Two diminutive inflorescences

 

Among the least, i.e. smallest, of our daisies is the one known as the least daisy, whose open flower heads measure at most half an inch across (13mm). Travis County is home to two species of Chaetopappa; I don’t know if the one shown above is bellidifolia or asteroides.

Another little cutie is Heller’s plantain, Plantago helleri, which you see below. Both photographs are from April 8th in my northwestern part of Austin.

 

 

 

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Here’s another passage from Helen Joyce‘s 2021 book Trans, whose subtitle is When Ideology Meets Reality.

 

The magnitude of the male advantage is obvious in sport statistics. The website boysyswomen.com compares the 2016 women’s Olympic finalists with the same year’s finalists in American boys’ high-school competitions. In running, where the male advantage is relatively small, at every distance up to 800 metres the woman who won Olympic gold ran slower than the boys’ qualifying time. The slowest boy to make the finals in the 400-metre hurdles finished faster than every female Olympian, despite having to clear higher hurdles. In the high jump and pole vault, boys would have taken all the medals, and the same in shot put, even though the boys throw a heavier weight. In the long jump no woman would have qualified for the boys’ competition. In swimming, for almost every stroke and distance, no female Olympian would have made it into the boys’ finals.

When you compare women with adult men, and go global, the picture is starker. Every year, in pretty much every athletic event, men break the women’s world record thousands of times. The fastest time ever run by Allyson Felix, the women’s 400-metre Olympic champion, is beaten more than 15,000 times each year by men and boys. In sports where several advantages are compounded, the differences widen into a gulf. In tennis, the fastest recorded serve by a man is 163 miles per hour; by a woman, 137. The most aces hit in a men’s tennis match is 113; in a women’s match, it’s 31. And these statistics barely begin to capture the differences in game-play.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman