A bright red beetle

 

On April 22nd I went over to the other side of Great Hills Park to see whether any Mexican hats, Ratibida columnifera, had already come up this spring in a place where I’d found them in other years. Some had. On one of them I couldn’t help noticing an insect that Robert Androw at bugguide.net has identified as the longhorn beetle Batyle suturalis. I’d identified it as a bright red beetle, which shows the difference in our entomological skills. When it comes to etymology, though, our roles are most likely reversed, with probably few if any of the good folks at bugguide.net knowing that the English word beetle is related to bite.

 

 

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We recently subscribed to New Scientist, a magazine published in London that comes out weekly, and with such a frequent publication schedule provides lots of articles about science. As expected of a magazine from Britain, more of its stories involve that country than would be the case in a magazine published in another country; even so, most of its articles report findings from all over the world.

The other day I was reading the April 15th issue and came to the Views column, in which Annalee Newitz wrote a piece about finding a new home online after giving up on Twitter. Who is the writer? The magazine includes a small photograph showing an androgynous-looking person, beneath which is a blurb that begins: “Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terrafarmers….”

Presumably the possessive pronoun their is to alert us that Annalee Newitz “identifies as” “non-binary” or “gender nonconforming” or “gender-fluid” or “gender-queer” or something similar. Now, that their is not the their that English has long used as a generic pronoun when we’re not thinking of a specific person and therefore can’t specify a gender. Here’s an example from Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair: “‘A person can’t help their birth,’ Rosalind replied with great liberality.” That usage has become more common in recent years, and probably few people would now think it strange to hear the advice that in the event of an airplane crash, each passenger exiting the plane should leave their belongings behind. We know that each passenger is either a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, but because we’re thinking of all the passengers on the plane, we’re okay with using a plural pronoun.

However, when referring to one specific person, English has always used either he or she, him or her, his or her. For example: “When Madeleine got out of the burning plane, she left her bag behind.” We would not traditionally say “Madeleine left their bag behind,” though I grant you a few people have started saying things like that.

In any case, as I started reading Annalee Newitz’s column I couldn’t help noticing how the second sentence began: “I abandoned my account last November….” After the magazine went out of its way to indicate that we should refer to Annalee as they, I had the strong feeling that Annalee should have written “We abandoned our account….” Presumably Annalee would argue that Annalee, though of no particular gender or of several genders, is still just one person, and therefore the singular I and my are appropriate. That leaves us with the situation in which people who refer to Annalee are supposed to use the plural pronoun they, but Annalee can still use the singular pronouns I and my. Ah, my foolish mind, looking for consistency in all the wrong places.

 

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Bug and beetle on Mexican hat

 

As I was leaving the grounds of the Hyde Park Baptist High School on May 30th I caught sight of a Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera) that didn’t look quite normal. When I got close to check it out I discovered a blister beetle on it, and then I noticed a bug lower down as well. After the bug (likely Calocoris barberi) moved up onto the column, I made this portrait.

 

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Last week I went to log in to my savings account at a bank. A message came up saying that the bank was reorganizing its online system and I’d need to create a new password. Okay, that happens. I began the process, as part of which I received an email with a temporary password I’d have to use. Here’s the relevant portion of that e-mail:

Your new temporary password is d5KzZYu-

Please sign in with the password exactly as shown including upper and lower case. Ensure that there is no punctuation, characters or spaces before or after the password.

Do you see my dilemma? I was told to use the password exactly as shown, and yet I was supposed to ensure that no punctuation appears after the password. Was the hyphen at the end of the first line the final character of the temporary password, or was it a punctuation mark I needed to avoid? Why would the people managing the bank allow such an ambiguity to occur? It’s easy for a programmer to exclude a hyphen and all other punctuation marks from the character set from which temporary passwords are generated. And yet that didn’t happen.

Another point of confusion during the process was a reference to an OTP device. Do you know what an OTP device is? I didn’t. It turns out that the bank intends OTP as an initialism for “one-time passcode.” So why doesn’t the bank just use the full phrase and avoid any doubt? I queried the internet just now to see if I could find out what OTP stands for. Some sites did say “one-time password” or “one-time passcode.” Other sites said that OTP means “on the phone,” “one true pairing,” or something less savory.

As you’ve heard me say more than once: everything online and in manuals needs to appear in a way that’s clear to a novice user. The fact that the company’s staff knows how to interpret things is irrelevant.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Full house

From May 13th at the Southwest Williamson County Regional Park, look at all the Euphoria kernii beetles that had crammed themselves into the base of a prickly pear cactus flower, Opuntia engelmannii. The beetles did seem to be in a state of euphoria.

