to be an “Islamophobic” crime remains.  Here’s from an op-ed in the latest Harvard Crimson (bolding is mine)

At Stanford University, campus police are investigating allegations that a student wearing a shirt with the Syrian city of Damascus written in Arabic on it was struck by a car, the driver of which yelled, “Fuck you people.” At George Washington University, students reported instances of strangers ripping hijabs from the heads of Muslim students. And at Yale University, a message declaring “Death to Palestine” was found written on a whiteboard inside of a student dorm building.

On Nov. 25, this bigotry turned into bullets.

That day, three Palestinian college students in Vermont were shot while speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves. That attack on Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University; Kinnan Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford University; and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, a student at Trinity University, should remind the nation of the consequences of ignoring anti-Palestinian racism.

These racist attacks are not isolated incidents.

Note the complete lack of doubt in the bit above.

VICE News, an uber-woke organ, has combed through Eaton’s social media posts, and though there’s evidence of an unbalanced mind (Eaton struggled with depression and also went through 19 jobs in nine years), there’s not a hint of hatred of Muslims or Arabs. Nevertheless, the VICE article is called “Everything we now abut the man accused of shooting three Palestinian students in Vermont” with the dark subheading, “Social media accounts linked to Jason J. Eaton by VICE News show a number of troubling posts.”  Troubling? Any sign of “Islamophobia”?

Nope; the “troubling” bit is that his posts often appeared unhinged. Here’s what VICE dug up:

But Business Insider also cited evidence, first uncovered by Vice, of a “conspiratorial” bent in posts on what appear to be Eaton’s social media accounts, most of which have since been deleted or locked. One, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, said “Libertarians want trans furrys to be able to protect their cannabis farms with unregistered machine guns.”

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Further evidence of Eaton’s worldview comes in 2004, when the Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire, which belongs to the USA TODAY Network, reported Eaton was presenting a lecture at a local church about, in Eaton’s words, “taking back the money and power that consumers have ceded to multinational corporations.”

And there’s this:

One of Eaton’s struggles was with romantic relationships, according to a police report. On Oct. 21, 2019, two officers from the Dewitt Police Department in New York, near Syracuse, were dispatched to the residence of a woman who had a previous relationship with Eaton, but who said he was now continuing to text her after she told him to stop.

No mention of Muslims yet. Here’s an implicit accusation of anti-Muslim bigotry from a Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:

THE FACE OF THE FUTURE?

THIS may be the face of the future—unless Americans address hate within. Jason Eaton was charged w/ 3 counts of 2nd degree attempted murder after allegedly shooting 3 Palestinian students. We need a moral makeover, if not plastic surgery. #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/GKRJTcgVRc

— Rev. & Prof. Cornell William Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) November 27, 2023

You can find any number of Muslims who are convinced that this was a hate crime motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment itself inflamed by the war. Here’s part of an NPR interview with Abed Ayoub, National Executive Director, Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (my bolding)

  • William Brangham:

    As we reported, we still don’t know what the motive is here, whether this was a random attack or whether these young men were specifically targeted because they’re Palestinian.

    The families, as you know, put out a statement today saying they clearly believe that this is a hate crime. And I want to read an excerpt of this. They place the blame on: “U.S. media and even elected officials from the highest levels of the government have repeated racist and dehumanizing language in recent weeks. This hateful rhetoric emboldens people to act with violence.”

    I’m curious, do you share that same belief?

Abed Ayoub:

Absolutely.

Our belief has been that the rhetoric against Arabs, against Palestinians in this country, the dehumanization of Palestinians would eventually lead to these violent hate crimes we’re seeing. That’s exactly what’s happening. That’s what happened in Chicago to Wadea, the 6-year-old was stabbed.

That’s what happened in this situation and other examples that our office has been fielding across the country since early October. So the rhetoric, the way we’re being dehumanized and the way Arabs and Palestinians are being portrayed leads to these violent hate crimes.

And, unfortunately, this may not be the last incident we hear of, unless there’s an effort to change the rhetoric and to change the way we are being portrayed.

I could give many more examples, but you can look them up yourself  The point is that people are willing to believe something without any evidence, and that “something” is what fulfills the ideological narrative they’ve embraced. One would think that Muslims and advocates of comity would be happy if there were no evidence that Eaton hated Muslims. Then it would be a simple “non hate” crime, perhaps one prompted by an unstable mind, and Islamophobia wouldn’t be as pervasive. But people seem to want that not to be true.

It’s also an example of how the divisiveness of people based on their identity has become embedded in society. If a Muslim, black, or Jew has been killed, we assume automatically that their race or religion was a factor.  But really: we need some evidence before rushing to judgement.

Categories: Science

Holiday snaps: Boston and Cambridge

Why Evolution is True Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 7:15am

Here are a few photos I’ve taken in Cambridge and Boston during the past few days. My dining has been sporadic and not that photogenic, so there aren’t any pictures of fancy meals.

A new duck for me: a male ring-necked duck (Aythya collaris) on Fresh Pond in Cambridge. It’s a diving duck, and, sure enough, it dove several times, but it was wary and this is the best photo I could get with a telephoto lens.

Lamb rogan josh at the Maharaja Restaurant in Cambridge. They used to have a great buffet, but sadly, it’s gone. The food, however, is very good.

Do you remember “Car Talk,” the fascinating auto-repair show that used to be on NPR, hosted by the Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers (Tom and Ray Magliozzi)? Well, that show originated from Harvard Square. As Wikipedia notes,

The show’s offices were located near their shop at the corner of JFK Street and Brattle Street in Harvard Square, marked as “Dewey, Cheetham & Howe“, the imaginary law firm to which they referred on-air. DC&H doubled as the business name of Tappet Brothers Associates, the corporation established to manage the business end of Car Talk. Initially a joke, the company was incorporated after the show expanded from a single station to national syndication.

The offices are still there, though the show is gone (Tom died in 2014). Here’s the building and the famous sign:

I hope you recognize the pun in the name.

Two days ago I wandered down to the Boston Common and the adjacent Public Garden with one aim: to photograph the bronze statue of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings, all modeled on a single drawing in the best children’s book ever written, Make Way for DucklingsThe book, written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey and published in 1941, recounts the story of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, a mated pair of ducks and their ducklings, who, after many travails, find a home in the pond in the Public Gardens. Here’s an illustration from the story showing Mrs. Mallard (Mr. Mallard was a deadbeat dad who largely abandoned the family) with her eight ducklings getting some help crossing the street. The ducklings were named Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack.

The sculpture I wanted to see (and have seen many times before), was created by Nancy SchönWikipedia says this:

The original set of bronze statues was installed in the Boston Public Garden in 1987, and a copy was installed in Moscow at Novodevichy Park in 1991.

. . . The Make Way for Ducklings sculpture is routinely dressed in outfits throughout the year, for various Boston sports teams, for events such as the Boston Marathon, and for holidays such as Mother’s Day.

I knew that they would be dressed for the cold, but here’s what the undressed ducks look like  (photo from Wikipedia). The poses are identical to one of the illustrations in the book.

And here’s the whole family, wearing little hand-knit sweaters to keep out the cold (my photos):

Mrs. Mallard’s hat had slipped off, so I put it back on:

. . . and the eight babies, each with a different costume. My friend Tim walked by the ducklings on Tuesday (later on the day I visited), and reported that two duckling costumes were missing. The miscreant who removed them should be arrested! Fortunately, they were all dressed when I saw them.

Hand knitting on the sweaters!

Across the Boston Common is a new statue, “The Embrace,” by Hank Willis Thomas. Wikipedia says this:

The artwork commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and depicts four intertwined arms, representing the hug they shared after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The work was created by welding together about 609 smaller pieces. The sculpture has received largely negative responses from critics and the public.

The negative responses were based largely on the fact that it shows only the intertwined arms and not Martin or Coretta. But that seems petty when you see the sculpture, which I liked:

An inscription by the statue:

. . . and the Massachusetts Statehouse, the Capitol building of the state, first constructed in 1798 and expanded in 1895. It’s one of the oldest existing state capitol buildings.

A panorama of downtown Boston from the Boston Common (click to enlarge). My shadow is at right.

Some food.  First, a lamb gyro, salad, and fries from The Greek Corner Restaurant in Cambridge (as I said, I didn’t eat fancy food):

And no visit to Cambridge is complete without a visit to America’s finest purveyor of homemade ice cream, Christina’s. Here’s the list of flavors, which I’ve put in black and white to make the flavors more legible. Too much choice! It was hard for me to decide, as I was having only two scoops:

Azuki bean and green tea is a great Japanese-style mixture (carrot cake, which has a cream-cheese-icing flavor, is also excellent), but I had to get their best flavor, burnt sugar. It is the best flavor of ice cream in the world. With it I had a scoop of ginger-molasses, which was excellent. If you go to Cambridge and don’t go to Christina’s, you’ll have missed a great culinary experience.  My cup:

Categories: Science

Seams on a baseball shift its trajectory by unexpectedly large amount

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 7:00am
When a baseball is tilted and spinning just right, its raised, hand-stitched seams skew the process by which its wake is created and radically shift its trajectory in the air
Categories: Science

Sand-dwelling fungi discovered and named after Dune's giant sandworms

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 4:00am
One of four newly described species of "stalked puffball" fungi from Hungary’s Pannonian steppe erupts out of the sand like the iconic Shai-Hulud
Categories: Science

The top ten films about artificial intelligence according to an expert

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 3:30am
From Wall-E to Short Circuit via I, Robot, these are the best films out there about AI, says Alan Turing Institute ethics fellow Mhairi Aitken
Categories: Science

Uganda is planning a massive clean energy expansion – paid for by oil

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 3:00am
Uganda announced a plan at COP28 to use oil revenues to fund a rapid expansion of clean energy across the east African country
Categories: Science

Unusual dark hedgehog from eastern China is new to science

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 2:00am
A species of hedgehog that hadn't been scientifically identified before has been discovered in two eastern Chinese provinces
Categories: Science

Insects thrive on solar farms planted with native flowers

New Scientist Feed - Thu, 12/07/2023 - 1:00am
Two solar farms in Minnesota saw big increases in bees and other insects after a variety of native grasses and wildlfowers were planted among the panels
Categories: Science

Genetic errors are behind more than two thirds of early miscarriages

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 12/06/2023 - 10:00pm
Chromosomal abnormalities were thought to cause around half of miscarriages, but a new genetic analysis technique puts the figure at nearer two-thirds for early miscarriages, with the remaining third probably also due to factors that are out of our control
Categories: Science

Quantum computer sets record on path towards error-free calculations

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 12/06/2023 - 1:21pm
A quantum computer built by QuEra contains the largest ever number of "logical quantum bits", which can be used for error-free calculations
Categories: Science

Robotic mouse with flexible spine moves with greater speed and agility

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 12/06/2023 - 11:00am
Most robots lack a flexible spine, so researchers created a 3D-printed mouse with the ability to bend its back and found that it could move faster
Categories: Science

DNA nanobots can exponentially self-replicate

New Scientist Feed - Wed, 12/06/2023 - 11:00am
Tiny machines made from strands of DNA can build copies of themselves, leading to exponential replication. Similar devices could one day be used to create drugs inside the body
Categories: Science

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