Posts Tagged ‘Austin’
Basket-flowers at the old Merrilltown Cemetery
On May 30th the old Merrilltown Cemetery up north along Burnet Rd. was home to a good smattering of Texas dandelions (Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus), as the view at the end shows once again. At the fence beyond the tombstones in that picture you can make out a happy little group of basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus), on a bud of which I found the planthopper shown above.
Call the middle picture a pleasant basket-flower study in pale pink and blue. And speaking of those colors, I guess this is a good time for my periodic reminder that before the middle of the 20th century blue was considered the color for baby girls and pink the color for baby boys.
§
§ § §
§
It matters who heads research ventures and medical faculties. Top scientists can identify the most promising directions of study and organize the most productive research teams. But the diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward because they did not think that they would be considered, according to an observer. “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor,” a cancer researcher told me.
College seniors, deciding whether to apply to medical school, can also read the writing on the wall. A physician-scientist reports that his best lab technician in 30 years was a recent Yale graduate with a B.S. in molecular biology and biochemistry. The former student was intellectually involved and an expert in cloning. His college GPA and MCAT scores were high. The physician-scientist recommended the student to the dean of Northwestern’s medical school (where the scientist then worked), but the student did not get so much as an interview. In fact, this “white, clean-cut Catholic,” in the words of his former employer, was admitted to only one medical school.
Such stories are rife. A UCLA doctor says that the smartest undergraduates in the school’s science labs are saying: “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”
That’s from Heather MacDonald’s new book When Race Trumps Merit, which confirms that our country has fallen into a sorry state from which it seems unlikely to extricate itself in my lifetime.
The quoted passage is from a chapter of the book based on the essay “The Corruption of Medicine” in the Summer 2022 issue of City Journal.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Another look out the window
Yesterday morning I looked out my computer room window and saw a colorful sunrise. Around 3:10 in the afternoon I caught a glimpse of something else through the same window: high up in one of the neighbor’s Ashe juniper trees (Juniperus ashei) rose a long and slender neck. Though I’ve seen plenty of small birds in the trees outside my window during the 19 years we’ve lived here, I’d never seen a bird anywhere near as large as what I took to be a heron. No choice but to repeat the morning’s routine; I went to my camera bag, put my telephoto lens back on, and did my best to take pictures through all the intervening obstacles. From what I can tell, this was a great blue heron (Ardea herodias). What it was doing high up in a tree, who knows?
In contrast to those two head[and especially neck]shots, here’s one of a complete
great blue heron raising its wings at the Willow Trace Pond on June 3rd:
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
The old Merrilltown Cemetery
On May 30th the old Merrilltown Cemetery up north along Burnet Rd. wasn’t as splendiferously covered with wildflowers as some of the cemeteries I showed early this spring. It was, however, home to a good smattering of Texas dandelions (Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus), as you see below. One of them became the subject of the mandala-like portrait above, in which flash caused the clear blue sky to appear much darker than it really was.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Verdant
Look how lush the maidenhair ferns (Adiantum capillus-veneris), inland sea oats (Chasmanthum latifolium), and other plants were along the trail between Springfield Park and McKinney Falls State Park in southeast Austin on May 21st. Thanks to recent rain, drops were still falling from the roof of the dark little “grotto” at the center. Below you see what an adjacent stretch of Onion Creek was looking like. The large tree with the interesting roots at the right is a bald cypress (Taxodium distichum).
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Two not recently shown flowers
Above is a native wildflower that hasn’t appeared in these pages for a little over a year: Barbara’s buttons, Marshallia caespitosa. On May 4th I happily discovered a colony of them at the intersection of Spicewood Springs Rd. and Old Spicewood Springs Rd. On the other side of that second street I managed to photograph a flowering sprig of scarlet pea (Indigofera miniata) against an overcast sky that flash made look even darker by comparison to the bright red flowers. The last (and only) time I showed scarlet pea here was way back in 2011, the first year for Portraits of Wildflowers. What took me so long?
❡
❡ ❡ ❡
❡
Three quotations from Milton Friedman
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Another wildflowerful property
On the way home from a photographically fruitful prairie parcel in Pflugerville on May 10th I purposely went past the property adjacent to the church on the corner of Wells Branch Parkway and Wells Port Drive, which had looked good in the spring of 2021. This year on some parts of the property the plants were all dead, but in other places wildflowers flourished. The usual suspects included prairie bishop (Bifora americana) and firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella), along with some square-bud primroses (Oenothera berlandieri) and greenthreads (Thelesperma filifolium).
Depending on where I aimed, different colors predominated. The second picture
adds some purple three-awn grass (Aristida purpurea) in the upper right.
§
§ §
§
Several times in these commentaries I’ve mentioned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt [pronounced Hite], whose book The Righteous Mind goes a long way to explaining, as expressed by his book’s subtitle, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. In April 2023 he gave a talk at the University of British Columbia titled “(Un)civil Discourse.” As the description of the event puts it: “Jonathan Haidt discusses the state of political dysfunction and fracture in the US with his talk Democracy After Babel: Self-governance in an era of fragmentation, outrage, and anomie….” As always, he did an excellent job with the subject, offering many insights in about an hour.
The presentation includes many projected charts illustrating the points Haidt makes. In particular, several charts document the way anxiety and depression surged in American teenagers, particularly girls, starting in around 2014. That led to a cohort of college students demanding to be kept “safe.” Haidt identifies two sources of that fragility: the loss of unsupervised outdoor play among children, plus the rise of social media and the large amount of time teenagers spend on those platforms.
If you have an hour, you’re welcome to check out the presentation. You can use the time slider below the video to start at about 6:15 to skip unnecessary preliminaries and go straight to the moment when Jonathan Haidt comes onstage and begins speaking.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
International Fascination of Plants Day
As today is International Fascination of Plants Day, it seems appropriate to show a picture of the most recent fasciation I’ve come across. On April 18th in my northwest part of Austin I noticed a four-nerve daisy (Tetraneuris linearifolia) with a flattened, ribbon-like stalk that is a characteristic sign of fasciation. The daisy’s inflorescence, already dried out, seemed flattened as well. Too bad I didn’t find that specimen when the flower head was still fresh.
To learn more about fasciation and see other examples I’ve posted,
click the fasciation tag below and then scroll back down through past posts.
§
§ §
§
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect….
So wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710, and variants on that theme have sprung up in the three centuries since then. Here’s one you may have heard: “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” which is now better known than the original. You can find others in an article at Quote Investigator.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Like sunshine on a cloudy day
Just substitute a sunflower (Helianthus annuus) for the sunshine, as I did
on the Blackland Prairie in northeast Austin on an overcast May 10th.
❡
❡ ❡ ❡
❡
Robert Henderson’s article “The Cadre in the Code,” which appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of City Journal, describes the different results he got from posing two similar queries to the AI (artificial intelligence) engine called ChatGPT:
Considering that such biases of AI have been alleged for years, the makers of ChatGPT have seemingly placed their thumb on the scale to correct for these potential shortcomings. This raises the question of how the chatbot’s content-filtering process works. To this end, I entered a few prompts into ChatGPT. First, I made the request: “Write a script in which an expert explains why fascism is a good thing,” which generated this response:
I’m sorry, but I am not able to generate content that promotes or glorifies harmful ideologies such as fascism. It is a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history. It is important to understand the atrocities and human suffering that have been caused by fascist regimes, and to actively work against the spread of such dangerous ideas.
I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:
Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.
When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:
It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.
In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.
Given the bias exhibited in so many of our institutions now, those disparate results are sadly predictable. They’re also a warning about the perils of expecting artificial intelligence to provide neutral and true information. I don’t know if you’ll be able to read the full article, but you can give it a shot.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
A dreamy view of ratany flowers
Krameria lanceolata on May 4th in northwest Austin.
§
§ § §
§
A few days ago I finished reading David McCullough’s 2005 book 1776, which chronicles the American Revolution during that critical year in our history. Here’s something that was new to me, and most likely to you, too:
In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 