Amateur night on the town

Mark Steel proposes:

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve so it’s going to be FUN. Because this is when you’re not only allowed but encouraged to get drunk ….

…. New Year’s Eve is like those boards that local authorities put up for kids to graffiti on, or the chants that baseball fans are directed to sing by stadium announcers. By making these acts official the fun is ruined ….

…. [Y]ou’ve a better chance of having a brilliant time at Christmas and New Year if you ignore the fact it’s Christmas and New Year. Or join a religion that insists the Christians are three days out, then get absolutely smashed on January 4th.

There are a couple of other holidays like this; there is plenty of drinking and revelry on the Fourth of July in the United States, and wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day, 2008, moved to the ides of March to avoid everyone getting drunk on Sunday and being hung over on Monday?

I once asked a friend of mine if he had any plans on St. Patrick’s Day, and he said, “No, not really. Too many amateurs out tonight.”

He has a point.

Shutter speed

Okay, I know this sounds stupid, but what is the muzzle velocity, as such, of a mortar round? No, really.

Because this is a great photo:

I mean, that might be as clearly as you will ever see one of those things in flight.

Okay, okay, so it’s another from the BBC’s Year in pictures.

But, y’know … it’s just a really cool photo, even for a pacifist like me.

Who’s your daddy?

Obviously, I’m missing something, or presuming too much. Something like that.

The caption reads, “U.S. President Barack Obama warned of ‘difficult days ahead’ in Iraq as U.S. troops withdraw from towns and cities, six years after the invasion. Here, a young boy reacts upon seeing his father return from a 12 month tour in Iraq”.

Now, like I said, there must be something wrong with my perception of the frame. Perhaps it’s more fun to simply ask if anyone else sees it?

Okay, okay. So, “Welcome Home Daddy”? (What, you see it now?)

I guess I’m wrong to presume that the child in the picture is associated with the pregnant woman, because I find myself wondering … um … you know … a twelve month tour? Welcome home Daddy? What, is the new one waiting a couple extra months for Daddy to get home? Or ….

Or maybe that’s just unseemly. At any rate, this one made the BBC’s Year In Pictures. There’s only twelve of them, so it’s not all that detailed an account of the year, but, you know, check it out if you’re interested. Hell, I figure a little unseemly humor probably works better than war, massive arson, or swine flu.

Anyway, yeah. I won’t claim this a useful post, but it’s something to do. Er … whatever. I’ll shut up now.

Hatred is myopic

Prominent hatemonger Peter LaBarbera offers this amazingly myopic argument:

A little over a year ago, Amanda Collette became the ultimate victim of homosexuality when Wimberly shot her in the back at school. As the Miami Herald reported, “Collette, 15, a star dancer on the school’s hip-hop dance squad, had rejected romantic advances from Wimberly in the days before the shooting.” Minutes after the shooting, Wimberly cried in a call to the 911 operator: ”I didn’t want to kill her so I shot her in the back . . . I just wanted to give her the pain she gave me.”

Regardless of what other factors were involved in this tragedy, it is not unreasonable to assert that Collette would be alive today were it not for the modern GLBT activist movement, which aggressively seeks to mainstream sexual deviance and immoral gay/lesbian “relationships” as normal and acceptable — most tragically among young people.

Yes, Virginia, there was a time in America when young women did not have to worry about sexual harassment and sexual advances from other young women. And the GLBT movement is first and foremost to blame for the rising number of youth who are embracing homosexual behaviors and considering destructive “gay,” lesbian, bisexual, or “transgender” self-”identities,” at younger and younger ages. We ask you to pray for the families of both Collette and Wimberly, and pray for the Christian conversion of Teah Wimberly as she awaits sentencing.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment:

If one murder committed by a homosexual teenager caught up in the confusion of love, lust, and hormones, is an indictment of homosexuality, what do the thousands of rapes, murders, and beatings between heterosexuals say of heterosexuality?

The ants go marching ….

Okay, so this is like really, really cool. Victoria Gill, writing for BBC, lets us in on the coolness:

In Africa and in the tropics, armies of tiny creatures make the twisting stems of acacia plants their homes.

Aggressive, stinging ants feed on the sugary nectar the plant provides and live in nests protected by its thick bark.

This is the world of “ant guards”.

The acacias might appear overrun by them, but the plants have the ants wrapped around their little stems.

These same plants that provide shelter and produce nourishing nectar to feed the insects also make chemicals that send them into a defensive frenzy, forcing them into retreat.

It is actually a fairly intricate relationship, with the ants territorially protecting a food source, including the swarming of larger herbivores, and the tree being able to chemically prevent the ants from causing too much havoc. Dr. Nigel Raine, at University of London, explained:

“The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.”

In recent studies, described in the journal Functional Ecology, Dr Raine and his colleagues found that the plants with the closest relationships with ants – those that provided homes for their miniature guard army – produced the chemicals that were most effective at keeping the ants at bay.

“And that was associated with the flower being open,” he says. “So the chemicals are probably in the pollen” ….

…. The repellent chemicals are specific to the ants. In fact, they attract and repel different groups of insects.

“[The chemicals] don’t repel bees, even though they are quite closely related to ants. And in some cases, the chemicals actually seem to attract the bees,” says Dr Raine.

The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate.

“We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained.

“The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.”

Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.

Not quite the Christmas spirit

Because Christmas isn’t complete without its depressing tragedies:

A pastor fatally shot one of his eight children on Christmas Day during a dispute at the family home, where more than a dozen relatives had gathered to celebrate the holiday, police said.

Kirk Caldwell killed 21-year-old Jordan Caldwell after intervening in a violent confrontation between the son and a woman at around 2 p.m. at their home in suburban Philadelphia, Darby Borough police said Friday.

Kirk Caldwell fired a single shot, striking his son in the chest, police Chief Robert Smythe said. Jordan Caldwell died at a hospital shortly afterward, police said ….

…. As a pastor at End Times Harvest Mission for Christ in Philadelphia, Kirk Caldwell had spoken against violence at a vigil for a slain teen in Darby last summer.

“Retaliation is never the answer. Retaliation is only going to make it worse,” Caldwell said, according to the Daily Times of Delaware County.

According to the Associated Press, no charges had been filed against the forty-four year-old preacher as of Friday.

Still, it will probably make for some awkward family gatherings in the future.

(Thanks, of course, to Dan Savage for brightening my holiday.)

Inherent corruption

It’s really quite simple:

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

Goldman and other Wall Street firms maintain there is nothing improper about synthetic C.D.O.s, saying that they typically employ many trading techniques to hedge investments and protect against losses. They add that many prudent investors often do the same. Goldman used these securities initially to offset any potential losses stemming from its positive bets on mortgage securities.

But Goldman and other firms eventually used the C.D.O.s to place unusually large negative bets that were not mainly for hedging purposes, and investors and industry experts say that put the firms at odds with their own clients’ interests.

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

This is capitalism.

From the This Isn’t Really News department

We shouldn’t be surprised at the news Clyde Haberman brings:

In this season given to tidings of comfort and joy, word has come that we New Yorkers are the sad sacks of the United States. This is something of a surprise. Sure, we complain a lot. Grumbling could qualify as the official state sport. But are we really the unhappiest of them all?

It seems so, judging from a study by two economics professors, newly published in Science magazine. The academics — Andrew J. Oswald, of the University of Warwick in Britain, and Stephen Wu, of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. — examined piles of data, tossed them into a research Cuisinart and came up with a guide to American happiness, ranked by state. On the smiley scale, New York landed on the bottom.

Dead last?

“I’m sorry about that,” Professor Oswald said by phone from Warwick.

It’s rather dismal. If there were a National Happy League, we’d be the New Jersey Nets. We’re No. 51 out of 51. The District of Columbia was included in the list as if it were a state. It made it all the way to No. 37 despite the handicap of having Congress in its midst.

Two words I didn’t need to hear today: ‘mating plug’

The upside of prudery:

Scientists believe it may be possible to combat malaria by interfering with the sex lives of the mosquitoes which spread the disease.

They have shown that the insects can only mate successfully if the male is able to seal his sperm inside the female using a “mating plug”.

Without the plug, fertilisation cannot occur, and the animals cannot reproduce.

There is a lot in the BBC article about plugs. I haven’t yet decided if that is disquieting.

Rediscovery: Plants are alive

I’m not going to complain about Natalie Angier‘s opinion piece in today’s New York Times:

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Indeed, I’m glad to see it. But I wanted to point out that this isn’t exactly news.