 

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 Here’s more about consciousness from philosopher Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick:

So we have these three facts: thoughts and feelings are real, they are not describable in purely physical terms, but the universe has within it only the physical things described by the equations of physicists. It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them. As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, “your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively do, though I cannot observe such a thing as your life, touch it, put it under a microscope, or keep it on a bottle on a shelf.” Thought and feeling are what matter does, when it is arranged in the remarkably complex ways that brains are. Matter is all that is needed for them to exist, but they are not themselves lumps of matter. In this sense, “I” is a verb dressed as a noun.

The idea that the mental emerges from the physical is a tricky one. It looks to me like a partial description masquerading as an explanation. What I mean is, to say consciousness is an emergent property is not to explain consciousness at all. To do that you’d have to explain how it emerges, and although some claim to have done that, most remain unconvinced. But what does seem to be true is that consciousness does indeed emerge from complex physical events in the brain, even if we don’t know how it does so. Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there’s something else in our heads doing the mental work instead. The evidence for this is simple but overwhelming: damage the brain, and you impair consciousness. Change the chemicals in the brain, and you change consciousness. Stimulate certain parts of the brain, and you get a certain kind of experience. To accept this (as surely we must) but insist that brains aren’t the engines of thought is not impossible, but it is perverse.

(Another passage appeared in a post two weeks ago.)

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Euphoria

I often see Euphoria beetles in prickly pear cactus flowers (Opuntia engelmannii). On May 21st I noticed this pair apparently living up to their genus name. For a closer look, click the excerpt below.

For the origin and meanings of euphoria, the word, here’s a brief account.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Yellow on yellow

Probably the wildflower I’ve seen the most in Austin over the past few weeks is Thelesperma filifolium, known as greenthread because of its thread-like leaves. Unless you get up close, though, what you’re most likely to notice is the yellow of the flowers. On April 20th I set out to photograph a nice little greenthread colony I’d spotted a day earlier that had sprung up at a road construction site. For some of my portraits I used a wide aperture and exposed for the dark center of a flower head, knowing that the flower heads in the background would come out with little detail and probably overexposed. It’s an aesthetic that questions whether there can ever be too much bright yellow.

On one flower head I found a cucumber beetle, Diabrotica undecimpunctata*, at the tip of a ray, giving a second sense to this post’s title of “Yellow on yellow.”

* Latin undecim means literally ‘one-ten,’ i.e. ‘one plus ten,’ or eleven. This species of beetle has 11 spots.

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Did you know that Austin has recently been the fastest growing metropolitan statistical area in the United States? The second fastest is Raleigh (North Carolina), where my oldest friend in the world now lives; I think we met when we were two or three years old. We grew up in Nassau County (New York), which during some of our years there I seem to remember was the fastest growing county in the country. And I’ll hasten to add that fast is one of those strange English words that can mean opposite things. If you run fast you move quickly, but if you stand fast you don’t move at all. Can you think of any other self-contradictory words?

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Beetle on a buffalo gourd flower

Somehow I haven’t shown a picture of a buffalo gourd flower here since 2011, so it’s high time to make up for the oversight. That making up is made easy by the fact that on May 15th off Lost Horizon Dr. I found a group of flowering Cucurbita foetidissima vines. The species name indicates that this plant has quite an unpleasant smell—at least to people. The odor seems to have had the opposite effect on the little pollen-bedecked beetle shown here that had come from the flower’s interior out onto its rim.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Blister beetle on Penstemon cobaea

On April 8th in Round Rock I came across this blister beetle in the genus Pyrota, apparently P. lineata or P. bilineata. The flower is the kind of foxglove, Penstemon cobaea, that you saw from farther back in a post here last month. Thanks to bugguide.net for identifying the genus of the beetle.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Tumbling flower beetle on American basket-flower

My first photo stop on May 1st was at the old Merrilltown Cemetery on Burnet Rd., at whose edges in past years I’d photographed plenty of American basket-flowers, Centaurea americana. Though it was still early in the season, a few basket-flowers had opened, and on one of them I found this tumbling flower beetle.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Euphoria on a Texas thistle

In a comment yesterday on the recent post showing plants flowering on the Blackland Prairie, Lisa asked whether I had a closeup of a Texas thistle. I answered that I might show a current picture of one in the days ahead. Now let me be more decisive, take the thistle by the thorns*, and post a photograph I took on May 6th of a Cirsium texanum in Cedar Park. Burrowing euphorically into the flower head was a Euphoria kernii beetle.

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* Technically speaking, a thistle has spines or prickles rather than thorns, but you wouldn’t want me to pass up a good alliterative alternative to “take the bull by the horns,” would you?

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Another little creature on a flower

Not far in space or time from where I photographed the crab spider on a Texas thistle at the Purgatory Creek Natural Area in San Marcos on April 27th, I saw Acmaeodera beetles on flowers of the skeleton-plants (Lygodesmia texana) that were out in goodly numbers (both the beetles and the skeleton-plants).

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman