Someone has, for reasons upon which I will not speculate, uploaded the entirety of the film adaptation of apocolypti-porn blockbuster Left Behind to YouTube. Which is as good as an invitation to slacktivist Fred Clark, who’s already eviscerated the book. A brief sample:
This is why NORAD doesn’t let foreigners with satellite-broadcasting equipment just wander in to their central command. You shout something, some botanist translates it for them, and the next thing you know your military secrets are being broadcast to the entire world by some hack reporter who acts like you’d just sat down with him for an interview.
For all the scaremongering “defense of marriage” language used by supporters of Proposition 8, the passage of this silly measure actually dealt the institution a severe blow. What had been a right is now only a privilege — a privilege that the state is free to withhold as it sees fit. Yielding that kind of power to the state is not the sort of thing that a free people ought to be doing if they wish to remain a free people.
I can’t resist this one: a (very) minority religious group is suing a Utah town because it wouldn’t accept their donation of a monument to sit beside a Ten Commandments plaque in a public park. The New York Times says the case goes to the Supreme Court tomorrow. The minority religion in question is called Summum – it apparently incorporates elements of Gnostic Christianity and ancient Egyptian iconography. The monument they to donate would have been carved with the text of Summum’s Seven Aphorisms, which are supposed to have been given to Moses along with the Ten Commandments.
The situation is a real-world version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument against mixing church and state – once you incorporate one religious narrative into state-sponsored architecture, science curricula, or whatever, how can you argue that any religious narrative isn’t appropriate for inclusion? (The FSM is a facetious Creator originally proposed for inclusion in Kansan public school science classes, as an “alternative” to both scientific explanations and Christian Creationism.) The Summum church has a point. And that point is (perhaps contrary to their actual wishes) that the Ten Commandments has no more business in a government-funded public space than the Seven Aphorisms do.
It’s real. In spite of frantic flipping between (at various points) tallies by NPR, the New York Times, good ol’ FiveThirtyEight, and the BBC, I actually saw the news first from “The Daily Show” election special.
I have never felt so proud of my country. Americans did the right thing, even if after trying everything else first. Barack Obama’s win tonight represents a victory for deliberation over impulse and for nuance over polarization. He withstood some of the ugliest things Americans are willing to say about other Americans, and reminded us that we are all in this together. There is a lot of work to be done – and much of it just undoing the work of the previous President. But if anyone can do it, it’s Barack Obama.
The more I think about it the more this election day feels like one giant collective, global puke. That Bush-Cheney thing never quite settled with us, did it? We’ll feel a lot better but a lot more tired once the last heave is over.
Yeah, I finally watched Barack Obama’s half-hour message, online. It’s an excellent wrap-up to a too-long campaign and it hit all the right notes for me, anyway. Some of it is production values, of course, but there were genuinely affecting passages, especially when Obama tied his own story to the particular issues he addressed, as with education or health care. Folks have compared him to John F. Kennedy quite a bit, but I think actually the better parallel is with Abraham Lincoln – a man who essentially came from nowhere by dint of study, ambition, and genuine vision. He’ll have a lot to live up to if he wins – but I’ll be proud to punch my ballot for Barack Obama.
Postscript: What if, instead of public financing, we just gave every candidate a half-hour block of TV time to use as he or she would in the week before Election Day? This long form emphasizes, if anything, the sheer volume of substantive policy proposals that make up Obama’s platform – and might point up a candidate who didn’t have anything substantive to say.
A monarch butterfly, collecting nectar and probably transferring pollen (Flickr, jby)
The authors, Jantzen and Eisner, start from the premise that the large, showy wings of butterflies should (very generally) make them major targets of predation. They note, however, that butterflies are also marked by highly erratic flight – an extreme maneuverability that makes it difficult for a predator to guess where a butterfly is going to be in the future based on its current trajectory. Maybe showy wings actually act as a kind of inverse protective coloration:
A bird, we suggest, could learn or inherently know that brightly colored airborne prey, discernible from afar, is not worth the chase. Too elusive to catch and, because of their [wing] scales, too slippery to hold … Birds might simply write butterflies off, and … relegate them all to the category of the undesirable, treating them as they treat noxious insects that they disregard.
Jantzen and Eisner’s experiment, in which they amputated butterflies’ hindwings, confirms that butterflies can still fly without the second pair of wings, but fly less erratically. Does the result confirm the authors’ major hypothesis, though? I’m not so sure. There are plenty of other reasons to have big, showy wings – mate attraction, or as placement for eye spots to fool predators – and plenty of butterflies and moths are comparatively small and non-showy. Jantzen and Eisner’s hypothesis smells more than a bit like adaptive story-telling, though it provides some food for thought.
Reference
B. Jantzen, T. Eisner (2008). Hindwings are unnecessary for flight but essential for execution of normal evasive flight in Lepidoptera PNAS, 105 (43), 16636-40 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807223105
